Great books are like rivers. We never step into the same one twice. So let’s wade right in with Cather’s odd little Introduction is a frame narrative that aims to give a plausible (if fictive) origin story for the novel to come.
"Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out" reminded me of a moment from Marilynne Robinson's "Psalm Eight" in which she's talking about the "majestic terrains" of her youth in northern Idaho: "In my childhood, when the presence of God seemed everywhere and I seemed to myself a mote of exception, improbable as a flaw in the sun, the very sweetness of the experience lay in the stinging thought--not me, not like me, not mine." Feeling a mote of exception leads Robinson to pray; Jim doesn't pray here, though he later sees fall afternoons as "a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day."
Some incredible details used to introduce the many new characters, like Peter with "his bare feet tucked apologetically under the seat" at church and the "still coppery" eyebrows of Jim's grandfather.
Hm, yes, reminds me how the Shimerda's religious difference is part of their strangeness. It's like, in a land where one is so subject to overwhelming forces, people are nervous about messing with observance. Jim does say, on that day when he first sees the land around the farm, that "I was entirely happy" and that happiness "is to be dissolved in something complete and great." I just happened to have been reading Becca Rothfeld's piece about Simone Weil in the Washington Post where she describes Simone Weil's effort "to pass into the uncreated." There are ominous notes in it, wanting to walk "over the edge of the world," "perhaps we feel like that when we die"—perhaps there is a shadow of being relieved of the grief at the loss of his parents, by becoming not himself.
Being relieved of grief by becoming not himself: that seems exactly right. I love the end of chapter 2. It's an experience of the prairie sublime, which resembles slipping into a dream, which resembles death itself (of the old self, at least).
I totally agree about the wonderful ending to chapter 2. One tiny detail. Cather uses one of her favorite words, "something," three times in those closing lines. "I was something that lay under the sun and felt it... Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something ... that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."
That moment Jim says he's "entirely happy" with Antonia felt sacred. An echo of the "dome of heaven" when he first arrives in Nebraska. It was like they were in a tiny cathedral made of tall grasses and light and that lone tree -- trees, later said, were so rare it was as if they were being visited by a person. Nature is not merely a setting, but a spiritual witness to these two newcomers. First time reading, so eager to see how things will unfold for A and J.
I'm pretty sure I would not have gotten around to My Antonia if I hadn't seen your group read. So far, it's a real joy. And your commentary was a really nice addition. I'm so glad I saw this.
Come on folks, don't be shy! Remember I went on TikTok trying to pronounce Àntonia! Maybe I'll give the comments a try.
I was really struck by the colors—the way Cather emphasizes red, which is not a color you usually associate with landscape, and kind of makes it vivid and arresting, even otherworldly—coppery, rosy, ruddy; like the burning bush; air heady as wine; and then the golds running through—amber, blond, tawny. The grandfather’s eyes really jump out from the contrast: “bright blue” with their “fresh, frosty sparkle.” He has a sharply defined presence even though he barely says anything; Mr. Shimerda by contrast is elusive and hard to picture, “something from which all the warmth and light had died out.”
Also I was thinking about the framing device of Jim’s writing the story for the “author,” and it occurred to me that it allows Cather in a way to dramatize how Antonia is maybe not fully *seen* by those around her; she’s a little beyond everyone’s understanding. Like her eyes full of the things she wants to say, but does not know how. Also Jim—whose name we rarely hear—barely seems, unlike anyone else, to have to *work*. He has a sort of privileged, coddled even, position, though he doesn’t seem aware of it. Partly an echo of his orphanhood? I think about his grandparents, how he is all they have of their child, though no one talks about that. Anyway my mother really loved this book, and I feel like I see in this sense of Antonia’s elusive soulfulness something about the way a girl from the 1950s Midwest could feel about herself.
Yes, the colors are surprising: copper red grass; blond cornfields are rosy gold: haystacks turn rosy. I tend to think of the prairie as very monochromatic.
I was reminded of Celine Song’s recent film “Past Lives” about a powerful attachment formed in childhood. The key moments and images of these opening chapters to me are Antonia’s reaching out her hand to Jim “coaxingly.” Offering her silver ring. The shared sympathy for ground-owls and the two Russians. Their two long black shadows cast before and after in chapter six. The shared danger of the giant rattler. It’s important to recognize how closely bonded Antonia and Jim already are by these experiences. This is Jim Burden’s Burden if you will, the burden of attachment to Antonia and why he alone is able to tell her story. (It might seem at first that she could represent the vast country as a symbol or metonymy, but that is probably Cather throwing us off the scent. The deeper level is in their relationship.) That’s just my take on these chapters. I am grateful for the commentary already offered and look forward to more!
