Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather (review)

In 2015 Hastings College, a private liberal arts institution in Hastings, Nebraska, launched Hastings College Press. Staffed primarily by students in classes or internships, the press specializes in reprinting “forgotten regional texts.”¹ Its initial run of titles for 2015 included Alexander’s Bridge (1912), the first novel from Nebraska’s most famous author, Willa Cather, who spent most of her childhood a mere forty miles south in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Alexander’s Bridge tells the story of Bartley Alexander, an engineer who designs bridges. A man of action, strong and handsome, Bartley has moved from his humble western beginnings to attain success and respect among eastern elites. His comfortable life and place in Boston’s high society are thanks in no small part to his loving wife, Winifred, who comes from a well-to-do family. But Bartley’s life is upended on a business trip to London. There he encounters Hilda, an old college flame who is now an actress. Already grappling with the feeling that his routinized life, successful though it may be, has left him empty, running into Hilda ignites a passionate affair. The love triangle that results and Bartley’s internal struggle as he leads a double life provide much of the drama that unfolds. Bartley finds himself helpless in his attempts to end his relationship with Hilda, ultimately leading to tragedy.

Many of Cather’s books could hardly count as forgotten, but if Cather herself had her way Alexander’s Bridge would be a prime candidate. Although the book received warm reviews at the time, including the stamp of approval from H. L. Mencken, it paled in comparison to the acclaim that her next book, O Pioneers! (1913), received. For Cather Alexander’s Bridge was of a different order entirely than her subsequent work, so distinct that when she reflected back on her first novel, she claimed that there were, in fact, two.² Cather depicted Alexander’s Bridge as a youthful fling with attractive cosmopolitan material, written after “meeting some interesting people in London.”³ Only with O Pioneers!, centered on immigrant Nebraska farmers, did Cather pen a book that she felt was her own.

Scholars have not necessarily been content to let Cather have the last word on Alexander’s Bridge. Bernice Slote, James Woodress, Marilee Lindemann, Tom Quirk, and others have gained an appreciation for the book that Cather herself lacked, recognizing in it elements of continuity with the Cather corpus that make it very much a Cather novel despite its cosmopolitan settings. Susan Schiller, professor of English at Central Michigan University, follows the path of those appreciate scholars in her introduction to the Hastings College Press edition. Expanding especially on Bernice Slote, who emphasized the centrality of the “divided self” theme to Alexander’s Bridge, Schiller argues that this theme had autobiographical resonance for Cather. Relying on letters and biographical details, Schiller’s introductory essay paints a portrait of Cather’s life in the years immediately before and after she published Alexander’s Bridge, showing how Cather’s editorial work for McClure’s Magazine and her yearning to free herself from the shackles of that heavy work load influenced the book. Schiller sees in Alexander’s Bridge “an example of Cather’s hope to live a writer’s life as well as the reflection of a process she uses to disconnect from six years of grinding editorial work at McClure’s Magazine” (x).

If, as Schiller argues, Bartley Alexander represented Cather’s own internal struggles, it is interesting (and only fitting in an outlet such as this) to note the strikingly different effects that memories of a midwestern upbringing had for the two. Though the novel is set in Boston, London, and Quebec, Bartley’s childhood in the “rough days of the old West” is a consistent background presence (37). Indeed, Bartley’s affair with Hilda is not really about Hilda but rather about reconnecting with “some one vastly dearer to...