Backlisted - My Ántonia by Willa Cather

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

Hermione Lee joins John and Andy to discuss the work of American novelist Willa Cather and, in its centenary year, her pioneering novel My Ántonia. John also talks about Wilding by Isabella Tree and Andy revisits one his favourite books, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. So this is what I've been doing this week. I've been having a significant birthday about which I felt sufficiently traumatised that my wife had to organise a series of events to take my mind off it, which she did very successfully.

So shall I just tell you what they were? Because you can chime in if you have experienced these things. On the day of my actual birthday, I had lunch at Rules. Marvellous. I've never been to Rules before. I've never eaten at Rules. England's oldest restaurant. England's oldest restaurant.

Features in The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, which is one of my favourite books. One of Greene's favourite restaurants in London by repute and sort of a combination of haunches of venison and spotted dick. Lots of red velvet and kind of... And Melvin Bragg arrived halfway through, not on my table. That would have been quite the thing that would have been organised would have been quite the thing that would have been organized anyway so that was have you ever john have you ever eaten at rules i have i have eaten at rules it's a very odd reason why i've eaten a couple of times one is

that the qi office is just was down the road and the other is that the man who owns it john mayhew used to own browns with Jeremy Mulford in Oxford. And he made so much money, Browns was fabulously successful in the early 80s. And he was bought out and he used his money to buy an estate in Scotland and then bought rules in London. And his estate in Scotland, I think, still supplies all the game for rules in London. I think still supplies all the game for rules in London. So we had a jolly there once, which was Oxford kind of bar. I was working behind the bar in Browns, and we went down and had a slap-up feed.

It was a feast I ate to forget. It's a 50th. That was great. So I did that, and then the next day we went to Dungeness. That was wonderful. Weather was incredible. That was wonderful. Weather was incredible. There was no one around when we got there.

Derek Jarman's garden is still there. It's incredible. We had fish and chips at the Pilot on the beach outdoors. It was wonderful. And then we stopped off in Rye on the way back. So that was good. Well, you'll enjoy your 40s. So that was good. 50 years?

Did you go to Henry James' house? Well, Hermione, it's interesting you should ask me that. I had planned to go to Henry James' house in a sort of almost in quotation marks because I thought, well, you know, to mark a thing to do on my 50th birthday in Rye, Henry James' house is currently shut for refurbishment. Of course, in Rostaro. So I wasn't able to go on this occasion. On the Saturday, I went to see the Rutles

playing at the Winter Gardens in Margate. Have you ever been to the Winter Gardens in Margate and have you ever seen the Rutles? I have not seen the Rutles. I've not been to the Winter Gardens in Margate, but I know that the Winter Gardens in Margate is a thing. It was tremendous. And the highlight of the whole thing

the Ruttles which were of course Neil Innes and Eric Idle's pastiche parody mixtape of the Beatles in the 70s for which they wrote an album's worth of songs. As part of their live set it's the original Neil Innes is part of it and the drummer

Barry Worm is present and correct. And they played a version on ukulele of George's All Things Must Pass, which actually, to see some old boys who were doing it at this point, really for fun, playing this song which was written by George Harrison when he was 25, seeing it sung by a much older people. Grizzled. No, it's really moving. It's great.

Did you shed a tear? You know what, I did shed a tear. Old man with beer in his hand, crying. It just sounds like the best birthday celebration set up. And then finally, I had a surprise lunch at the Forditch Arms outside Canterbury, which all my oldest friends came to which I didn't know anything about so anyone listening to this will think why Andy Miller you feel quite so sorry for yourself because those are my factory settings I'm afraid I can't help it but I had a

fantastic I had a fantastic fantastic birthday I've got a little birthday present for you have you very very little uh one of the things that you noticed when we first met was that I fold down the corners of the books. Doesn't go down well. I'm not comfortable with it. So my daughter is also not comfortable with it and she's made some bookmarks for both of you. So I've got one for you.

Oh, wow. And then one for you, John, because it's your birthday tomorrow. Well, that's very kind of you. Meg, thank you very much. What does yours say? So mine's a little bookmark that fits on the corner of the page and mine says 50 years of speed reading.

It's true. It's so true. Thank you, Meg. That is brilliant. Master storyteller, which is unfortunately a phrase that comes up far too often in our podcast. We should probably... Now stop. It is my birthday tomorrow but I have no plans other than to get through this podcast. And I didn't bring you your present because I was so nervous this morning to finish all my reading and preparation.

Man, I understand. So you'll have to wait for another fortnight. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us hunkered down in a sod house on the Nebraska prairie. The May wind moving the red grass in endless waves all around us. books. Today you find us hunkered down in a sod house on the Nebraska prairie, the May wind moving the red grass in endless waves all around us. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today is rather a

special edition because we are joined by the critic and biographer Hermione Lee. Hello. Hello, thank you. Thank you for coming to the kitchen table. It seems extraordinary to have you here, thank you. And Hermione was until last year President of Wollstone College in Oxford, remains Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford and in 2013 was made a Dame for her services to literary scholarship and a more was made a dame for her services to literary scholarship and a more wonderfully apposite scholarship for Batlister we could not hope for. Hermione has written books on some of the greatest 20th century women writers. Her biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1996, Edith Wharton in 2006, a study of Elizabeth

