Willa Cather\u2019s classic, now 100 years old, still sings and dances.<\/b>
\nW illa Cather, as Joseph Epstein recently wrote in these pages, was the most cultured American novelist of the 20th century. One aspect of Cather\u2019s culturedness was her knowledge and love of music, a subject about which she often wrote. As a young critic for the Nebraska State Journal, Cather stringently reviewed performances by visiting singers and pianists. Musical characters abound in such short stories as \u201cEric Hermannson\u2019s Soul\u201d (1900) and \u201cA Wagner Matinee\u201d (1904), fruits of her decade in Pittsburgh working as a journalist and teacher. Thea Kronborg, the heroine of Cather\u2019s The Song of the Lark (1915), is an operatic soprano. The form of The Professor\u2019s House (1925), Cather held, \u201cwas very much akin to the arrangement followed in sonatas\u201d albeit \u201chandled somewhat freely.\u201d In short, music was a pigment on Willa Cather\u2019s imaginative palette, one she used to render her characters vivid and memorable.
Cather\u2019s best-known work, My \u00c1ntonia, was first published in the fall of 1918; it remains required reading for many high schoolers today. The novel\u2019s centenary is a fitting occasion to consider one of its underappreciated qualities: its musical hues, values, and intensities.
My \u00c1ntonia is the story of \u00c1ntonia Shimerda and her transformation over more than 30 years from a poor immigrant child to a prosperous farmer and mother. The narrator is her admirer Jim Burden. Having at the outset of the story lost his parents, Jim has been sent from Virginia to live with his paternal grandparents on their farm outside Black Hawk, Nebraska (a fictionalized version of Red Cloud, where Cather grew up). The Shimerdas are the Burdens\u2019 neighbors.
The novel\u2019s first distinctly musical character is \u00c1ntonia\u2019s father, a violinist. Life has been hard on him. At the behest of his domineering wife, he moved his family from Bohemia to America, buying land at an inflated price, having been told that prosperity awaits him in the new world. His oldest child, Ambrosch, is disagreeable and small-minded. His other son, Marek, is cognitively impaired and suffers from a congenital malformation of the limbs. In spirit, Mr. Shimerda is closest to the elder of his two daughters, \u00c1ntonia, who alone perceives his quality and divines his temperament.
Unfortunately, Mr. Shimerda is old, weak, and ill suited for farm work. His \u201cwell-shaped\u201d hands look somehow \u201cskilled,\u201d not hardened by the field. His face is one \u201cfrom which all the warmth and light had died out.\u201d If Alexandra Bergson, the heroine of Cather\u2019s O, Pioneers! (1913), looks to the barren Nebraska country with \u201clove and yearning,\u201d foreseeing a bright and prosperous future, Mr. Shimerda looks to it with regret and in utter defeat. Back in Bohemia, he earned extra money playing his violin for weddings and dances. His dearest friend was a trombone player, and the two of them talked and played music endlessly. But in his new country, Mr. Shimerda refuses to play his violin, even when begged to do so by his favorite child. Perhaps its sound would remind him too poignantly of the role he once played and the fellowship he has lost.
Mr. Shimerda\u2019s sorrow soon overwhelms him and during an obliterating snowstorm he obliterates himself. \u00c1ntonia redoubles her efforts to make the family farm a success\u2014and she keeps alive his memory, recalling especially his intelligence and refinement. His presence, like a recurring theme in a musical composition, hovers over the novel.
T he most intensely musical chapters of My \u00c1ntonia occupy the middle of the book. A few years after her father\u2019s death, \u00c1ntonia goes to Black Hawk to work for the Harlings, a prosperous family living next door to Jim, who has himself moved to town along with his grandparents. At the center of the Harling household is the matriarch, Mrs. Harling. However busy she is, she finds time each day to play the piano. She plays not to impress others (as does the title character in Henry James\u2019s The Princess Casamassima) nor to get what she wants (as does Emma in Flaubert\u2019s Madame Bovary). Rather, Mrs. Harling plays for her own benefit and as a way of cultivating herself and entertaining her family and friends. She takes music so seriously that Jim has learned not to disturb her in the middle of a practice session, when her fingers are \u201cmoving quickly and neatly over the keys\u201d and her eyes are \u201cfixed on the music with intelligent concentration.\u201d In Mrs. Harling\u2019s piano playing, we perhaps see a reflection of Willa Cather\u2019s own patient and steady self-cultivation.
The four Harling daughters are musical, too, which makes their house a lively place. \u201cOn Saturday nights,\u201d Jim reports, \u201cMrs. Harling used to play the old operas for us\u2014\u2018Martha,\u2019 \u2018Norma,\u2019 \u2018Rigoletto\u2019\u2014telling us the story while she played. Every Saturday night was like a party.\u201d One imagines her presiding at the keyboard, playing arrangements of thickly orchestrated operas, pausing between numbers to set the scene for her spellbound audience. How real the stories of these operas must have seemed, stories that acquire life and light through melody and harmony.
