Another Cather!

 Four years ago, I lamented that I had reached the end of one of the great (and late) reading journeys of my life: I had read every one of Willa Cather's novels. Or had I? It seems not...
   Yesterday morning I was walking past the Oxfam bookshop (one of my regular haunts, though it's a charity about which I have serious reservations – of course not serious enough to stop me buying books from their shelves) when I felt my bibliophile antennae twitch, so in I went. And straight away I spotted a little cluster of Cathers – My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and, in a World's Classics paperback edition... Alexander's Bridge? That was a title I'd never heard of – and, picking it off the shelf, I discovered that it was in fact Willa Cather's first novel, serialised in McClure's magazine in 1912, then published in the same year. By the time Cather wrote the preface to the reissued Alexander's Bridge ten years later, she was regarding it as an artistic failure, and neatly diagnosing what was essentially wrong with it – the same thing that is wrong with many first novels – 'the fact that it is not always easy for the inexperienced writer to distinguish between his own material and that which he would like to make his own. Everything is new to the young writer, and everything seems equally personal. That which is outside his deepest experience, which he observes and studies, often seems more vital than that which he knows well...' But is is from his (or her!) 'life line', his deepest experience and sense of life, that true art will emerge, 'when his "life line" and the line of his personal endeavour meet'. As they did, to wonderful effect, in Cather's next novel, O Pioneers!
 Is Alexander's Bridge as deficient as its author thought it? Well, I'll soon find out. This novel is more like a novella in length – ninety-odd pages – so even I should have it read before long.