Bowen in 1981, Penelope Fitzgerald, that was published in 2013, and the subject of today's episode, Willa Cather. Have you written one book about Willa Cather? Yes, just one book, yeah. But with different titles depending on... In England it was published as Willa Cather, A Life Saved Up up because one of the things I wanted to talk about was how long she nourishes and keeps her experiences before she uses them and how often she comes back to things and in America they called it Willa Cather double lives which is a rather different emphasis but still makes some sense for her actually. well if ever there was a person qualified

to give new life to old books it is Hermione Lee so thank you for coming thanks yes um welcome Hermione it's Willa Cather's fourth novel My Antonia first published in 1918 that we're here to discuss centenary edition absolutely but before we get on to the the meat of that discussion um I've got to pop the usual question. Andy, what have you been reading this week? Okay, so in the run-up to my birthday, I read various gloomy texts that I either hadn't read, as in I read The Long Goodbye by Roman Chandler, which was suitably bleak, and I re-read The end of the affair which i said i mentioned in relation to rules so i reread the end of the affair by graham green which i traditionally say is one of my

favorite novels green was one of my favorite writers when i was much younger whenever i go back to green i still find things that surprise and please me, even if I can also see flaws that I couldn't see when I was younger. But I haven't read... I don't think I've read The End of the Affair for about 20 years. And we've never done... We've always talked about doing Green. We will do Green. In fact, John, one of the reasons why I wanted to read this

was I had stuck in my head, ever since you said this, on an episode of Batlisted two years ago. We mentioned green in passing, and John said, ah, the problem with green's work now is that it's disfigured by Catholicism. That's what you said. Those of you who are exactly disfigured by Catholicism.

I remember throwing you a look and saying, I don't think that's true. But then I thought, why is it stuck in my head? Maybe there is some truth to it. The phrase was in my head when I was reading The End of the Affair again. And partly because there is a character in The End of the Affair who is literally

disfigured. He has birthmark on his face. One of the plot points in the book is this character's relationship to faith or lack of faith and how that affects his physical condition. And I realised that as I was reading it, that in fact the writing isn't disfigured by Catholicism, but is of course transfigured by Catholicism. Oh!

but is of course transfigured by Catholicism that it is it doesn't matter whether you are a Catholic whether you believe in Catholicism whether you believe in God whether you believe even in belief you are in the hands of a writer who wants to use belief

to explore everything else the three main characters who revolve around the idea of a belief in God or a belief in love or a belief in hatred or a belief in art and what I found very moving about reading the book now funnily enough some of it is in the perpetually adolescent graham green mode you know few writers feel as sorry for themselves so entertainingly as graham green does or at least bendrix does his narrator in this book and yet there are so many brilliant little touches that no other writer would be bold enough, I think, to try and get away with. First of all, in terms of the plot, and I don't want to give plot elements away if

people haven't read the book, but in terms of the prose as well, the prose is very plain, and then there'll be a very Greenian metaphor, or twist, or shocking piece of imagery which shouldn't work against such a grey background and the other thing that the end of the affair seems to be about to me is and this struck me as being magnificent actually on this reading is it's so complex in terms of structure it moves around all the time from the middle of the second world war to after the second world war to just before the end of the second world war but you never lose track of where you are he must have he must have labored over it it's like a little jewel box of a thing it's so sophisticated and these are things that i never think I don't think Green ever gets the credit for that so this idea sorry it sounds like I've been quarreling with you in my head I

haven't but the idea that the writing is I'm on the ropes here the writing is weighed down by an unfashionable obsession with faith first of all I don't think the obsession with faith is unfashionable. I can see that the Catholicism might be of its time. But in all other respects, this is such a great book. And I did some of the book on audio as well, the Colin Firth audio reading, which was released about five years ago. That is absolutely tremendous. That kind of dismal, clapham common. i don't want to say seedy because people always say that would be great but the the drizzle you know so i'm just going to read a little bit

here which i thought listeners of the podcast would appreciate about writers routines keep an ear out for the the the sort of Greenian technique that I was just describing. You'll spot it when it happens. When young, one builds up habits of work one believes will last a lifetime and withstand any catastrophe. Over 20 years, I have probably averaged 500 words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I've always been very methodical, and when my quota of work is done, I break off even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning's work I count what I have done, and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript.

work, I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript. No printer need make a careful cast off of my work, for there on the front page of my typescript is marked the figure 83,764. When I was young, not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be getting to bed, so long as I slept in my own bed, I would read the morning's work over and sleep on it. Even the war hardly affected me. A lame leg kept me out of the army, and as I was in civil defence, my fellow workers were only too glad that I never wanted the quiet morning turns of duty. I got, as a result, a quite false reputation for keenness, but I was keen only for my desk,

my sheet of paper, that quota of words dripping slowly, methodically, from the pen. It needed Sarah to upset my self-imposed discipline. The bombs between those first daylight raids and the V1s of 1944 kept their own convenient nocturnal habits, but so often it was only in the mornings that I could see Sarah, for in the afternoon she was never quite secure from friends who, their shopping done, would want company and gossip before the evening siren. Sometimes she would come in between two queues and we would make love between the greengrocers and the butchers. But it was quite easy to return to work even under those

conditions. As long as one is happy, one can endure any discipline. It was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work. When I began to realise how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed. Love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other. I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing.

Pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted, I was happy. I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death. I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck. Wow.

Now that is writing. Yeah. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, it's not in the same category as Graham Green. I've read a book called Wilding by Isabella Tree, the subtitle of which is The Return of Nature to a British Farm. It's about a 15-year experiment in West Sussex.

