Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War Janis P. Stout (bio) Steven Trout, Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. ix + 225 pp. $40 (cloth). Willa Cather's fourth and surely most widely read novel My Ántonia (1918) was nominated for the newly established Pulitzer Prize but was not selected. Her next novel, the frequently vilified One of Ours (1922), was nominated and won—a fact that has sometimes been cited by critics wishing to make a point about the nature of the Pulitzer Prize. Steven Trout rejects the assumption on which such citations of the prize for One of Ours are based—that is, the assumption that it is an inferior, even inept novel. On the contrary, Trout regards it as a subtly nuanced, modernistically fragmented and conflicted work. Rejecting both the traditional view that it is an idealistic, even naive, celebration of militarism and the more recently ascendant view that it is "an ironic unmasking of military romanticism," he argues that One of Ours is instead an examination of "the paradoxical nature of war and the idealism it inspires" (53). To establish this argument, Trout provides a valuable and informative grounding in the Great War rhetoric that would have been familiar to Cather's contemporary readers and in what he calls the "culture of commemoration" (34) in which the novel participates and which it ultimately calls into question. It is this aspect of Memorial Fictions that is its greatest strength. Certainly Trout is not the first to identify the fractured nature of Cather's language, narrative point of view, and apparent intention in One of Ours, but he is the first to argue such a judgment of the novel in so historically grounded a way. The [End Page 95] contextual information provided by his readings of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the reburial rituals honoring G. P. Cather, the cousin after whom Cather modeled her main character, will be extremely useful not only to Cather scholars but to others working on the literary and social effects of World War I more largely. In a lengthy chapter called "Cather and Combat," Trout tackles head-on the critical carping that has dogged the author's heels for having presumed to trespass on the male preserve of writing directly about combat. Such criticism was initially launched by several particularly influential reviews, especially H. L. Mencken's sexist charge, in Smart Set, that the war section of the novel approximates "the level of a serial in The Lady's [sic] Home Journal" and that its combat is "fought out, not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot" (quoted by Trout, 106). One wonders if Ernest Hemingway was remembering this last bit when he wrote his notorious letter to Edmund Wilson, in 1923, sneering that the final "scene in the lines" came directly from the "battle scene in Birth of a Nation" (Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway's Selected Letters [New York: Scribner, 1981], 105). Once again Trout provides a sampling of contemporary materials not now familiar, such as a parody of the novel published in Literary Review in February 1923, and he perceptively identifies parallels between One of Ours and such texts as D. H. Lawrence's "The Prussian Officer," Emile Zola's La Débâcle, Joseph Conrad's "Youth," and the citation that accompanied G. P. Cather's posthumous award of the Distinguished Service Cross. Strikingly, he points out that the novel's perpetuation of an American "Myth of the Last Stand" links it, indeed, with the supposedly "most realistic war film ever made," Saving Private Ryan—a film that also "demonstrates that the romantic appeal of fighting to the last man is alive and well" (145). Also interesting, though perhaps not to be listed among the study's primary strengths, is its chapter on Cather's The Professor's House, a text that the Great War "inhabits (or haunts)" (150). To be sure, Trout's assertion of such a haunting is sound enough, but he pursues the argument with a zeal that occasionally leads him into conjectures and...