Willa Cather - My Antonia (Small Works List)

 

I pulled Willa Cather’s name from the Small Works List probably because a short story most have been featured in one of the anthologies I scavenged for names. This is one reason why I love to have the Small Works List as a part of this project, but it gives me at least two cracks at an author of the stature of Willa Cather. I asked a friend of mine who is an American Lit professor which book to read from Cather because her writing is just inside that which he knows a great deal about. From this time period, he is probably more familiar with Faulkner and was the person who recommended that I read Go Down, Moses when I got to that text earlier in the year. I was glad for that and so I asked him what to read again. He said that he had read My Antonia recently but had always wanted to read Death Comes for the Archbishop. I decided to read My Antonia because I had read One of Ours for the Pulitzer project years ago, and I have Death Comes for the Archbishop on the Big Book List already. 

My Antonia is one of these American novels that you may have heard the name of before because it is so specific with its inflection on the foreign seeming first name. I think it was assigned in my high school AP Literature class, but I don't remember actually having read this book then. I remember certain key moments in the text but almost as memories more than having experienced the text first hand. This book has lingered at the periphery of my mind for a long time, and thanks to the Small Works List I felt I could tunnel back into the recesses of my baby literature brain and correct some stuff. 

I must have read or was in the room while those who have read My Antonia discussed it in high school though I misremembered two key moments which I will mention briefly here. First, I misremembered how Mr. Shimerda died which I have thought about over and over again in my life since high school though I wouldn’t have said that I read this book. It appears that Mr. Shimerda committed suicide with a gun and set aside his belongings carefully beforehand. I thought this was one of the gravest upsets that I can remember at that point in my life. Rereading it now after several very personal experiences with suicide, some very grave indeed, I really felt differently after reading it again. It was also unclear as to the nature of Mr. Shimderda’s death that I didn’t remember. Also, I thought I remember his boots being set aside as a deeply sad moment about poverty and struggle which is still true but not so affecting this time but more touching than anything.

The second moment that I misremembered was the nature of the physical altercation that moves the last section of the book where Jim lays in Antonia’s bed because there was something strange about Cutter’s behavior as the couple left out of town. Antonia didn’t feel comfortable staying in the house alone, and decorum resists Jim staying there with her, so Jim slept in her bed. Cutter comes back to presumably sexually assault Antonia in the night with the wife out of town, and finds Jim in the bed instead. There is this issue of the cologne smelling arm that wakes Jim that night. I thought that this happened to Antonia as a high schooler and was again deeply affected by this moment, I am glad now that I had misremembered this moment and have set that troubling memory in my mind. The real version is a much better version of the story.

There is a moment towards the end of the book, we all know that it is coming. It is the final meeting between Jim who has gone away and become a person in his own right in the world, due in large part to Antonia who allowed him to be himself in the strange circumstances that he grew up in. We don't deal with Jim's internal struggles that much, how the loss of his parents affected him on the page here, but his awkwardness and emotional aloofness stand out as he relates to his environment and other characters in the novel. It is a study in understatement as we journey with his deeply isolated character, how he only glances off of other people. He has very significant moments with Antonia but really they only sort of barely know each other really, if you were to add up all of the moments they spend together he is always just around the corner from her and only a few times do they really engage with each other which I find fascinating. He probably ended up spending more time with Lena Lingard in Lincoln than he spent with Antonia his whole upbringing. This relationship falls into a sort of category that they were dear to each other and each held the other as a sort of prized possession even if they never did anything with it, they were always glad that it was there. I loved this very much and this is a treasure of a novel in the way that it takes its time, and it savors these things not to be exploited or preserved in something saccharine like syrupy sentimentality. In their last meeting, Jim meets all of Antonia's children but does not regret her life though it was different than his. He knows that he cannot have done what he cherishes in his life he had accomplished if Antonia joined him. He regrets her poor decision with the train man, but everyone does even Antonia though she is blessed with the eldest child there of. Cather captures life her not unexamined, but unsullied with judgment of these characters, these things happened and it is to be reckoned with not evaluated.

I have asked for Sam to read this book which is one of the only times in my life that I have made such a forceful recommendation. I loved this book very much. I wept with a few pages left. I wept and wept as I read the near ending of this book. I haven’t cried like that at the end of a book in a long time. I loved this book very much.