My Antonia, by Willa Cather

(If you haven’t read this book, know that spoilers abound in this overview.)

I find it rare, when I am reading, to be gripped by feelings and longings I don’t understand. Non-fiction and memoirs are where I usually hang out. Sometimes good fiction can plumb the depths of whatever my unconscious is holding onto. My Antonia, by Willa Cather (1873-1947), was published in 1918, and it caught me unawares.

A description: “All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.” The setting is southern Nebraska, near Red Cloud.

An evocative writer makes you stop reading and think about what you are imagining and feeling. Willa Cather developed her talent through years of hard work and determination. In 1896 she got a position in Pittsburgh at a women’s magazine: Home Monthly. She wrote short stories, poetry, articles, and continued working as a journalist for other publications. She also taught at Pittsburgh’s Central High School for a year, and taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School. She published her first book of poetry in 1903, followed by a collection of short stories in 1905. She joined McClure’s Magazine as an editor and her first novel (Alexander’s Bridge) was serialized by McClure’s in 1912.

“…Cather learned to create on her pages a new-found sense of intimacy, one borne of the relation between intimates. This is first really seen in My Antonia.” 

(From the section “Emerging Writer, 1914-1922”, Willa Cather Center website: https://www.willacather.org/about/willa-cather-biography.)

Kathleen Norris wrote a Foreword to the 1995 paperback edition of My Antonia. She says: “Intent on telling the truths of a particular time and place, she made her own prose as spare as the land about which she was writing, and became a pioneer in American fiction.” Norris mentions that Cather had the great good fortune to have lived among the first generation of white settlers in 1880s Nebraska. In her Foreword, Norris also states: “In many ways the world of My Antonia is still with us, a neglected but significant part of America.” 

Ms. Norris grew up in Lemmon, North Dakota, a small town near the southern border of that state. I grew up in Minnesota and immigrants, starting in the 1860s, moved into the state from Europe and Great Britain. Many settled on farmland, thanks to the Homestead Act of 1862 and the liberation the railroads provided after the Civil War. They usually banded together and were suspicious of others, even as they needed help outside their own enclaves.

But it is Antonia who left a lasting impression on Willa Cather. Cather writes: “Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade – that grew stronger with time…she lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true…but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things…All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.”

Someone like Antonia often leaves us with an intense yearning, a need to be near them, to feel their essence. Attraction to another person seems to work on a number of simultaneous levels. It can be visual, physical, appreciation of speech and style, gestures, even sexual attraction can be part of it. Whatever their special quality, it pulls us to them by proximity or thought. Why is that?

PBS American Masters  did a review of her life. In it, David McCullough speaks about the suicide the Grandfather commits: “Kills himself, commits suicide. Can’t take it – some people are crushed by it. It will either make you or break you. That’s a very American theme...And what really counts in the long run, is the feeling it leaves with you – that feeling that you have about the book, My Antonia. Ten years after you’ve read it, you can still feel that. Why? Because of the transforming magic of art. Because Willa Cather took that story and made it immortal.”

PBS Documentary:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1AJDk9QCkk&t=3343s

For several days, I have wanted to write just one more thing about Willa Cather and this novel. What I settled on was something Willa Cather wrote in her Introduction to the book in 1918. She is taking a long train journey with her friend, Jim, the narrator of the book.

“…our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To call her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain.”