Charles Burrell and his wife, Isabella Tree, who's written the book, decide they're going to rewild their estate. They essentially stop farming, the arable farming. They introduce various species, ex-mort ponies, tamworth pigs, longhorn cattle, and allow them more or less to run and roam free.

It's not that straightforward. They get a lot of opposition from local farmers surrounding them because of ragwort and thistles. But what happens is after 15 years, they have created the most extraordinary receptacle for biodiversity. They have nightingales, they have the turtle doves that are now critically endangered. They have 37 of the 54 species of British butterflies have returned. It's been the most remarkable transformation. And it's sort of now become a kind of a beacon in British

conservation history as what can happen with a simple ordinary bit of land if you allow nature with a bit of planning to and of course the longhorn cattle the beef that they're producing the pork they're producing is fetching massive prices because it's so delicious it's a simple story she tells it very very well is it set out like a diary it's a delicious. It's a simple story and she tells it very, very well. Is it set out like a diary? It's a chronological history. And I'll just read a little tiny bit just to give you a this is about the extraordinary fritillaries, silverwashed fritillaries that have returned. As I say, some of the nature writing in the book is very good, but she writes, deep, rich orange and speckled with black, every now and again, a flick of the wings

flashed an underside of green and mother of pearl, the silver wash that gives fritillaries their name. The female flies straight and level, the slow semaphore of her wing beats and the scent from the tip of her abdomen exuding allure. The male swoops in tight loops under and up in front of her, stalling so she can pass beneath him through a shower of intoxicating scent scales shed from his forewings. Nothing, I felt, could have encouraged me at that moment beyond shafts of sunlight spun with the dust of butterflies.

For Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, the human connection with nature, something he calls biophilia, the rich natural pleasure that comes from being surrounded by living organisms, is rooted in our evolution. We have been hunter-gatherers for 99% of our genetic history, totally and intimately involved with the natural world. For a million years, our survival depended on our ability to read the weather, the stars and the species around us, to navigate, empathise and the species around us, to navigate,

empathise and cooperate with our environment. The need to relate to the landscape and to other forms of life, whether one considers this urge aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, cognitive or even spiritual, is in our genes. Sever that connection, and we are floating in a world where our deepest sense of ourselves is lost. Oddly enough, as I was reading it, there just seemed to me, there's so much, we're going on to Willa Cather in a moment, there's so much about the connection to the natural world and the importance of the natural world, that it's a very, very hopeful, amazing,

I think it's also selling rather well. I mean, it's published by right it's published by picador i mean as you know i have animals myself it's an incredibly inspiring book if you have any sort of sense of what what's the right thing to do and actually the right thing to do is generally let nature get on with it it's it's ironic isn't it that the word spiritual is so important there and that when we come on to talk about Willa Cather, I think there is not a religious but a spiritual feeling about the relationship to the land. But she would take precisely, presumably, the opposite line,

which is that what you want to do is de-wild. Yes. You know, that actually what the characters that she most admires and is most interested in are the ones who create a sort of hortus inclusus, a kind of cultivated garden inside with the wilderness kind of lapping at the edges the desert or whatever so she she would probably take the opposite line that wilding is just what you don't want to do with your landscape but it's exactly what i was thinking because that there but of course she writes so brilliantly about arriving in in

the prairie uh and there being no fences having come from Virginia uh Jim's and and the grass the book chat will continue on the other side of this message I I am going to propose I'm going to read the blurb on this book right now yeah and and then we're going to I'm going to ask Hermione the traditional opening question but we want to set the book up what we what we tend to do is we read the blurb on the back you didn't write this blurb did you i've got a virago modern classic edition here no no no written by a person in the virago office all right this novel was published a hundred years ago my Antonia Willa Cather in this famous novel Jim Burden tells the story of his beloved childhood friend Antonia the immigrant girl and the woman whose struggle and splendor represent the very source of life

itself in her novels Willa Cather sought to recapture the superb vitality of frontier America, nowhere more so than in this magnificent portrait of the pioneer woman, seen through the eyes of a man for whom she can only be a memory, never a possession. Willa Cather's artistic genius, the beauty and lyrical quality of her prose, her elegiac vision of the joys and sorrows of things gone by suffuses My Antonia, which, with A Lost Lady, also published by Virago, represents the finest work of this great American writer. Now, I am going to turn to you, Hermione Lee, and say, how do you rate that blurb? Is that a good blurb? Well, it is a good blurb, actually, but I would probably have an argument about the finest work, because although I love my Antonia, which is why I'm here today, and I also adore A Lost Lady,

my actual favourite cover is a novel called The Professor's House. So although I do love these books, I would want to put The Professor's House onto that blurb. We are going to talk about several of these books not least because John and I have respectful of the challenge being laid before us have been reading several novels by Willa Cather. The Professor's House but that's great because I want one of my questions was going to be where should I go next well let's talk about My Antonia then can you recall when you first read Willa Cather or My Antonia? This is a very disappointing answer, but curiously, I can't. I sort of can't remember a time when she hasn't been in my head and my heart.

There are some novels that I can absolutely date and name, the place, the time, the moment in my life, the other people who were in the house, as it were. And all those key, for instance, Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, Far From the Madding Crowd, the first time I read Proust. So these are things that I do. And they're always kind of rites of passage or they're moments of growing up. But with Cather, I think the thing I most remember is that I had,

because I was a very sort of bookish child and teenager, I had read lots of American literature, and I'd read Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and Whitman and Twain and Faulkner. And then here came this woman writer who was doing the most astonishing things with American history, American landscape, American character, the energy and life force, if you like, of what has created America. trivial to say, my God, she's doing a man's work, but she seemed to me to be doing something as a woman writer that was as good, if not more marvellous than any of those writers and taking on the burden, the name of the character in this book, taking on the burden of history and time and the bigness of America in a way that kind of transcended gender, actually. So that was my first sort of thought about the experience of meeting her, as it were.

