by Hermione Lee
‘hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren.’ [DA, p.32]
Evidently Cather is working in close imitation of her sources. This process has been much admired and discussed, in analyses of her debt to Puvis de Chavannes’ fake-medieval frieze of the quiet holy stories of St Geneviève (its monumental, static quality, the soft light in which the figures seem to be suspended ‘outside time’, the lack of perspective)22 and to ‘The Golden Legend’. A suggestive comparison has been made with Auerbach’s definition, in Mimesis, of medieval narrative as ‘paratactic’, working through complete scenes set side by side: ‘a series of loosely related “pictures”, each of which captures a gesture from a decisive moment in the subject’s life’.23 Cather’s best critics24 find in her use of this method not a retreat into the faux-naif, but a sophisticated version of symbolism, a modernist refusal of naturalism. As in more sensational contemporaneous modernist works, shaped by quite opposite feelings of uncertainty and scepticism – The Waste Land or To the Lighthouse or The Sound and the Fury – the narrative method is the meaning. The point, Cather says in her commentary on the novel, is to make it seem that everything is being seen and understood at once – as though God were telling the story. Like the great modernist texts, but with a different intention from most of them, this redistributed narrative makes its centre a conception of time, not as linear accumulation, but as a conjunction of ‘timeless moments’.
To this end, a sustained chronology is carefully subverted, and many crucial events, which Howlett narrates in their proper order (such as Latour’s encouragement of Vaillant when the two young men are running away from home) are saved up till very near the end of their lives. ‘In their end is their beginning.’ Instead of a cumulative plot the nine books of the novel have sections with titles, each of which starts again, like the separate anecdotes of saints’ lives in the ‘Golden Legend’ (‘In a tyme ther was a man’…‘In a tyme also a man ther was’…‘And another tyme he was in his medytacyons’…),25 with no direct connection to what preceded it: ‘One afternoon in the autumn of 1851’; ‘The Bishop and his Vicar were riding through the rain in the Truchas mountains’; ‘Bishop Latour, with Jacinto, was riding through the mountains on his first official visit to Taos’. ‘Memorable occasions’ [DA, p.140], such as the building of the new cathedral, are anticipated or recalled, but not enacted. Dates are withheld, and sometimes work backwards, so that at the start of the final book, a letter from Latour dated 1888, a few months before his death, is followed by a reference to the arrival of his young assistant in 1885, then by a return to the building of the cathedral in 1880, and finally by a recollection of his journey to the Navajo country in 1875.
The main narrative is punctuated by a number of inset stories. Some of these are remembered events which have been ‘passed over’ at the time, to emerge later. In one of these, Vaillant tells of an encounter with an Indian who showed him a cave with, long buried inside it, the chalice and other objects for the celebration of the Mass. This story has been ‘buried’ until it is needed as a parable for Vaillant’s plea that he should be sent to Arizona to discover the ‘buried treasure’ of lost Catholic souls. Others of these ‘buried’, inset stories go back into history and legend: they invoke the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531, or the momentous 1680 rebellion of the Indians.
The effect is partly to make the whole story, told in the twentieth century of the nineteenth, feel like a medieval legend. (It is often hard to remember that the historical period of Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1848 to 1880, closes as the period of O Pioneers! and My Ántonia is beginning. The later novel seems to be set much earlier in time.) But it is also to remove irony and suspense, the usual characteristics of historical narrative. When the Bishop watches his friend’s preparations for the move to Denver, ‘he seemed to know, as if it had been revealed to him, that this was a final break; that their lives would part here, and that they would never work together again’. [DA, p.252] No dramatic distinction is made between what is ‘revealed’ to him, and what to us. Everything can be read, everything is ‘revealed’ at the same time.
At the end of the book this way of reading is ‘revealed’ as the novel’s subject as well as its method. The Bishop on his deathbed observes ‘that there was no longer any perspective in his memories’: all his ‘states of mind’ are ‘within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible’. Everything is placed together in ‘the great picture of his life’. [DA, p.290] The native prehistory of the ancient New World (which at times he has felt in ominous, antediluvian resistance to his European habits of mind), the historic period ‘accomplished’ in his lifetime, and the moments of his own existence, are ordered – as the scenes of this narrative have been ordered – from the viewpoint of immortality. It is a reconciled version of the more ominous predestined returnings to the past, which have turned out to be movements towards death, in all her novels. That death ‘comes’ for the archbishop is simply another scene in the ‘great picture’, another act in the continuing present tense. As in the Holbein sequence, death does not make an unexpected appearance; he comes, is there, all the time. ‘ “I shall not die of a cold, my son,” ’ the Bishop says to his young assistant, without anxiety, ‘ “I shall die of having lived.” ’ [DA, p.269]
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If history in the eye of God (or the archbishop) is a series of pictures all seen, in stasis, at the same time, the narrative has to make its meanings not out of slowly developing psychological states or complex political entanglements, but out of gesture, appearance, colour and light. What Rebecca West, in a strong essay on Death Comes for the Archbishop, calls its ‘amazing sensory achievements’,26 its intense, brilliant visualizations, is a performance of prodigious virtuosity. Cather insisted that she had avoided ‘dramatic treatment’ in this novel, and, in terms of plot, so she did. But in another way, her description of it as an exercise in restraint and simplicity is misleading. In its ‘mood’ (‘the mood is the thing’),27 Death Comes for the Archbishop is sensationally dramatic. Of course Cather has always been able, in Conrad’s words, ‘to make you hear, to make you feel…before all, to make you see.’28 But there are two new developments.