Immediately following the chapters about the Harlings is a chapter that Richard Giannone, in Music in Willa Cather\u2019s Fiction, calls the book\u2019s \u201cpulsating center.\u201d \u201cOccurring as it does in the very middle of the novel,\u201d he writes, \u201cit gives off the emotional\u2014the musical\u2014impulse which reverberates throughout.\u201d The chapter tells the story of Samson d\u2019Arnault, a prodigiously talented blind African-American pianist. Blind d\u2019Arnault, as he is known, is staying for a few days at a hotel in Black Hawk as he barnstorms through the Plains. When he was a boy, growing up on the d\u2019Arnault plantation in the South where \u201cthe spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted,\u201d Samson would run away from home, always in the same direction\u2014to the plantation house where Nellie d\u2019Arnault practiced piano. When she took a break, Miss Nellie sometimes spotted him at her window, listening intently, wearing a look of positive \u201crapture.\u201d
One day as he listened, Samson heard her shut the lid of the piano and leave the room. Something overcame him. He began to climb in through the window. Fearful he might be caught, he almost lost heart, but he was too close to turn back. He felt his way to the instrument, sat down, acquainted himself with the geography of the keyboard\u2014and discovered he could repeat what he had heard while standing at the window. In a flash, he realized that music \u201cwas to piece him out and make a whole creature of him.\u201d If suffering and deprivation were holes in the garment of his life, music was the mending patch. He was soon taken into the home of the d\u2019Arnaults to develop his gift. So relentlessly did he practice, Cather writes, \u201che wore his teachers out.\u201d
The portrait of Samson d\u2019Arnault illustrates a point made by Joseph Epstein . \u201cBetter than any modern writer,\u201d he holds, Cather \u201cappreciated human dignity and understood what lay behind it.\u201d Consider Samson\u2019s entrance at the Black Hawk hotel: \u201cThe door from the office opened, and Johnnie Gardener [the proprietor] came in, directing Blind d\u2019Arnault\u2014he would never consent to be led.\u201d The last clause is rich in implications. He would consent only to be directed\u2014one would think from behind. He must have thought himself too substantial a man, too dignified, to be led by the hand, as though he were a helpless child. In overcoming the obstacles of blindness and racism, he exemplified the motto of John William \u201cBlind\u201d Boone, one of the pianists on whom Cather based the character of Samson d\u2019Arnault: \u201cMerit, not sympathy, wins.\u201d
F or Jim Burden, now in high school, summers in Black Hawk can be so dull that silence seems \u201cto ooze out of the ground.\u201d This is why the arrival of the Vannis, a couple from Kansas City, provides such welcome relief. The Vannis establish a pavilion where they lead dances and give dance lessons to the children of the town\u2019s \u201cambitious mothers.\u201d The pavilion is soon \u201cthe most cheerful place in town\u201d; it attracts young people from miles away, drawn by the music and the promise of a good time.
None is drawn more than \u00c1ntonia. Dancing appeals to her elementally; it is her spirit\u2019s way of responding to the music she associates with her father. Soon she is considered the best dancer in town. Jim grasps part of the reason why: Her moves on the floor are a sign of spontaneity (\u201cshe had so much spring and variety, and was always putting in new steps and slides\u201d) and hearty physicality (\u201cWhen you spun out into the floor with [her], you didn\u2019t return to anything\u201d). The more she dances, the more she enjoys herself:
\u00c1ntonia\u2019s great enthusiasm is a sign of her need for freedom and expression. Inspired by music, she finds in dancing a temporary release from the drudgery of her constant toil.
Her enthusiasm, however, sometimes clouds her judgment. One of her dance partners, Larry Donovan, falls in love with her, proposes marriage, and then abandons her. It is not clear whether he leaves before or after realizing she is pregnant with his child.
I n the coda of My \u00c1ntonia, Jim picks up the thread of \u00c1ntonia\u2019s story 20 years later. On a visit to Nebraska, he learns that she has flourished. She is happy, successful, full of purpose, her family rooted deeply in the soil Mr. Shimerda found so foreign. One evening, Jim, in the company of \u00c1ntonia and her husband, Anton Cuzak, is treated to a musical performance by some of their children:
This passage is full of echoes. The strings of Mr. Shimerda\u2019s violin are at last sounding again. The name of \u00c1ntonia\u2019s daughter Nina recalls Nina Harling, \u00c1ntonia\u2019s favorite among the Harling girls. Nina\u2019s \u201cpretty little dance\u201d shows she responds easily and naturally to what moves her\u2014and suggests that daughter is very much like mother, possessed of the same potential for goodness, liveliness, and love.
The music in My \u00c1ntonia binds the characters across the generations and, for us readers, endows them with vividness and depth. Revisit Willa Cather\u2019s subtle and imperishable story as it begins its second century and you may find yourself taking its characters into your being much as you remember a favorite song.<\/p>\n

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