My Ántonia
Willa Cather
There are a very few books that impressed me so much on my first read that I can remember exactly where I was. Perhaps the strongest of these experiences was my first reading of Willa Cather's My Antonia. I had just gotten it out of the Cornell Undergraduate Library and sat down in my room to read it. At the same time I put a new album my parents had given me on my turntable -- Gustav Mahler's Symphony #1 "Titan". I don't usually listen to music while I read -- I have not so capacious a mind as to be able to encompass two distinct works of art at the same time.
But somehow, this time it worked. Despite its title "Langsam, schleppend, Immer sehr gemächlich" "slow, dragging, always very restrained", the first movement of Mahler's Titan symphony begins lively and cheerful. As I read about Jim and Ántonia playing together on the prairie it felt as if the music had been written for them. Titan remains one of my all-time favorite musical works to this day. (Indeed, I am listening to it now as I type.) It is weird that a novel with so distinct a sense of its place -- the American west -- should be complemented so well by a European composer. Or perhaps not -- Mahler was born in Bohemia, and Ántonia, too, is Bohemian.
Cather begins My Ántonia with an Introduction that purports to tell how the book came to be. She shared a train compartment with her old friend James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, who asked her why she had never written anything about Ántonia. The upshot of this conversation was that Jim himself was induced to write down his recollections of Ántonia, all mixed in with his own story, and that the result was this book.
I was foolish enough to believe this the first time I read it, and I spent some time afterwards researching the history of My Antonia, hoping to find Jim Burden somewhere in history, or perhaps his model under another name. I eventually discovered that Jim Burden never lived, or that if he did, it was as Willa Cather. The story of Jim Burden growing up on the prairie is the story of Willa Cather growing up on the prairie.
It's one of the great works of American literature. And I urge you to try reading it while listening to Mahler's Titan!
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