Alexander's Bridge

I love Willa Cather.  Of the writer's of that era, she remains one I return to again and again.  I have taken on a "reading challenge and one of theme was something like "the first novel of a writer you love."  I looked into it and realized I had not read Cather's first novel, a short book only just over 100 pages, called "Alexander's Bridge" 

The English major in me was struck by all the symbolism in the book.  I often wondered if writers' consciously craft in symbolism, or it is just a natural part of the story telling.  In this book, the bridge is a powerful symbol.  Alexander is an engineer who has achieved fame as a result of his spectacular bridges.  He has all the trappings of success; a beautiful home, a successful business a beautiful, cultured wife who adores him.  Remember we are talking about the Victorian era, so I am not placing any of today's standards on this window into the past.   Early in the book, his wife and his old professor talk about how we must all cross some sort of bridge to get to the future; the inference is that bridges also lead to the past.  Alexander goes to England and encounters his first love and begins an affair with her.  This is implied in the book rather than spelled out.  If it were being written today, we would have gotten all the details of their escapades.  He goes back to his life in America and is happy there, but when he returns again to England he makes a decision to leave his wife and move back to England.  He wants to recapture the wild youth he was ( can you say "mid-life crisis'?  I knew you could).  He writes his wife a long letter but before he can give it to her, ( SPOILER ALERT)  he is killed when the bridge he has planned collapses.  She finds the soaked letter in his pocket, but  it is unreadable.  She continues to mourn him all the days of her life, ignorant of his mistress and his true intentions.   His mistress lives her life, going forward in the knowledge of love and loss.  The symbolism, that Alexander died while the bridge he built collapsed under him IS the plot of the novel.  He went back and forth across the bridge of his life, to his past love and to his imagined future with his wife.  I believe he was trapped between the two when he died; it was his wife whom he saw in the river as he was dying, not his mistress.

The book reminded me how much I enjoy Willa Cather and will probably read another of her books in the coming weeks.  I am going to  try T.H. White's "The Mountain Road" a book that was published the year I was born.  So far I have tried TWO books from 1958 and I didn't finish either of them.  I find the books from that year to be.. dull.  I think the pervasive heaviness of the Cold War invaded literature.  "The Mountain Road"  is supposed to be based on White's wartime experiences.  I am hopeful it will be better than the dreadful Edna Ferber book about "Ice Palace" which was about Alaska.  I thoroughly disliked the main character, a vapid greedy woman who made me stop reading after a few pages of exposure to her.  I didn't want to waste time spending any sort of time in her company!