Cornflower Book Group - Death comes for the Archbishop

   

    What struck me from the very first page of Death Comes for the Archbishop was that here speaks an authoritative voice, a writer in complete command of her material and her prose; and so also throughout these linked stories of a time and a place and of common characters, Willa Cather's liking for her protagonists comes through very strongly. She admires her priests and is fond of them.

     I loved her occasional descriptive notes on the men such as this on Father Vaillant: "he added a glow to whatever kind of human society he was dropped down into", and this on Father Latour's hands: "[they] had a curious authority ... they seemed always to be investigating and making firm decisions". The men are straight and true, "fearless and fine", and I must admit that I took to them and I shed a tear at the end.

     The other main component of this episodic narrative is the land itself, the great expanse of New Mexico where "the earth was the floor of the sky" and (on the Mesa plain) "the country was still waiting to be made into a landscape." In her comment on my introductory post for this book, Mary said that reading it was like reading your way into a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, and I think she was spot on there, as the place is so vividly described, defined by its colours, shaped by forces of nature which are ever-present.

    As a whole, the book has a balance and a steadiness to it that speak of that authorial control I mentioned earlier. It was a great pleasure for me to discover Willa Cather through this most touching piece of writing, one in which things vast and mighty are telescopically defined and made intimate. What did you think of it? 

Comments

[Julie Fredericksen]

What on earth time did you post this - O Dark Thirty a.m.? It is 7:24 p.m. Friday in Bismarck, ND, as I read this.

I didn't know what to call this book. I don't classify it as a novel, and it is not really a collection of short stories. You called it linked stories. That is good. I call it a series of vignettes, probably because of the visual aspect this book so strongly has. The place - the landscape - is certainly as much a character as Fathers Latour and Vaillant. And for me, it showed another side of the famous Indian scout Kit Carson.

Of all the lines of the book to quote, I too would have picked this one: the great expanse of New Mexico where "the earth was the floor of the sky".

I hope this introduced some British readers to the beauty of the great Southwest - to its sages and ochres, its vermilions and rusts, its coppers and khakis, its burnt siennas and burnt umbers, its roans and russets, its sorrel and tans, its stark pueblo white and its burning blue skies.

I also hope that you will sometime find time to read "My Antonia", which is about a Nebraska pioneer/immigrant girl and the boy who loved her. (This one IS a novel.)

[Oxslip]

The style was one of the defining features of this book and it's a measure of the confidence of the writing (I agree with you Cornflower) that it worked so well, despite being a potential disaster in other hands. The linking plot never felt like a device, and through it I learned a little about the Mexican, native American, Spanish and later colonial invaders of the region. In particular I loved reading the description of the Acoma Mesa and the life of those people on their unassailable, but potentially very dry rock.
Overall this read like a romance to the potential best in human nature and religion. Willa Cather was in love with the idea of the good that can be done by people one to another and she uses her characters to show that this can easily transcend the boundaries of race. She was also in love with the country and its landscapes and the writing is so tender that it has made me want to visit Mexico very much.
Like all romantics the subject is somewhat idealised - we see a little of the worst of people, as in the murdering husband of Magdalena, but there is always a sweet and positive resolution. Similarly the Catholic church is well known to have been far from consistently benign and fatherly throughout its influence and I remain sceptical about the missionary style of outreach. Much good aid work is done by churches, but seating it within a religious context seems a curiously Victorian way of going about things in the 21st century.
What a fabulous book though, thank you for the recommendation and I'm going to carry on the Mexican theme with Lacuna.

[Dark Puss]

Dark Puss is not going to be so positive about this book as Cornflower, Julie Fredericksen or Oxlip. I felt that it was too much like a set of short stories and like many such sets some were very good and some rather ordinary. I cannot, sadly, speak with any authority about the country or the behaviour of the Catholic church missionaries of the time, but I share the reservations expressed by Oxlip.

What came across well was the feeling of brotherly love between Vaillant and Latour, this was expressed with sone subtlety and was indeed a linking theme. The descriptions of the countryside were also a strength.

On the less positive, I have already mentioned the disjointedness that made this less than the sum of its parts. Some of the shorter episodes, such as The Lonely Road to Mora were quite weak. I felt she was not very good at instilling in me a sense of dread and terror in that episode, the writing here was just far to "obvious" and the resolution naive. There were some other aspects of the writing that irritated me, in particular her desire to describe the mental and moral characteristics of people by Physiognomy/Phrenology. Sometimes the descriptive writing seemed rather repetitive again making me think of a set of short stories collected together.

Easy to read, interesting for place and period, but not a great work in my opinion.

[Sandy]

AS Byatt in her introduction to my edition says that Willa Cather categorised this work as a 'narrative', rather than a novel. The book's writing style and descriptive passages are the main memory for me, rather than the actual characters or plot.

I discovered a history & landscape of which I was previously uninformed. The description of landscape and atmosphere were compelling. Overall I felt that I had read a well written book about a time and place of moment & interest but I had not become engrossed in the characters and their situations in an emotional way.

Thanks Cornflower for the choice - another experience I would not have had except for this group.

[Michael Faulkner]

I agree with others here that the narrative is episodic, but I didn't find that a weakness and of course Cather herself didn't pretend it was otherwise. I loved the book when I first read it years ago after a trip to New Mexico, and still loved it second time around. It's curious because the understated, almost monotonal narrative style makes it quite a dry read in a way, but Cather was a journalist by profession, and for me the power of the writing comes from combining her straight journalistic style with wonderfully vivid imagery - the confidence to call an image a spade.
I see what Dark Puss means about the phrenological descriptions, but as a means of conveying character without losing the matter of fact tone I think it works well. In fact one of my favourite passages is where the priests meet the psychopath Buck Scales for the fist time, at his shack on the road to Mora. Having given him a typically prosaic introduction as "an American, of a very unprepossessing type", Cather describes the man by focussing on his snake-like neck and bony, malevolent little head, shifting the possessive pronoun from "his" to "this" (twice) to "its" in a single paragraph and reducing the head's owner by association to an object of revulsion.
Great storytelling, powerful language - and descriptions of the high desert landscape which stay with you. I agree about Georgia O'Keeffe and would add Maynard Dixon, only more so!

[Audrey]

I was very happy to have this opportunity to read Willa Cather for the first time. I didn't find the narrative (a good word for it!) any more disjointed than many contemporary novels that change perspective from one chapter or one page to the next. There was great beauty and imagination in some of the writing, and I agrre with Karen about the descriptive notes. In style and subject matter, this isn't a book I would have chosen on my own, so I appreciated the chance to expand my horizons. I've also been told that My Antonia and The Professor's House are the Cathers to read next.

[anne]

I was a bit intrigued by the descriptiion as a narrative but having read the book this is a very apt characterisation. I knew very little about this part of the world and found the descriptions of the landscapes and countryside fascinating. It was as through the landscape and was the continuing background for the stories and legends of the missionaries. Although we never met her as such, I felt the references to Sister Philomene interesting and felt she and her nuns were like us hearing about the tales and legends of New Mexico. Like Sandy I would never have read this book were it not for CBG.

[Delyn]

I love Cather's narrative style and this has been on e of my favourite books for some time. It's a remarkable portrait of New Mexico and its people.
I've just returned from the American Southwest, finding myself in Durango, Taos and Santa Fe. A friend had left me a pile of books to read - needless to say, I didn't h
ave time! but, top of the pile was DCTTA which I'd read some 13 years ago when making a similar visit.
Cather describes the landscape so accurately as well as the spiritual and moral concerns of the two central character
s.Her prose is simple and spare, but vivid.
It was a delight to read this book again, and, apart from the many casinos that have sprouted, to appreciate the colourful and majestic landscape as well as spending a little time with people of the various tribes.

[Susie Vereker]

It is some years since I read Willa Cather and I couldn’t remember much about her. I feared that this priestly travelogue might not prove that interesting, but very soon changed my mind and became involved in their astonishingly long and brave journeys. I'm afraid I had to look at the atlas to see where New Mexico was and then I googled Albuquerque and the mountainous pueblos, and so the novel gave me an insight into a world I knew nothing about.
But, as others have said, it wasn’t exactly a novel, more of a series of stories and anecdotes, simply but movingly told.

[Michael Faulkner]

Delyn - your friend may have put it on your reading list, but if not you might enjoy another New Mexico classic, The House At Otowi Bridge by Peggy Pond Church, about a remarkable woman called Edith Warner who kept a tea room near Los Alamos in the 1930s and 40s, with the atomic facility on one side and San Ildefonso Pueblo on the other! M

[Delyn]

Many thanks, Michael, for your suggestion. I'll certainly get on to that one.

[Barbara MacLeod]

The author and her subject matter were unknown to me. While reading (and enjoying) this particular 'slice of life' it brought to mind several other 'slices'.

She talks about how "the Indians had exhaustless patience" when it came to decorating their blankets and belts and ceremonial robes. "But their conception of decoration did not extend to the landscape. They had none of the European's desire to 'master' nature, to arrange and re-create.... This was not so much from indolence... as from an inherited caution and respect .... ".

And therein lay a huge cultural clash. It's a pity books like this were not more widely available (or read, maybe I should say) in the early years of 'opening up' North America. I had not thought of the word "indolence" in all the years growing up among native Indians in British Columbia but the author has it spot on in the story where she describes differences between the Indians and the white men. (This is where Father Latour and the Navajo Indian, Eusabio, travel together on their mules to Santa Fe.)

