(Click on book cover for full text of novel.)
WALTER J. MUILENBURG, PRAIRIE
Walter J. Muilenburg’s Prairie (1925) was the second book published (after James Weldon and Rosamond Johnson’s Book of Negro Spirituals)byThe Viking Press, which would quickly establish itself as an important literary publisher. (Other presses founded in the US in 1925 include Caxton Press and the University of Minnesota Press.)
Muilenburg’s novel is the story of Elias Vaughan, who leaves his boyhood home in the Mississippi valley to homestead in the Dakotas. The life there is hard, it is brutal, and it requires constant battle with a tough environment. Vaughan’s wife dies, and his son leaves the minute he can. But in Frank Luther Mott’s words, in his celebratory review of the book in The Midland: “Vaughn himself loves it all, accepts defeat only to hope for victory, knows a kind of mystic ecstasy in his contact with soil, weather, sunset, and season, and, in spite of misfortunes which to some observers might seem to be major tragedies, does in the end essentially succeed.”
He is a mystic, Mott says, and, like many local color characters, an aesthete manqué. Here is his response to the land when he first goes homestead-hunting with an agent:
The morning air, unstirred by a breeze, was cool and exhilarating. As Elias looked out at the long reaches of gently rolling prairie, a glow came into his deep-set grey eyes. This was the country he had dreamed of, this was his Promised Land. It was so wide, so free; the small farmhouses, miles apart, each with its tiny cluster of buildings, only served to accentuate the feeling of vastness. To the young settler there was something remote and magical in these dwellings, as though they were under the spell of a pervading, sunlit silence. On all sides stretched the prairie floor, gray-green with a carpet of unnumbered grasses. Now and then, a soft blurring of green into purple or yellow marked a bank of wild flowers. At such times, if he had been alone, Elias would have stopped to look more closely, but he was ashamed to have his companion know this. And there was no hurry; there were years and years ahead to revel in all these things; there would be a new delight for each day—a new fragrance, a new possibility.
Willa Cather’s characters, Hamlin Garland’s, Sarah Orne Jewett’s—these and many others engage in similar rhapsodies.
Ruth Suckow in the New York Tribune and Lloyd Morris in the New York Times praised the novel. Louis Bromfield said it was “A bitter book, one might say, but yet a truthful one.” Other venues were lukewarm or worse. “Not brilliant” (Independent); “Lacks universal appeal” (International Book Review), “mechanical” (Saturday Review). And a second review in the New York Times quipped that although it was brave of Muilenburg to compete with Knut Hamsun, he loses. Hamsun “lifts his book into the realm of the eternal and gives him the advantage in all comparisons. Prairie is a good book, but it has no outstanding beauty; pages of it are uninspired and dull, dialogue is frequently wooden and deadly, and for the sake of atmosphere it details dead items. The characters are alive, but they are studies of one dimension.”
Muilenburg taught at a small college in Minnesota for a while, and retired into the woods, where he became a bit of a recluse. After three stories in The Midland, one called “Prairie,” and this novel, he never published again.