Cather drew on the naturalist writers of her day who documented the misery of the urban poor and recounted violent tales of the wilderness to limn the emotional realities of her characters
I was deeply moved by Jim's response to Mr. Shimerda's death, as he sat, almost as if at a wake, in the kitchen of his grandparents' house, after everyone else had left for the Shimerdas'. He seemed so understanding and appreciative of Mr. Shimerda's great sadness, and his description of how "Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting now in this quiet house," demonstrated to me something in Jim's character that I now realize I had really wanted to see but hadn't seen before. "Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories..." -- such powerful empathy, that moved him to find the "heart and center of the house," where he could just sit with those thoughts and memories.
I liked how he always noticed how deeply Mr. Shimerda looked at him, "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." And he describes him in terms that are so different from the broad, encompassing landscape: " his features might have been cut out of a shell."
Speaking of genres such as Naturalism, there’s such a contrast between the brutality of the two deaths in these chapters and the Romanticism of Cather’s descriptions of the Burdens’s country Christmas and of the prairie in Spring. These extremes merge in the description of Mr. Shimerda’s grave, which survives the taming of the prairie and which no traveler can ignore: “. . . the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it.” Jim says that he loved “dim superstition . . . that had put the grave there” and the “spirit that could not carry out the sentence” of the surveyors. Nature’s brutal forces may prevail sometimes, but it’s “clemency” is more powerful.
There was a story today on the radio about preserving the grass of the high plains, which they called "the most imperiled native ecosystem on earth." The report is about the southern plains. But already Cather/Jim is mentioning the disappearance of the grass in Nebraska …
How are the Shimerdas even staying alive? It is hard to understand. The description of their living conditions and state of poverty is difficult to read. They are being taken advantage of and are neglected by their neighbors, both at once. This is survival of the fittest?
It takes a suicide to change the pattern.
I keep trying to put myself in the place of Mrs. Shimerda, who doesn't get much of a break in the book, and maybe for good reason, I don't know. But can you imagine being in her place? She is always angry and at the same time calculating. She married a dreamer albeit a formerly successful one so someone had to do the calculating.
Interesting how the crisis of the death of Mr. Shimerda leads to a wider window on the Grandfather's Christian beliefs and rearranges the family's response to the Shimerdas' needs.
Mr. Shimerda is not equal to the nearly absurd demands placed on him by the move to the American prairie. Plus he is cheated. Maybe he didn't exercise the best judgment always. Later the loss of his two friends Pavel and Peter has "a depressing effect" on him.
Speaking of Pavel and Peter, they threw the bride and groom to the wolves to save themselves. Clearly they were exercising their free will there, making a decision that would haunt them both and determine the trajectory of the rest of their lives.
The narrative does have a collagist structure, which seems to fit with its being an account by Jim and not a novel per se.
I find in the story of the precious dried mushrooms given by Mrs. Shimerda and then discarded in suspicion and fear by Jim's grandmother some kind of analogy for how the two cultures may meet but not blend. There are rough edges that can't be smoothed out except perhaps by more interaction as well as a dose or two of trust.
I was thinking about how Mrs. Shimerda's wish to come to America so her son could strike it rich and be better off then they were back in the village is really the archetypal American journey: it's sort of caricatured here, but it is the whole impulse of the immigration and the westward expansion, and here it is called into question. Why leave where you understand how to live and are at ease to make yourself miserable in these apparently completely unexpected conditions? We understand the grandparents to have made the move more prudently but we really don't know how they ended up there, so far from their family in Virginia. And I so agree about the mushrooms! It reminded me how the Shimerdas have this gift culture: they keep trying to give away things people don't want, they are trying to create a culture of mutual reciprocity (this is something Robert Putnam talks about in his work on social cohesion that I mentioned somewhere else), but no one is interested in what they have to offer. Putnam's whole point is that societies need to build mutual trust for people to be able to survive adversity … One way of thinking about Pavel and Peter's story: Did Peter sacrifice the bride to save Pavel?