In my limited reading of her work over the last couple of months, her style, I'm not going to say her style changes, because you could recognizably see it's Cather every time. But her willingness to deploy that style in different, increasingly daring ways. Yes, she is. It's a paradox because I think sometimes, perhaps particularly in America, when you've been brought up on O Pioneers or My Antoneer as a sort of school text, I've heard American readers say, oh, she's rather conservative and she's rather traditional and she's rather old-fashioned. And this is not true.

Because she has a pastoral subject often, there's a tendency perhaps to see her as rather reactionary or traditional. But as you rightly say, in her form and in her methods and in the way she increasingly goes for paring things down, taking out the normal bits of plotting that you might expect, playing with time in a very subtly complicated way,

making her character seem like sort of isolated figures on a bare stage or in a bare room. This is as experimental as Faulkner or Virginia Woolf or late Henry James, but in her own, as you rightly say, in her own tone of voice. The thing that kept coming up to me was sort of early D.H. Lawrence as well. That's very good, actually. That she has the same kind of intensity. I will always remember when I first read it,

but it reminded me a little bit of the first time I read The Rainbow and was thinking that this was the missing link in the English novel, you know, that somehow out of Hardy and George Eliot, there was a new thing. And I felt that very strongly with that there must have been a link between kind of the 19th century novels, even the kids novels, The Little House on the Prairie, Little Women. It's so interesting about the link to Lawrence. I mean, Lawrence is problematic for readers now in all kinds of ways, in ways that Cather isn't.

But one of the things they deeply have in common, I think, is that sense of a sort of earthbound natural self which lies under the sophistications and complexities of modern life. I think they both, I mean, Lawrence goes on boringly about blood and loins and so on. But there is a similarity, I think, in the way that there's a kind of true authentic self, which is quite, one might say primitive, I mean, which the way that there's a kind of true, authentic self, which is quite, one might say, primitive, I mean, which is close to the ground and maybe can't communicate itself ultimately. So I think Lawrence is a very wordy writer,

I think much wordier than Cather, but in a way they're both after this paradoxical idea that they want to use language in the best possible way in order to express something that's almost silent or incommunicable. I think we'll probably keep coming back to that. I want to mention as well a slightly later book. It's not that much later. It's less than 10 years later. I read another of the books called My my mortal enemy which is very short um which does things that are

daring to the point of um brutal with leaving things out about characters to the extent that the reader is presented with contradictory information via what they're shown and basically told, now you make sense of it, which seemed to me incredibly bold for a journey for a writer to have gone on from her first novel, which she didn't like, I believe I'm right in saying. Axe on the Scrooge, well, yes. Max Anders Bridge, well, yes. You know, but there's going to be sub-Jamesian fiction through these frontier novels and on into something spare.

So it's only ten years later, My Mortal Enemy. As you say, it is brutal. It's a very cruel book and a book about a relationship. It seems to be a book about an awful, self-destructive relationship between a husband and wife. It's actually just as much about the relationship between the young girl who observes this. And when she first sees Myra Henshaw, who is the woman of the title, who is a terribly self-harming, restless, discontented, vindictive, revengeful person who's terrific.

And there's a wonderful first meeting between them, which is a bit like Isabel meeting Madame Merle in James's Portrait of a Lady. And Mara is a rather Jamesian character. And you know that this girl is going to have to watch out because she might get destroyed by this person. She is actually almost destroyed by her. destroyed by this person. She is actually almost destroyed by her. And it's about disillusion,

revenge, and the pelican tearing its own breast. It's about someone who is unable to be happy. And in that sense, it's sort of the opposite of the character of Antonia in My Antonia, who goes through the most terrible life experiences, but somehow manages to find some kind of happiness or um is joyous she's a joyous person fundamentally it sounds a little bit like the cutters from my antonio given their own wick cutter who is this hideous money lender who cuts everyone up and also loves to tell his wife about his infidelities and make sure that he kills her just before he commits suicide so that she won't inherit any of his money. The thing is that we are happily revealed. The thing that's so good about My Antonia,

the way Katha approaches these things, I thought this was brilliant and very modern, was the way in which dramatic events you could tell me the story of my antonia in a way that made it seem like melodrama yeah but she doesn't it's it's not it's i mean but but it is brutality the brutality i'm sorry you know the suicide is very very very realistically presented she doesn't spare any of the details but then the apparent punishment which you're always expecting for a fallen the fallen woman narrative she completely resists that and the other thing she does is she you know without am i allowed to say this but the narrator doesn't get

the girl i mean you know she's playing with well or doesn or doesn't... It's complex. So you're quite right. So if you told it another way, it would be like a Zola novel. Or it would be like Tess of the Derbyshire. You're right, you say. So this is a young immigrant girl with a very unbelievably difficult family circumstance. Tragic death of her father. Awful mother, awful mother, awful brother, has to work in the fields, relinquishes her education, is left by her. I don't think it's a spoiler this because in a sense, you know, it's not exactly suspenseful, the novel, oddly. But you could tell that story blow by blow by blow you could tell the story of a just about

surviving czech immigrant in 1880s 1890s nebraska where life is incredibly hard but it isn't told that way at all either chronologically or in terms of suspenseful major acts of melodrama it's told on the contrary backwards and through retrospect and as part of the life of the uh narrator who tells the story and what's that wonderful phrase she had saying that she wanted she wanted it to be like the underside of the rug yes yes and also there's a wonderful moment where she's with a friend who's also a writer, and the friend has a big brown earthenware Sicilian junk with some flowers on it. And Cather picks it up and puts it on an empty table and says, I want my heron to be like this.

