Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 1

I’m going to have a series of posts here dedicated to our reading of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.  The novel is a fictional account of the establishment of a dioceses in mid 19^th century New Mexico based on the life of two real life priests, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the Archbishop, and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, his primary vicar.  In the novel, Lamy is known as Father Jean Marie Latour and Machebeuf is known as Father Joseph Vaillant.  Both are Jesuits and both originally come from France, though they have been working as priests in the American Midwest before being appointed to New Mexico. 

Here is the opening situation of the novel.  The United States has recently won their war with Mexico and absorbed a good portion of the western territories, including what is called New Mexico.  A new Catholic diocese needs to be formed and a new Bishop appointed.  In a break with the past several centuries, the Catholic hierarchy decides not to put a Spanish bishop to run the mostly Spanish clergy but a French Jesuit.  It becomes clear why the need for this change in direction.  The Spanish clergy have devolved into heresy and rapacious enrichment off the native population.  Fr. Latour needs to bring reform and, above all, order to the region, the clergy, and the faithful.

There are several major themes that govern the novel, but first among them is how the hard landscape shapes the lives of all those who live there, especially the indigenous population.  The landscape is distinct.  We see this in the very opening scene in the novel proper, not the prologue, where Latour traveling down into central New Mexico finds himself lost in the desert.

As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still. He must have traveled through thirty miles of these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks — yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick-dust, and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the junipers, too, were the shape of Mexican ovens. Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red. The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.  (p. 17)

The desert is a “geometrical nightmare” where the hills “seemed to be pushing each other,” and if they are pushing each other then they could be an overwhelming threat to a mere human.  We also get an immense scale of the land.  It is common in the story to travel thousands of miles.  And the weather often shapes their travels across boundless region.  At another instance we see the two priests riding across vast territory

The priests were riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be green, though just now they were slate-coloured.  On every side lay ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbone of mountains.  The sky was low; purplish lead-coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges.  There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead—rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens.  Even the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in the singular light.  (p.64)

Look at what the landscape and the natural elements have done to the mules and priests.  It shapes them, their activities and their lives.  There are many such scenes and descriptions throughout the novel.  The landscape is central to the novel, and perhaps even more than just as it impacts travel and lives.  The landscape has shaped the native people.  It has shaped their culture, their language, their child rearing, and their myths.  I’ll develop that theme another time, but I want to end with another quote on the landscape, this one showing how deep into history the landscape originates.  The description below is of the surrounding landscape of the town of Ácoma. 

The mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau.  The country was still waiting to be made into landscape. (p. 95)

The landscape here is connected to creation, not just creation by natural process, but back to the Creator’s initiating acts.  Cather provides a depth of history rooted in the landscape that is fathomless, mystifying, primeval.  And her point is that it’s incomplete.  The Creator didn’t finish, and so the culture isn’t finished either.  Just as the landscape are “waiting” to be completed, so are the people.

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To do the landscape theme full justice, I should also point out how the seeds of the theme are planted even as the novel opens in the Prologue.  The Prologue does not open with Fr. Latour or even in New Mexico.  It opens with a dinner in Rome by three Cardinals and a different Bishop at a villa to discuss the appointment of a bishop to this just created New Mexican episcopate.

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.  The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace.  The hidden garden in which the four men sat at a table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of a rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with vineyards.  A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above.  The table stood in a sanded square, among potted orange and oleander trees, shaded by spreading ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead.  Beyond the balustrade was the drop into thin air, and far below the landscape stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached Rome itself.

If you parse carefully the language of this opening passage, the landscape in Rome is actually a microcosm of the landscape we will see in New Mexico.  The four dignitaries are sitting on a terrace, “a mere shelf of a rock, overhanging a steep declivity.”  That is exactly what the plateaus are that we see in New Mexico.  Several of the mesas had ad hoc steps as passageways up.  Surrounding the villa are hills—the Sabine hills—which correspond to the surrounding mountains in the New Mexican landscape.  The table at the villa stands on sand, echoing the desert sand of the “monotonous red sand-hills” of the American territory, and the various trees offer European versions of the American junipers and fir trees that we will come across later.  The landscape in Rome undulates, simulating that in New Mexico are fissures.  The drop from the villa is apparently very high, just as we see the drops from the mesas. 

But, if the landscape in Rome is a microcosm of the landscape we will see in New Mexico, it is but a tamed version, a landscape that has undergone a civilizing process.  The sand on which the table sits is a controlled square, not a vast desert.  The passage leading up to the villa are cut steps, not natural formed rock, and those steps lead to a “promenade,” not to indigenous cliff dwellings.  The trees about them are potted or forced to grow out of rocks instead of the random and uncontrolled sprouting.  The undulations are soft in the Roman landscape, not “oven-baked” cracks in the earth or even canyons.  While there are echoes of the New Mexican landscape in Rome, there is also contrast.  Indeed, the four dignitaries at dinner in Rome seem to echo and contrast with the four priests at dinner on the Ácoma mesa in the story of Fr. Baltazar with very different outcomes.  The Sabine hills recall a brutal pagan Roman past, echoing the Indian native dark pagan culture.  But the Roman landscape leads to the dome of St. Peter, not the “gothic cathedral” of a cave where Indian fire and snake ceremonies take place.

We have in Willa Cather a writer of immense skill, one who can simultaneously echo and contrast with imagery at will.