My Àntonia: Book One, Chapters 8–19

Jake Marpole carrying a Christmas tree on horseback. Illustration by W. T. Benda from a set of plates commissioned by Willa Cather for the first edition of My Àntonia

When I’m asked to talk about Willa Cather, I tend to look for ways to say what a great writer she is. I want to persuade readers that she’s every bit as sophisticated and daring as her modernist peers like Faulkner (who admired her work) or Hemingway (who disparaged it). At the same time, I have to admit that one of the things I most love about her work is its wisdom, the ways she tells us what’s important in life. In My Ántonia she insists on the value of early memories: “some memories,” Jim says, “are realities.”

Each time I read the novel, it tugs at my own memories in unexpected ways. I grew up in a small town in Indiana—not quite Nebraska but remote enough from the culture of the coasts. My German-Jewish father left Nazi Germany at age ten (Jim’s age!) to live with a foster family in England. His grandmother was named Antonie but everyone called her Toni. Having just lost my father, at age ninety-eight, I find he saturates my reading this time around. Books show us a different face each time we read them.

As Book One (and the radiant Nebraska autumn) draws to a close, we witness the growing intimacy of Jim and Ántonia, accelerated by the killing of that “abominable,” “loathsome,” “disgusting,” “hideous” rattlesnake (killed by adjectives, you might say). Their great adventure makes her treat him, despite their age difference, “more like an equal.” For Jim, the heavy winter snow that follows is all magic, highlighting “like strokes of Chinese white on canvas” the great circle in the grass where Indians rode before the settlers violently displaced them (and named their town after the Native leader Black Hawk). This seems to Jim “a good omen for the winter.”

Things are indeed ominous for the Shimerdas, huddling in their frozen cave of a home, who are barely surviving on rotting potatoes discarded by the postmaster. Doomed Mr. Shimerda, with his aristocratic manners and his “wintry flicker of a smile,” has run out of hope, helplessly pleading that his family “were not beggars in the old country.” His disastrous suicide is shadowed by lurid rumors that he may have been murdered. One narrative strand in Book One culminates in Christmas, the other in the burial at the crossroads.

These divergent tonalities are held together, I think, by Cather’s embrace of naturalism, the literary movement among her contemporaries inspired by Darwin’s struggle for survival. Naturalist writers like Stephen Crane (“An Experiment in Misery”) and Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives) documented the misery of the urban poor. Crane as a young reporter visited Nebraska to write about the brutal winter of 1895.

Cather, a student and aspiring journalist at the University of Nebraska at the time, interviewed him for the local paper. In “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life,” Crane asked a farmer, “How did you get along?” The answer: “Don’t git along, stranger. Who the hell told you I did get along?” One can imagine Mr. Shimerda, whose grim domestic scene could have been lifted from Crane’s report, saying the same thing in his more polite way.

Other naturalist writers like Jack London specialized in violent tales of the wilderness, like The Call of the Wild. In My Ántonia, the hired hands of Jim’s grandparents, Jake Marpole and Otto Fuchs (whose name means “fox”), tell “wonderful animal stories; about grey wolves and bears in the Rockies, wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains” to while away the “bitter, starlit nights.”

Two animal stories stand out in Book One. First, there’s Jim’s battle with the rattlesnake. Afterwards Jim realizes that maybe the snake, who was old and hadn’t shown “much fight,” probably wasn’t so dangerous after all. I wonder if Elizabeth Bishop had this scene somewhere in the back of her mind when she wrote her great poem “The Fish.” “Tremendous” he certainly was, but “He didn’t fight. / He hadn’t fought at all.”

The other animal tale concerns that marvelous pair Pavel and Peter, who left Russia because of a “great trouble” and have been “batching” in their neat house outfitted with a double bed and Peter’s beloved cow. Pavel, suffering from TB, delivers a deathbed confession to Mr. Shimerda, who won’t live much longer himself. Darwin’s struggle for existence plays out amid a joyful wedding party making their way homeward. Pursued by marauding wolves, Peter, on the lead sledge along with the bridal pair, makes a desperate decision to lighten the load. Forever after, Pavel and Peter were known as “the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves.” The story itself pursued them like a pack of wolves.

What is this story about? Is it a return of that recurrent leitmotif of American literature (and of naturalism), nature versus man? Is there a buried theme involving a same-sex couple (Pavel and Peter) and a straight one? Whatever its meaning, it is an intense source of excitement for Jim and Ántonia, for whom “the story of the wedding party was never at an end … as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago and the wedding party had been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.”

David Brooks invoked Pavel’s story in a 2019 New Year’s Eve column for The New York Times, “because this looks to be the year of the wolves.” Predicting that impending indictments would provoke “not just a political crisis but a constitutional one,” he worried, in a naturalistic vein, that America might become a land “where good people lay low and where wolves are left free to prey on the weak.”

Later in Book One, Cather gives a leisurely treatment of Christmas as celebrated at the home of Jim’s big-hearted grandparents. Snowfall prevents shopping in Black Hawk, so family members have to improvise. Cather gives a full paragraph to the handmade book that Jim, with help from his grandmother, constructs for Yulka. The Christmas tree, adorned with stiff little paper figures from Otto Fuchs’s trunk, becomes a “talking tree,” with “legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.” We might ask what work these marvelous things—the homemade book and the storytelling tree—are doing here. Is Cather inviting us to think of her novel as somehow crafted, a handmade artifact of a time and place, constructed like a collage of legends and stories?

These descriptions of Christmas things imply an aesthetic and a worldview. So does the description in Chapter Twelve of Grandfather reading from the New Testament on Christmas morning and offering a prayer “for the poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than it was here with us.” The “struggle for life,” whether in cities or on the Nebraska prairie, is of course more Darwin than Jesus, another naturalist touch.

Book One ends with a devastating proclamation from Ántonia. “Things will be easy for you,” she tells Jim Burden. “But they will be hard for us.”

Join us with your thoughts here in the comments! And read Book Two for Sunday, February 18. We’ll soon be announcing our Zoom party at the close to meet Chris and each other, stay tuned.

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Chris Benfey is the author of five books about the American Gilded Age, including The Great Wave and A Summer of Hummingbirds, and the family memoir Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. He has written for Book Post on hunting, kites, Whitman, and other subjects.

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J. H. Wegmann, Photographic portrait (circa 1886) of the Sadilek children, from whom Cather’s portrait of the Shimerda family was drawn. Antone (Ambrosch) is seated, Anna (Àntonia) to the left, Frank (Marek) in the center, and Christine (Yulka) to the right. PHO-4-W689-224. Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Collection. Willa Cather Foundation Collections and Archives at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Our thanks to the Willa Cather Foundation for drawing these artefacts to our attention! Lots more here.

An aside from the editor: In his recent book of essays, This Wide Terraqueous World, the novelist Laird Hunt, many of whose books are set in rural Indiana where he spent his later childhood, recounts a bemused road trip visit to Red Cloud and the National Willa Cather Center, writing of “some of her novels that seem so beautifully drunk on the deeper registers of life’s best natural beauties.” “Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of the best books set in the West I know,” he writes, “and I have read a few. I had it more in mind than My Ántonia—though I love that one too and it takes place in something much like the bulged and creek-cut crop-land I had all around me …”