Willa Cather goes head to head with a venomous snake

I ended up having a reasonably terrible night’s sleep last night due to a) enduring stomach cramps and b) falling asleep to have a horrific dream about a snake that could shoot acid from its fangs.

In this dream, I, for some reason, was locked in a suite in a Holiday Inn with it.  At first I wasn’t too alarmed because I thought it was a boa constrictor.  I locked it in the bathroom, located a dead badger (as you do in Holiday Inns the length and breadth of the globe. Very efficient room service), and chucked the badger in for the snake to swallow.

I watched through a crack in the door as the snake slithered up to the badger. It then reared up, flipped its head on a hinge, produced the most humongous fangs I have ever seen and shot acres of acid venom all over the badger.

I shrieked. The acid venom dripped and pooled and began to destroy everything in its path, except the snake.  It was just trickling under the bathroom door when I woke up in a galloping panic.

It was pretty futile trying to get much sleep after that.

I refrained from screaming the place down, galloping round and round the bedroom pulling at my hair and shrieking ‘A snake! A snake!’ which was what my entire adrenal system was telling me to do.

I drank half a pint of Rescue Remedy (God knows if it works like it says it does, but it has brandy in it, so all is well), and read my book instead.

I read Willa Cather’s ‘O Pioneers!’ from start to finish in one fevered, book reading marathon.

Like many American classics it is  concerned with man (or in this case woman) battling the forces of nature to civilize and tame the wilderness.  It is not surprising that this is an enduring theme given the vastness of the country and the fact that nobody in those days had a Dyson.

Unlike many American classics, it is not obsessed by proving that men have the best willies, the sharpest axes and more acres of barren howling wilderness filled with dead animals than anyone else.  I think this is a vast improvement on the genre myself.

Cather has written a book about a competent woman.  Not only that but she is a competent woman who is quite quiet about being competent, and who just gets on with things.  She isn’t feisty (a word I hate), or peppy (a word I hate even more).  She is just normal.  It’s such a relief.

She doesn’t make a big thing about the heroine, Alexandra, being a woman. She just is a woman, just like the other people who aren’t women are men.  She does point out the problems that some of the men have with the fact that Alexandra is a woman, but not in a confrontational kind of way.  Alexandra generally listens to what the men have to say, says something lovely and neutral like; ‘Thank you for your concern.’ Then she calmly gets on with whatever she was going to do in the first place.

It is a bloody marvellous book. Really it is.

There is a bit of doomed romance in there, a bit of fulfilled romance, and a teeny bit of melodrama just to get things moving nicely.  All in all it is a beautifully balanced, beautifully written book about someone who isn’t keen on the status quo and who sets about changing it by just being bloody good at what they do.

Then there’s the sheer beauty of the writing. God, it’s wonderful the way that Cather writes.  Really and truly it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Her love of the country that she writes about shines through in every description, and even though Nebraska sounds mostly like a god forsaken hole where you’d probably only go if you really had no other choice and someone was chasing you with a giant, venomous snake, for example, she still makes you quite want to go and have a look at it.

Even though I am trying (and failing) not to buy any more books, I went straight to Amazon this morning and uploaded ‘My Antonia’ onto Kindle for a very reasonable £1.89, because this is supposed to be her classic work, and if it’s better than ‘O Pioneers!’ I am going to enjoy it so much I just might cry.

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