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 19th
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.
###
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.
