Book Report: My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918, 2004)

Well, I wish I could say that my confusion between Willa Cather and Eudora Welty is easing with my reading, apparently, a couple of Cather novels in the recent years. Oh, but no. I had this book before me with the author’s name right on it, but I got to thinking Eudora Welty wrote O Pioneers! which I read in 2018. Wow, four years ago? I feel a little better about forgetting who wrote it then, even though I said at the end of the book report:

I do have a copy of My Antonia around here somewhere; this book was a pleasant enough read that I won’t hide from the other novel if I find it.

Apparently, it took me four years (!) to find it even though it was in the front rank of my office bookshelves. You know, where I go most often when looking for a new book to read. In my defense, I probably passed over it a couple of times looking for something quicker or something that appealed to me more in that moment. But I finally picked the book up.

The book is very similar to O Pioneers! Both are set in Nebraska during the sodbusting years; however, this book follows a young man, Jim Burden, sent to live with his grandparents and his friendship with a young Bohemian (from Bohemia, not just wearing hemp) whose family arrives on the same train. She is the Ántonia of the title; the name is pronounced the Bohemian way, not the way to pronounce the small town down the county highway from where I lived my last years in high school. The Shimerda dwelling is basically a cave, and they really do not know how to farm or bust sod, coming from a city in Europe, so they need help, and Jim and Ántonia bond as he helps the children learn English. They have some youthful adventures; then Jim and his grandparents move to town when they rent their farm, and Ántonia, who is a couple years older than Jim, gets a job in one of the houses in town, and although they are not quite peas-and-carrots, when a traveling dance instructor troupe comes to town and hosts dances in a big tent, Jim hangs with Tony (as he sometimes calls her and I’m going to for the rest of the review because the accent on the A is a bother) and some of the other hired girls. Then Jim goes to Lincoln for college; another of the hired girls moves to Lincoln and starts a dress shop which does well, and she spends some time with Jim, but he becomes distracted from his studies, so his mentor, who is moving to Massachusetts to teach at Harvard, encourages Jim to come along, and Jim does. And then, twenty-some years later, Jim returns to Nebraska and sees Tony and her family, which includes her illegitimate daughter, the result of her dalliance with the son of a local railroad baron; the boy had promised to marry her, but he was not a good man, and after they lived together in Denver for a while, he abandoned her, pregnant, to return to Nebraska in shame. In the years since, she married another immigrant and they’ve had a large family. Tony has grown old, lost some teeth, put on some weight, whilst Jim, presumably, has aged better with his law degree and urban lifestyle. Jim feels the same connection with Tony as he had when they were kids–a kinship, more brother and sister though the middle part of the book indicated some romantic leanings–and he promises to visit the family and her boys in the future. And, finis.

One of the dings I, well, dinged O Pioneers! for was that it was a series of short stories or, more truthfully, sketches that Cather stitched together to make a book. You know, this book is also broken into sections. The first two, “The Shimerdas” and “The Hired Girls”, deal with the introduction of the characters and their lives on their respective farms and then their subsequent moves to town (Jim when his grandparents rent their farm, Tony when she hires on at another household). These two sections comprise the first 200 pages roughly of the 277 page book, and they hang together pretty well, hinting that there might be a cohesive plot. The next section, “Lena Lingard”, is about the hired girl who becomes the dress maker and meets up with Jim Burden in Lincoln; we still might have some plot advancement if she really does rival Tony for the author’s affections. Oh, but no. She mentions Tony is going with the ne’er-do-well son of the railroad businessman and seems to like him a lot. In “A Pioneer Woman’s Story”, the next section, takes place a couple years later, when Jim comes back to the Nebraska town after graduating law school and hears the story of Tony’s betrayal and her raising her new daughter at the old Shimerda place. Then the last section, “Cuzak’s Boys”, takes place decades later. The narrator has updated us on the other hired girls and how they’ve gone on in the world. Lena continues to be a successful dress maker, but she has gone to San Francisco and joined another hired girl, who had gone to Seattle, opened a business of ill repute, but sold it to join the Yukon gold rush where she made out big. When Jim, the narrator, returns to Nebraska, he visits Tony, now Mrs. Cuzak, and meets her family. And, that’s it. Ultimately, the book offered indications there might be a plot, which kept me reading along a little better than O Pioneers! (I presume), but ultimately it is just a series of sketches, and the whole My Ántonia title and repeating of Optima dies… prima fugit make one suspect that the author might have wanted to convey more a mood of nostalgia and the loss of youth, but that alone is a little disappointing after 277 pages.

Still, an easy enough read. I note that, like The Red Badge of Courage in the heavy use of colors as adjectives–one cannot go pages without blue sky or orange this or red grass. I think modern writers have been trained to not use colors as adjectives, but they’re easier to see in one’s mind’s eye than other obscure shades used as adjectives. The pamphlet that Reader’s Digest provided with the book says the author became friends with Stephen Crane, and one wonders if this tic was part of his influence on her.

I did flag a couple passages in the book for comment.

Regarding the back story of two Russians who have moved to Nebraska, someone relates that they had been drivers of dogsleds taking a wedding party home, but when the party was beset by wolves, the two men sacrificed the entire party to save themselves.

We did not tell Pavel’s secret to any one, but guarded it jealously–as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.

C’mon, man. In the 21st century, the Right Thinkers Who Talk On Television have assured me that it’s Ukraine and not the Ukraine. A hundred years of common usage must be publickly discarded so that the current Right Thinkers Who Talk on Television can teach us rubes something and prove their own shibbolestication.

Regarding town living in the late 1800s:

Most Black Hawk [residents of the town, not the tribe] fathers had no personal habits outside their domestic ones; they paid the bills, pushed the baby carriage after office hours, moved the sprinkler about over the lawn, and took the family driving on Sunday.

You know, when the Monkees were singing in 1967:

They were echoing criticisms of the literati of fifty years earlier.

Although I think I just marked the passage because I did not realize sprinklers were a product of the 1800s.

Eh, I flagged a couple of other things and was not really sure what I wanted to say about them when I flagged them.

At any rate, still, a worthwhile read just to remember what life was like a hundred and forty or fifty years ago–and might be again!