I’m so glad to realize, I have no idea where this novel is going.
Chris Benfey, you illuminated something very helpful for me by highlighting Cather’s tone, or her ability to craft and handle tone in a novel that does, now that I stand back from it, move powerfully and steadily through such different registers. And it does so without losing a voice of recollected, recreated childhood.
Probably I never quite grasped naturalism before — as a historical literary moment, and also as a thing modern readers might often take for granted, as it became popular? But such precise naturalism is creating the experience of reading the narrative, and how it feels both immersive and propulsive. I move at two speeds. I feel as if I'm reverently taking my time with each of Jim’s descriptions, his sharp recreation of place (the Nebraskan in me is actually, finally homesick for the brutal seasonal facts out there on the plains), to foreground the human realities. I can’t be the only one who couldn't breathe during the wolf attack. Good lord. And that was because of Cather’s skill with tone, because this sensational scene wasn’t lurid or — gothic? — or cause for philosophical commentary, nothing quite like that. So I could affix the brutality of that memory to the present of Jim’s memory, and Pavel’s vividly sad, dissolute end. That awful tale looms in the house with the death-bed. It follows those who hear it outside, into the cold air, unexplained, or maybe self-explanatory. Landscape and memory and loss (and love), all becoming one thing.
Anyway, that’s just one example. They proliferate! I remember I once heard a poet defining “tone” to a roomful of aspiring poets as something like "clarity of intent.” Which makes sense to me, even though Cather’s intent is a mystery thus far, and in the best way. Single chapters are different rooms, unexpectedly put together and dressed, but moved through at a deliberate pace. And yet, the same house. The floor feels solid.
Has anyone read one of the many biographies of Cather? I just started Benjamin Taylor’s CHASING BRIGHT MEDUSAS, which Chris Benfey mentioned in the last note. Taylor’s such a good writer himself — it matters. And does anyone who grew up in a similar rural or smalltown place feel at all like reading this book is like leafing through an album of long-lost relatives? A little?
Yes, perhaps naturalism feels so much like part of American writing that we don't notice it as a conscious literary effort to embrace the harsh realities of its moment. The way the chapters are distinct from each other seems to be so much a feature of the book—particularly as we move from Peter and Mr. Shimerda's deaths to the comforting scenes of the farmhouse interior, at Christmas and even during the preparations for Mr. Shimerda's funeral, the "cheerful noises" of carpentry for the coffin and the arrival of the dashing Anton Jelinek. The building of the farmhouse itself (you mention the chapters like rooms) seems a way of containing life-giving effort and managing the threats beyond—like the novel. I hope that we'll be able to bring Ben Taylor into our little menage. So fortuitous that his book is just out.
This was a devastating section, ripe for naturalism. But there are still some delightful comic touches. Jim's grandfather's response to Mr. Shimerda kneeling before the Christmas tree really got me: "Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brown and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere." Amazing!
Jim: “I looked forward to any new crisis with delight”—my favorite line so far. The story of the wolves, the bridal party, and the sleigh ride takes on the quality of a folktale for Jim and Antonia with all its delights and horrors, as we see the families in the book struggling with the elements amidst immense beauty. I am reminded of two other sleigh rides—Jim, Antonia, and Kulka in Jim‘s makeshift sleigh, a wonderful scene of innocence and fun, and Nicolas and Natasha’s Christmas sleigh ride in War and Peace, filled with magic and love before the onset of war. I’m assuming Cather read Tolstoy.
Cather was a great admirer of Tolstoy, whom she first read as a youngster in Red Cloud (the model for Black Hawk). She was also a huge fan of Turgenev. I completely agree that the story of the wedding and the wolves has a folktale quality, maybe even a specifically Russian folktale vibe. Maybe worth thinking about why Cather decided to set it in Russia/Ukraine, and told by a Russian storyteller. More on Cather and Russian writers here:
Oh yes, the story of the wolves is so like those stories in Turgenev's "Hunter's Diary"/"Sportsman's Notebook." I realized only recently how around Turgenev was personally in the lives of James and that generation. Talk about manors and country houses. Reminds me of the detail that Antonia and her mother used to steal wood from the local grandee. (Anton Jelinek also seems like a character cut from that literary cloth.)
