My Àntonia: Conclusion, Book Five

George Inness, Afterglow (1893), detail. Edward B. Butler Collection, Art Institute of Chicago. Willa Cather noted her appreciation of the light in this painting in a review of the Art Institute

When Book Five opens, twenty years have passed, the archetypal time lapse of Rip Van Winkle, one of the plays from Jim and Lena’s theater-going days. We are now in epilogue land. Jim is still firmly committed to backward glances. “Some memories are realities,” he says in the first paragraph of Book Five, “and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” I love what Ántonia, firmly in the present, says when she first recognizes Jim: “What’s happened? Is anybody dead?”  

We are reminded again and again in these final chapters that Ántonia is surrounded by her children, almost submerged by them, so many children that everyone has lost count. Tiny Soderball thinks Ántonia has “ten or eleven.” I counted twelve, including Martha, her daughter with Larry Donovan. The children, Czech speakers before they go to school, are very close. They adore each other. “I didn’t even know Martha wasn’t my full sister until after she was engaged to Joe,” Anna tells Jim.

When Jim tells Ántonia he has no children, she seems “embarrassed,” as though he has confessed to something shameful. This is a gulf yawning between them. We may wonder whether Ántonia lives in the past as much as Jim does. Do parents generally think that their memories are “better than anything” that can ever happen to them again? Jim lives in the past. Ántonia lives in her children, and the future.

Jim tries to bridge the gulf with intense talk of “the miracle” (what exactly is it?) when he first sees her, almost toothless “but not diminished.” She is, he tells himself, “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” I’ve mentioned before how Cather loves the word “something,” and so does Jim. “She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl,” he remarks, “but she still had that something which fires the imagination.”  

Can we imagine Ántonia herself telling the story of Jim’s visit twenty years after her jilting by Larry Donovan? Would she think, for a minute, that this is the guy she should have married? Would Jim, for all his talk to her sons about how he was “very much in love” with their mother, have consented to stay in Nebraska? Would she have agreed to follow him to New York? Can we imagine her as a city lawyer’s wife, coaxing reluctant Jim to have a couple of kids?

By my count, there are three Antons in the novel and one Ántonia. (Was there a shortage of Bohemian names?) Twelve-year-old Leo gets the most attention in these final chapters, though. Leo with his fiddle—his grandfather’s fiddle—and his faun-like demeanor seems like some apparition from the old country, a wood-sprite, with his “jealous, animal little love.”

And then there’s Anton Cuzak. Tiny Soderball had told Jim that Ántonia hadn’t “done very well,” and that “her husband was not a man of much force.” Lena disagreed, assuring Jim that “there’s nothing the matter with Cuzak. You’d like him. He isn’t a hustler, but a rough man would never have suited Tony.”

Anton doesn’t seem such a bad match for Ántonia, does he? He knows things, like how to graft fruit trees. He’s not a clod. He’s not abusive. He’s kind. He treasures his children and loves his wife. He likes music and dancing. He’s lonely for the city life, but hey, he can dance with the girls on a Saturday night and his wife doesn’t mind. Jim worries that Cuzak has sacrificed too much, that he’s an “instrument of Ántonia’s special mission.”

Jim is a marriage skeptic. “I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!” he concludes darkly, as though the single life—or his own independent life within an unhappy marriage—is the “right” one. And yet, he seems bent on adopting himself into Ántonia’s boisterously happy family, sleeping in the hayloft with Leo—“I found I hated to leave this boy”—and planning a hunting trip with the older brothers. “There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet.”

Cather’s endings always surprise me. It’s as though she knows what we expect: a neat tidying up, a resolution. Instead, we generally get a certain raggedness, a change of direction, a lingering ambiguity or uncertainty. I still don’t know what really happens at the end of one of Cather’s finest stories, “Coming, Aphrodite!” or her (perhaps) greatest novel, The Professor’s House. As for My Ántonia, I sometimes have a hard time holding the ending firmly in mind. All those children. All those Antons. All those photographs.   

Book Five does have some surprises, though. Did we expect that the Cutters would turn up in an even more lurid way than when last seen, when Cutter was scheming to rape Ántonia and ended up in bed with Jim instead? A murder-suicide, in Black Hawk? When Rudolph, the oldest boy, tells the story, the other kids are thrilled. “‘Hurrah! The murder!’ the children murmured, looking pleased and interested.” (Remember how much Jim and Ántonia, as children, loved hearing about the man who threw the bride to the wolves?) Five paragraphs from the end of the novel, Jim is still discussing the Cutter case with one of the old local lawyers.

But the final paragraph of the book is grand, almost orchestral, sounding so many of the dominant themes of the novel. It is a very neat tidying up, at least emotionally, at least for Jim. He finds himself on the remains of the very road that first brought him and Ántonia—two “wondering children, being taken we knew not whither”—to Nebraska. “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

Ah, Jim. Always the dreamer. To quote an even more famous closing sentence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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Please join us in the comments! And then, in real(er) life, in conversation next Sunday at 2 PM (EST) with Chris and Ben Taylor, author of the recent biography, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather. Register here. Think about your questions for them!

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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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Drawing of Christopher Benfey explaining his book A Summer of Hummingbirds, by Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker’s new book about teaching himself to draw, Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, will be published in just a few weeks! See his drawings for Book Post at the tag “N Baker Drawing.”