by Hermione Lee
Once, towards the end of the section, they rediscover the essential, childhood relationship between the close and the infinite, in an extended Arcadian idyll by the river. It begins with Jim swimming alone and naked in the river, then dressing in a ‘green enclosure’ under a growth of grapevines. As he leaves, he repeats his possessive childhood gesture of crumbling the earth in his fingers: ‘I kept picking off little pieces of scaly chalk from the dried water gullies, and breaking them up in my hands’. [MA, p.234] He finds Ántonia under the side of the river bank, grieving over the memories aroused by the smell of the elderflowers. Consolingly, crouched under the bank and looking at the sky, they retrace the story of Mr Shimerda. Then, with the other girls, they move up to the chalk bluffs, with a view of the town and the prairie, and lie about in the sun, their talk opening out through their personal history and desires (it is a feminine version of ‘The Enchanted Bluff’) to the history of the first pioneers. The long, imperceptibly shaped scene concludes with their momentary sighting of the plough on the horizon, magnified in the frame of the setting sun. Though the whole passage is adult, socialized, sensual, historically conscious, it re-enacts the shape of the childhood scenes.
Jim’s adult life is made up of dislocation and absence. He inhabits or looks in on makeshift, improvised spaces, like his awkwardly furnished college room. After he moves East, he seems an absentee in his own narrative, coming back in from long disappearances to catch up on the old stories. His first return to Ántonia, in her troubles, goes back over the familiar routes, to his childhood bedroom, to Mr Shimerda’s grave, to the ‘old pull of the earth’ at nightfall, to Ántonia’s face ‘at the very bottom of my memory’. But these items seem recapitulated as a prelude to leave-taking. It’s not until the very end of the book (which is balanced against the whole weight of the long first part) that Jim refinds the shape of childhood so as to keep it. Ántonia’s innumerable children re-enact (but with more energy and vigour than Jim and Ántonia) the original processes. They too keep rushing up and out from underground hidden places to the outside:
We were standing outside talking, when they all came running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold heads and brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight. It made me dizzy for a moment. [MA, pp.338–9]
With Antonia in her orchard, Jim feels himself back in a protected place, the town and America and the world kept out:
There was the deepest peace in that orchard. It was surrounded by a triple enclosure; the wire fence, then the hedge of thorny locusts, then the mulberry hedge which kept out the hot winds of summer and held fast to the protecting snows of winter. The hedges were so tall that we could see nothing but the blue sky above them…[MA, p.341]
But appeasing and consolatory though this is, this is not Jim’s place, or his childhood; it’s as though he is trying to reinsert himself into the womb. Trying to get back inside is what memory does. Memory grafts together the close and the far, making scenes of the past ‘so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand’ – like the earth he crumbled through his fingers – and so distant as to be ‘incommunicable’.
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Jim’s last sentence implies that his past is ‘incommunicable’ to anyone who has not shared it. But that is precisely what the book has been doing: communicating his past to us, or that part of his past, at least, which ‘fires his imagination’ (as he says of Ántonia [MA, p.353]). So this book, which makes itself look so natural and unwritten, is all to do with language and reading. If the incommunicable past is to be read, it must be decodable. When Jim, as a child, is baffled by the hieroglyphic cuff-buttons of the train conductor, who is covered in buttons and badges and ‘more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk’, [MA, p.4] or has the decorations on the cowboy boots of his grandfather’s hired help, Otto Fuchs, interpreted for him (‘the undraped female figures…he solemnly explained, were angels’ [MA, p.13]), or when Lena makes up for the dullness of the Nebraska prairie by reading her glum Norwegian lover Ole Benson’s tattoos (‘ “We used to sit and look at them for hours; there wasn’t much to look at out there. He was like a picture book” ’ [MA, p.282]), their naive decipherings mimic the whole operation of the novel. Hieroglyphs need keys; landscapes and people have to be read.
All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual impression of the stinging lash in the wind. [MA, p.64]
Such ‘tracings’, ‘marks’, ‘impressions’ (the book is full of synonyms for signs) may be purely phenomenological, but the tendency of the human mind is to supply human meanings. The rows of Nebraskan sunflowers may have been, according to the botanists, a native growth, but Jim prefers the legend that the persecuted Mormons, on their first pioneering, left a trail of sunflower seeds to mark ‘the roads to freedom’. [MA, pp.28–9]
When, like Thea looking at the wagon trails or the cliff-dwellers’ relics, Jim is ‘stirred’ by the faint marking on the grass of ‘a great circle where the Indians used to ride’, or goes back to the cross and the island of grass which mark the grave of Mr Shimerda, or refinds, at the end of the book, the traces of the old pioneer roads, now as faint as that Indian circle, his reading of these ‘old figures’ connects remote and immediate history. The tone of these readings is almost always elegiac. There are more cheery, forward-looking interpretations of landscape, like Jim’s grandfather foreseeing with his ‘clear, meditative eye’ that the Nebraskan cornfields would one day be a great economic force in the world. [MA, p.137] But this strikes an uncharacteristically celebratory, even chauvinistic note. More often the readings of landscape are revaluations of what has been lost or destroyed or is passing away.
