Before posting that last bit, I finished rereading an old favorite for the third time – My Antonia. Sigh – (imagining a sunset with plow silhouette and heroic movie soundtrack music (A western Tara's Theme) every time I say the name). And I’ll probably read it yet again before I die. My grandfather gave me this book when I was about the age of Antonia when Jim met her on the way to Black Hawk, Nebraska. Maybe he knew it would be an easy book for a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan to love. My name is scrawled in atrocious black marker printing on the book plate inside the front cover, even though it’s only a paperback, and a faded yellow violet has been pressed so long between the pages that it left a silhouette 2 pages back. I loved the cover, the typeface, the heft, the story, the characters, and I fell in love with Willa Cather. At a time when I had little spending money, I saved up enough to buy half a shelf of her books. O Pioneers and Death Comes for the Archbishop I’ve reread not too long ago, and I’ve pulled One of Ours to revisit since my husband’s at war. (After I finish Franny and Zooey, my upstairs book, and Summertime, my downstairs/swim lesson book).
In a way, the book has become a part of the myth of my own youth, just as it is the story of Jim’s revisiting the places and people of his past that have formed his present person. Does his attachment to his memories strengthen who he is or prevent him from falling in love with anyone else?
On the surface, there isn’t much complexity to the plot to My Antonia. And maybe it’s sentimental and nostalgic. I thought about picking it for Reading for Believers, but I was afraid others might think it dull. And I didn’t know if my love for it would stand another read. But it is moving and beautifully, though sparely, written. I’ve dogeared a lot of pages.
If Home tells the story of a good life, badly lived (by Jack), My Antonia is the story of a hard life, well lived. Despite the setbacks Antonia faces time and again, she is still full of joy when Jim meets her 20 years and 12 kids after her disgrace. She doesn’t even begrudge the years she spent working in town. Her immigrant peers from the country have made money and found gold, but none have found the happiness she possesses, not even Jim, whose love for Antonia isn’t big enough to accommodate her spirit. She never loses the “fire of life.” An achievement.
I suppose it is that unfulfilled connection between Jim and Antonia that made the book so heartwrenching to me as a young teenager addicted to romance. It’s clear that they remain in love with each other, but that love is not possessive, and from the beginning it honestly recognizes how unsuited they are for each other while also recognizing each other’s worthiness.
Could Jim and Antonia have made a life together? Jim recognizes that even Cusak, with whom Antonia has such a fruitful relationship, is not living the life he planned to live: “I wonder whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!” A challenge to the Catholic idea of marriage, but Cusak recognizes his sacrifices have merit in the enjoyment he gets from his sons. That line jumped out at me, as a military wife. I certainly never planned on living in the deep south, separated for months from my husband, but I had a moment of real happiness to be here the other day, while admiring the resurrection ferns green on the dark live oaks against the blue sky. And perhaps the question could be turned on Jim: Is he living the life that is right for him?
This time I enjoyed the book as much for its love affair with the land as the affair between Jim and Antonia. When Jim arrives in Nebraska from Virginia, he is in awe of seeing the complete dome of the sky. “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, Blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.” The sunflower lined roads seem roads to freedom. Jim’s grandfather can see the plains will someday feed the world. The golden fields, the plow silhouetted by the sunset, the harsh winters, the hot summers, all fed the nostalgia for my own semi-rural Midwestern youth.
Some favorite lines:
“The prayers of all good people are good.” Jim’s grandfather comments, in a nod to the Shimerda’s Catholicism.
“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I know that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thing of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. . . . But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences.”
Among the garden vegetables “nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun. . . I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