One is that, for the first and last time, the Southwest is the novel. In the past – in ‘The Enchanted Bluff’, or The Song of the Lark, or The Professor’s House – the desert and mesa country had been seen in contrast with, or through the frame of, a more subdued environment. Now, the subdued frame-landscape – here, the fondly remembered grey streets and chestnut trees of the Auvergne, which, when at last he returns to them, Latour finds sad and enervating – has become the background. Death Comes for the Archbishop is flooded with colour and space, with light which shifts and fluctuates, written up again and again in imitation of the mesa country, where each rock has its reduplicated cloud-shape ‘like a reflection’ above it:
The desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually reformed and re-coloured by the cloud shadows. The whole country seemed fluid to the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light. [DA, p.96]
The language of composition – ‘re-formed’, ‘change of accent’, ‘distribution’ – makes plain the parallel she intends between her improvisation as a novelist, and the improvisations of the maker of this astounding scene. ‘Let there be light’ is a phrase common to both.
That takes us on to the other difference between the ‘amazing sensory achievements’ of Death Comes for the Archbishop and the earlier novels. All this light and colour and landscape means: it is there to be read. Death Comes for the Archbishop is not full of luxurious description just because she wanted a lot of atmosphere; what is seen (as in the venerable tradition of American philosophers of landscape, Emerson, Thoreau and Frost) is meant to be translated. The distinction between this and the plough on the horizon in My Ántonia, or the ridges on the sandbanks in ‘The Enchanted Bl
uff’ is that, now, the readings are sacramental. Bishop Latour habitually makes theological translations of the scene – it’s part of his Jesuit training. On his first appearance, he shuts his eyes against the unreadable ‘geometrical nightmare’ of the repetitious desert, and opens them to find a juniper tree he can read – ‘living vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross’. [DA, p.19] The sun glittering on the rain after the storm puts him in mind of the first morning of the Creation; [DA, p.99] the Sangre de Cristo mountains remind him of the dried blood of saints. [DA, p.273]
Latour’s Jesuitical interpretations are condoned by the author’s typological29 readings. The priests’ gardens, for instance (Christianized versions of the Professor’s French garden) obviously symbolize the European qualities of order and good housekeeping their mission brings with it, and much play is made throughout with souls as seeds that need watering. Cather takes particular pleasure in ‘reading’ the desert plants, which seem to come alive under observation: the patches of wild pumpkin that look ‘less like a plant than like a great colony of grey-green lizards, moving and suddenly arrested by fear’; [DA, p.88] the ancient, twisted cottonwoods with bursts of delicate leaf-growth at the very tip of their huge branches. [DA, p.222] By implication, their energetic growth in the teeth of unpromising conditions represents the priests themselves.
But there are different kinds of readings. The illiterate Kit Carson makes a practical reading of the landscape which prints ‘a reliable map’ of it in his brain; the Indians, his adversaries, make a quite different translation of landscape which the Bishop comes to understand (as he would learn a new language) as a theology equal in complexity to his own. There are variations, too, within the Catholic reading of landscape. Latour appreciates the New Mexican tamarisk tree for its aesthetic suitability: it seems to him ‘especially designed in shape and colour for the adobe village’. [DA, p.202] Vaillant, by contrast, loves it because it has been ‘the companion of his wanderings’ and seems to him ‘the tree of the people’. [DA, p.202]
This difference in readings, one more aesthetic and aloof, the other more personal and humane, extends to the two priests’ views of miracles, a crucial subject which contains a form of commentary on the way the book works. Vaillant, a more naive and credulous reader than Latour, believes in miraculous interventions. ‘His dear Joseph’ (thinks Latour) ‘must always have the miracle very direct and spectacular, not with Nature, but against it’. [DA, p.29] To corroborate that reading, several such miracles are given as inset legends, always told through sympathetically simple voices, like the humble old Father Escolastico’s faithful rendering of the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe (whose appearance to a poor Mexican in 1531 was authenticated by the roses she told him to gather in December and by the miraculous portrait of herself imprinted on his robe). Latour appreciates this form of belief. But for him, a miracle is simply an intensified version of perception:
‘Where there is great love there are always miracles,’ he said at length. ‘One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.’ [DA, p.50]
‘To make you hear, to make you feel…before all, to make you see.’ Clearly Latour’s edict on miracles is also a writer’s credo, which transposes the belief Cather has had, from her earliest writing days, that art is a form of religion, to its inverse belief (like the cloud over the mesa) that religion is a form of art.
