by Hermione Lee
Because the frame journey of the Introduction covers the same ground as the novel’s first journey, the book straight away establishes the feeling it will end with, of circular infinity, renewable time. In its end is its beginning. Jim’s wry introductory word for the journey, ‘interminable’, is tied by affinity and by opposition to the solemn, concluding word ‘predetermined’, like the sun and the moon Jim sees on one of his return journeys, confronting each other ‘across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world’. [MA, p.322] The journey – ours, Cather’s, Jim’s – doesn’t close, it ‘keeps returning’ (Jim and Ántonia, we are made to feel, are still living as we read it). But it has a point, which is to understand what the journey has been for. These concepts of renewal and purpose are consolatory: My Ántonia is an exceptionally heartening and affirmative book. But to be on an interminable and predetermined journey is also a source of anxiety; and the novel is ‘burdened’ too with the difficulty and strangeness of returning, and the shadowy presence of what the circle might exclude.
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That the way back into the past is not as easy a journey as the novel makes it seem is suggested by the difficulties Cather had with her Introduction, which is itself a duplicated text. The version she wrote for publication in 1918 was rewritten in 1926.1 In both versions, the narrator describes her shared childhood with Jim, and characterizes him as a romantic, whose love of the West has inspired his work as ‘legal counsel for one of the great Western railways’. (The 1918 version has more detail about his disappointing marriage and his ‘big Western dreams’.) In the earlier version of the Introduction, Jim and the narrator agree that they will both write down their memories of Ántonia. Jim says: ‘ “I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and felt her…” ’ When Jim turns up some time later with his notes, the narrator has written hardly anything. Jim says, ‘Now, what about yours?’, warning her not to be influenced by his narrative. But she reproduces it as it stands, without attempting to write her own. In the later, rewritten Introduction, Cather simplifies, abandoning the idea of rival narratives, and thereby making her disguise as Jim seem inevitable and necessary. Jim says on the train that he has ‘from time to time’ been writing down his memories of Ántonia; some months later he comes to the narrator’s apartment and produces what he calls ‘the thing about Ántonia’. In both versions of the Introduction, the emphasis is on the spontaneous, natural shape of Jim’s recollections:
‘I didn’t take time to arrange it; I simply wrote down pretty much all that her name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form. It hasn’t any title, either.’
Only at the very last does Jim give ‘the thing’ the name ‘Ántonia’, prefixing this after a moment with the word ‘my’, just as the Introduction prefixes the story.
An introductory frame in which the author returns to the scene of his past, or listens to someone talking on a journey, or comes into possession of a manuscript, is a familiar device. Cather borrowed it, as she freely admitted,2 from French and Russian novels, and in doing so lent her ‘raw’ Western American novel a deep, rich, melancholy, Old World flavour. The Kreutzer Sonata was one model, with its tragic marital story told on a long night’s train journey across Russia – one of the short Tolstoi novels which Cather read so often in her youth that they seemed to Russianize her American landscape.3 So the Introduction gives the novel its shape4 and tone. And it looks ahead to the book’s last words, Jim’s reclaiming of the incommunicable past: as though all its language has been as close as possible to a kind of feeling silence. Cather’s comments on My Ántonia insist on its simple and faithful memorializing, its truth to the past.5 But this simplicity is the product of enormous prowess and control. Remote though she makes herself look from the flamboyant modernist texts of her contemporaries, which weave back through time to investigate an ambivalent relationship between narrator and subject – Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby – the journey back in My Ántonia is quite as deliberate and complex.
The writing came out of a literal, and a literary, returning. In 1914, after her unpleasant neck infection, she went to Fremstad’s camp to recuperate, and then to Red Cloud for the summer. She was still working on The Song of the Lark, but the groundwork for My Ántonia was being done now, as she caught up with the lives of all the local families – including her models for Ántonia (Annie Pavelka, née Sadilek) and for the Harlings (the Miners). It was like revisiting characters in a book, as various, she said, as in War and Peace.6 In 1915 she went to the Southwest on an adventurous trip with Edith. That winter, Judge McClung died, and the Pittsburgh house which had been her second home since 1901 was closed up. It was her second loss that year: Annie Fields had died in February. Then, very soon after the death of her father, Isabelle married. Cather was devastated.7 Using Edith, her family, and the West for consolation, she spent 1916 in Taos, in Wyoming with Roscoe and his wife and children, and in Red Cloud, keeping house all summer for her sick mother. By the time she went back to New York in the autumn, she had written several chapters of My Ántonia. So, though it drew so deeply on the material of her childhood, it was strongly coloured too by these recent feelings: her desolation at Isabelle’s betrayal, her rediscovery of the old Western stories, and her temporary assumption of a domestic, quasi-maternal role in Red Cloud. Underlying these personal feelings was a horror at what was happening in the world. My Ántonia is very strikingly not her War and Peace: the war (which she would need more time to write about) makes the loudest silence in the book, the most noticeable ‘presence of the thing not named’.8 But it powerfully motivates the need to reclaim and find lasting value in the past.
