Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (originally published in 1927) is the story of Fathers Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant as they arrive in the New Mexican dioceses in 1851 as its new, young Bishop and Vicar respectively. The novel follows their lives as they grow to love and respect the land and its people: the various indigenous groups with their many ways of life, the Mexican families who settled the land generations before, and the newly arrived Euro-American settlers. The priests share friendship and a calling to missionary work, as they also mourn their French homeland and childhoods. At the heart of their relationship is a deep-seated friendship stretching back to childhood, but Cather’s novel is much more about the men’s sense of place, and their dedication to service and the work they are called to do. Few books reveal a sense of place with more eloquence and beauty than Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop; the novel is unobtrusively an ode to the landscapes and people of the American Southwest.
As the reader follows the parallel lives of Latour—solemn, solitary, reserved—and Vaillant—ugly, kind, loyal—the novel meanders through the varied landscapes of New Mexico and Arizona. In the days pre-dating statehood, when traditional lifestyles might be observed everywhere, Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop celebrates the interconnectedness of native lifestyles, communities, beliefs. One such passage reads: “It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. [. . .] Moreover, these Indians disliked novelty and change. They came and went by the old paths worn into the rock by the feet of their fathers, used the old natural stairway of stone to climb to their mesa towns, carried water from the old springs, even after white men had dug wells” (233). Ultimately, as Cather writes,
They seemed to have none of the European’s desire to ‘master’ nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited cation and respect. It was as if the great county were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. When they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt was never a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest; and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it; they never desecrated it. (233-234)
These passages, written in tribute to lifestyles that statehood (and even the strengthened presence of Father Latour’s Catholic Church) would disrupt and begin to unravel, might come off to some as a nostalgic and romanticized version of the noble savage trope, but that is not how this novel reads to me. Rather, Fathers Latour and Vaillant witness the stark difference in world-views between recently arrived Euro-Americans and the long-established indigenous communities. Cather’s prose, alternating in focus between the two missionary priests, recognize the complexity of this moment and landscape as it hosts and bears witness to a great mixing of cultures, some seeking to conquer, others roosted on mesas or nestled into arroyos seeking to maintain their ways in humble harmony with the beautiful, harsh landscape of the American Southwest.
As outsiders, neither Euro-American settlers, old Mexican imports, or indigenous people, Fathers Latour and Vaillant mingle with individuals and communities from each of these diverse groups. Cather sprinkles in fictionalized versions of historical characters like Kit Carson. In fact, her Father Latour is a fictionalization of the first archbishop of New Mexico, Father Lamy. Amidst the many varied characters within the novel, death emerges as an important theme, as it, like the landscape, is one thing all people share: the death of native infants, of old men, of criminals, of travelers, even of the titular character. As the title suggests, Cather’s novel works towards the moment of Father Latour’s death after a long life lived among the varied people and landscapes of New Mexico. As he approaches the hour of his death, Latour reflects on the many changes he has witnessed since he arrived. Through Latour’s life and old age, Cather’s novel forces her readers to sit with the immensity of the changes which occurred in that place at that time, but also to wonder over its vast, immutable landscape.
While the people and individual characters are certainly important to the novel’s progression, Cather’s descriptions of the landscape supersede all else. Her attention to color, for example, weaves through nearly every description. At one point, Father Latour returns to France for Church business, and there he finds himself in conversation with a nun from Father Vaillant’s sister’s (Mother Superior’s) convent. This nun’s description of the impact Father Vaillant’s letters have upon her, how they transport her to the American Southwest, surely applies to the experience felt by any of this novel’s readers: “I come and stand in this alcove and look up our little street with its one lamp, and just beyond the turn there, is New Mexico; all that he has written us of those red deserts and blue mountains, the great plains and the herds of bison, and the canyons more profound than our deepest mountain gorges. I can feel that I am there, my heart beats faster, and it seems but a moment until the retiring-bell cuts short my dreams” (182). If nothing else, Death Comes for the Archbishop will certainly enable its reader to look out, “just beyond the turn there” and see nineteenth-century New Mexico stretch out before her. The “heart beats faster,” no doubt, and any reader might “feel that I am there,” as Cather brings to life the grandeur of this unique, even magical place.
I was delighted to find a clipping of Bishop Lamy’s biography, Lamy of Santa Fé, inserted into my used copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather fictionalizes the life and works of Bishop Lamy in the character of Father Latour.
Death Comes for the Archbishop marks my third Willa Cather read in the past two years (the other two, Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, were re-reads, this was a first-go); and it will definitely not be my last. Cather’s grace of descriptive language and the complex simplicity of her characters make for exquisite fiction. Whether reading her novels set on the American Great Plain (often referred to as her prairie books), those in the American Southwest, or (in the case of Song of the Lark) those that mix the two, her novels promise to transport the reader. In the case of Death Comes for the Archbishop (and Song of the Lark for that matter), Cather stuns her reader with exacting prose that bring the magnificent landscapes (that certainly impressed Cather on her own trips to New Mexico and Arizona) off the page. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather immortalizes the landscapes and people of the nineteenth-century American Southwest, and makes them readily available to anyone who spends time with her novel.
