Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Acoma as his introduction to the mesa country. One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of the silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave.

I'm excited to have a ticket to a dinner and seminar at the New York Historical Society next week about Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Only, what I thought was a seminar seems to be more of a discussion, and I'm actually supposed to have recently read the book. So, while starting the new year, with all its attendant slate-clearing and excitement, with a re-read is not ideal, there's few books that could better inaugurate the year.

The first time I read Death Comes for the Archbishop, I didn't get it. I kept waiting for the death, and I was stupid. The second time I read it, I saw the simple grandeur of Cather's prose for what it is, and having read more of her books since then, it's only grown higher in my estimation. So I thought I'd try something unusual and write a negative review of Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Let's start with the moral case against Cather's novel. Cather, it seems to me, has escaped critical censure for the small-c conservative and traditionalist aspects of her writing. In One of Ours, it's the glorification of World War I heroism and the sacrifice of young American lives for what I think we now see as little reward. In O! Pioneers and My Antonia, it's the myth-making around the long-gone days of the pioneer, which situates American identity in a past that never really existed. Similarly, Death Comes for the Archbishop is primarily about whitewashing the frontier and the "civilizing" of the American West. To see this, you need only to look at the Bishop Latour's praise for and friendship with Kit Carson, one of the premiere Indian fighters of his day, and whose depredations Latour only goes so far as to call "misguided." Or to Latour's nostalgia for the Spanish "martyrs" who were driven out centuries before by the Pueblo Revolt. The novel's central symbol is the cathedral that Latour builds from a hill of yellow rock he finds near the Pueblo of Acoma. The cathedral's design is European, French, but the rock is taken quite literally from the land, which Latour believes no one will miss, though he doesn't seem to have asked.

Cather goes out of her way to present Latour and his bosom friend, Father Vaillant, as friends of the Indians. On his deathbed, Latour rejoices that he has lived long enough to see the Navajo returned to their lands (no thanks to the "misguided" Kit Carson), and the novel's grandest villain is the gluttonous Fray Ramirez who abuses his parishioners at Acoma, and gets thrown off the cliff wall for it. But Death Comes for the Archbishop is invested, too, in a fundamental vision of Indian differentness, not simply rooted in the past but atavistic to the point of simplicity. Indians are both somehow manifestations of the land itself and an ancient prehistory. In some ways, this is meant to be a compliment: when one rebellious priest warns Latour not to try to change the old ways of the Indian religion, Latour remarks that ancientness is what he likes in the people of New Mexico--it is a quality shared with the Catholic church.

This might be the book's most significant elision: its insistence that the spread and maintenance of the Church in New Mexico is neither coercive nor particularly transformative. Latour and his fellow Catholics are consistently contrasted with "bad whites" like the murderous Buck Scales, who abuses his Mexican wife, or the town Protestants who love to violate sacred places and things. But this only serves to hide the ways in which the Church is one arm of European colonial transformation. Latour can build his cathedral because he believes that the Catholic church is catholic in that old sense of universal; it belongs everywhere. Contrary to the U.S. government, he is grateful that the Navajos have returned to "their land," but it does not occur to him, even as he digs up that yellow rock to build his cathedral, that the Church itself is a kind of invading force, using and possessing someone else's land.

Aesthetically, the novel reflects this project of elision. Unlike My Antonia or O! Pioneers, which have more conventional dramatic narratives--even as they, like Archbishop, each cover many years--Death Comes for the Archbishop feels strangely episodic and halting, without forward movement. It moves from anecdote to excursion: from a story that someone tells Father Latour (like that of the villainous priest at Acoma) to another trip out into the difficult desert. What happens at home in Santa Fe is hardly ever seen; the yellow rock is discovered, the cathedral is built. We know that the priests at Acoma force their charges to gather heavy pine trees from the distant mountains to build the church, but who builds the Cathedral of St. Francis, we're not permitted to know. I don't know either, of course, but it seems to me there's something intentionally obscured about the workings of the Church that's reflected in the book's subtly unconventional structure. Archbishop is a book with plenty of event, but no history, perhaps because it's unable to look at history with honesty.

Okay, I can't believe in any of that, even as I think there's some truth in it. Truly, I only appreciate Death Comes for the Archbishop more having seen this summer so many of the places it describes, like the cloud citadel of Acoma--which, of course, Cather describes perfectly. One thing I love about New Mexico, and the Southwest more broadly, is that the vast and striking landscape puts me in mind of eternity. It's a place for spiritual people, and I do actually think that Cather effectively imagines a profound similarity between Latour, Vaillant, and their parishioners: all are simple people, trying their best to keep their minds on the things that really matter. The anecdote about the waylaid traveler who is helped by a Mexican-Indigenous family, only to realize later that they were the Holy Family is one of the truest and most effecting parts of the novel. And the last thirty pages, in which the Archbishop--finally--dies remain among the greatest creations of American literature. I do think that Cather engages in more than her share of American mythmaking, which always requires a partly blind eye. But Death Comes for the Archbishop is about something greater than America.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

The Bishop sat a long time by the spring, while the declining sun poured its beautifying light over those low, rose-tinted houses and bright gardens.  The old grandfather had shown him arrow-heads and corroded medals, and a sword hilt, evidently Spanish, that he had found in the earth near the water-head.  This spot had been a refuge for humanity long before these Mexicans had come upon it.  It was older than history, like those well-heads in his own country where the Roman settlers had set up the image of a river goddess, and later the Christian priests had planted a cross.  This settlement was his Bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren.  Their Faith planted by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not dead; it awaited only the toil of the husbandman.

It was really interesting to re-read Death Comes for the Archbishop on the heels of Ceremony.  In the latter Silko adds the white missionaries who came to the indigenous populations of New Mexico to the forces of witchery, the colonialist evil that Tayo must expunge through a traditional Pueblo ceremony.  Willa Cather's account of Bishop Jean Latour--a fictionalized version of the real Bishop Lamy--quite obviously does not feel the same way.  But it's also not that far off as you might suppose.  Cather has a keen appreciation for the indigenous people Latour ministers to that seems respectful without being patronizing, and though Latour himself is a paragon of gentleness, he arrives to a church in disarray, represented by men who use the wild remoteness of the land to abuse others.  At the mesa-top community of Acoma, Latour muses that the beautiful church, constructed of giant wood beams that must have been carried for hundreds of miles by workers who were little more than slaves, represents a great cruelty.  (For this crime and others we learn that the former priest of Acoma was unceremoniously tossed off the mesa.)

In fact, Death Comes for the Archbishop is full of cruelty, from the Mexican priests who refuse to give up their fiefdoms to the new French Archbishop to the poor whites who murder supplicant travelers.  Or the protestant family that refuses to let their Mexican servant see a priest or attend the Catholic church of her upbringing.  It's easy to miss these things because Cather's style is as gentle as Latour himself.  My memory was of a novel where nothing much happens, but that's not true.  A lot happens, but it plods by episodically with the easy grace of a man whose eyes are set on higher things.

I liked the novel more on this re-reading for several reasons.  I knew that the novel isn't really about the Arcbishop's death, but rather his life--a surprise which, subtle as it is, threw me the first time.  Or perhaps it's more correct to say it's about a friendship, that of Latour and his vicar Father Joseph Vaillant, boyhood friends from France who have come together to serve God in the desert.  One way of reading Death Comes for the Archbishop is as a study of goodness; both Latour and Vaillant are scrupulously kind and pious men, but in wildly different ways.  Whereas Vaillant is an outgoing populist who serves passionately among the most deprived, Latour is a quieter, more contemplative man whose passion for his people comes perhaps from a deeper understanding.  Latour says that Vaillant "must always have the miracle very direct and spectacular, not with Nature but against it.  He would almost be able to tell the colour of the mantle Our Lady wore when She took the mare by the bridle back yonder among the junipers and led her out of the pathless sand-hills, as the angel led the ass on the Flight into Egypt."  Another reason I liked it more this time is that a friend pointed out to me the way in which Archbishop is a model for Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a study of a good and quiet man of the cloth.  Both novels are remarkable because they believe that good can be as interesting, and as multiform, as evil.

