My Ántonia
By . Boston: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN COMPANY. 1918. 12mo, xiv+417 pp. $1.50.
MISS CATHER’S Americanism is her belief in the ‘foreigner’ and in the absorption by America of the stanch moral qualities of the pioneer immigrant. These qualities the immigrant brought, it is true, along with his red-handkerchief bundle; but his new life strengthened them an hundredfold, to the immense profit of his sons and daughters and of American industry and agriculture generally.
To show what stuff Americanism is made of, Miss Cather chooses a background which she knows well—the Nebraska prairie country. It is a glorious land, in which one feels ‘motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.’ But it is also obdurate and grudging. In it the author places a group of immigrants who, giving all that is in them, force even prosperity out of the unwilling soil. One of Miss Cather’s points is that some of them had more to give than the native settlers had; and the result helps prove her point, for ‘ to-day 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.’ The reader follows Miss Cather’s enthusiasms, and says with Frances Harling, ‘You always put a kind of glamour over them [the country girls]. The trouble with you ... is that you’re romantic.’
My Ántonia is, then, a book of enthusiasms, a collection of tales, anecdotes, and odds and ends of human tragedy, all bearing directly or indirectly on the immigrant and his thoroughgoing tussle with life. The shortcomings of native setlers lend cogency to the plain implication that the immigrants’ moral and physical contributions are among the essential, the enduring gifts to the nation and the race. But the heroine is so distinctly ‘My Ántonia’ to the author alone, that we rather resent her allowing a New York lawyer, the putative but non-existent author of these reminiscences, to call her his Ántonia. What saturates the reality of the material with the glamour of romance is not the gratuitous invention of James Quayle Burden, whose romance the tale purports to be: it is the author’s own responsive imagination, and, almost above all, her gift of style.
H. T. F.