Yes, I feel like the representation of "the country" is less about Antonia herself or any one character than the situating of them in the landscape—its invitation to exaltation, to erasure, to risk. I was struck by the line, "the great land had never looked to me so big and so free." It was an experience of violence that gave him that feeling.
I saw "Past Lives" for the first time last night, just after Ann and I had wrapped up my first post. Completely Catherian, as you say! And I think the comparison of film and book (give Cather credit for coming first!) can be sustained right up to the end of the novel.
That's two movie recommendations so far! One reader signed up because she liked Minari and read that the director, Lee Isaac Chung, was inspired by Willa Cather
I know! I've been thinking about the "past lives" theme among Cather's contemporaries. "Can't repeat the past?" Gatsby, who wants to pick up where he left off with Daisy, says to Nick Carraway. "Why of course you can!" And then there's Faulkner's line, paraphrased in a famous Obama speech on race: "The past is never dead. It's not even the past." Which Proust, born two years before Cather, had his own way of demonstrating.
I watched it after reading this exchange! I'm waiting to see how Jim's and Àntonia's relationship unfolds, I can't remember from my years-ago reading (what mostly stays with me from that are the descriptions of the natural world). Let's see if Chris comes back.
I was mainly thinking about the intensity of childhood memories in the film and the novel, the way that, as Jim says later on, "Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." The three leads in "Past Lives" may differ on this point. And we may, as Ann suggests, find ourselves returning to these comparisons with films and with other novels, like Gatsby, later in our discussions.
(I have a friend who does "past lives" work with people, and we have had such interesting conversations about how one's life and character can feel like a continuation of something of which one is only dimly aware...)
I loved comparing Jim to Nick (Gatsby) ... Both are "suspect" narrators ... Both have this amiable, determined to experience life vibe...& both brought their naivety & openess to inform the narrative,
Chris--Thanks so much for your thoughtful and insightful post on the beginning of My Antonia. I vaguely recall that there's another introduction, a revised one, where Cather edits out some of the details of Jim Burden's wife--I can't find it, though.
I think it's also interesting to note that apparently in the abbreviated version the Writer was genderless. In the restored longer version the Writer is identified as female.
This is my first time reading My Antonia – unless I’ve forgotten having read it before, which is entirely possible! I am struck by how Cather’s writing compels me to read very slowly, which I tend do anyway – but to slow down even more here to really take in her exquisite descriptions. Her writing is so richly visual. There must be something else, though, in the construction of her prose that encourages savoring it. I have returned to piano practice after many years of not playing, and I find that I am no longer interested in racing through technically challenging pieces, but rather savoring the expressive potential of the music. I’m thinking there is a connection here, although I’m not sure quite where to go with it. I was surprised, as someone else mentioned, by the freedom which Jim enjoys in these early chapters, although I am not quite convinced by his apparent unconcern about the loss of his family and his former life – I would like to know more about them. I also find the ability of Jim and Antonia to communicate and establish such a close relationship so quickly a bit unbelievable. I am definitely looking forward to what comes next and appreciate all the insightful commentary!
Yes! So agree with what you say about pace. I think tying the book to the seasons contributes to that. This is kind of far afield, but on a podcast recently with Ezra Klein the writer Kyle Chayka was talking about how online reading forces you to keep moving, and to have full aesthetic experiences we, especially younger people raised online, need to teach ourselves to be patient, to sit/work through things. I think Jim’s grief is in the background, he lacks the means to experience it; but there is this convention of making child-heroes orphans to liberate them, maybe it’s being dispensed with too easily. My thought about their early relationship is that relief that kids sometimes have that there is another kid their age, when they would otherwise be alone; although some kids aren’t able to open into those opportunities, it’s true.
Cather clearly knows her landscape well and brings it to vivid life. There is a vividness to her descriptions of people and animals, too. I liked the image of Peter the Russian patting the flanks of his cow and pulling up her lariat pin.
The narrator Jim seems mature beyond his years, and I was surprised to hear that Antonia, who is reliant on him, is being supercilious to him. And then I was also surprised to learn she is 4 yrs older than him, making her 14, practically a young woman. Ordinarily between a 10 yr old boy and a 14 yr old girl stretches a wide prairie, of long red grass ... so her superciliousness which apparently is vanquished by the killing of the snake is more understandable, and it makes me wonder about the life she left behind in Bohemia. She has arrived in a new country at a threshold age, different from Jim's arrival which seems more padded. He has quite a soft landing. The warm bath in the kitchen is a nice scene, and he has to tell his grandma he is old enough to wash himself. Maybe I've read too many stories of orphan misery, but Jim is well taken care of from the get go. It doesn't seem to me that his elders are taking him for granted, as he remarks. He seems to be getting quite a bit of attention and very little in the way of chores!