The novel is a return, too, to her best methods, after the Wagnerian literalness of The Song of the Lark. ‘Quite of itself and with no direction from me’, Cather said in 1931, insisting on the novel’s naturalness, My Ántonia ‘took the road of O Pioneers! – not the road of The Song of the Lark’.9 Elsie Sergeant famously recalled her, early in 1916, placing an old Sicilian jar filled with scented stock in the middle of a bare, round, antique table, moving the lamp to fall on its glazed colours, and saying (her voice faltering and her eyes filling with tears): ‘ “I want my new heroine to be like this – like a rare object in the middle of a table, which one may examine from all sides.” ’10
The lamp falling on the pot, as an image for narration, recalls her use of Virgil in the novel. Jim Burden sits in his room at the University of Nebraska, preparing to read the Georgics, while a Virgilian evening star hangs outside ‘like the lamp engraved upon the title page of old Latin texts’. [MA, p.263] By its light, like that of the lamp Cather angles onto the pot, Jim sees the ‘figures’ of his past standing out ‘strengthened and simplified’. Illuminating sentences from Virgil are ‘engraved’ in the text, one of them, indeed, on the title page of the book: ‘Optima dies…prima fugit’: ‘the best days are the first to flee’. Another sentence consoles us for that thought: ‘Primus ego in patriam mecum…deducam Musas’: ‘I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country’. The equation seems simple and heartening. By the light of the Virgilian example, Cather as Jim consoles herself for her lost youth (and for the lost golden age of American pioneering history) by turning the figures of her local past into an American pastoral, in an utterance as perfectly appropriate to its subject as the Georgics, ‘where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow’. [MA, p.264]
But there is tension, too, between the tranquil, luminous Virgilian example, and the ‘places and people of my own infinitesimal past’. When Jim shuts the window against the evening star and regretfully lights his own lamp, ‘the dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds’. [MA, p.263] We have just been told that when he set himself up in this room, he pushed a lot of the furnishings out of the way and ‘considered them non-existent, as children
eliminate incongruous objects when they are playing house’. [MA, p.259] But customary, incongruous objects reassert themselves. Jim’s contemplation of Virgil is about to be broken in on by the reappearance of Lena Lingard, one of his ‘figures’ from the past, not at all shadowy or distant, but firmly flesh and blood. Later, Jim will realize that poetry like Virgil’s depends for its existence on girls like Lena, and her female figure will be superimposed, like a floating picture, over the mournful words of the classical text, ‘Optima dies…prima fugit’. [MA, p.271] The analogy between the classical pastoral and Jim’s narrative, apparently so secure and consolatory, is in fact equivocal and unsettling. Not all his ‘figures’ will stay in place, safely ‘simplified and strengthened’ as part of the lost best days. They go on living and changing, refusing to be ‘eliminated’. The lamp can only ‘affix its beam’11 if the subject is dead – a stone pot, or the lost past. But Jim’s pastoral figures are not static, they are not like the frieze on Keats’s Grecian Urn, ‘cold pastoral’. They talk, dance, grow up, improvise, change, disappear, return, go in and out of his reach. One of the pleasures of My Ántonia is its dynamic between mournful, selective Virgilian retrospect, and the incongruous energies of living reality. This is, also, a negotiation between traditions of male writing (pastoral elegy, classical epic, romance) and the real shapes, the ‘true stories’ of women’s lives, with Jim as a mediator between the two.
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In the first part of My Ántonia, ‘The Shimerdas’, Jim, secure in his well-run Protestant grandparents’ home, grows up alongside Ántonia, who is doing her best in her struggling, poor, ill-adapted Bohemian family. Together, they make sense of the ‘materials’ to hand: he teaches her language, she tells him stories. Their mutual discoveries keep pace until after the suicide of Mr Shimerda, the central event of the first section. Then they begin to move apart. In the second section, ‘The Hired Girls’, Jim’s family moves into the town, Black Hawk, and Ántonia soon follows, to work for his neighbours, the attractive Harlings. As Jim becomes increasingly restless, the narrative opens out into the life of the town, in particular of Jim’s friends, the immigrant ‘hired girls’ – Ántonia, Lena, Tiny, and the others. In the third section, ‘Lena Lingard’, he is at university. A visit from Lena, now a smart Lincoln dressmaker, starts a subdued flirtation (coloured by their emotional response to a performance of Camille) which they renounce in the interests of his future. The fourth section, ambiguously named ‘The Pioneer Woman’s Story’, is set two years after Jim, now in training as a lawyer, has gone East. He comes back to hear from the Widow Steavens (his grandparents’ tenant on their old farm) the story of what has been happening to Ántonia: deserted by a selfish, unscrupulous railroad man, she has come back home with an illegitimate baby. She and Jim meet again, ‘like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears’, and speak of their old friendship. In ‘Cuzak’s Boys’, twenty years on, much-travelled Jim comes back once more (after seeing Lena and Tiny, prospering in San Francisco) to find Ántonia married to a Bohemian, on a thriving farm, with ten or eleven children. He is given an emotional welcome, spends the night there, and promises himself a renewal of the friendship. Black Hawk disappoints him, but he retraces his steps over the country where Mr Shimerda was buried, recognizing his ‘predetermined’ road.