I want her to be just this object object in this so that there's something simple and found she's like a found object and I think I think that the brilliance with which she delivers Antonia and there's a lot of obviously there's a lot of stuff about my Antonia is it Jim Burden's Antonia is it it's not Antonia presenting herself and but actually just just the subtlety and the sense that you get of how Antonia changes and transforms through the five kind of staves of the book it's you know I kept having to go back and and realizing yes her language gets better and then when she marries another Czech her language goes but almost goes back when she went the scene at the end with the children which is is one of the great scenes in literature, I think.

I mean, who has ever done meeting children better than that scene where he goes back? It's incredibly brilliantly written and very moving. But it's very, very subtly done. And I think, you know, having read it sort of once i it's it's you know it's a book that i will definitely go back to it's about who who owns whom isn't it who takes possession of her so if it was called anthony yeah it would be a very different book actually and there is this interesting frame story which is just like a russian novel and she's very very interested in particularly Turgenev.

And there's a lot of feeling of Turgenev, I think, in Canva. And so in the first version of this frame story, it's like the Quoits of Sinatra in Tolstoy. You know, somebody meets a man on a train going into the Midwest from New York. And they start talking about a girl they both knew. And the man, who is Jim Burden, says, well, I'll write it down for you, is it? Well, I'll write my version of it.

And the person who's narrating the frame story is much more obviously Cava in the first version. She's identified as a woman. Whereas in the later version of that frame story interestingly she kind of neutralizes herself and makes herself disappear a bit more and you don't know whether she's a man or a woman and then Jim comes back and sees her and gives her this manuscript which is called Antonia and then as he's just about to to leave it with the author he writes my at the beginning of the title and of course that changes the whole thing

because what we're being told is that this is jim's story this is jim's story of the anthony that was his childhood friend and whom he then felt differently about and then lost and then refound you know for 40 years on it's not anthony's story she doesn't get to tell her own story and there's a problem there as well as... The frame is so brilliant because the narrator who is maybe Kathar says, I didn't like his wife. I have that bit right here.

He says, or she says, although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great western railways and is often away from his office for weeks together. That is one reason why we seldom meet. Another is that I do not like his wife. Which is a... But suddenly, you know, when you just pick this book up, do you think, oh, I'm going to like this? I would like to write a novel.

If I wrote novels, I'd like to write a novel from the point of view of Mrs. Burden. I love these offstage characters, like Ahab's wife in Moby Dick. So, you know, she might turn out to be rather like Myra Henshaw, I think, in My Mortal Enemy. There tend to be two types of women. There are the prickly, seductive, decorative, worldly, rather urban types who are sort of trying to get out of what they're trapped in. And there are the heroic, epic, enduring, stoic, you know, not more simple, but more close to the earth.

She tends to divide between the two. Yes, I was going to say, that's true, isn't it, of the other novels that she wrote in this period. So that's true of O Pioneer. O Pioneer, there's a marvellous character who's a Scandinavian immigrant, not a Czech immigrant, called Alexandra Bergson, and she is another of these epic women of the earth. Then there's Song of the Lark,

which is a story about a very famous opera singer, but the quality in her is drawn from the strength of her native upbringing and her closeness to the land. So she's very, very interested in that quality of female strength, female epic strength, as well as female victimhood and complexity and difficulty. So I wonder whether we could have a little extract from the beginning of the book. Yes it's quite early in the book. Jim Burden has just arrived from his long journey

from Virginia to Nebraska. He's been on the train for a very long time and he keeps looking out of the window and he says to himself the only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still all day long Nebraska one of the great lines in the book and so he's gone to bed very exhausted he wakes up in the morning and he's gone to stay with he's an orphan in the novel and he's gone to stay with his grandparents who have a farm in Nebraska. Early the next morning, I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk, Black Hawk's the little town, until you came to the Norwegian settlement where there were several.

Our neighbours lived in sod houses and dugouts, comfortable but not very roomy. Our white-frame house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corn cribs at the bottom of the shallow draw was a muddy little pond with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The road from the post office came directly by our door, crossed the farmyard and

curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along the western skyline, it skirted a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield and the sorghum patch behind the barn were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I. Rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I. North of the house, inside the ploughed firebreaks, grew a thick-set strip of box elder trees, low and bushy,

their leaves already turning yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them and over the plum patch behind the sod chicken house. As I looked about me, I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up, and there was so much motion in it it the whole

country seemed somehow to be running. I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother when she came out her sun bonnet on her head a grain sack in her hand and asked me if I did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner and then they go up to the garden and she warns him about the snakes and I'll just go to the last couple of sentences of the of the chapter he's left alone the earth was warm under me and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me their backs were polished vermilion with black spots I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it like the pumpkins and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire

whether it is sun or air or goodness and knowledge. at any rate that is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great when it comes to one it comes as naturally as sleep so one thing about this i think is is this extraordinary sense of tiny tiny detail it's like the borrowers you know you're a sort of grass level you've got the spots on the beetles and all the factual detail about the, you know, the different bits of the farm and going up to get the potatoes. It's completely matter of fact. And then rushing through it like the movement of the wind in the grass is this astonishing sense of eternity and being part of something beyond yourself Eudora Welty another great American writer said that the thing with Willa Cather is that there's nothing in the middle it's all either foreground or it's distance yes you know there's no middle that's really fascinating because because Cather's what's so interesting

is the way Cather writes like a journalist, like the journalist that she was, and yet is achieving levels of symbolism which are profoundly anti-journalistic. But she's also very... She's sort of funny. I mean, I think I'd almost forgotten that I had a grandmother. It's so strange. It's such a strange moment. What does she mean he mean uh but

i know just what he means he's become part of the natural world what is this about family and relate relations there's a lot of comedy in the book as well there's a family i've got a volume here called willa catherine writing and there's a little bit by Catherine which I'll share with you in a minute. This was published in the 40s. I think it's posthumous. And the foreword is by Stephen Tennant. How will we describe Stephen Tennant? I mean, this is the... Well, glamorous camp,

fantastically literary, member of a very wealthy family who made a sort of interesting and curious alliance with Willa Cather in the, I think in the 30s or even early 40s. I just want to read this from his foreword because I thought this was terrific. Willa Cather could portray young hearts, young longing, as very few artists ever have done. Perhaps Tolstoy has done

this sometimes, but she did not use his elaboration or irony. She was curiously independent in all her approaches. Her vision was a poet's vision, simplified by an extraordinary natural honesty and warmth. When one thinks of the deep indelible impression made by some of her books, A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy, My Antonia, I think it is the burden of unspent feeling, one remembers, something gathered up. That's the burden of, you said burden earlier, didn't you, Jim Burden, but the burden of unspent feeling. But he's so good about youth too. I mean, I was going to say when you asked me, do remember when i first read her and i do think one of the things that she she kind of keeps you company through your life actually because she

is wonderful at youth and this is a novel about growing up above all things and what happens to you when you grow up and and then she also is very good on the disappointments of middle life and the difficulties of middle life. And she's good on old age. But she is, she's a wonderful writer of youth. He's quite right. Going back to the frame of the book and Burden and his,

Catherine not liking his wife, you do feel that so much of his emotional bonding capacity has gone towards Antonia during his life he's sort of ruined for women in a way yes I agree with you and I'm looking at Hermione because I normally on that list to do the do the biographical things but it seems presumptuous and ridiculous that I I would do that okay well can we say a little bit about kathleen life in terms of the dates are 1873 to 1947 and she grew up in virginia in farming

country in virginia quite a big family didn't like her mother very much lots of brothers and sisters a very important maternal granny called rachel boke who stayed with the family and you know these old ladies are very important part of the writing and when she was nine they went just like Jim Burden in the novel they went all the way from Virginia to Nebraska they were on the farmland for about not more than about a year and a half and then they moved into a little town called Red Cloud. No the farming didn't work very well so he moved into Red Cloud and she was about 10. And then she was a rather difficult, discontented, ambitious,

restless girl who also wanted to be a boy. There's these incredible photographs of her dressed as a boy when she was about 13 or 14. That's right. So there's all that cross-dressing. And there's something kind of innocent and sweet about it. And also, obviously, she's unhappy in her woman's right. So there's all that cross-dressing and there's something kind of innocent and sweet about it. And also, obviously, she's unhappy in her woman's body. And she, you know, Cava is a passionate lesbian lover of women who didn't talk about that and didn't write about it

and kept her major relationship very much under wraps and disguises herself as a male narrator very often. You have no doubt about that, the lesbian? Oh, well, I mean, she loved women. She also had great passionate feelings for men. But I think what's, you know, my view is that what's interesting about this is not that she was sort of repressing her real emotions and disguising herself all the time and not not coming out in her my view is that she transcends gender in the books and writes brilliantly both as a man and a woman and about

different kinds of of gender that's flowing it flowing in and out of of gender which is what Antonia does so but clearly there's a problem about the sex in my Antonia because um you know that it's it's a thwarted sexual novel in lots of ways and I'm sure there's some problem about the sex in my Antonia because you know that it's a thwarted sexual novel in lots of ways and I'm sure there's some of her own feeling but just to finish yes yes before we get distracted into the sex so she's very very bright she can't wait to get away from home like many writers who spend their lives writing endlessly about the place they came from like Joyce or Catherine Mansfield.

She actually at the time couldn't wait to get out of it. And it's one of those odd paradigms. What she loved in that Nebraskan context of the 80s and early 90s was the lives of all the many immigrant families around her. So, you know, Czechs,ans french scandinavians extraordinary range of people who would all come west in order to try and that's part of the great subject for kevin that's one that's probably the subject she's most famous for so she goes to the university of lincoln she becomes a journalist very quickly she's a very scathing drama critic people knew

that she was not talented not not what I want to say but very, yes, outstandingly capable. You know. Oh no, totally. Absolutely. She went to Pittsburgh as a journalist

spent 10 years in Pittsburgh working very hard teaching as well as journalism. She fell deeply in love with a woman called Isabel McClung who then married and she found that very difficult. She started writing short stories. She went to Europe, published a volume of rather sentimental poems, and she met the life's companion, her life's companion, Edith Lewis,

who was her sort of slave, I think, really, and looked after all her life. Then she worked for McClure, Sam McClure, investigative journalist in New York, and ghost wrote his autobiography, interestingly. And she got a very good piece of advice from an older writer, a woman called Sarah Orne Jewett, wonderful Boston story writer, who said, quit the day job. That's basically what she said, not in those words, but, you know, because otherwise you're going to waste it and you'll find your life has gone and you won't have written your book so she quit the day job and then she started writing novels around 1912 but this is really interesting we a recurring theme that we've had on backlisted is we've done episodes on authors we always think now think of jane garden as the jane garden famously says you know i raised a family and the the moment the the youngest child went off to school, I went upstairs and started writing.