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Latour’s speech applies ‘miraculous’ perception to people, not landscape; but in this book above all, Cather makes an indissoluble connection between the reading of the animate and the inanimate. Her passionate relish for physical detail – rooms, clothes, food, physique, facial appearances – is not just for realistic colouring. Characters are speaking pictures, like the violent sensual face of the old priest of Taos. Latour takes an aesthetic pleasure in the looks of this man, who is his adversary, which mimics the author’s (and, by analogy, God’s) perception: to look closely is to understand. Rebecca West observes that in connecting Vaillant’s eagerness to baptize the Mexicans and to have his lamb cooked properly, Cather is sympathetically invoking the Roman Catholic Church’s insistence that ‘man must take the universe sensibly’. West contrasts this (favourably) with Puritan asceticism.30 But, while drawn to Catholic sensationalism, ritual and tradition, Cather also has a strong feeling for the puritan cast of thought, whereby the universe is translated typologically and the people in it (as in Bunyan) represent states of grace.
It is often remarked31 that the characters in Death Comes for the Archbishop play allegorical roles. ‘The legend of Fray Baltazar’, for instance, tells the story of the seventeenth-century Spanish priest at Acoma who tyrannized over the local Indians so that his garden and his cookery would be of the best. (There’s an obvious contrast with our priests’ moderate pleasure in their gardens and cooking.) For fifteen years he cultivates his ‘little kingdom’ on the rock, until the day he invites some priests to an ‘extravagant’ banquet. Unfortunately, the Indian boy waiting at table slops the precious sauce onto one of the priests; Baltazar leaps up and strikes him, and he falls dead. The other priests run away, and at nightfall the Indians come for justice, and throw Baltazar off the cliff: ‘So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they had liked very well. But everything has its day’, [DA, p.113] comments the narrator, with marvellously sardonic insouciance. Her impersonal, unmoralizing tone, matching the gleeful comic relish with which the whole story has been told, lets her get away with a formal parable against greed, pride, and wrath.
No explanation for this parable is needed. Appearances and actions are not deceptive; indeed, physical signs are insisted on with extreme emphasis, so that, in some of these ‘parables’, an uncensored display of prejudices about bodies spills out over the requirements of the story. The murderer on the road to Mora doesn’t stand a chance in Cather’s physiognomical court-of-law:
He was tall, gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small, bony head. Under his close-clipped hair this repellent head showed a number of thick ridges, as if the skull joinings were over-grown by layers of superfluous bone. With its small, rudimentary ears, this head had a positively malignant look. [DA, p.67]
The powerfully sensual Padre Martínez, the priest from Taos, has (it is hinted) an illegitimate son, known as his ‘student’. This minor character, Trinidad, has physical abuse heaped on him with almost hysterical relish. He is repulsively fat, greedy, greasy, slothful and imbecilic, with a ‘thick, felty voice’ [DA, p.164] and a face with ‘the grey, oily look of soft cheeses’. [DA, p.145] In the procession of the ‘Penitentes’ at Abuquiu (a native tradition for which Cather cannot disguise her revulsion) he has himself hung on a Cross and whipped in imitation of Christ, but he is so heavy and weak that the Cross falls down and he faints under the whipping. The disgusting story makes a grotesque travesty of the novel’s pleasure in symbolic gestures.
The physical disgust Cather works out on her allegorical sinners is counterpointed by her physical idealization of the saints. Latour, for instance, has fine, elegant fingers (always a ‘good sign’ in Cather) with a curious mixture of authority and nervousness [DA, p.209] and a ‘special’ way of handling sacred, or beautiful, objects. [DA, p.241] Magdalena is ugly when she is brutalized, but after her redemption she becomes beautiful. She even appears, in one of the novel’s most unembarrassed (though possibly embarrassing) iconographical moments, in a sunlit garden surrounded by doves, coming for ‘apple blossoms and daffodils’ ‘in a whirlwind of gleaming wings.’ [DA, p.209] Moments like this, taken out of context, are difficult to accept: the allegorizing looks too prescriptive
and secure. But the kind of ambivalence and complexity in Marian Forrester or Godfrey St Peter or Myra Henshawe is not what is wanted here. Now, the figures don’t slip out from under the frieze of attitudes in which they are placed. Latour, looking at a roomful of his friends at a Mexican dinner party (where each of them has been described by their clothes and appearance) reflects ‘how each of these men not only had a story, but seemed to have become his story’. [DA, p.183] It is the same phrase that Cather used of the New Mexican churches that inspired the novel: ‘They are their own story.’
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For people to be their own story requires a specialized narrative language. Cather described it as ‘tuning’ to the right note, and then keeping the pitch by means of ‘time-worn phrases’ and ‘language a little stiff, a little formal’. The effect is of an old translation, a style which aimed to reconcile all the different languages – American, French, Spanish, Indian – of this vanished historical place and time. In the novel’s translationese, Eusabio, Latour’s dignified Indian friend, speaks a venerable species of pidgin (‘My friend has come’ [DA, p.221]…‘Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things’ [DA, p.291]), while Latour and Vaillant ‘converse’ with each other as if ‘from the French’: ‘We must trust to these intelligent beasts’ [DA, p.70]; ‘It is not expedient to interfere’ [DA, p.156]. This manner is picked up by the narrative when, as in Vaillant’s letters home, it is giving their version of events: