My Antonia

Dear Dad,

Yesterday I finished reading My Antonia by Willa Cather. I had never read Cather because a girl I knew in college once mocked her as having an overly simple, almost nursery-school style. It just goes to show how uninformed opinions can sway you. I found Cather's writing some of the most beautiful I have ever read, writing with a song inside it. And I don't think I have ever read such vivid descriptions of people and places, both of which seem more real to me than most people or places I've known. After the first few pages I found myself saying, "I want to meet this woman and run away with her for the rest of my life." The force of her personality was that overpowering--gentle, smart, worldly, optimistic in the face of disappointment and sadness, and capable of bringing unsurpassed beauty into the world.

But I have to confess that after finishing the book I was in a funk, and I found it hard to explain why. There is something about My Antonia that conjures up your own failures and disappointments in life--all of the "might have beens," the romances you never had, the successes eluded, youth and promise eaten away by the passing of years. The beautiful writing and the believable characters impress it on you in a very personal and heartbreaking way.

Later on, however, I began to get angry with Cather. She tries to paint a brave face on Antonia at the end of the book, but it's clear she has ended up badly, with her teeth falling out, 10 children, and living in borderline poverty. And Jim, the pussy, has led an easy life away from Nebraska, having never pressed Antonia about his deep-seated love for her and abandoning her when she is most in need. Granted it might not have worked anyway--they were different in so many respects, but I blame him for not trying--for letting a passion like that go--that's a sin to my thinking. It reminds me of Zorba saying to the boss, "There is one sin that God will not forgive: If a woman calls a man to her bed, and he will not go, God will not forgive him." Okay--that's Zorba The Unfaithful speaking, but there's a deeper meaning behind his words. If you have a passion, if you love someone, you have an obligation to act on it, to try to make it real. Jim Burden cannot or will not do this. He is timid and weak. He simply leaves Antonia and goes off to study Latin.

I now think this is the point of the book and the reason it affected me so: in spite of their love for each other the two characters are doomed to never be together. Still I want to rebel against it. Jim Burden is one of Christopher Booker's "perpetual boys," incapable of uniting himself with his anima. He hasn't learned his lessons from life, borne out by his failed marriage to the wealthy socialite. This makes My Antonia a kind of dark version of a Voyage and Return story--wherein Jim ventures into the world of the Hired Girls and then returns home, without having grown up or brought back the anima with him. As Booker says, these kinds of stories are usually about troubled, inadequate people, and that certainly describes Jim Burden.

I later read that Cather was a lesbian, and a part of me wants to think she simply wouldn't allow her heroine to be happily and passionately married to a man, but I don't know that I have any evidence for that. Yet I do think that the characters have been set up for failure, having such different backgrounds and with Antonia being four years older than Jim, a yawning divide at that age.

So in the end I was disappointed, and bitterly so, given the book's early promise. And so the book turns out to be much like life--in the beginning anything seems possible, you can hardly wait to turn the pages, but in the end it turns out like everything else--rather mundane and a little sad.

Thus my mood upon finishing My Antonia. The next book I read will be a happier one.

Charlie