In Katha's case, though, she doesn't start writing fiction until she's in her late 30s. Yes, it's a long apprenticeship. But she doesn't have the child-rearing element. She has more the... Career. Career, and I suppose she's been allowed to be relatively self-determining yes but also there was a financial issue in that there was no money and and in the 1890s many of these you know bank

crises farming families you know she needed to send money home she was supporting the family so these are these are real financial exigencies and she was frightened like many people are of making the jump and going freelance and she was also she was very early on ambitious for her art wasn't she she i mean you were saying right at the beginning that she didn't want to be a lady novelist she wanted to be you know she wanted to be virgil she wanted to be a great writer she did want to be the virgil of nebraska as it were and she was i think But like many great women writers, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, she doesn't get started until quite late, you know. And there aren't hundreds of books.

I mean, she wrote her novels between 1912, when the first one came out, and 1940, when the last one came out. And there's not a novel a year, you know. And she starts, I've got the, I have the dates in front of me. So she has a, as you might expect, there's a run, isn't there, from, she publishes a novel 1912, 1913, 1915, 1918, 1922, 1923, and then it starts. The real moment of turning, I think,

is when her first visit to the landscape of Arizona and New Mexico in 1912, which just opens up a whole other landscape. She keeps coming back to it in many, many novels. Death Comes Out of the Bishop. And The Professor's House, too. Yes, and then she becomes a rather increasingly grumpy, antcial difficult private full-time writer and successful this is the thing that we but i think we don't realize in this country particularly that she was you know she sold a lot of books she won the pulitzer prize she was considered part of the there's some there's some footage of her isn't there at the at the Algonquin with several other extremely famous writers from that period so she

becomes this she is a major writer. She rather ruthlessly changes publisher she goes from Houghton Mifflin because she wasn't satisfied with the way they were publicizing her and goes to Knopf so she's she's a professional through and through. She lives in she lives in Greenwich Village She lives in New York. Greenwich Village, which she likes because it sort of has a sort of village, a similar Nebraskan village-y feel. But then she gets places to live in New Hampshire

and Grand Manan in Maine, where I've never been to, but I would love to go, which sounds the most end-of-the-world remote. I'd like to be away, away, like the wild buzzard. I want to come back round to this point that John was making about the narrator for most of the book, Jim Burden. The thing I found really affecting about reading the book, and particularly as you get to the end of the book,

I'm just going to read the last paragraph in a minute because i think it's worthy of a bit of discussion is the sense of what you were saying hermione about cather perhaps expressing some of how she felt as an outsider in that character that that character can't quite find his way through to this person and this era which means so much to him, my Antonia. She's at arm's length from him. He can't. Well, he's gone away. It's our problem with pastoral, isn't it? You know, that whole pastoral tradition.

So it's about shepherds and it's about people working the land. And it's sometimes Arcadian and idyllic. And so it's sometimes about love. And it's sometimes more like Virgil's Georgics. It's about hard labor and grafting your, you know, doing your fruit vines and digging the soil. But the person who's writing the pastoral is not a shepherd. But the person who's writing the pastoral is not a shepherd. The person who's writing the pastoral is often someone who's gone away like Jim Burden and had an education and read his classics.

And has created, it's the classic problem of the poet or writer who writes about their childhood scene. And in doing so, separates themselves from it. I mean, you see that in jamis heaney he says when he comes back he says something one of them he's getting the kind of the old farm boy feeling of it's so right if you've got animals you know there's masses of work to be done and at the end of the day the nostalgia's gone i want to go i want to go somewhere else now i've had had enough of this routine. It's a very good book about that. I'm going to read this last paragraph because this is so... So Jim Burden is back.

He's visited Antonia. He's acknowledged to you, the reader. Her 11th voice. He's acknowledged that the moment moment there's been a moment where he said i missed i missed it right then he says this was the road over which antonia and i came on that night when we got off the train at black hawk and were bedded down in the straw wondering children being taken we knew not whither i had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were

so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of destiny, had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

But this is why they can't have an erotic relationship because she has to stay in his mind as the figure of the past, the figures that stand out in the landscape of his own childhood, the figure of memory around which all his best emotions have accreted. And other people in the novel, Lena and Tiny, they often become businesswomen or whatever. But Antonia, he needs to sort of encircle her and come back to her as this figure of his past. And there's something very strange about that ending. As read it I sort of felt it which is that it's

very sad and although he says you know I found her again absolutely absolutely it's about death isn't it yes it is this is about an ending not a new beginning I was going to say this is why I didn't say I had to read it three or four times because my first reading I thought that seems quite that seems rather upbeat by the fourth reading, I was thinking, no, wait a minute, that's... It's in the same minor key as the last paragraph of Gatsby. Yes, exactly.