In this section she highlights how it was the white man's way to assert himself on the landscape and the Indian's way to pass through not disturbing it. They took from the land only what was needed.... Yes. But oh how I recall the problems that arose! For example, every year my father had orchard work to be done. Every year it was the same problem: when the fish were running the Indians - his workforce - disappeared. And some days later, they turned up again on the doorstep (meanwhile the fruit was picked by others).

A generation before my father, my grandfather was a (Protestant) missionary in northern British Columbia (i.e. Port Simpson 1920-1930s). My mother who was the eldest of 5 children growing up in the manse had many stories of trying to get the Indians to come to church. The best method, apparently, was to have lots of rousing hymns to sing.

Among my own memories are incidents of Indians being talked down to while maintaining, as Willa Cather describes in the same section, their "unfailing good manners".

However, I finish with a nod towards the author's 2 main characters - Father Latour and Father Vaillant: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. In the early 1970s I flew from Glasgow to Vancouver. I was seated next to a young lady, ages with myself, and asked her what was taking her to Vancouver. She replied most earnestly, "I am bringing Christianity to the natives of northern British Columbia."!

[Mr Cornflower]

A very striking and distinctive book - the only thing remotely like it which I have ever read is Ronald Blyth's Akenfield, which using real people under fictionalised names gives a similarly powerful example of how outwardly impersonal forces like history and landscape are ultimately best understood by looking at how we behave to each other as individuals and families.

[Audrey]

That's an interesting comparison!

[Dark Puss]

How do we understand landscape through human-human behaviour? Or at least to me it is absolutely not obvious that is the "best" way to understand it. Would you give this cat of little brain a concrete example?

[Susie Vereker]

DP, you know perfectly well you have loads and loads of brain. I'm not sure what Mr C meant either, except, in my case, reading this novel about human interaction has helped me to learn about New Mexico whereas I might not have bothered to pick up a history/geography book on the subject.
On another tack, Willa C has obviously leant very heavily on her original sources, so it must have been a quick book to write and I agree some stories were more interesting than others.

[Mr Cornflower]

Not of course the only way or even necessarily the best way, but one valid way among others. First and most obvious is human geography, especially in a country like England which has been densely settled by a complex, changing society for thousands of years and where simple questions like "why does Devon have smaller fields and thicker hedges than Lincolnshire?" or "why is the New Forest different from the surrounding countryside?" require answers that depend not just on geology and terrain but on politics, power, religion, trade and lots of other complex human relationships. (At a very detailed level see Chesterton's "Rolling English Road").
We do need to be wary of the pathetic fallacy - cliches which for example allege that 'extreme' landscapes like New Mexico are emblematic of certain locally predominant types of behaviour, while temperaments of a more sedate phlegmatic cast have the upper hand in flatter, greener, cooler Suffolk. But in a looser sense I'd cite Auden's topographical poems (eg "Bucolics", "Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno", "In Praise of Limestone")in support of the view that the places we inhabit are not merely neutral backgrounds like the back curtain of a photo booth but have a wide if diffuse relationship of mutual influence with our lives.

[Michael Faulkner]

I'm fascinated that your grandfather was a missionary in Port Simpson. Was your dad's orchard up there also? I've been to BC a few times and spent eight months in a bunkhouse on a ranch on Lake Nicola with two Colorado Indians, they were my best frieds there I suppose. I spent a lot of time on the reserve when I wan't working (sorry Cornflower, digressing terribly as usual). My most vivid memory is of a wild horse round-up on the reserve and the pow-wow afterwards, at which I was the only white. In my experience Cather was right about the unfailing politeness, despite pretty awful conditions and labour discrimination. I hope things have changed for the better (that was in the late 70s) - maybe you're in the UK now? One final thing: Louis 'Denver Colorado' Holmes used to roll up his sleeve and say to me, 'See this Mike? Red skin!' All best. M

[Dark Puss]

I knew you would be able to provide an excellent answer! Many thanks indeed. Peter

[Dark Puss]

Susie, some times I can be very obtuse, and English Literature is certainly not my strong point, even if overall there is nothing much wrong with my mental abilities.

[Barbara MacLeod]

Our orchard was in the Shusway (east of Kamloops on the Trans-Canada highway). I am my husband's expensive souvenier of 43 years ago!

[Barbara MacLeod]

Oops, that should be "Shuswap".

[Barbara MacLeod]

I think a lot of it has to do with scale. For example, think of people who live on small islands versus people who live on large continents. Given that there is such a thing as a "sense of place" I feel size has a lot to do with human behaviour in this regard.

[Audrey]

If anyone is interested, there's some excellent information about Willa Cather here:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/willa-cather/about-willa-cather/549/

and American readers might be able to find this documentary in the library. It was very good.

[Cornflower]

Many thanks, Audrey.

[Dark Puss]

You may also find this archive of interest.

http://cather.unl.edu/