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.