This apparently bare, inconsequential narrative, which notably fails to fulfil the title’s promise of a love affair or a heroine’s life story, gives up its meaning through the shape it takes. And the shape of the book is the making of Jim’s memory. Its ‘formless’ structure – two long and three short sections spread over about forty years – is, in fact, very carefully formed to represent the process of memory-making. In the first two sections the material accumulates for retrospection. ‘I can remember exactly how the country looked to me’ Jim says. [MA, p.16] or: ‘All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory.’ [MA, p.28])12 In the last three the past is gone away from, returned to, and made sense of. So the book’s shape enacts the relation between Cather’s early life and her writing. But by using Jim as an equivocal, limited, reserved surrogate, she avoids the unmediated autobiographical literalness of The Song of the Lark. Jim is and is not ‘her’, just as Ántonia is and is not ‘his’.
Jim, unlike Cather, is an orphan, when he makes his journey (like Cather) from safe Virginia into the ‘utter darkness’ and undifferentiatedness of Nebraska, where there seem at first to be no whereabouts: ‘There seemed to be nothing to see’; ‘not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries are made’. [MA, p.7] We recognize this dark negative space, like chaos before the Word, from the beginning of O Pioneers! As in the earlier pastoral, this blank stuff is going to be created and ordered through speech, love, endurance, and the making of shapes.
From the moment Jim emerges from the train, and sees Ántonia and her huddled, ‘encumbered’ family also emerging, the shape of his narrative replicates the process of growth from infancy to adulthood. Like a child’s book, the first section has simple, coloured, apprehensible things standing out on every page – food, clothes, animals, plants – in a primary environment of smells, warmth, light, space, snow, sky. Useful objects have their uses explained; Grandfather’s silver-rimmed spectacles for reading prayers, grandmother’s hickory cane tipped with copper for killing rattlesnakes, Mrs Shimerda’s feather quilt for keeping her food warm. (Sometimes the usefulness is untranslatable, like Mrs Shimerda’s cèpes from the Bohemian forests, thrown on the fire by Jim’s suspicious grandmother.) The child’s perspective sees things either very close or very far. This, as Eudora Welty says, is Cather’s usual perception of the world:
There is the foreground, with the living present, its human figures in action; and there is the horizon of infinite distance…but there is no intervening ground…There is no recent past. There is no middle distance.13
So Jim, taking possession of his Nebraska, is at once investigative child and retrospective author. On his first day, Jim comes out of his grandmother’s warm basement kitchen and moves up through the farmyard, the sea of red prairie grass his own height, the cattle corral, the garden set away from the house, towards ‘the edge of the world’. His impulse is towards ‘the horizon of infinite distance’: ‘I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother’. But there she is, very real and close, digging potatoes and warning him against rattlesnakes. She leaves him in a sheltered spot in the garden:
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun or air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. [MA, p.18]
Jim could be another Thoreau or Emerson (‘I am nothing, I see all’)14 or Whitman loafing at his ease, ‘observing a spear of summer grass’,15 as the narrator contemplates his ‘intimations of immortality’ in the language of American transcendentalism. But at the same time he seems tiny and animal, a vivid microscopic part of the natural scene.
This pull between earth and space, near and far, solidity and dissolution, is the constant factor in Jim and Ántonia’s childhood. They are always coming out from underground (Jim from his secure kitchen, Ántonia from her dark constricting cave) into infinite space.
Jim’s response to the death of Mr Shimerda is at the heart of this movement. Jim imagines the old man’s spirit resting in his grandparents’ kitchen before his long journey home: ‘Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow’. Through his intense re-imaginings of everything Ántonia has told him about her father’s life, Jim encloses
him inside a protected space, before his memory ‘fades out from the air’, and dissolves. His crossroads burial on ‘a very little spot in that snow-covered waste’, which will be preserved as ‘a little island’ in the changing landscape, sums up the movement between enclosure and dissolution which makes the whole shape of the book.
As Jim and Ántonia grow up, this shape is cross-cut with other patterns, as in the confusing, complicating growth from childhood into adolescence and adulthood. In the town scenes, there is still an attraction towards safe enclosures, like the grandparents’ Black Hawk house, a ‘landmark’ for country people coming into town, or the Harlings’ convivial kitchen, or the town laundryman’s pleasant prospect, like a framed Degas:
On summer afternoons he used to sit for hours on the sidewalk in front of his laundry, his newspaper lying on his knee, watching his girls through the big open window while they ironed and talked in Danish. [MA, p.221]
But the town’s spaces – the hotel with its partition between parlour and dining-room, the temporary dance-pavilion on the vacant lot, the school, the Fireman’s Hall, the depot, the Opera House – are more ambiguous enclosures, where social and sexual partitions take complex shape. And Jim’s relation to these enclosures is less accepting: he climbs out of his bedroom window at night, resenting, now, his grandparents’ security; he paces the streets feeling that ‘the little sleeping houses’ are places of ‘evasions and negations’, producing nothing but waste. [MA, p.219] (In a parallel but subordinated movement, Ántonia is also breaking out from the enclosures of her home and the Harlings’ protection, into more dangerous spaces.)