Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, 1927 Alfred A Knopf, Inc.
Upon reading 1927’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, my third Willa Cather novel, I am convinced of my previous notion that she is one of American literature’s preeminent voices, in company with Hemingway and Wharton. While absent of the brazen metaphor of the former, or the gilded wit of the latter, Cather’s prose has an unadorned, sincere intimacy that allows for a deeper readerly connection than with her contemporaries.
Cather first creates an affinity between her protagonists and readers. Here we take the road to the mid 1800s American Southwest with her Catholic missionary, Father Jean Marie Latour. Steadfast, conservative, and dignified, Father Latour is a static character. Such a distinction cannot be taken in this case as a discredit. On the contrary, he serves as the constant in the mirage of shifting social, political, and physical landscapes of his time and place. After receiving his papal assignment for the Apostolic Vicar of New Mexico, the French priest devotes his years cultivating relationships with Native Americans, Mexican landholders, fellow priests (both rogue and faithful), and the various frontiersmen pushing the young nation westward.
Most admirable in this story is the deferential gaze towards all groups of people traveling through the narrative. Cather is not a dispassionate sociologist, nor a patronizing admirer of any of her characters. An elegant example of this balance is the mutual respect between Father Latour and his Native American guide Jacinto. Sitting by the fire after a day of travel, the former reflects that he “seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him.”
Within the boundary of a paragraph, Cather emanates a wisdom about the acceptance and respect of our differences that the darker parts of our American history reveal too many fail to grasp, much less accept.
Along with Cather as a respectful observer of diverse human relationships, there is the beautiful conveyance of the physical landscape she is renowned for. In this regard, Death Comes for the Archbishop may be her most triumphant work. The plot itself, with its crisscrossing of wild country, lends itself ideally to the opportunity. In prose rich with symbolism, she writes that “...here there was always activity overhead, clouds forming and moving all day long. Whether they were dark and full of violence, or soft and white with luxurious idleness, they powerfully affected the world beneath them. The desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually reformed and re-coloured by the cloud shadows. The whole country seemed fluid to the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light.”
Cather’s work creates a dichotomy. The saturation of folklore, superstitions, and religious myth border magical realism at times. Even still, the readers are still cast into the grating and callous reality of the era’s American southwest.
Absent however, until the concluding pages of the novel, are the explicit mentions of the social and political issues that plagued the historical era. Therein lies the grace of Willa Cather’s writing; she gives us the story without condemnation of her characters, and the opportunity to go forth with our own conclusions.
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a story of intimacy, an intimacy with her characters that radiates outward toward one with the landscape. Her characters are bonded through life and death to that landscape. In the end, the readers are bonded with both.