I've recently read The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which takes place in Florida and is also about a young boy running around in a wilderness, less touched by humans than the more cultivated one here. Thinking of the scene of the killing of the snake, how the snake's "disgusting vitality" is bashed out of it by Jim. Cather is aiming for more than a story about brute survival here, it seems. What it means to not just survive but find a sense of place in a landscape that is ruled by weather and marauding wild animals. The snake who "had forgot that the world doesn't owe Rattlers a living" is a grace note still.
And where The Yearling was also about human relations set against a challenging landscape, it seems the landscape here is more of a helpmeet, part of the poetry of the reminiscence.
How beautifully put! Time to reread The Yearling. We had a great piece by Patricia Storace about Rawlings' Cross Creek Cookery, and how it was a mostly unacknowledged collaboration with her Black cook, Idella Parker (Idella's Crisp Biscuits books.substack.com/p/our-authors). I was fascinated about how much killing the snake seemed to unleash for Jim ("the great land had never looked to me so big and so free"), like a recognition that violence ran through our presence there. I guess Chris will have more for us on that!
There’s an emotional space to these first few chapters that seems to rhyme and resonate so convincingly with actual childhood, and the way childhood opens itself to experience. The naming of things, first of all, like Jim has arrived in Eden — “the very edge of the world” “an old ancient Evil” — is doubled with him helping “name” things for this girl who is every bit as much a foreigner to this landscape as he is. Not to mention a slightly older girl (lord, how important those four years would be, if we were those kids!). I love the sense of definition and discovery. It’s the peculiar genius of childhood, that kind of poetry. And I think it’s deepened and made richer by the book's introduction, too, the sense that two Nebraskans who meet again as adults in the busy, complicated East, continue to feel just slightly alien among that adult world, and the world that isn’t a huge prairie. How they fall into each other’s company so gratefully, holders of the same secret. I feel innocent and halfway new again, the way you can when remembering childhood, right along with them.
Personally, I’ve avoided this novel for years, and that was dumb of me. I’m from Nebraska, in the ruralest parts of the same prairie, and so Cather was always a writer to deal with (rather than discover and savor on my own). It’s a weird, pleasing shock to come across details that would still have been very much present in the 1980s, when I was a kid. Earthen cellars, plastered-over-sod, the occasional old rattlesnake coiled beside a path, the sense (especially driving on the flat dial-tone that is Interstate 80) that you could travel all day across Nebraska and "still be in Nebraska.” But I also remember — and this feels relevant — how in certain old-timer’s houses, you could find a framed portrait of someone like Catherine the Great, inherited from a grand-relative. The portraits spoke of the vast unknown of what certain families would have left behind, the things they had run so far away from, and the opposite of a child’s view, the Eden-like naming of a new world. I feel the contrast between those things pretty intensely in these first few chapters. Ron Hansen (another NE writer) described it thusly, this end-of-the-world feeling for those people who followed fate and ended up living and dying far, far from home: “They put down roots in an emptiness like the one they kept secret in their youth.”
If anyone wants to make a pilgrimage, I can recommend a few roadside joints.
That would be great! How wonderful to have a Nebraskan in the group encountering the book for the first time. Good to be reminded of the age difference, that is important. Interesting the way these Biblical references surface, though they're so naturally woven into the language they are almost invisible.
My memory of this book is of something impossibly lush and perfectly proportioned/designed but with all the ragged edges of real life. Cather's calling it the underside of a rug is so perfect. The degree to which she fulfilled her vision still astonishes me. And what a wonderful contrast this provides to Middlemarch, which has pretty much all of those features in James' list.
So interesting, Ann. Does this work verge on a seance? What are these past lives? Speaking of past lives, another theme I thought we might track in these chapters is “Europe versus America.” A familiar one doubtless and something that obsessed Henry James and so many others, but I feel like Cather’s take is unique. Her sense for the past lives of these immigrants (also from a different Europe) is vivid and flies in the face of American ideals and Jim Burden’s native pragmatism, their differing attitude towards death and tragedy, their sense for the poetry of the everyday, their togetherness as a family, their gift-giving and so much else. What do you think?
Past lives work: I don't really know. I don't think so. I think it's more looking inside yourself and recognizing something you find there, uncovering those stories, rather than communicating with them. More like therapy, but plural. Interestingly the past lives don't follow one right after the other; they go quiet and only emerge from time to time; you only have a few, not hundreds. Re Europe v America, I happened to be reading recently for another project "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, and there was this quote that really struck me. He's writing about how important social connection is for the health of societies and he quotes a scholar who says that old-country immigrants “were accustomed to a more tightly knit communal life than almost any Americans can now recall.” He was talking about how often immigrants from one place create societies and mutual aid groups and so on when they get here (you can see the Shimerdas trying to do that), but what I found affecting was the thought that we have this country made up of people descended from people who did that to themselves: broke all their social connections and tried to remake them in a place without one common culture to adopt.