Yes! In so many ways Cather seems to be writing a Russian novel as a way to tell the story of the American experience. She tried to find a model in Henry James in her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. A mistake. She found a much better model in the Russians: Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov. Such cultural exchanges are unpredictable; we never quite know where we'll find our "home" in art. An overwhelming scene in Cather's The Song of the Lark is when her singer-heroine Thea (cf. Diva or goddess) first hears Dvorak's New World Symphony. She can't believe it. Here is her small Colorado town and all her childhood experience in a musical nutshell, as composed (in New York City) by a native of "Bohemia." Ántonia's violin-playing father is another Bohemian musician, of course.
Oh what a good connection! The sleigh has this magical speed, and also this element of taking pleasure at the edge of danger—the winter, the snow. The War and Peace sleigh ride is also at night, isn't it?
So much to look into here! We must look into Cather’s Russian literature connections. I’d also like to point out how Homeric Cather is, both in style and content. I think she might have been able to read some Homer in the original, having received Greek instruction as a teen in Nebraska from an eccentric oldster there. Tolstoy also read Homer before writing War and Peace. The close observation of craftspeople is characteristic, perhaps. The great scene where Otto makes the coffin for Mr. Shimerda with macabre gusto reminds me of Odysseus building his raft on Calypso’s isle.
Yes! And also the incredible chapter in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying when Cash builds a coffin for his dying mother. In thirteen numbered entries he explains why he built it "on the bevel." I once heard Seamus Heaney describe this passage as a great poem. The close linkage of storytelling to craftspeople is a major theme in Walter Benjamin's famous essay "The Storyteller," in which he wonders, among other things, "whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's relationship."
That’s right! Great connection, Chris. Also thought of Peter Coffin shaving down the bench for Ishmael to sleep on at the Coffin Inn! Whistling to himself the while. A hard bed to lie on.
What a great string of associations. I love how Cather manages both to learn Greek and to read Anna Karenina in Red Cloud, without the help of the internet.
To go back to your earlier comment, Otto making the coffin also sounds like Tolstoy: "his hands went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them."
Thanks, Anthony. My Tolstoy is rusty but it does sound Tolstoyan: there is Levin scythe in hand going back and forth over the field in the reaping scene. I learn that Cather found a copy of Anna K. As a teen in a Red Cloud drugstore!
Also thinking about how this kind of capability is admired as a thing of beauty but it is also a matter of survival. The Shimerdas are nearly doomed because they do not know how to do things: "I've come strange to a new country myself but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have." The grandparents and later the Harlings seem like a kind of aristocracy of capableness.
Acocella praises Cather as unflinching for the way she registers the vicarious pleasure human beings take in the deaths of others. Jim wakes that morning hoping for a crisis. Stimulated by the suicide Otto and Jake become garrulous telling other horror stories. But I do agree with Barbara above that there is genuine pity and empathy mixed in, too. When Jim us alone and has a chance to reflect, he does seem to be visited by Mr. Shimerda’s homecoming spirit.
As we were saying before! There is a frisson at death and danger (the snake, Jim and Antonia's "pleasure" at the terrible story of the wolves) that must be some register of their felt proximity. Jim is honest about his less noble feelings, as when he is frustrated by Antonia's vulgarity at the close of Book One. But I was struck that he didn't worry more about the Shimerdas during the huge storm, or think too much about what Mr. Shimerda's terrible death—how bound up they were with it as they huddled away from the elements—could have been like for Antonia. There is silence from the midwinter burial at the end of Ch 16 to her greeting him "gaily" from her team in the bright spring. There has been such an unseen transformation in her into this hearty survivor who competes with Ambrosch to carry the family. The way Paul above talks about the chapters like rooms—it makes me think that part of the art here is to put things side by side and build these webs of unspoken feeling between, like the things that grandfather doesn't say. The book is in some ways laconic as the people are. Must read Acocella!