The climax of these readings is the famous sighting of the plough against the sun, which, though often extracted as Cather’s most characteristic piece of heroic pastoral, is deeply embedded in the context of readings and signs. The moment takes its force from the long scene that precedes it, in which the girls have given a history of the sufferings of the women pioneers – the stories of their mothers – and Jim has countered with the male story of Coronado’s heroic defeat, which recalls to Ántonia her father’s desolate death. Remote and immediate history have been linked together in their apparently idle talk. When the light changes (always a signal in Cather for a moment of transcendent revelation), and the plough stands out for them like ‘a picture-writing’ on the sun, it seems a heroic consolation for the painful ‘destinies’ they have been contemplating. But this figure is as much part of the past, for the narrator, as Coronado’s sword; and even as they look at it, the vision disappears, the light goes, and ‘that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie’. [MA, p.245]
These ‘old figures’ have their value restored through imaginative sympathy: without it, they are meaningless hieroglyphics. History is incommunicable unless the necessary connections are made between the past and the present. My Ántonia is full of appropriations and recognitions. Some of these take comical, childish form. When Jim hears the terrifying story of Peter and Pavel throwing a young bride and groom from their sledge to the pursuing wolves, he transposes the story from the Russian steppes to ‘a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia’. [MA, p.61] Little Nina Harling, under the spell of Ántonia’s stories of Christmas in the old country, ‘cherishes a belief that Christ was born in Bohemia a short time before the Shimerdas left that country’. [MA, p.176] But this is just what the adult Jim does when he superimposes the figures of his past onto Virgil’s poetry. It’s only by such appropriations that ‘dead’ languages can be brought back to life. And the same applies to people: Ántonia, refound after almost a quarter of a century, would be merely a stranger, a ‘stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested’, with grizzled hair and bad teeth, [MA, p.331] if her essential ‘identity’, underlying those marks, could not be recognized b
y her attentive re-reader.
Early in the novel there is a wonderful example of this attentive, sympathetic recognition, which is for Cather (rather than sexual passion or self-involvement) life’s most valuable emotion. Mr Shimerda has come to visit the Burden household at Christmas:
As it grew dark, I asked whether I might light the Christmas trees before the lamp was brought. When the candle-ends sent up their conical yellow flames, all the coloured figures from Austria stood out clear and full of meaning against the green boughs. Mr Shimerda rose, crossed himself, and quietly knelt down before the tree, his head sunk forward. His long body formed a letter ‘S’. I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather. He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt people’s feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree before, but now, with someone kneeling before it – images, candles….Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brow and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.
We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to look at us, and that our faces were open books to him. When his deep-seeing eyes rested on me, I felt as if he were looking far ahead into the future for me, down the road I would have to travel.
At nine o’clock Mr Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar….He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. ‘The prayers of all good people are good’, he said quietly. [MA, pp.87–8]
Mr Shimerda injects his own associations – Catholic, feudal, Eastern European – into the room: the shape of his body in prayer spelling the first letter of his own name. Grandfather, sensitive to his response, nevertheless by a figurative gesture translates what Christmas means to him back into his own language. The reciprocal sympathy of the two old men – almost, but not quite, comical – is turned more solemnly towards the child (both of them are reading him as he now, as a remembering adult, is reading them) and the scene becomes his education, like a text in a Christmas sermon for him to contemplate.
My Ántonia is full of such sympathetic readings. The admirable Widow Steavens tells the story of ‘her’ Ántonia, carefully and painstakingly, with an attention to female details – the wedding clothes Ántonia brings back with her, the soap she has ready for her baby – which speak to us of Ántonia’s life more directly and intimately than Jim’s version ever does. Ántonia’s children read her photograph album with a ‘pleased recognition’ [MA, p.349] which revitalizes what would otherwise just be stiff, faded, absurd snapshots of Jim’s past: ‘two men, uncomfortably seated, with an awkward-looking boy in baggy clothes standing between them’. [MA, p.350]
These readings are forms of translation: a metaphor which, obviously, suits a novel about immigrants in America. The emphasis on language is very often historical and sociological: even more than O Pioneers!, My Ántonia gives a full, detailed picture of a particular culture at a transitional moment. Early on, small struggles with language, touching or comical – Otto labouring over his Christmas letter to his mother in German, after so long away, or greedy Mrs Shimerda grabbing the words she needs: ‘ “Pay no more, keep cow?” ’ – point to the immigrants’ painful difficulties. It is a history of assimilation obstructed by native hostility (foreigners give you diseases, Jake the Virginian hired man tells Jim) and mutual suspicion: the Austrians hate the Czechs, the Norwegians won’t have Mr Shimerda in their graveyard.
