During the 1950s, I spent four long years treading water at Erasmus Hall, a jam-packed public high school at the bepigeoned corner of Flatbush and Church avenues. Among the required books in our overcrowded 11th grade English class was Willa Cather’s prairie novel My Antonia.
I’ve just returned to My Antonia after an interval of fifty years. It’s an excellent novel, though I confess with shame that I remembered very little of it. I managed to retain a bit of the Nebraska atmosphere and emotion — the empty, roadless steppe, the harsh winters, the sod houses, and the spirit of the indomitable settlers. I had absolutely zero recollection of the novel’s details and not so much as a glimmer of the story. But then, there isn’t much in the way of plot — simply the history of narrator Jim Burden’s socially confused and sexually troubled response to the "Bohemian" immigrant Antonia Shimerda, a vibrant girl (and later a woman) two or three years older than he. I remembered Antonia herself — wild, willful, determined, and ultimately triumphant — but I hadn’t even a trace memory of Jim. Perhaps it’s because Antonia remains in Nebraska where she tames her prairie acres and also births and nurtures uncountable children, while Jim, burdened with advantages and a middle-class education, leaves Black Hawk to become a lawyer for the railroad (in effect, an antagonist of the smallholding farmer) and, if I’ve read correctly, remains unmarried and childless, a rueful observer rather than an actor in the great pioneer epic.
I’m also astonished that I had no recollection of buxom, eager Lena Lingard, who teaches Jim about sex. Was I so virginal and naive that I was unable to construe Cather’s circumlocutions?
I didn’t remember, and surely didn’t appreciate, that My Antonia is a lovely, evocatively written book, extremely economical and at the same time rich in telling detail.
When I read My Antonia for the first time, I hadn’t encountered a plot of grass larger than the outfield at Ebbets Field (297 feet down the right field foul line), so "prairie" was a concept I had to take on faith. Now that I’ve been to Willa Cather country many times — not yet to Red Cloud itself but to Hastings, where the author spent her adolescence — My Antonia no longer seems quite so extra-terrestrial. Still, I wonder why the Italians and Irish and Jews and ‘Negroes’ who populated Erasmus Hall were supplied with such books– My Antonia along with O. E. Rolvaag’s no-longer-read Giants in the Earth, which is a desperately grim story of Norwegian immigrants in the Dakotas. I felt, and I think I was encouraged to feel, that they were the heroic, admirable, hard-working truly American immigrants, while we (shopkeepers, telephone linesman, garbage collectors, school-teachers) had somehow snuck in the easy, city way. Why weren’t we asked to read books about us? Weren’t we just as genuine?
Midway through the novel, Jim takes a few seconds to meditate on the relations between old families like his own (his grandparents came from Virginia) and the Czechs and Scandinavians whom they looked down upon. Conventional wisdom was that "all foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English." "But today," says Jim, speaking as a surrogate Willa Cather herself, "the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses." It’s an observation that applies not only to the economics of Nebraska in the 1880s, but is perpetual to the American experience. Immigrants work hard. Is it possible that today’s anti-immigration frenzy is driven by the fear that the present crop of brown-skinned newcomers will work so furiously that they’ll leave in the lurch the neo-nativists who seem to have contented themselves with a lazy respectability?
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