Mr. Shimerda engages with Jim, wanting to connect on a deeper level than he’s used to. Even though they lack a common language. Jim is embarrassed as he is “used to being taken for granted by his elders.” Here is someone who touches him, looks at him searchingly.
I found that very affecting, and mysterious. Jim intuits that there is something there beyond his understanding, reaching toward him. This "American" experience he is having of the West is implicitly (also) an experience of otherness.
Both times I have read this novel, I have been struck by the starkness of Jim’s introduction to Nebraska. It’s pitch black, and he has the feeling that he has fallen off the edge of the world “outside of man’s jurisdiction,” so empty that he feels erased and aimless, unable to say his prayers for the first time or to imagine that his parents could still be watching him. This existential confrontation doesn’t seem to scare him though; maybe it’s accompanied by a thrill of freedom and adventure. His grandparents and their homestead soon fill the void, but there’s no one to provide such a foundation for the Shimerdas.
There is that spooky thing where he has to wait until morning to see where he is, though he has had a glimpse from the train. It's hard to imagine the shock that people must have felt, before there was a lot of photography, coming from the east coast or old European villages, of seeing this expanse. I find the theme of, kind of, capableness interesting. The grandparents' capableness is such a comfort, to Jim and to others; we get the idea that its part character, part experience, and part having supports—the Shimerdas are afraid to go to town. But then as you say Àntonia gives Jim a taste of the freedom and danger of not having that and embracing life without it.
I can’t remember if there is a theme of capableness vs. luck, but we shall see. Again, referencing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experiences, I am thinking about how events such as horrible weather, illness or a swindle can affect a family’s fortunes.
These first few chapters read like a love letter to the prairie—the colors endless fields “and there was so much motion in it. The whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.“ I had remembered the beauty of the landscape from my first reading many years ago, but after reading the book, “ Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I was somewhat traumatized after learning of Wilder’s actual desperate experience on the plains. Wilder and her family suffered from relentless tragedy: blizzards, insects, drought, illness, fires and poor investments. Her daughter helped craft her more optimistic portrait of her childhood in the famous series. So it is with much relief that I read these luscious descriptions, and hope for a renewed sense of the beauty of the prairies, notwithstanding some of the hardships which will inevitably occur.
I didn't know this! Those books were such a part of my childhood, and I associated them so much with my own mother, from Minnesota, who used to say she put herself to sleep by imagining the wind passing through the prairie. She was probably giving me an upbeat portrait of her own childhood via Laura...
I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about Jake Marpole! Mona Simpson, in the Middlemarch discussion last summer, spoke with us (out of E.M. Forster) about flat versus round characters, or something like that, but it would be hard to say if Jake is round or flat. He is not very likeable, at first, being xenophobic, but can that perhaps be forgiven him given his illiteracy and lack of opportunities for seeing the world? There is a strong attachment to Jim there, too? He's a living connection to the old home place. His name is right there smack in the middle of the opening paragraph, and that also seems to me an indication of his importance, and yet we aren't vouchsafed much access to his inner world. What do people think of this guy?
I'm having a feeling about Jim that I don't feel like others share quite. To me Cather is visibly observing how callous in a way he is toward the Shimerdas and other people who lack his security. He's not a bad person, but he can't escape how coddled he is, he can't really inhabit their fear and want, though he is right there beside it. When he arrives with the "mountain boy" Jake we think they might almost be peers, but it is soon clear that Jim isn't expected at all to work and live as Jake does, and he sees no awkwardness there. The episode with the grasshopper is an illustration of how it's Àntonia and her father who respond to a vulnerable thing. More to say about this in the second half of Book One …
"Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out" reminded me of a moment from Marilynne Robinson's "Psalm Eight" in which she's talking about the "majestic terrains" of her youth in northern Idaho: "In my childhood, when the presence of God seemed everywhere and I seemed to myself a mote of exception, improbable as a flaw in the sun, the very sweetness of the experience lay in the stinging thought--not me, not like me, not mine." Feeling a mote of exception leads Robinson to pray; Jim doesn't pray here, though he later sees fall afternoons as "a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day."
Some incredible details used to introduce the many new characters, like Peter with "his bare feet tucked apologetically under the seat" at church and the "still coppery" eyebrows of Jim's grandfather.
