I find books from a variety of sources and collect reviews and quotes and snippets of material fill up and overflow from my collection folders and stuffed into my commonplace book. I remember some 35 years (circa 1988) ago coming across an essay entitled Class Action by the historian David McCollough (now recently passed), A historian’s counsel to graduating collegians. This excerpt from the essay is what pointed me to the book, finally bought and read so many years later:
“Or go to a tiny graveyard on the Nebraska prairie north of the little town of Red Cloud and look about until you find a small headstone that reads, “Anna Pavelka, 1869-1955.” By every fashionable index used to measure success and importance, Anna Pavelka was nobody. Three weeks ago, my wife, Rosalee, and I were among several hundred visitors who arrived in a caravan of Red Cloud school buses to pay her homage. Who was she and why did we bother?
She was born Anna Sadilek in Mizovic, Bohemia (present-day Czechoslovakia), in 1869. In 1883, at age 14, she sailed with her family to America to settle on the treeless Nebraska prairies in a sod hut. Sometime later, in despair over the struggle and isolation of his alien new life, her father killed himself. As a suicide he was denied burial in the Catholic seminary. They buried him instead beside the road, and the road still makes a little jog at the spot there still. Annie afterward worked as a hired girl in Red Cloud. She fell in love. She left town with a railroad man she hoped to marry but was deserted by him and forced to return. She bore an illegitimate child. Later, she married John Pavelka, also of Bohemia, who had been a tailor’s apprentice in New York – a city man who new little of farming. She ran the farm and bore him, I believe, 11 more children. She spent her life on the farm there on the prairie.
And that is about all there is to the story – except that she adored her children and her farm and she was also known to a younger woman from red Cloud named Willa Cather who transformed her life into a very great and enduring American novel called, “My Antonia.” The Antonia of the story – the Anna Sadilek Pavelka of real life – was a figure of heroic staying power. But it is her faith and joy in life, her warmth that matter most. “At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness, “ says her city-man husband at the close of the novel, remembering his first years in Nebraska, “but my woman got such a warm heart.”
Anna Pavelka reaches out to us because of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “transfiguring touch” of Willa Cather’s art, because of what she, through Willa Cather, says about the human spirit. Take the novels of Willa Cather with you when you go to Nebraska. Bring Faulkner when you’re going South. Take books wherever you go.”
The book was written exactly 105 years ago. Yes 105 years ago. Willa Cather writes this story from the perspective of a third person narrator (a fictional character Jim Burton), though in fact Will Cather herself was a contemporary and acquaintance to Anna Sadilek (renamed as Antonia, or Tony) in the book. The book tells the story of Antonias family’s arrival on the plains of Nebraska, her growing up on a rural farm and also in the railroad town of Red Cloud (Blackhawk), managing through cold and drought and the labor of hired work, but also sweetened by the play of youth and the bloom of growing up and becoming an adult, with a spirit that never dims. A positive outlook on the small blessings of life. The writing is both mundane and sublime, here a couple of passages that I have highlighted, and the words touch through the power of their descriptive force:
“Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie…. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify – it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said; “this is reality, whether you like it or not. All of those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what is underneath. This is the truth. “it was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer. “
When Jim meets back up with Antonia after a twenty- year absence: “Do you know Antonia, since I have been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in my part of the world. I’d have liked to have you as 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”. …. I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were…and remembering how many kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me, the closest, realest face….at the very bottom of my memory. I’ll come back, I said earnestly.”
These two held a lifelong bond through growth and parting of their eventful lives. The book reaches out through the sharing of this quiet, powerful story; the great writing stays with you. It reminds us of the spirit of those who settled our rural America. A small treasure that I came across and wish to share with others.