American writers of fiction seem to group themselves into the crude and purposeful, the frankly and engagingly commercial, and—the “lesser Henry Jameses.” To the last-named group, some of the reviewers think, belongs Willa Sibert Cather, the remarkable young poet and story writer whose first long work in prose “Alexander’s Bridge” (Houghton Mifflin Company) is now given to the public in book form. A “condensed novel,” the Boston Transcript calls it; but rather is it a long short story, almost perfectly fulfilling Poe’s requirements of brevity and unity. “The little book suggests a portrait group,” says a writer in the Louisville Courier-Journal, “whose personages are presented with such intensity, with such feeling for character, as to make the canvas lose a moment its static quality, the figures seem but caught a moment in the scene of a drama.” The psychology is so delicate, according to the Providence Journal, and the story in its way such a rare bit of fiction that “only readers as finely sensitive as the author will appreciate it.” Miss Cather is a realist and a psychologist, and she possesses a highly developed faculty of using words, whether in poetry or prose, with exquisite fitness. “There are wordy writers sometimes called great,” says the New York World, “to whom should be taught the lessons which ‘Alexander’s Bridge’ may teach of the power and blessedness of simplicity.”
A Titanic Disaster in Fiction.
Willa Cather’s most notable successes thus far in the short story have dealt with American subjects touching on social psychology. “Alexander’s Bridge” is evidently founded on the spectacular collapse of the great cantilever bridge in Canada several years ago—a titanic disaster in bridge building. But it was not Miss Cather’s intention to make her story an industrial exposure. “Do I believe in the industrial novel that does give information?” she said recently to an interviewer. “Certainly, but that is one kind of a story; ‘Alexander’s Bridge’ is another. This is not the story of a bridge and how it was built, but of a man who built bridges.” Nothing could better emphasize Miss Cather’s individualism and her determination to use social and industrial conditions for her own purposes as an artist. Alexander’s bridge—the greatest undertaking of its kind in the world—collapses because of insufficient material, the niggardliness of a building commission, although “according to all human calculations” such a thing “simply couldn’t happen.” But all this serves only as a mighty symbol of the man’s own moral nature, which collapses because of a like hidden erotic weakness. “There were other bridge-builders in the world, certainly,” writes Miss Cather, “but it was always Alexander’s picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted, because he looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head seemed as hard and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked strong enough in themselves to support a span of any one of his ten great bridges that cut the air above as many rivers.” Yet the greatest of these collapses, causing sad loss of life; and Alexander goes down with it, leaving not only the wife who loves him and whom he loves with a romantic devotion, but a charming young actress in London to mourn him. “There was no shock of any kind; the bridge had no impetus except from its own weight. It lurched neither to right nor left, but sank almost in a vertical line, snapping and breaking and tearing as it went, because no integral part could bear for an instant the enormous strain loosed upon it.”
—Review from the November issue of Current Literature 1912.