Hm, yes, reminds me how the Shimerda's religious difference is part of their strangeness. It's like, in a land where one is so subject to overwhelming forces, people are nervous about messing with observance. Jim does say, on that day when he first sees the land around the farm, that "I was entirely happy" and that happiness "is to be dissolved in something complete and great." I just happened to have been reading Becca Rothfeld's piece about Simone Weil in the Washington Post where she describes Simone Weil's effort "to pass into the uncreated." There are ominous notes in it, wanting to walk "over the edge of the world," "perhaps we feel like that when we die"—perhaps there is a shadow of being relieved of the grief at the loss of his parents, by becoming not himself.
Being relieved of grief by becoming not himself: that seems exactly right. I love the end of chapter 2. It's an experience of the prairie sublime, which resembles slipping into a dream, which resembles death itself (of the old self, at least).
I totally agree about the wonderful ending to chapter 2. One tiny detail. Cather uses one of her favorite words, "something," three times in those closing lines. "I was something that lay under the sun and felt it... Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something ... that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."
That moment Jim says he's "entirely happy" with Antonia felt sacred. An echo of the "dome of heaven" when he first arrives in Nebraska. It was like they were in a tiny cathedral made of tall grasses and light and that lone tree -- trees, later said, were so rare it was as if they were being visited by a person. Nature is not merely a setting, but a spiritual witness to these two newcomers. First time reading, so eager to see how things will unfold for A and J.
I'm pretty sure I would not have gotten around to My Antonia if I hadn't seen your group read. So far, it's a real joy. And your commentary was a really nice addition. I'm so glad I saw this.
Thanks so much for joining in! Tell us some of your thoughts!
Come on folks, don't be shy! Remember I went on TikTok trying to pronounce Àntonia! Maybe I'll give the comments a try.
I was really struck by the colors—the way Cather emphasizes red, which is not a color you usually associate with landscape, and kind of makes it vivid and arresting, even otherworldly—coppery, rosy, ruddy; like the burning bush; air heady as wine; and then the golds running through—amber, blond, tawny. The grandfather’s eyes really jump out from the contrast: “bright blue” with their “fresh, frosty sparkle.” He has a sharply defined presence even though he barely says anything; Mr. Shimerda by contrast is elusive and hard to picture, “something from which all the warmth and light had died out.”
Also I was thinking about the framing device of Jim’s writing the story for the “author,” and it occurred to me that it allows Cather in a way to dramatize how Antonia is maybe not fully *seen* by those around her; she’s a little beyond everyone’s understanding. Like her eyes full of the things she wants to say, but does not know how. Also Jim—whose name we rarely hear—barely seems, unlike anyone else, to have to *work*. He has a sort of privileged, coddled even, position, though he doesn’t seem aware of it. Partly an echo of his orphanhood? I think about his grandparents, how he is all they have of their child, though no one talks about that. Anyway my mother really loved this book, and I feel like I see in this sense of Antonia’s elusive soulfulness something about the way a girl from the 1950s Midwest could feel about herself.
Yes, the colors are surprising: copper red grass; blond cornfields are rosy gold: haystacks turn rosy. I tend to think of the prairie as very monochromatic.
It's why I liked that picture of the sumac!
I was reminded of Celine Song’s recent film “Past Lives” about a powerful attachment formed in childhood. The key moments and images of these opening chapters to me are Antonia’s reaching out her hand to Jim “coaxingly.” Offering her silver ring. The shared sympathy for ground-owls and the two Russians. Their two long black shadows cast before and after in chapter six. The shared danger of the giant rattler. It’s important to recognize how closely bonded Antonia and Jim already are by these experiences. This is Jim Burden’s Burden if you will, the burden of attachment to Antonia and why he alone is able to tell her story. (It might seem at first that she could represent the vast country as a symbol or metonymy, but that is probably Cather throwing us off the scent. The deeper level is in their relationship.) That’s just my take on these chapters. I am grateful for the commentary already offered and look forward to more!
Yes, I feel like the representation of "the country" is less about Antonia herself or any one character than the situating of them in the landscape—its invitation to exaltation, to erasure, to risk. I was struck by the line, "the great land had never looked to me so big and so free." It was an experience of violence that gave him that feeling.
I saw "Past Lives" for the first time last night, just after Ann and I had wrapped up my first post. Completely Catherian, as you say! And I think the comparison of film and book (give Cather credit for coming first!) can be sustained right up to the end of the novel.
That's two movie recommendations so far! One reader signed up because she liked Minari and read that the director, Lee Isaac Chung, was inspired by Willa Cather
To add a third movie: the roses and coppers, and the gorgeous landscape descriptions more generally, put me in mind of "Days of Heaven" ...
