Death Comes For The Archbishop (1990) - Plot & Excerpts
Although I have read this book before, that was long enough ago that this was essentially like reading the book for the first time.I believe this is the fifth of Cather's books that I have read (this both the first and the most recent) and confirms my appreciation for her skills in presenting the landscapes of the American West, the developing American way of life as it pushes west, and the varying and various peoples who lived on and from the land. Cather had mentioned the canyons of the Southwest in The Song of the Lark while otherwise describing the development of the plains.Here, everything is devoted to the vast desert territory of the Southwest, land that has been newly added to the nation. The titular character is sent to Santa Fe to establish an American bishopric and we live the following decades with him.It had been nearly a year after he had embarked upon the Mississippi that the young Bishop, at about the sunset hour of an afternoon, at last beheld the old settlement toward which he had been journeying so long: ...Across the level, Father Latour could distinguish low brown shapes, like earthworks, lying at the base of wrinkled green mountains with bare tops,--wave like mountains, resembling billows beaten up from a flat sea by a heavy gale; and their green was of two colors --aspen and evergreen, not intermingled but lying in solid areas of light and dark. (p 21)This was to be Latour's home for the rest of his life.He came to know the countryside, the Mexicans, the various Pueblos and their customs. Cather describes the beliefs and ways of all quite carefully. There are aspects that are dated but there are parts that are amazingly current. In describing Latour's trip through the desert with a Mexican friend and their Indian guide, Cather writes:When they left the rock or tree or sand dune that had sheltered them for the night, the Navajo was careful to obliterate every trace of their temporary occupation....Father Latour judged that, as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, to make it over a little (or at least leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the land- scape, not to stand out against it....It was as if the great country were asleep and they wished to carry on lives without awakening it... (pp 233-234)There is much history in this novel, history of the settlement of the Southwest since the arrival of the Spanish, history of the Catholic Church in America by way of this Bishop's life in Santa Fe, reflections on the often sad past in Indian Country and the new changes with continued western expansion.In one last selection from the novel I will give a sample of the descriptive prose Cather does so well. In other novels she describes the Plains. Here it is Acoma Pueblo: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 silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. (p 95)I strongly recommend this novel to those wishing to delve into American classics.
Beautiful, scenic - my fave bits were the descriptions of the SW landscape and the hints that Cather gives us of how hard that life was for the two RC missionaries who head out to save the souls there. But what it didn't give me - which is what I like in my priestly books - is an intimate view of either their struggle with their faith or their devotion to it when challenged.Cather teased me with the stuff that I wanted to know much more about -- the relocation and slaughter of the Navajos and the Church's complicity in that. The tenuous balance between the vanishing Mexican and Indian cultures as the whites moved in. I think I was looking for more character development and more plot than this was ever intended to have, so in the end, I had to settle for the loveliness of the descriptions of landscape, and the gently evolving relationship between Fr. Vaillant and Fr. Latour. Cather describes beautifully the Indians' spiritual relationship to the land:"But their conception of decoration did not extend to the landscape. 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 caution and respect. It was as if the great country 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."Cather's level of environmental consciousness, there and elsewhere (the description of the setting of the Archbishop's cathedral was similarly evocative), and her understanding of the native American relationship to nature, seems so prescient (and so beautiful), writing from 1927. What she didn't give me, what I wanted to see, was some level of consciousness and conflict among those whites - and the two priests in particular - that the colonization of the land and the souls there was wrong. Instead, she shows me the Archbishop on his deathbed, stating: "'I have lived to see two great wrongs righted; I have seen the end of black slavery, and I have seen the Navajos restored to their own country.'" I suppose this perspective, from a character whose vantage point is so close in time to the occurrences, is as much as can be hoped for in the way of a political statement.
What do You think about Death Comes For The Archbishop (1990)?
I savored near every page of Cather's look at the nineteenth century Southwest through a fictional narrative of the lives of two missionary priests.In Commonweal when asked about the genesis of her book Cather describes how learning of the life, times and friendship of two men of the early catholic church in the Southwest: The first Archbishop of Santa Fe, Jean Baptiste Lamy and his friend and one time vicar, Joseph Projectus Machebeuf (1812-1889), the first Bishop of Denver who would later be remembered by many simply as The Apostle of Colorado.While the perspectives of the stories belong to the two priests, the landscape that met them each day and the way it shaped the lives, trials, and morals of the people who made it their home are the true focus of the work. I picked my copy of this book up at Pecos National Historical Park, where the ruins of Native American dwellings nestled alongside a Spanish catholic mission and where the unwitting tourist can step directly over the Santa Fe trail. Voracious readers can enjoy a large selection of natural history, fiction, photography, travel, and cultural titles in a bookstore in the quietly lovely visitor's center thanks to Greer Garson and her husband, E. E. Fogelson.Looking for more? Anya Seton's historical romance, The Turquoise, segues back in time re-telling old stories of the early southwest juxtaposed with glimpses of society life in New York.But for me, the book that Cather's most brings to mind is John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven written a few years after Cather's and set in another place altogether: California' Salinas Valley. The land is more than a setting in each book, and both use a sequential story style. Both spend time showing how native people struggle against displacement and how the way all people make their lives upon the land and among one another in a way that opens a door offering the willing reader a glimpse at what turns a soul light or dark.
—Natalie
I have only heard from other readers that Willa Cather is an amazing author, a woman who truly understands America's people, one who can capture the beauty of its landscapes with the vivid detail her silky prose paints. I have heard her praised as a brilliant champion of the fiction, especially of the descriptive passage. So I was just a smidge sad to find in this book a painful amount of dry (we're talking drier than the deserts the plot flounders in), lifeless writing focusing on, quite litera
—Erin Mallon
26 JAN 2014 -- a great recommendation from Melinda. Many thanks, Melinda. This is right up my reading alley. 30 JUN 2014 -- review soon to arrive. For right now, this is reading bliss. A new favorite! This is a beautifully written, evocative book. While reading Death Comes for the Archbishop, all I had to do was close my eyes and I could see the mesas, pueblos, and old mission-style churches in New Mexico. I have never been to New Mexico, but through this book, I have made a journey with Fathers Latour and Valliant. I loved this book! A beautiful mesa. Notice how the clouds mimic the shape/form of the mesa. This similarity is marked upon in Ms. Cather's book. Imagine living high above your enemies in the safety of a pueblo such as this one: Death Comes for the Archbishop is rich in deeply descriptive "scenic" writing. Ms. Cather portrays the landscape so richly I honestly believe the landscape is a living character within the story just as are Fathers Latour and Valliant. I hope that Fathers Latour and Valliant had the opportunity to see many of these beautiful cactus flowers along their many travels through New Mexico. And on a final note, this is the mission-style church I pictured while reading: Isn't it gorgeous? This is one of the best books I have read in a very long. I owe a boatload of "Thank You's" to Melinda for her recommendation. Many Thanks, Melinda. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a book which I will enjoy for a lifetime and will re-read every year. Beautiful!
—Wanda
