My Antonia

I was assigned to read My Antonia in seventh grade, didn't like it, and struck Willa Cather off my list of authors to read, until Jennie recommended The Professor's House a few years ago. Since then I've worked my way through Cather's œuvre, and some of her novels rank as my all-time favorites. So I was curious to re-read My Antonia: was I wrong to be unimpressed? Would I see things that had escaped me in seventh grade? The answer is "no." My Antonia is inferior to all the other novels I've read by Cather, and I can't understand why it received so much praise, or why it hasn't been displaced on school syllabi by Lucy Gayheart or (if you want a novel about the making of America, which people do, unfortunately, when they think of Cather) O Pioneers!. It's a hodgepodge, a grab-bag of characters and anecdotes that never come together. Oh, it's not terrible — it has the looseness, the breadth and breath of life, some of the episodes are memorable, and Cather's prose is always graceful, but I'm peeved that I almost missed out on Cather because someone inexplicably thought My Antonia was just the thing for a school syllabus!

This is the best part:

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over.  When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed.  Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon.  There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields.  If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight.  There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.  No, there was nothing but land -- slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.  I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.  I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it.  But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it.  I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures.  I had left even their spirits behind me.  The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither.  I don't think I was homesick.  If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter.  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.

"Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made": one could say that My Antonia is not a novel, but the material out of which novels are made.

The New York Times is not going to publish my letter, so here it is:

To the Editor:

I read Jiri Pehe's opinion piece, "A Spring Awakening for Human Rights," with sympathetic interest. I was startled, however, to read that "After 1968, once powerful communist parties in France, Italy and other Western European countries gradually faded." This is not true in the case of Italy. Indeed, the Italian Communist Party, under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia: in a speech he gave in Moscow in the presence of Leonid Brezhnev, Berlinguer declared that the "tragedy in Prague" had revealed fundamental differences within the communist movement on national sovereignty, socialist democracy, and cultural freedom. The Italian Communist Party continued to be the main opposition party through the 1970s and 1980s, and is the direct ancestor of the main center-left party in Italy today.

"Drift," as defined by a new student, a fifth grader:

to move unknowingly and floatingish

I'm re-reading Philip Pullman's The Shadow in the North: my ninth grade is going to read it this semester. (Patrick complained that last semester's book, Emily of New Moon, had no plot. You want plot?! I'll give you plot!!) (Gratifyingly, most of his classmates liked Emily of New Moon, and not just the girls.)

I noticed on the copyright page that The Shadow in the North had originally been published in 1986 under the title The Shadow in the Plate. "In the plate"? What's that?! Then I realized he must mean "photographic plate": Sally's comrades run a photographer's studio. A shadowy evil in the north, photography... these are the leit motifs of Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass). Where do they come from?

Photography (not to mention electricity) as a link to the spirit world was the object of much study in the nineteenth century — and Northern Lights is set in the nineteenth century, albeit a fantasy of the nineteenth century — no less than the Sally Lockhart quartet. The northern evil must come (via Milton) from Canaanite mythology, where the great Adversary had his seat in the north. God, anti-god, Pullman's atheism...

Funny names for food:

sticky Richard
spotted Dick
bangers and mash
neaps and tatties
toad in the hole
pigs in blanket
bubble and squeak

saltimbocca

A while ago I went to JS's presentation of his new book, at Columbia. It was very interesting, and a lively discussion followed. I participated, but I wasn't yet able to put into words what I was thinking. Hence this post.

— I was troubled by the way that the word "ahistorical" was used as if it were a bad word. The philosophical foundations of human rights are "ahistorical." So they are, and isn't it in the nature of ideals to be ahistorical? Ideals can be bad and they can be good, and historicism is a poor standard by which to judge them. And: why not say, instead of "ahistorical," "timeless"? I know that's a word that people are embarrassed to use, but why? It's an embarrassment that should be interrogated.
[J once pointed out that academic critics' fondness for the word "interrogate" betrays their adversarial stance toward literature. Yes, although it's also a word that translates poorly from romance languages — in Italy teachers interrogate their students, and I suppose there's something adversarial in the exercise, but not as much as in a police interrogation!]

The flip side: I recently read Perry Miller's essays in Errand into the Wilderness, on the first few decades of Calvinism in America. He shows very convincingly that this tremendously unstable Calvinist edifice [J's talk was all about the deep contradictions in pure Calvinism] began to buckle under pressure from reality very soon — by the 1660s Boston reverends were already engaging in casuistry, and surely they knew what they were doing. Isn't there a danger in treating Calvinism in America as something that never evolved — a danger of being ahistorical?

Books since last summer:

Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763
Felix Holt, the Radical (George Eliot)
Vertigo (Sebald)
Nights at the Circus (Carter)
Storia degli Italiani, vol. II (Procacci)
Sexing the Cherry (Winterson)
The East Face of Helicon: West Asiastic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (West)
Malgudi Days (Narayan)
The Same Sea (Oz)
Ozma of Oz (Baum)
Comet in Moominland (Jansson)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: vol. I: The Pox Party (Anderson)
Prince Caspian (Lewis)
Emily of New Moon (Montgomery)
The Enchanted Castle (Nesbit)
My Antonia (Cather):
I, Claudius (Graves)
Claudius the God (Graves)
Miti e leggende di antica Roma (Agizza)
My Mortal Enemy (Cather)
Living in the Land of Ashes (Gebert)
The Omnivore's Dilemma (Pollan)
Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (Gessen)
One of Ours (Cather)