A remarkable coincidence that you just saw the film the other night, Chris!
I know! I've been thinking about the "past lives" theme among Cather's contemporaries. "Can't repeat the past?" Gatsby, who wants to pick up where he left off with Daisy, says to Nick Carraway. "Why of course you can!" And then there's Faulkner's line, paraphrased in a famous Obama speech on race: "The past is never dead. It's not even the past." Which Proust, born two years before Cather, had his own way of demonstrating.
I wonder if there are times when people feel the pull of the future more strongly than other times.
I loved Past Lives! What do you think makes it completely "Catherian" ?
I watched it after reading this exchange! I'm waiting to see how Jim's and Àntonia's relationship unfolds, I can't remember from my years-ago reading (what mostly stays with me from that are the descriptions of the natural world). Let's see if Chris comes back.
I was mainly thinking about the intensity of childhood memories in the film and the novel, the way that, as Jim says later on, "Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." The three leads in "Past Lives" may differ on this point. And we may, as Ann suggests, find ourselves returning to these comparisons with films and with other novels, like Gatsby, later in our discussions.
Yes... Antonia has that whole "the path not taken" vibe (just like Past Lives).... a yearning "what if..." bittersweet.
(I have a friend who does "past lives" work with people, and we have had such interesting conversations about how one's life and character can feel like a continuation of something of which one is only dimly aware...)
I loved comparing Jim to Nick (Gatsby) ... Both are "suspect" narrators ... Both have this amiable, determined to experience life vibe...& both brought their naivety & openess to inform the narrative,
Openness, such a good word here. They are both a little enchanted, which makes them receptive.
Chris--Thanks so much for your thoughtful and insightful post on the beginning of My Antonia. I vaguely recall that there's another introduction, a revised one, where Cather edits out some of the details of Jim Burden's wife--I can't find it, though.
Quite right. She published a revised, much softened introduction in 1926. Editors generally
prefer the original, spikier version (as do I!), though both versions insist that Jim's marriage is an unhappy one.
Do we know what motivated her? Was it real people, or something to do with the novel itself?
I think it's also interesting to note that apparently in the abbreviated version the Writer was genderless. In the restored longer version the Writer is identified as female.
Whoa! That's certainly interesting.
This is my first time reading My Antonia – unless I’ve forgotten having read it before, which is entirely possible! I am struck by how Cather’s writing compels me to read very slowly, which I tend do anyway – but to slow down even more here to really take in her exquisite descriptions. Her writing is so richly visual. There must be something else, though, in the construction of her prose that encourages savoring it. I have returned to piano practice after many years of not playing, and I find that I am no longer interested in racing through technically challenging pieces, but rather savoring the expressive potential of the music. I’m thinking there is a connection here, although I’m not sure quite where to go with it. I was surprised, as someone else mentioned, by the freedom which Jim enjoys in these early chapters, although I am not quite convinced by his apparent unconcern about the loss of his family and his former life – I would like to know more about them. I also find the ability of Jim and Antonia to communicate and establish such a close relationship so quickly a bit unbelievable. I am definitely looking forward to what comes next and appreciate all the insightful commentary!
Yes! So agree with what you say about pace. I think tying the book to the seasons contributes to that. This is kind of far afield, but on a podcast recently with Ezra Klein the writer Kyle Chayka was talking about how online reading forces you to keep moving, and to have full aesthetic experiences we, especially younger people raised online, need to teach ourselves to be patient, to sit/work through things. I think Jim’s grief is in the background, he lacks the means to experience it; but there is this convention of making child-heroes orphans to liberate them, maybe it’s being dispensed with too easily. My thought about their early relationship is that relief that kids sometimes have that there is another kid their age, when they would otherwise be alone; although some kids aren’t able to open into those opportunities, it’s true.
Cather clearly knows her landscape well and brings it to vivid life. There is a vividness to her descriptions of people and animals, too. I liked the image of Peter the Russian patting the flanks of his cow and pulling up her lariat pin.
The narrator Jim seems mature beyond his years, and I was surprised to hear that Antonia, who is reliant on him, is being supercilious to him. And then I was also surprised to learn she is 4 yrs older than him, making her 14, practically a young woman. Ordinarily between a 10 yr old boy and a 14 yr old girl stretches a wide prairie, of long red grass ... so her superciliousness which apparently is vanquished by the killing of the snake is more understandable, and it makes me wonder about the life she left behind in Bohemia. She has arrived in a new country at a threshold age, different from Jim's arrival which seems more padded. He has quite a soft landing. The warm bath in the kitchen is a nice scene, and he has to tell his grandma he is old enough to wash himself. Maybe I've read too many stories of orphan misery, but Jim is well taken care of from the get go. It doesn't seem to me that his elders are taking him for granted, as he remarks. He seems to be getting quite a bit of attention and very little in the way of chores!