What Jim learns from the Christmas scene with his grandfather and Mr Shimerda is racial tolerance, and ‘The Hired Girls’ is, in part, a ferocious satire on small-town xenophobia. Jim’s preference for the bold, sensual immigrant girls, with their strong values of family loyalty and self-improvement and their energetic pleasure-seeking, over the timid, snobbish Black Hawk natives, is often expressed as a comparison between languages. The ‘beautiful talk’ Ántonia remembers from the old country comes through in the ‘impulsive and foreign’ quality of her speech, in her ‘deep vibrating voice’: ‘Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart’. [MA, p.176] Lena, more smoothly assimilated, has learnt the small town ‘flat commonplaces’, but speaks them with a ‘caressing intonation’ which seems to translate them back into her own language. Native American, by contrast, seems to Jim a ‘furtive and repressed’ speech. [MA, p.219] To find that, at the end of the novel, the Cuzak family have reverted to the ‘rich old language’ of Bohemia seems a judgement on the world outside.
But ‘the language problem’ goes deeper than cultural adaptation. If there is no communication, no true ‘reading’ of signs, then we are left with no sympathy or memory or value in life, just the impenetrable runes of extinct civilizations. The precariousness with which meaning is sustained is always being touched on – for instance in a subtle comment on Jim’s university teacher Gaston Cleric’s extraordinary aptitude for bringing the classics to life in his talk, which may have been ‘fatal to his poetic gift’: ‘He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication’. [MA, p.260] Valuable language must be saved up as well as given out. Two strange, deprived minor characters in the novel bring home to us the perilous fragility of communication. One of them cannot speak, the other cannot see. Ántonia’s ‘crazy’ brother Marek, web-fingered and retarded, can only make ‘his queer noises’ for food and attention. Jim translates even these – he knows Marek wants ‘to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse’ for him [MA, p.77] – but the boy won’t always have such sympathetic interpreters, and stands no more chance in America than Benjy in The Sound and the Fury: we hear later that he has ‘got violent and been sent away to an institution’ [MA, p.314] (just as Alexandra’s brothers wanted to send away old Ivar), his incommunicable meanings silenced for ever. The other misfit has been luckier. He is a famous blind black pianist16 (who comes through Black Hawk on his travels) who, as the blind child of a slave in the post-Bellum South – the most deprived of the deprived – found his way, by instinct, to his employer’s piano. His story, which is only superficially a diversion from the main narrative, describes his salvation by the only language – music – which could ‘piece him out and make a whole creature of him’. [MA, p.188]
Blind d’Arnault survives by improvising, and improvisation is one of the novel’s most insistent expressions of energy. Under duress, people make something out of whatever comes to hand, whether it’s Jim’s homemade Christmas, or the Harlings’ charades and costume balls, or Cuzak pulling from his pockets, like an amateur conjuror, an endless succession of toys (‘penny dolls, a wooden clown, a balloon pig that was inflated by a whistle’ [MA, p.359]) for his children. The book’s leading improviser is Ántonia, a story-teller, inventor, translator, namer of names and recapitulator of memories. The energy that pours out of her in the childhood section is primarily verbal. In her scenes with Jim she is learning as many words as quickly as possible, or interpreting to him the story of Peter and Pavel, or turning his killing of a snake into a tall tale, ‘with a great deal of colour’. [MA, p.49] When she is in trouble or unhappy – after her father’s death or her desertion – she loses her capacity for improvisation, and can only talk about the crops and the weather. But at the end, she is still making a shape of life out of language, telling her childhood to her own children, so that her story-making seems to hold off old age.
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Jim’s summing-up of the Ántonia who ‘fires his imagination’, in another of Cather’s much-quoted, transcendent passages, is like his vision of the plough. ‘His’ Ántonia – mother of sons, rich mine of life – is a ‘figure’ which he now, definitively, reads for us: one who leaves ‘images in the mind that did not fade’, who stays in the mind in ‘a succession of pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one’s first primer’, who ‘lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true’. [MA, p.353] Just so,
the lamp falls on the pot in the centre of the table, or the plough stands out against the sun, or the ‘figures’ of the naked land are superimposed on the classical pastoral. It is a moving conclusion to the narrative’s process of reading and remembering. All the same, Ántonia is a woman, not a plough. She is not as ‘fixed’ as Jim would have her.
Jim’s elegiac pastoral expresses Cather’s deepest feelings: it would be perverse to argue that his reading of Ántonia is meant to be distrusted.17 But his imagination is only ‘fired’ within limits. Figures which do not speak to his sense of what is ‘immemorial’ or ‘universal’ or ‘true’ (Lena Lingard, or Tiny Soderball) are relegated to the edges of his circle of memory, like the awkward items of furniture pushed out of the way in his college room. And what might have been powerful emotions in Ántonia’s story – the aftermath of sexual betrayal, for instance – are muted in the interests of Jim’s memorializing.
But the presence of alternative possibilities makes itself felt inside Jim’s narrative from the first. As in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where the made-up bookish adventures of Tom Sawyer look dubious against Huck’s real emergencies, Jim’s childhood reading of Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson is always being outdone by realities. When he gets up after the blizzard, eager for new excitements – ‘perhaps a barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbour was lost in the storm’ [MA, p.94] –what he gets is the suicide of Mr Shimerda. A deflation of romance goes on throughout. Jim weeps his heart out over Camille, but he has ‘prudently’ remembered to bring his umbrella with him for going home.