Jim’s grandparents are a mystery to me, too. Why would they move to the frontier, presumably late in life? You’d think that type of risky journey would be reserved for younger couples trying to stake out land, or for single adventurers. Would love a back story, but don’t think we’ll get one.
I've been thinking about Ann's great phrase for Jim's grandparents and the Harlings, as "like a kind of aristocracy of capableness." That sounds exactly right. The Shimerdas keep harping on the aristocracy in the Old Country, and how Mr. Shimerda, with his fancy gun (remember what Chekhov said about guns introduced in the first act) and his violin, is an aristocrat. Cather seems to be wondering what an aristocrat of the New World might look like. The grandparents certainly seem to qualify, with their instinctive generosity (noblesse oblige) and freedom from bigotry. She also liked the big railroad men who, in her view, dreamed the West into existence. (There's a lot about this in her terrific novel A Lost Lady.) Grownup Jim is also in the railroad business.
Catching up with just two appreciations: Jim's reflection about Mr. Shimerda: "If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would never have happened." -- this sentence seemed in the moment to have stood for the whole movement of Book I, from Jim's family's indifference and even hostile judgments of the Shimerdas through to the release of their generosity that follows the suicide.
And the extraordinarily beautiful passage at the end of Chapter 16, starting with "Years afterward" to the end. I think it is only with these moments that I finally entered the book.
I was deeply moved by Jim's response to Mr. Shimerda's death, as he sat, almost as if at a wake, in the kitchen of his grandparents' house, after everyone else had left for the Shimerdas'. He seemed so understanding and appreciative of Mr. Shimerda's great sadness, and his description of how "Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting now in this quiet house," demonstrated to me something in Jim's character that I now realize I had really wanted to see but hadn't seen before. "Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories..." -- such powerful empathy, that moved him to find the "heart and center of the house," where he could just sit with those thoughts and memories.
I liked how he always noticed how deeply Mr. Shimerda looked at him, "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." And he describes him in terms that are so different from the broad, encompassing landscape: " his features might have been cut out of a shell."
Speaking of genres such as Naturalism, there’s such a contrast between the brutality of the two deaths in these chapters and the Romanticism of Cather’s descriptions of the Burdens’s country Christmas and of the prairie in Spring. These extremes merge in the description of Mr. Shimerda’s grave, which survives the taming of the prairie and which no traveler can ignore: “. . . the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it.” Jim says that he loved “dim superstition . . . that had put the grave there” and the “spirit that could not carry out the sentence” of the surveyors. Nature’s brutal forces may prevail sometimes, but it’s “clemency” is more powerful.
What a beautiful observation! And the grave is itself a crossroads …
Oh, dang! Right, Ann.
There was a story today on the radio about preserving the grass of the high plains, which they called "the most imperiled native ecosystem on earth." The report is about the southern plains. But already Cather/Jim is mentioning the disappearance of the grass in Nebraska …
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/14/1231313598/groups-ban-together-to-save-native-grasslands-in-the-high-plains
Look, another essay proclaiming the contemporary relevance of Willa Cather!
https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/willa-cather-and-the-antique-virtues-one-of-ours
It's a movement! I've asked Peter Meilaender to come join our comments, let's see if he comes!
I'm here. : )
It has taken me a while--but better late than never?
How are the Shimerdas even staying alive? It is hard to understand. The description of their living conditions and state of poverty is difficult to read. They are being taken advantage of and are neglected by their neighbors, both at once. This is survival of the fittest?
It takes a suicide to change the pattern.
I keep trying to put myself in the place of Mrs. Shimerda, who doesn't get much of a break in the book, and maybe for good reason, I don't know. But can you imagine being in her place? She is always angry and at the same time calculating. She married a dreamer albeit a formerly successful one so someone had to do the calculating.