A Few Great Passages:
“Consequently he had slept late the next morning—did not awaken until six o’clock, when he heard the Angelus ringing. He recovered consciousness slowly, unwilling to let go of pleasing delusion that he was in Rome. Still half believing that he was lodged near St. John Lateran, he yet heard every stroke of the Ave Maria bell, marvelling [sic] to hear it rung correctly (nine quick strokes in all, divided into threes, with an interval between); and from a bell with beautiful tone. Full, clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through the air like a globe of silver. [. . .] Once before he had been carried out of the body thus to a place far way. It had happened in a street in New Orleans. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey-sweet perfume. Mimosa—but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent one winter in his childhood to recover from an illness. And now this silvery ell note had carried him father and faster than sound could travel.” (42-43).
“Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean, but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love” (50).
“The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary mesas cutting into the firmament” (92).
“From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left, --piles of architecture that we like mountains. The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,--that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds” (94).
“Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Ácoma 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; something they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of 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” (95).
“All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a periodic man-hunt; these Indians, born in fear and dying by violence for generations, had at last taken this leap away from the earth, ad on that rock had found the hope of all suffering and tormented creatures—safety. They came down to the plain to hunt and to grow their crops, but there was always a place to go back to. If a band of Navajos were on the Ácoma’s trail, there was still one hope; if he could reach rock—Sanctuary! On the winding stone stairway up the cliff, a handful of men could keep off a multitude. The rock of Ácoma had ever been taken by a foe but once—by Spaniards in armour. It was very different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing to the imagination. The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship. Chris Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands—their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them” (97).
“Looking out over the great plain spotted with mesas and glittering with rain sheets, the Bishop saw the distant mountains bright with sunlight. Again he thought that the first Creation morning might have looked like this, when the dry land was first drawn up out of he deep, and all was confusion” (99).
“By the time the Bishop and his guide reached the last turn in the trail, and rose through the crack, stepping out on the flat top of the rock, the noontide sun was blazing down upon Ácoma with almost unsupportable brightness. The bare stone floor of the town and its deep-worn paths were washed white and clean, and those depressions in the surface which Ácomas call their cisterns, were full of fresh rain water. Already the women were bringing out their clothes, to begin washing. The drinking water was carried up the stairway in earthen jars on the heads of women, from a secret spring below; but for all other purposes the people depended on the rainfall held in these cisterns” (99).
“From this loggia he watched the sun go down; watched the desert become dark, the shadows creep upward. Abroad in the plain the scattered mesa tops, red with the afterglow, one by one lost their light, like candles going out. He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams. Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock. Something reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like the crustaceans in their armour” (103).
“One approached [Arroyo Hondo] over a sage-brush plain that appeared to run level and unbroken to the base of the distant mountains; then without warning, one suddenly found oneself upon the brink of a precipice, of a chasm in the earth over two hundred feet deep, the sides sheer cliffs, but cliffs of earth, not rock. Drawing rein at the edge, one looked down into a sunken world of green fields and gardens, with a pink adobe town, at the bottom of this great ditch” (164-165).
“In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene. Among the watchers there was always the hope that the dying man might reveal something of what he alone could see; that his countenance, if not his lips, would speak, and on his features would fall some light or shadow from beyond. The ‘Last Words’ of great men, Napoleon, Lord Byron, were still printed in giftbooks, and the dying murmurs of every common man and woman were listened for and treasured by their neighbours and kids-folk. These sayings, no matter how unimportant, were given oracular significance and pondered by those who must one day go the same road” (169-170).
“It was the month of Mary and the month of May. Father Vaillant was lying on an army cot, covered with blankets, under the grape arbour in the garden, watching the Bishop and his gardener at work in the vegetable plots. The apple trees were in blossom, the cherry blooms had gone by. The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathes was saturated by earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of blue sky in it” (200).
“On the south, against the earth wall, was the one row of trees they had found growing there when they first came, --old, old tamarisks, with twisted trunks. They had been so neglected, left to fight for life in such hard, sun-baked, burro-trodden ground, that their trunks had the hardness of cypress. They looked, indeed, like very old posts, well seasoned and polished by time, miraculously endowed with the power to burst into delicate foliage and flowers, to cover themselves with long brooms of lavender-pink blossom” (201).
“Beside the river was a grove of tall, naked cottonwoods—trees of great antiquity and enormous size—so large that they seemed to belong to a bygone age. They grew far apart, and their strange twisted shapes must have come about from the ceaseless winds that bend them to the east and scoured them with sand, and from the fact that they lived with very little water, --the river was nearly dry here for most of the year. The trees rose out of the ground at a slant, and forty or fifty feet above the earth all these white, dry trunks changed their direction, grew back over their base line. Some split into great forks which arched down almost to the ground; some did not fork at all, but the main trunk dipped downward in a strong curve, as if drawn by a bow-string; and some terminated in a thick coruscation of growth, like a crooked palm tree. They were all living trees, yet they seemed to be of old, dead, dry wood, and had scant foliage. High up in the forks, or at the end of a preposterous length of twisted bough, would burst a faint bouquet of delicate green leaves—out of all keeping with the great lengths of seasoned white trunk and branches. The grove looked like a winter wood of giant trees, with clusters of mistletoe growing among the bare boughs” (221-222).
“The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longer for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!” (232).
“Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light0heared mornings of the desert, or that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert” (273).
“The air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his 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 sodt and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolds, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!” (273).
“Lying so still that the bed-clothes over his body scarcely moved, with his hands resting delicately on the sheet beside him or upon his breast, the Bishop was living over his life” (281).
“He was soon to have done with 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” (288).
Bibliography
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Turtleback Books: 1990.
