PASTURES NEW
Alexandra Harris on why a classic tale of immigrants to the American prairies remains more relevant than ever in its centenary year
Willa Cather’s tale of refugees from a century ago is as relevant today as ever before
My Antonia, the fourth of 12 novels by the great American writer Willa Cather and among her very finest, was published in 1918. Though it is concerned with the passage of time, and though it looks back to the years of Nebraskan pioneering which Cather knew from her childhood in the 1880s, it reaches its centenary without the least sign of ageing. Or it may be that, like the memories treasured by its central characters, it grows and deepens with the years.
Antonia is the daughter of an immigrant family, the Shimerdas, who have left behind everything they know in Bohemia to try a new life on the plains of the Midwest. American pioneering came with a rhetoric of conquest, but Cather leaves that language in abeyance as she observes their struggle to survive the first winter in a primitive shelter. It is the sorrow of displacement one feels most of all. The only gift the Shimerdas can offer their neighbours is dried mushrooms, the cherished remnant of a remembered home half a world away.
The knowledge of long hardship gives weight to the novel’s exquisitely realised moments of fulfilment: a conversation in the setting sun, a story related with delight, a homemade Christmas. Antonia has a way of celebrating their goodness, not in direct statements but with ‘a look or a gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things’.
We come to understand, too, how memories are written into the landscape. One of the novel’s most enduring images is that of a road with a curve in it: the road runs straight across the prairie, laid down with confidence and hope, but it curves so as to leave a pioneer’s grave undisturbed. There’s clemency in that curve; the present bends to honour the past.
Cather did not make a lot of noise about herself and tended to be suspicious of those whose work she thought showily avant-garde. She cared about purposeful craftsmanship – whether the craft of a prairie homesteader making a way of life from the raw materials of the earth, or the craft of a writer finding forms for love and appreciation. Near the end of My Antonia, at the point in the book when another novelist might have been rapidly engineering a sex scene or at least the welling of a tear, Cather’s narrator tells us that ‘the miracle happened’. The miracle is simply that Antonia has come into the room. It is ‘one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take more courage than the noisy, excited passages of life’.
Cather looks with a wise, clear eye on those quiet moments. It’s not that she doesn’t do drama: she can end a love affair with gun shots and she has a pronounced interest in the gothic. Within the many stories carved into the expansive design of My Antonia there is a Russian bride thrown to the wolves and a predatory villain depicted with gusto. But the moment that matters is rarely the bloody one; it will come simply and unexpectedly, elsewhere.
In a year marked by celebrations of pioneering women, let us read and reread and act upon Cather’s visionary portrait of tough, hardworking, generous and feelingly remembered lives.
‘My Antonia’ by Willa Cather (£8.99, Vintage Classics) and a new edition of the biography ‘Willa Cather: Double Lives’ by Hermione Lee (£12.99, Vintage Classics) are both out now.