My Antonia by Willa Cather REVIEW
‘Optima
Dies Prima Fugit’ – Virgil ("Our best days are the
first to leave us")
“The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.”
There is a certain irony to the fact that Willa Cather thought that the bareness of Nebraska prairie might erase her when she first arrived.
In a 1913 newspaper interview Cather described her response to this desolate landscape:
“I shall never forget my introduction to it. We drove out from Red Cloud to my grandfather’s homestead one day in April. I was sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding onto the side of the wagon box to study myself – the roads were mostly faint trails over the bunch grass in those days. The land was open range and there was almost no fencing. As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal is if we had come to the end of everything – it was a kind of erasure of personality.”
The paradox is that in breaking people down, Nebraska is what allowed people to remake themselves (I suppose one might say this of any hardship that they have experienced in life … or of God). Willa Cather was one of those people who found Nebraska a place to die and be reborn. Her novel My Antonia is a celebration of the agent of destruction (Nebraska) and the people who she saw courageously reforming themselves there (not all did). “Winter lies too long in country towns,” she says in My Antonia,
“hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
In a sense, Nebraska became for her a country of “Velveteen Rabbits” – people who, either by choice or by necessity, were stripped of pretense and allowed to become who they actually were. “We agreed,” she writes in the introduction,
“that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”
In My Antonia, the landscape is a character. It is a living breathing shaping agent that peels away the outer shell of civilized pseudo-selves and, if they will accept the pain of it, re-sculpts them. Needless to say, not all the characters allow themselves to be made more human. Many of them, indeed, retain all the templated sameness of the places from which they came. But these people, it seems, are the ones that suffer without ever receiving the redemptive gift of that suffering (the reborn self – the life in harmony with themselves as real people). They live and die miserable (I am thinking here of the Cutters). Cather returns again and again to the image of a living – almost divine – landscape; loving, caring, revealing, pruning.
“Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping...”
“The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.”
“When Spring came after that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only--spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind--rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.”
In some ways, the harsh shaping beauty of the prairie becomes God personified.
“We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.”
The word for this sort of light is “crepuscular.” It is the sort of light that makes one believe that God lies lurking barely hidden behind the clouds. Cather’s experience of being absorbed into the vast prairie sunsets seem, on the surface, to be akin to the experience of mystics throughout history (Rumi or St. Theressa of Avila for example). “At any rate, that is happiness;” says Cather in My Antonia, “to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
By the time that Willa Cather arrived in Nebraska as a nine year old girl, she was already finding it difficult to live up to the expectations of a mother who wanted nothing more for her than to be a Victorian era woman. The beauty of Nebraska for Willa Cather was that it was a place new enough to allow some people some freedom to redefine themselves. “All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn,” says Jim Burden (the voice of Cather),
“The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again.”
“I could choose my own way.” And that is exactly what Willa Cather did. Her principle way of “chosing her own way” is reflected in the life of Jim Burden in the novel. He consistently resists the tendency of the people of Black Hawk to civilize him and mold him in the image of their “back east” expectations. Jim Burden rebelliously decides to like the “wrong sort of people.”
Like the hired hands:
“They were both of them jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.”
Like Mrs. Harding
“There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it.”
Like the country girls that stay out late to dance.
“The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.”
“People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he was with Tony and Lena or the three Marys.”
“Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative gave a favourable interpretation to everything. When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.”
And primarily, like Antonia.
“Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!' she used to sing joyfully. `I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.' She would toss her head and ask me to feel the muscles swell in her brown arm.”
“We all liked Tony's stories. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.”
“If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters' gate softly behind me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Antonia! I looked with contempt at the dark, silent little houses about me as I walked home, and thought of the stupid young men who were asleep in some of them. I knew where the real women were, though I was only a boy; and I would not be afraid of them, either!”
“Antonia had the most trusting, responsive eyes in the world; love and credulousness seemed to look out of them with open faces.”
“`Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.'”
“About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.”
“It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
Jim Burden wearies of the people who work simply to get back to who they were before they came to Nebraska. He discovers that even on the frontier, the spirit of pioneerism can often only be found among the foreign immigrants and it is to them that he gravitates. “They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood,” he says of the houses in Red Cloud (and no doubt of its inhabitants),
“with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all.”
What Cather sets out to do is to capture those glorious moments of her childhood before America could “Americanize” the souls that Nebraska hardships uncovered for her to meet. One suspects that the older she got, the fewer of these precious “original souls” she could find and the more she treasured her memories of the ones that she had found. Several times in the novel, she comments on how scarcity makes things precious. It was true of trees in Nebraska according to Antonia,
“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”
It was true of color according to Jim:
“In the winter bleakness a hunger for colour came over people, like the Laplander's craving for fats and sugar. Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting, shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude reds and greens and blues of that coloured glass held us there.”
And it was true of memories as well
“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
It is these memories – memories that Jim (and Cather) think they own that eventually come to own them. Perhaps we are all “owned” by the places where we were first loved and where we first loved. The Medieval Persian poet Rumi writes:
Once a
beloved asked her lover: "Friend,
You have seen many places in the world!
Now -
which of all these cities was the best?
He said: "The city where my sweetheart lives!"
Cather’s Jim loves Nebraska for many reasons but primarily it is because Nebraska is where Antonia lives and where he came to love her. And if s/he is to stay alive (one almost needs to be in love to be alive, do they not?) then one must at least stay within the neighborhood “of where the sweetheart lives.” That seems to be what Cather (Jim) decides to do when s/he decides to write about his/her Nebraska childhood. In My Antonia, Jim writes about his teacher, Cleric, and how he was inspired to put his memories of his childhood down on paper.
“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.”
“I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the `Georgics' where tomorrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to flee. 'Optima dies... prima fugit.' I turned back to the beginning of the third book, which we had read in class that morning. 'Primus ego in patriam mecum... deducam Musas'; `for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.' Cleric had explained to us that `patria' here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little I country'; to his father's fields, `sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.' … We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring at my book, the fervour of his voice stirred through the quantities on the page before me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.”
In book III, Chapter III, Jim tells us about going to see an opera in Lincoln with Lena. He liked going to plays with Leena ha tells us,
“Everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.”
The play that he talks about is called Camille. Cather assumes that the reader will know the play and does not explain it when telling us about her response to it. It is a story based on a novel by Alexander Dumas about a Parisian courtesan who comes to love a young man by the name of Armand. She is about to leave her exotic lifestyle as the kept woman of the rich for him but is dissuaded from doing so by Armand’s father who fears that the scandal will compromise the chances of Armand’s sister to marry well. Camille sympathizes and understands that allowing Armand to pursue the relationship further would only harm him and his family and leaves the relationship, leaving Armand to assume that he has been left for another man.
In My Antonia, the play leaves Jim sobbing throughout (as it does Leena). He does not explain why but we are left to understand that in some way, they understand that their family’s expectations for them will forever keep them from loving the people that they love. It is not difficult to understand how many layers of story there is to this story for Cather.
My Antonia provokes deep questions. As blissful as fond memories can be, is there a danger that if we go there too often and drink too deeply that we will not be able to get back? “I felt the old pull of the earth,” Jim says of his return to Red Cloud twenty years later, “the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.” His meeting with Antonia and her many children and her husband makes him wonder if he can ever feel anything but dislocated in his present life.
“I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!”
Memory can be a like a Venus fly-trap, can it not?
Question for Comment: What would it mean for you to “bring the muse into your country?” What part of the world; what part of humanity? What human experience would you give others a window into if you could?
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