Three years have passed and Jim’s grandparents have moved into town. The hired men, Jake and Otto, have migrated further west. Black Hawk is “a clean, well-planted little prairie town” (cf. Hemingway’s “clean, well-lighted place”), a very different stage for Cather’s drama than the rugged farmland that previously dominated this novel. Book Two is in one sense more domestic, more civilized, more socialized, than Book One, as the rough-and-tumble girls Jim knew from the outback find work in town. Much of the action happens indoors rather than among the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes. In other ways, though, Book Two is the wilder of the two sections, the more primal, as Jim and his contemporaries zigzag into the adult world of passion, sex, violence, and art.
Two events precede the momentous erection of the dancing pavilion in Black Hawk. One is the arrival of a tramp; the other is an appearance by the remarkable pianist Blind d’Arnault. Tramps filled the countryside during the 1890s, as the United States endured a devastating depression, and Nebraska suffered drought and famine, conditions that led to Mr. Shimerda’s suicide. A tramp is the subject of Tony’s “new story” in Chapter Four—a reminder of how many storytellers there are in this novel. The tramp has a MAGA-ish theory about the cause of his own misery, blaming it on the influx of immigrants. “So it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.” He also blames the climate. “The ponds in this country is done got so low a man couldn’t drownd himself in one of ’em.” He finds another way to a quick death, diving “head-first right into the threshing machine.” In Cather’s previous novel, The Song of the Lark, a tramp also kills himself in a lurid way, drowning himself in the town’s water supply.
Blind d’Arnault enters the narrative in Chapter Seven, a stumbling block for some of today’s readers. At times, the chapter seems to perpetuate the myth, dear to writers of the 1920s like Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), of the congenitally happy Black person. Blind d’Arnault (his first name derives from his disability) is repeatedly described as “happy” and “docile,” his “white teeth, all grinning.” He gives the kind of ingratiating performance to his white audience that Miles Davis so disliked in Louis Armstrong. The portrayal of d’Arnault recalls the mythology of the Old Plantation. Cather remarks that he grew up in the shadow of the Big House, “where the spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted.” (If you’re interested in Cather and race, you’ll want to read her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, in conjunction with Toni Morrison’s discussion of it in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.)
At the same time, d’Arnault has survived terrible trauma, and Cather relishes his precocious gift, writing about his discovery of the piano in some of the same magical (and erotic) ways in which she described a budding opera diva in The Song of the Lark. “He approached this highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him.” Cather was in love with musical prodigies, taking the young Yehudi Menuhin and his sister under her wing, as described in a lovely recent article in The New York Times.
The chapter is, among other things, an exercise in “primitivism,” the then widespread notion that certain people—those of “savage blood” (Cather’s term), or Gauguin’s South Sea islanders—are in touch with life’s primal energies. Through their music, their dancing, their uninhibited way of life, they provide the overcivilized among us with a momentary glimpse of escape. When d’Arnault plays in his self-taught, rhythmic, rapturous way, the hired girls are inspired to dance in the adjacent room before being invited inside, by d’Arnault himself, to join the festivities.
Dance is the surprising central thread of Book Two, and dance critics have responded deeply to Cather’s work. Joan Acocella, who wrote about dance for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and who died earlier this year, wrote a discerning book called Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. The book is dedicated to Arlene Croce, the leading dance critic of our time. Croce herself staunchly defended what some consider the attenuated ending of The Song of the Lark, arguing that an artist’s mature phase (she was thinking of the ballet dancer Suzanne Farrell) always seems thin to outsiders because the real life is within, and in the art. While Ántonia is not an artist, Cather suggests that in certain ways, including the way she dances, she has an artist’s temperament. (Some readers may feel that the ending of My Ántonia is a little thin.)
“The Hired Girls” features Ántonia and her vibrant friends Lena Lingard and Tiny Soderball. Among other things, this section is about physical—including, but not limited to, sexual—“awakening,” centered on women’s bodies and the contrast between the restricted indoor life of the “town girls,” descended from Virginia and Pennsylvania settlers, and the greater physical freedom of the “hired girls,” whose families are more recent arrivals from Bohemia (part of today’s Czech Republic) and Scandinavia. Dance marks the dividing line between these two populations. Proper girls don’t (really) dance.
Ántonia has an artist’s sense of what she’s doing on the dance floor, more like a jazz musician (or Blind d’Arnault) than a dutiful student at dancing school. “She taught me to dance against and around the hard-and-fast beat of the music,” Jim remarks.
Dancing with Ántonia is ecstatic. “When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you didn’t return to anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure.”
And then the heartbreaking kicker: “If, instead of going to the end of the railroad, old Mr. Shimerda had stayed in New York and picked up a living with his fiddle, how different Ántonia’s life might have been!”
That would have been a beautiful ending to Book Two. Instead, Cather appends the sordid episode in which Wick Cutter strands his wife in Kansas City so he can slither into bed with Ántonia. Surprise! Among other things, we might wonder why Cather, who was so deliberate in naming her characters, gave Wick Cutter (cutter of wicks, bringer of darkness?) a name so much like her own.
Join us with your thoughts here in the comments! And read Books Three and Four for Sunday, February 25. We’ll soon be announcing our Zoom party at the close to meet Chris and each other, stay tuned.
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.
Book Post’s bookselling partner Square Books is offering My Àntonia at a discount here on the occasion of Fireside Reading (discount applied in cart). Thanks Square!
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Looking back at "Past Lives," one of the things I'm noticing is how Jim and Àntonia don't have a shared language for talking about their relationship. The moments when each lets down their guard are syncopated. The kiss: Jim sort of tells Àntonia how important she is to him, but brings up kissing Lena Lingard! She laughs and calls him a "kid" she's "awful fond of." She makes avowals and he lets them pass: “Maybe I be the kind of girl you like better, now I come to town.” She says more in these casual moments than he ever tells us, the readers, but maybe he is keeping back what he is prepared to confide in the writer from New York.
Parts of book 2 read like a coming of age story both for the young characters and also for the town. “Stuff” has been happening in the town for a while, including the occasional short term disappearance of a young woman (which happened everywhere in the US until Roe)but now, with the dance hall, the hired girls, more saloons, the spirit of the town is evolving, and the elders are confronting what to do to keep young people in line. Lines are being drawn. Grandfather wouldn’t be happy about Jim’s visits to a saloon. Jim sneaks out the window! Antonia is warned, but rebels.