I've recently read The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which takes place in Florida and is also about a young boy running around in a wilderness, less touched by humans than the more cultivated one here. Thinking of the scene of the killing of the snake, how the snake's "disgusting vitality" is bashed out of it by Jim. Cather is aiming for more than a story about brute survival here, it seems. What it means to not just survive but find a sense of place in a landscape that is ruled by weather and marauding wild animals. The snake who "had forgot that the world doesn't owe Rattlers a living" is a grace note still.
And where The Yearling was also about human relations set against a challenging landscape, it seems the landscape here is more of a helpmeet, part of the poetry of the reminiscence.
How beautifully put! Time to reread The Yearling. We had a great piece by Patricia Storace about Rawlings' Cross Creek Cookery, and how it was a mostly unacknowledged collaboration with her Black cook, Idella Parker (Idella's Crisp Biscuits books.substack.com/p/our-authors). I was fascinated about how much killing the snake seemed to unleash for Jim ("the great land had never looked to me so big and so free"), like a recognition that violence ran through our presence there. I guess Chris will have more for us on that!
So glad to be back.
There’s an emotional space to these first few chapters that seems to rhyme and resonate so convincingly with actual childhood, and the way childhood opens itself to experience. The naming of things, first of all, like Jim has arrived in Eden — “the very edge of the world” “an old ancient Evil” — is doubled with him helping “name” things for this girl who is every bit as much a foreigner to this landscape as he is. Not to mention a slightly older girl (lord, how important those four years would be, if we were those kids!). I love the sense of definition and discovery. It’s the peculiar genius of childhood, that kind of poetry. And I think it’s deepened and made richer by the book's introduction, too, the sense that two Nebraskans who meet again as adults in the busy, complicated East, continue to feel just slightly alien among that adult world, and the world that isn’t a huge prairie. How they fall into each other’s company so gratefully, holders of the same secret. I feel innocent and halfway new again, the way you can when remembering childhood, right along with them.
Personally, I’ve avoided this novel for years, and that was dumb of me. I’m from Nebraska, in the ruralest parts of the same prairie, and so Cather was always a writer to deal with (rather than discover and savor on my own). It’s a weird, pleasing shock to come across details that would still have been very much present in the 1980s, when I was a kid. Earthen cellars, plastered-over-sod, the occasional old rattlesnake coiled beside a path, the sense (especially driving on the flat dial-tone that is Interstate 80) that you could travel all day across Nebraska and "still be in Nebraska.” But I also remember — and this feels relevant — how in certain old-timer’s houses, you could find a framed portrait of someone like Catherine the Great, inherited from a grand-relative. The portraits spoke of the vast unknown of what certain families would have left behind, the things they had run so far away from, and the opposite of a child’s view, the Eden-like naming of a new world. I feel the contrast between those things pretty intensely in these first few chapters. Ron Hansen (another NE writer) described it thusly, this end-of-the-world feeling for those people who followed fate and ended up living and dying far, far from home: “They put down roots in an emptiness like the one they kept secret in their youth.”
If anyone wants to make a pilgrimage, I can recommend a few roadside joints.
That would be great! How wonderful to have a Nebraskan in the group encountering the book for the first time. Good to be reminded of the age difference, that is important. Interesting the way these Biblical references surface, though they're so naturally woven into the language they are almost invisible.
My memory of this book is of something impossibly lush and perfectly proportioned/designed but with all the ragged edges of real life. Cather's calling it the underside of a rug is so perfect. The degree to which she fulfilled her vision still astonishes me. And what a wonderful contrast this provides to Middlemarch, which has pretty much all of those features in James' list.
I wonder what it would be like as a play … one would have to evoke the landscape in the way they spoke to each other.
Totally. But also, I think in this case some kind of lavish set design would be worth it!
So interesting, Ann. Does this work verge on a seance? What are these past lives? Speaking of past lives, another theme I thought we might track in these chapters is “Europe versus America.” A familiar one doubtless and something that obsessed Henry James and so many others, but I feel like Cather’s take is unique. Her sense for the past lives of these immigrants (also from a different Europe) is vivid and flies in the face of American ideals and Jim Burden’s native pragmatism, their differing attitude towards death and tragedy, their sense for the poetry of the everyday, their togetherness as a family, their gift-giving and so much else. What do you think?