There's a lot in common between them. But I don't know if we have too many readings. No, no, not at all. But, of course, it echoes the first reunion that they have. I mean, this plot is so peculiar. You've got a five part book the first two parts are this incredibly close up beetle level detail

which are more than half the book which in many ways are the best parts actually of the life of the children growing up, it is and then you've got three more parts in which he goes away he becomes a student he studies law he has a kind of relationship with one of the other immigrant

girls lena who's very seductive and sexy in the way that antonio is too sort of tough uh and workmanlike to be and then that ends because he has to go on with his career and then blow me 20 years pass um he hears the story of what's happened to ania, which is not good. And then he hears in the distance that she's been saved, as it were, and ended up being this maternal figure. So he has this reunion with her just after she's had this very bad time. She's been abandoned. She's had this illegitimate child. And there is this very strange tone to it, just like the ending. And there is this very strange tone to it, just like the ending.

So he's seen her again and she tells him, I'm going to take care of my little girl and, you know, I'm determined to make the best of my life. And off he goes. And he says, Sister, do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart or a wife or my mother or my sister. Anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind.

You influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. And she says, ain't it wonderful, jim how much people can mean to each other she has this amazing and then there's this extraordinary light hanging over there's the moon has risen and the sun is setting so there's this extraordinary sharp light and he says i felt the old pull of the earth the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall i wish i could be a little boy again and that my way could end there.

Then they part and he holds her wonderful rough brown hands and he can barely see her face in the darkness. I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me, the closest realist face under all the shadows of women's faces at the very bottom of my memory. I'll come back, I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness. Perhaps you will, I felt rather than saw her smile. But even if you don't, you're here, like my father, so I won't be lonesome.

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass. So it's all about returning and going back as if the road of destiny is the road that takes you to your tomb, really, back into the earth. The circle. The circle, as he says in that last paragraph.

That's what he says about her voice, Antonio's voice. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality it was deep a little husky and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart and the genius i think of giving her the voice the voice is so strong and like you say that lovely little sort of ain't it great Jim you know kind of bathhouse and humor and even from the early days talking about the mans and that Antonia is is the most living thing in the book but there's a problem too I think I don't think we should be completely uncritical about this because there is a problem that Jim as the narrator is this sophisticated you know he's been everywhere he's traveled a lot he's a

lawyer you know he's he lives in new york um he's got the lingo there's an amazing moment when i can't remember what it is she says to him and he said yes the queen of italy says that to me once and you think oh you don't have to go quite so far in order to contrast this worldly, sophisticated New York lawyer with this peasant woman from Bohemia who lives in her farm and with her 10 or 11 children. And so there is a problem, I think, with the fact that he invests so much truth, realness, sincerity, authenticity in her, and yet there has to be this distance. The other stories are great, you know, the Widow Stevens, and there are lots of Mrs Harling, there are lots of other stories in the book.

It really reminds me... There's no fixed... There isn't really, I don't think, a fixed point of view in the novel. There are three novels that this novel reminded me of, or a writer that comes to mind that really reminded me of reading Haldor Laxness, the Icelandic writer, where people similarly live in holes in the ground but have rich inner lives, battling with what Iceland could do to you in the first few years

of the 20th century. So independent people. Time will darken it, John, it reminds me of. William Maxwell. Maxwell, different kind of writer entirely, but the same kind of collection

of characters, as you said, about the book just now. The idea of its families who lived several miles from one another, all of whom float around in the background of the novel. And the third book that it reminded me of, in terms of its contrast of small communities with the cycles of nature, it's very like, and I would love to know if he's read it, of small communities with the cycles of nature. It's very like, and I would love to know if he's read it, Reservoir 13 by John.

True, Reservoir 13 by John McGregor. I haven't read it, but that last point. Which is, this is what I mean about the novel being, this novel, My Antonina, feeling modern. That's a novel that was published last year. That last point is what I would say that's what made me think of the rainbow, exactly that, the large, big rhythms. But there's also this narrative thing

that you've mentioned about all these other stories. And it's very interesting the way you start, very simple and close, with just the family, just the children, just the landscape. And then it actually gets more complicated just as life gets more complicated. So you get lots of different stories, lots of different people coming in. You get the life of the town.

You accrete these stories. And then dropped into this strangely structured narrative, there will be pieces, like pieces of a quilt, that are sort of dropped in, like the story of the Russians who throw the people to the wolves, this wonderful, brutal story. And there are a few others. So it's like one of those Cervantes, or it's like a pre-modern novel. I mean, it's modern, but it's also ancient in the sense

that it has this kind of classical structure where you drop other stories inside the main epic, if you like. The other thing about it that I think is astonishingly for our times is Cather's passionate sympathy for and interest in immigrant people. And what she doesn't want is a sort of bland, assimilated American culture. What she passionately loves and is interested in and recreates in these books is an immigrant culture in which people keep their characteristics and their qualities and their tribal behavior and the things they've brought with them from their old country like the dried mushrooms oh and she doesn't like the idea of

a sort of you know homogenous assimilated culture and she's very nostalgic about the closing of the frontier but my god this is someone who thinks that the doors and the ports and the gates should be open to people coming into America from all over the world and we need her now as a writer who says that. Right I think that's a brilliant point on which to end sadly we must leave it looking across the prairie the road to destiny stretching out ahead of us before we go very briefly this week's unbound project worth backing roger phillips wild cooking companion volume to his definitive foragers guide wild food but with even more hints and recipes about how to find and cook wild and domesticated plants when you're out on the prairie if you've ever wondered

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