Interesting how the crisis of the death of Mr. Shimerda leads to a wider window on the Grandfather's Christian beliefs and rearranges the family's response to the Shimerdas' needs.
Mr. Shimerda is not equal to the nearly absurd demands placed on him by the move to the American prairie. Plus he is cheated. Maybe he didn't exercise the best judgment always. Later the loss of his two friends Pavel and Peter has "a depressing effect" on him.
Speaking of Pavel and Peter, they threw the bride and groom to the wolves to save themselves. Clearly they were exercising their free will there, making a decision that would haunt them both and determine the trajectory of the rest of their lives.
The narrative does have a collagist structure, which seems to fit with its being an account by Jim and not a novel per se.
I find in the story of the precious dried mushrooms given by Mrs. Shimerda and then discarded in suspicion and fear by Jim's grandmother some kind of analogy for how the two cultures may meet but not blend. There are rough edges that can't be smoothed out except perhaps by more interaction as well as a dose or two of trust.
I was thinking about how Mrs. Shimerda's wish to come to America so her son could strike it rich and be better off then they were back in the village is really the archetypal American journey: it's sort of caricatured here, but it is the whole impulse of the immigration and the westward expansion, and here it is called into question. Why leave where you understand how to live and are at ease to make yourself miserable in these apparently completely unexpected conditions? We understand the grandparents to have made the move more prudently but we really don't know how they ended up there, so far from their family in Virginia. And I so agree about the mushrooms! It reminded me how the Shimerdas have this gift culture: they keep trying to give away things people don't want, they are trying to create a culture of mutual reciprocity (this is something Robert Putnam talks about in his work on social cohesion that I mentioned somewhere else), but no one is interested in what they have to offer. Putnam's whole point is that societies need to build mutual trust for people to be able to survive adversity … One way of thinking about Pavel and Peter's story: Did Peter sacrifice the bride to save Pavel?
I’m so glad to realize, I have no idea where this novel is going.
Chris Benfey, you illuminated something very helpful for me by highlighting Cather’s tone, or her ability to craft and handle tone in a novel that does, now that I stand back from it, move powerfully and steadily through such different registers. And it does so without losing a voice of recollected, recreated childhood.
Probably I never quite grasped naturalism before — as a historical literary moment, and also as a thing modern readers might often take for granted, as it became popular? But such precise naturalism is creating the experience of reading the narrative, and how it feels both immersive and propulsive. I move at two speeds. I feel as if I'm reverently taking my time with each of Jim’s descriptions, his sharp recreation of place (the Nebraskan in me is actually, finally homesick for the brutal seasonal facts out there on the plains), to foreground the human realities. I can’t be the only one who couldn't breathe during the wolf attack. Good lord. And that was because of Cather’s skill with tone, because this sensational scene wasn’t lurid or — gothic? — or cause for philosophical commentary, nothing quite like that. So I could affix the brutality of that memory to the present of Jim’s memory, and Pavel’s vividly sad, dissolute end. That awful tale looms in the house with the death-bed. It follows those who hear it outside, into the cold air, unexplained, or maybe self-explanatory. Landscape and memory and loss (and love), all becoming one thing.
Anyway, that’s just one example. They proliferate! I remember I once heard a poet defining “tone” to a roomful of aspiring poets as something like "clarity of intent.” Which makes sense to me, even though Cather’s intent is a mystery thus far, and in the best way. Single chapters are different rooms, unexpectedly put together and dressed, but moved through at a deliberate pace. And yet, the same house. The floor feels solid.
Has anyone read one of the many biographies of Cather? I just started Benjamin Taylor’s CHASING BRIGHT MEDUSAS, which Chris Benfey mentioned in the last note. Taylor’s such a good writer himself — it matters. And does anyone who grew up in a similar rural or smalltown place feel at all like reading this book is like leafing through an album of long-lost relatives? A little?
