DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP

I read Willa Cather's last novel in college without its making the slightest impression on me (whereas I can still remember exactly how overwhelmed with a desire to both laugh and cry I was over Anthony's awful fate in Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned ). What a treat to come back to Death Comes for the Archbishop when its compassion and straightforward writing and the sheer goodness of its main and supporting characters are so much more meaningful! How did Willa Cather understand a Catholic priest so well? Not just Bishop Latour, but Father Vaillant, too. She built two such different characters with their unique approaches to the roles as a priest, to their congregants, to their faith. And how did she--twenty years before her own death--re-create the last days and thoughts of a dying man so vividly? Her creative power to "pretend" is just remarkable! The landscape is as much a character in this as the priests, the Mexicans, and the Indians are: the breadth and variety of it is just gloriously portrayed. I'll remember the book for so many reasons. Her gentle humor is certainly one of them: "By the Gadsden Purchase, executed three years after Father Latour came to Santa Fe, the United States took over from Mexico a great territory which now forms southern New Mexico and Arizona. The authorities at Rome notified Father Latour that this new territory was to be annexed to his diocese, but that as the national boundary lines often cut parishes in two, the boundaries of Church jurisdiction must be settled by conference with the Mexican Bishops of Chihuahua and Sonora. Such conferences would necessitate a journey of nearly four thousand miles. As Father Vaillant remarked, at Rome they did not seem to realize that it was no easy matter for two missionaries on horseback to keep up with the march of history."

Willa Cather 1873-1947

I'm thrilled to have been invited to participate in a celebration next November of Willa Cather, a Cos Club member of very short duration (ooohhh! A mystery!). Sarah Gordon has pulled together wonderful letters from the newest published collection, one that has caused quite a stir for its confirmation of Cather's sexual preference, something she wasn't eager to reveal. Looks a bit like her estate couldn't resist making money off the announcement. Regardless... this evening will be a loving tribute to an exquisite writer, a compassionate woman, and courageous and independent citizen of the world. I'll spend this summer reading her novels, starting with the last, DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP (1927). The Saturday Review calls it "a masterly quiet narrative." The desciptions of the Western American landscape are so vivid, I can smell the pinon logs burning and see the white-washed pueblos shining in the sun. I particularly like this thought: (p 95, Modern Library edition) "The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave."