Alexander’s Bridge – Willa Cather (1912)

Willa Cather is one of the authors who I am determined to read a lot more of this year. I already have several waiting to be read, I feel she is a writer that I have so far neglected a little bit.

Alexander’s Bridge was Willa Cather’s first novel, published in 1912, it is quite different to O! Pioneers – her second novel and the first of her Prairie trilogy that she is perhaps best known for and depicts Pioneer life in Nebraska.

In 1907 the great new cantilever bridge that was being built over the St. Lawrence River in Quebec collapsed with terrible loss of life, including the chief engineer. At this time Willa Cather was working for a magazine in New York, but she was obviously later inspired to use this dramatic real life story in her first novel.

Bartley Alexander is a middle aged engineer, famous for the increasingly ambitious bridges that he has designed. Married to Winifred, a beautiful, elegant woman, whom he loves and who thoroughly adores him, he has an enviable home in Boston. As the novel opens the Alexanders are visited by Professor Wilson, Bartley’s one time teacher who has watched his career with pride and in Winifred finds a wonderfully warm and considerate hostess. Soon after on a trip to London, Bartley comes across Hilda Burgoyne an Irish actress who he had loved years earlier. At first Bartley is nervous of approaching her, and having watched her perform on stage takes to walking in the streets around her house.

“He started out upon these walks half guiltily, with a curious longing and expectancy which were wholly gratified by solitude. Solitude, but not solitariness; for he walked shoulder to shoulder with a shadowy companion – not little Hilda Burgoyne, by any means, but someone vastly dearer to him that she had ever been – his own young self, the youth who had waited for him upon the steps of the British Museum that night, and who, though he had tried to pass so quietly, had known him and came down and linked an arm in his
It was not until long afterwards that Alexander learned that for him this youth was the most dangerous of companions”

Of course the two do meet, and Bartley Alexander is delighted to find her so little changed. The relationship is resumed and Bartley finds himself emotionally torn between his beautiful, faultless wife and the excitement of a re-kindled love affair.

Winifred is the woman who has supported him throughout his career, who he met whilst building his very first bridge – their shared history is that of his success. Hilda is impulsive, passionate and generous, and with her Bartley is brought back to his youth. As he struggles with the two sides of himself – the cracks begin to show in his professional life. In the construction of his latest bridge in Canada, a bridge everyone is already taking about – Bartley Alexander has been forced to cut costs on his most audacious structure yet.

Willa Cather’s short first novel is beautifully and sympathetically written, and this struggle with differing sides of the self is a theme she comes back to in later work. Not a word is wasted in this novel, which combines extraordinary drama with real compassion. Cather’s characters are wonderfully real, their humanness and vulnerabilities are brilliantly explored. Apparently in later years, Cather was rather disparaging about her first novel, but I loved it. It is a simple story in many ways but it is so well written, it perfectly shows the brilliance that was to come.