Not far from his humble church in Santa Fe, Latour finds a single golden hill whose rock he decides will form his cathedral.  In contrast to the priest at Acoma, extracting it will be no unnecessary burden.  In contrast to the priest at the heart of William Golding's The Spire, he desires the cathedral not in vanity but in hope that it will make a permanent thing of beauty.  He tells Vaillant, "the Cathedral is not for us, Father Joseph.  We build for the future--better not lay a stone unless we can do that."  Doubtless Silko would read the cathedral's symbolism differently.  For me, it was wonderful to walk out of our rented apartment in Santa Fe and walk a few short blocks down to the plaza, four hundred years old, and see the thing itself, still gold, framed by a red mountain.  It allowed me to really understand both the reason and the beauty in Latour's words.

They frame also the final chapter of the book, which shares its title.  Though the book isn't really about Latour's death, like I said, the final chapter does contain its most compelling language, and its most beautiful observations about human life.  It's the kind of stuff that makes you want to quote without comment:

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older.  His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry "Today-today," like a child's.

How about:

The air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after this day.  He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it.  Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of the man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!

How remarkable that that passage isn't about the Archbishop's death, but rather the experience of his life!  When Latour does begin to die, Cather writes about it as an experience not of diminution but of enlargement and expansion:

He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories.  He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral.  He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him.  He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown.  They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.

Does one have to be as good a man as Latour to have as good a death?  I don't know.  I hope not.  But I do know that Cather is one of the only authors who can make death seem not only not frightening but perhaps even pleasant.

In the midst of the Archbishop's dying Cather stops to recount the story of the Navajos who, after being expelled to the other side of the Rio Grande, were allowed to return to their ancestral lands after a campaign of rebellion against the U.S. government.  It's a story I didn't know, and a rare reprieve in the long and sorry history of U.S.-Native relations.  It might seem like a strange digression from the Archbishop, but I think that Cather tells it because it represents a kind of reconciliation that parallels the reconciliation at the heart of Christian religion, the reconciliation that is promised to the Archbishop, who lies on his deathbed thinking about his boyhood in France with his friend Vaillant, himself long since dead.  If God has the power to return life to the dead, friend to friend, perhaps He can also return the Native peoples of America to the full vitality that was stolen from them.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

James Wood calls the final chapters of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop some of the most beautiful in the English language. To be sure, the final chapters are where the most striking moments lie:

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of the hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel like and one's heart cry "To-day, to-day," like a child's.

Cather paints death in the bright, pastel colors of the Southwest; for Jean Marie Latour, the Archbishop of New Mexico, death seems to hold little anxiety. Latour tells us that he will "soon be done with calendared time," a phrase that reduces death--and life--to little more than a material object. Death Comes for the Archbishop is mostly free of individual conflict; Bishop Latour's battles are on the larger scale that determines whether the church will thrive or wither in the distant Southwest. It is no wonder, then, that when the final conflict comes, Latour has his mind on greater things.

But Wood's claim reminds me of the Misfit from Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," who says of his latest victim, "She would of been a good woman... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Death Comes for the Archbishop is best when it faces last things, but Cather has the Bishop's entire story to tell. More typical are passages like this:

The streams were full of fish, the mountain was full of game. The pueblo, indeed, seemed to lie upon the knees of these verdant mountains, like a favoured child. Out yonder, on the juniper-spotted plateau in front of the village, the Spaniards had camped, exacting a heavy tribute of corn and furs and cotton garments from their hapless hosts. It was from here, the story went, that they set forth in the spring on their ill-fated search for the seven golden cities of Quivera, taking with them slaves and concubines ravished from the Pecos people.

There's nothing wrong with this, per se. It has a breezy plainness that seems appropriate to the arid setting. Take out the "u" in "favoured" and it could have been written in 1997 as much as in 1927. But it seems to me to work against the story itself: Latour is a French-born priest who served until his thirties in an Ohio diocese; the land he has been chosen to preside over stretches across thousands of miles, many of them desolate and sparsely populated. Yet we know the name of every cactus and shrub in New Mexico. Cather takes frequent breaks from Latour's story to tell us ones about Spanish explorers and native Americans like the one above. This surfeit of knowledge, combined with the dry style, veers to the tedium of mediocre travelogues. Does this reflect the mystery, the strangeness, the wonder of what someone like Bishop Latour must experience in this unknown wilderness?

But death is a wilderness about which neither Latour or Cather can overwhelm us with details. It is the quintessential "undiscovered country." In spite of his dismissal of it, death makes Latour more interesting and elevates the novel. If you believe your life is boring, you may want to think of that inevitability with some comfort.