Yes, perhaps naturalism feels so much like part of American writing that we don't notice it as a conscious literary effort to embrace the harsh realities of its moment. The way the chapters are distinct from each other seems to be so much a feature of the book—particularly as we move from Peter and Mr. Shimerda's deaths to the comforting scenes of the farmhouse interior, at Christmas and even during the preparations for Mr. Shimerda's funeral, the "cheerful noises" of carpentry for the coffin and the arrival of the dashing Anton Jelinek. The building of the farmhouse itself (you mention the chapters like rooms) seems a way of containing life-giving effort and managing the threats beyond—like the novel. I hope that we'll be able to bring Ben Taylor into our little menage. So fortuitous that his book is just out.
This was a devastating section, ripe for naturalism. But there are still some delightful comic touches. Jim's grandfather's response to Mr. Shimerda kneeling before the Christmas tree really got me: "Grandfather merely put his finger-tips to his brown and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere." Amazing!
That cracked me up too.
Jim: “I looked forward to any new crisis with delight”—my favorite line so far. The story of the wolves, the bridal party, and the sleigh ride takes on the quality of a folktale for Jim and Antonia with all its delights and horrors, as we see the families in the book struggling with the elements amidst immense beauty. I am reminded of two other sleigh rides—Jim, Antonia, and Kulka in Jim‘s makeshift sleigh, a wonderful scene of innocence and fun, and Nicolas and Natasha’s Christmas sleigh ride in War and Peace, filled with magic and love before the onset of war. I’m assuming Cather read Tolstoy.
Cather was a great admirer of Tolstoy, whom she first read as a youngster in Red Cloud (the model for Black Hawk). She was also a huge fan of Turgenev. I completely agree that the story of the wedding and the wolves has a folktale quality, maybe even a specifically Russian folktale vibe. Maybe worth thinking about why Cather decided to set it in Russia/Ukraine, and told by a Russian storyteller. More on Cather and Russian writers here:
https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/1/cs001.russians
Oh yes, the story of the wolves is so like those stories in Turgenev's "Hunter's Diary"/"Sportsman's Notebook." I realized only recently how around Turgenev was personally in the lives of James and that generation. Talk about manors and country houses. Reminds me of the detail that Antonia and her mother used to steal wood from the local grandee. (Anton Jelinek also seems like a character cut from that literary cloth.)
Yes! In so many ways Cather seems to be writing a Russian novel as a way to tell the story of the American experience. She tried to find a model in Henry James in her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. A mistake. She found a much better model in the Russians: Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov. Such cultural exchanges are unpredictable; we never quite know where we'll find our "home" in art. An overwhelming scene in Cather's The Song of the Lark is when her singer-heroine Thea (cf. Diva or goddess) first hears Dvorak's New World Symphony. She can't believe it. Here is her small Colorado town and all her childhood experience in a musical nutshell, as composed (in New York City) by a native of "Bohemia." Ántonia's violin-playing father is another Bohemian musician, of course.
Agreed, though, in her New York and Pittsburgh tales, Cather continues to profit from the Jamesian influence, e.g. in "Uncle Valentine," and
"Consequences," reminiscent of "The Jolly Corner."
Oh what a good connection! The sleigh has this magical speed, and also this element of taking pleasure at the edge of danger—the winter, the snow. The War and Peace sleigh ride is also at night, isn't it?
Yes, a starry night. And also with a group of friends in different sleighs!
So much to look into here! We must look into Cather’s Russian literature connections. I’d also like to point out how Homeric Cather is, both in style and content. I think she might have been able to read some Homer in the original, having received Greek instruction as a teen in Nebraska from an eccentric oldster there. Tolstoy also read Homer before writing War and Peace. The close observation of craftspeople is characteristic, perhaps. The great scene where Otto makes the coffin for Mr. Shimerda with macabre gusto reminds me of Odysseus building his raft on Calypso’s isle.
Yes! And also the incredible chapter in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying when Cash builds a coffin for his dying mother. In thirteen numbered entries he explains why he built it "on the bevel." I once heard Seamus Heaney describe this passage as a great poem. The close linkage of storytelling to craftspeople is a major theme in Walter Benjamin's famous essay "The Storyteller," in which he wonders, among other things, "whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's relationship."
That’s right! Great connection, Chris. Also thought of Peter Coffin shaving down the bench for Ishmael to sleep on at the Coffin Inn! Whistling to himself the while. A hard bed to lie on.
Or is it the Spouter Inn?
Yes, a lot of coffins in Moby Dick!
What a great string of associations. I love how Cather manages both to learn Greek and to read Anna Karenina in Red Cloud, without the help of the internet.
"on the bevel"—so Seamus Heaney. Poet, poietes, poiein
To go back to your earlier comment, Otto making the coffin also sounds like Tolstoy: "his hands went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if he were blessing them."
Thanks, Anthony. My Tolstoy is rusty but it does sound Tolstoyan: there is Levin scythe in hand going back and forth over the field in the reaping scene. I learn that Cather found a copy of Anna K. As a teen in a Red Cloud drugstore!
Also thinking about how this kind of capability is admired as a thing of beauty but it is also a matter of survival. The Shimerdas are nearly doomed because they do not know how to do things: "I've come strange to a new country myself but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have." The grandparents and later the Harlings seem like a kind of aristocracy of capableness.
Acocella praises Cather as unflinching for the way she registers the vicarious pleasure human beings take in the deaths of others. Jim wakes that morning hoping for a crisis. Stimulated by the suicide Otto and Jake become garrulous telling other horror stories. But I do agree with Barbara above that there is genuine pity and empathy mixed in, too. When Jim us alone and has a chance to reflect, he does seem to be visited by Mr. Shimerda’s homecoming spirit.
As we were saying before! There is a frisson at death and danger (the snake, Jim and Antonia's "pleasure" at the terrible story of the wolves) that must be some register of their felt proximity. Jim is honest about his less noble feelings, as when he is frustrated by Antonia's vulgarity at the close of Book One. But I was struck that he didn't worry more about the Shimerdas during the huge storm, or think too much about what Mr. Shimerda's terrible death—how bound up they were with it as they huddled away from the elements—could have been like for Antonia. There is silence from the midwinter burial at the end of Ch 16 to her greeting him "gaily" from her team in the bright spring. There has been such an unseen transformation in her into this hearty survivor who competes with Ambrosch to carry the family. The way Paul above talks about the chapters like rooms—it makes me think that part of the art here is to put things side by side and build these webs of unspoken feeling between, like the things that grandfather doesn't say. The book is in some ways laconic as the people are. Must read Acocella!
Jim’s grandparents are a mystery to me, too. Why would they move to the frontier, presumably late in life? You’d think that type of risky journey would be reserved for younger couples trying to stake out land, or for single adventurers. Would love a back story, but don’t think we’ll get one.
I've been thinking about Ann's great phrase for Jim's grandparents and the Harlings, as "like a kind of aristocracy of capableness." That sounds exactly right. The Shimerdas keep harping on the aristocracy in the Old Country, and how Mr. Shimerda, with his fancy gun (remember what Chekhov said about guns introduced in the first act) and his violin, is an aristocrat. Cather seems to be wondering what an aristocrat of the New World might look like. The grandparents certainly seem to qualify, with their instinctive generosity (noblesse oblige) and freedom from bigotry. She also liked the big railroad men who, in her view, dreamed the West into existence. (There's a lot about this in her terrific novel A Lost Lady.) Grownup Jim is also in the railroad business.
Catching up with just two appreciations: Jim's reflection about Mr. Shimerda: "If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would never have happened." -- this sentence seemed in the moment to have stood for the whole movement of Book I, from Jim's family's indifference and even hostile judgments of the Shimerdas through to the release of their generosity that follows the suicide.
And the extraordinarily beautiful passage at the end of Chapter 16, starting with "Years afterward" to the end. I think it is only with these moments that I finally entered the book.
(Just now catching up myself on a few comments I missed! This is so beautifully said.)