A little western tour--vii

 

Found it. 

Here 'tis--the rightfully proud stone of Lieut. G. P. Cather. Here lies a hero. 

His wife wanted his remains here, in the States, and here, where he grew up, the rugged plains of southern Nebraska, a cemetery near a burg named Bladen. Oddly enough, his mother wanted whatever was left of his mortal coil to stay in France, where he'd been buried soon after he fell, on May 28, 1918. Or so says the stone.

It's maybe the finest stone in his area of the cemetery and includes a bronzed portrait, as you can see.

Lieut. G. P. Cather

AUGUST 12, 1883

KILLED IN ACTION

AT THE BATTLE OF

CANTIGNY, FRANCE

MAY 28, 1918

CO.A 26 INFANT FIRST DIV

I came to see much more than a graveyard, but finding this Cather's stone was a major motivation for all the driving. I'd been reading Cather's 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours because I never had read that book before; and because I knew it had been both highly prized and heavily scorned. I'm sure the list of Pulitzer winners contains some others that have turned out not to be yawners, but this novel--about the "war to end all wars" was scorned by many, Hemingway and a dozen other heavyweights, for being, well, too--how should I say it?--soft. 

What all agree on is that Willa Cather, G. P's first cousin, is the prototype for Claude Wheeler, the protagonist of One of Ours; and that Cather was gifted with a story because she found a harvest of material in a stack of correspondence G. P. kept up with his mom back in Bladen. 

Which is not to say One of Ours is creative non-fiction. It's a novel that carries a load of created by her own imagination. She's writing a World War I novel, having never spent a moment a mud trench. Before the war, she'd been to France, loved it immensely--and that love is in the novel; but the scenes of battle she created are drawn from her ample imagination.

That, of course, may be why Hemingway hated One of Ours. Having been in war himself, he grew impatient with people who tried their hand at painting a picture of war when they had no history. Knowing Hemingway, he may have despised it because the novelist was a woman. That's not at all out of the question. 

This man, Grosvenor Phillips Cather, wasn't so much a ne'er do well, as he was someone who her cousin Willa decided simply hadn't found himself. Like Wheeler's, G. P.'s marriage wasn't peachy, and he seemed somehow to lack the sense of duty to farm, not the strength or the ability. What he never felt, not until his death was a true sense of calling, the kind of selfless commitment to anything really. He was floundering, as was his marriage. He wasn't a kid when he died. You can do the math yourself, but he was 35 years old, commissioned as an officer when he went in.

What Willa does with Wheeler is give him cause. She granted him a blessed epiphany amid a sense of calling he felt down to his soul for the first moment in his life. The action that war provides, he believes, has given him something he'd never once experienced in his life, a sense of a vital community with his blood brothers out there in the life and death trenches.

Claude Wheeler is killed in action just a few minutes after looking at the horrors of war all around him and realizing that alongside the heroic fighting men in his unit, he'd become somebody, not because he'd been heroic but because he was part of a selfless bunch of stubborn boys who risked everything--and often lost it all--for each other. The war both killed him and made him a man.

We tend to think of the literature of World War I as bloody awful, its power created not by the heroism of its warriors but by the abundant absurdity of all that useless death. Think of John Dos Passos or Siegfried Sassoon. 

Willa Cather's story is about a different vet, one who discovered something rich and true about himself a moment before a bullet caught him.

Up there on that bronze portrait of the doughboy, just to the right of his cheek is the line "For his country." Of that, I'm not so sure. Claude Wheeler wasn't thinking of Old Glory painting the breeze over the fruited Nebraska prairie. His joy, his epiphany was in the unforeseen revelation that, at that moment, between life and death, he was likely never more selfless, more committed to those around him, the boys of war, boys become men.

I enjoyed Willa Cather's One of Ours, but as I stood there at G. P's grave, I couldn't help but love the story of her story even more.