Past lives work: I don't really know. I don't think so. I think it's more looking inside yourself and recognizing something you find there, uncovering those stories, rather than communicating with them. More like therapy, but plural. Interestingly the past lives don't follow one right after the other; they go quiet and only emerge from time to time; you only have a few, not hundreds. Re Europe v America, I happened to be reading recently for another project "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, and there was this quote that really struck me. He's writing about how important social connection is for the health of societies and he quotes a scholar who says that old-country immigrants “were accustomed to a more tightly knit communal life than almost any Americans can now recall.” He was talking about how often immigrants from one place create societies and mutual aid groups and so on when they get here (you can see the Shimerdas trying to do that), but what I found affecting was the thought that we have this country made up of people descended from people who did that to themselves: broke all their social connections and tried to remake them in a place without one common culture to adopt.
Yes!
Mr. Shimerda engages with Jim, wanting to connect on a deeper level than he’s used to. Even though they lack a common language. Jim is embarrassed as he is “used to being taken for granted by his elders.” Here is someone who touches him, looks at him searchingly.
I found that very affecting, and mysterious. Jim intuits that there is something there beyond his understanding, reaching toward him. This "American" experience he is having of the West is implicitly (also) an experience of otherness.
Both times I have read this novel, I have been struck by the starkness of Jim’s introduction to Nebraska. It’s pitch black, and he has the feeling that he has fallen off the edge of the world “outside of man’s jurisdiction,” so empty that he feels erased and aimless, unable to say his prayers for the first time or to imagine that his parents could still be watching him. This existential confrontation doesn’t seem to scare him though; maybe it’s accompanied by a thrill of freedom and adventure. His grandparents and their homestead soon fill the void, but there’s no one to provide such a foundation for the Shimerdas.
And I should add, after reading the thread of comments about childhood friendship, that Antonia also contributes to Jim’s new foundation.
There is that spooky thing where he has to wait until morning to see where he is, though he has had a glimpse from the train. It's hard to imagine the shock that people must have felt, before there was a lot of photography, coming from the east coast or old European villages, of seeing this expanse. I find the theme of, kind of, capableness interesting. The grandparents' capableness is such a comfort, to Jim and to others; we get the idea that its part character, part experience, and part having supports—the Shimerdas are afraid to go to town. But then as you say Àntonia gives Jim a taste of the freedom and danger of not having that and embracing life without it.
I can’t remember if there is a theme of capableness vs. luck, but we shall see. Again, referencing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experiences, I am thinking about how events such as horrible weather, illness or a swindle can affect a family’s fortunes.
These first few chapters read like a love letter to the prairie—the colors endless fields “and there was so much motion in it. The whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.“ I had remembered the beauty of the landscape from my first reading many years ago, but after reading the book, “ Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I was somewhat traumatized after learning of Wilder’s actual desperate experience on the plains. Wilder and her family suffered from relentless tragedy: blizzards, insects, drought, illness, fires and poor investments. Her daughter helped craft her more optimistic portrait of her childhood in the famous series. So it is with much relief that I read these luscious descriptions, and hope for a renewed sense of the beauty of the prairies, notwithstanding some of the hardships which will inevitably occur.
I didn't know this! Those books were such a part of my childhood, and I associated them so much with my own mother, from Minnesota, who used to say she put herself to sleep by imagining the wind passing through the prairie. She was probably giving me an upbeat portrait of her own childhood via Laura...
Hi Ann,
Are we supposed to read to the end of Book 2 or Book 3 for Sunday? Thanks!
Oof, my mistake! End of Book One! Sorry, and thank you!
Dear all,
I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about Jake Marpole! Mona Simpson, in the Middlemarch discussion last summer, spoke with us (out of E.M. Forster) about flat versus round characters, or something like that, but it would be hard to say if Jake is round or flat. He is not very likeable, at first, being xenophobic, but can that perhaps be forgiven him given his illiteracy and lack of opportunities for seeing the world? There is a strong attachment to Jim there, too? He's a living connection to the old home place. His name is right there smack in the middle of the opening paragraph, and that also seems to me an indication of his importance, and yet we aren't vouchsafed much access to his inner world. What do people think of this guy?
I'm having a feeling about Jim that I don't feel like others share quite. To me Cather is visibly observing how callous in a way he is toward the Shimerdas and other people who lack his security. He's not a bad person, but he can't escape how coddled he is, he can't really inhabit their fear and want, though he is right there beside it. When he arrives with the "mountain boy" Jake we think they might almost be peers, but it is soon clear that Jim isn't expected at all to work and live as Jake does, and he sees no awkwardness there. The episode with the grasshopper is an illustration of how it's Àntonia and her father who respond to a vulnerable thing. More to say about this in the second half of Book One …
That’s a good, challenging reading of Jim. I will have to think on that!
Thanks! Look forward to what you come up with, always!