Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  There were five sons in the Smith family, fellows of low habits and evil tongues. Even the two younger boys, still children, showed a vicious disposition…they came with their lewd companions to rob the young pear trees or to speak filth against the priests. [DA, p.216]

  The narrator’s language, unlike the Smith family’s, shows respect for the cultural differences the novel encompasses. In retreat from what she saw as the obliterations of post-war America, Cather had sought out a time and place where several distinct cultures were alive in the same challenging landscape.32 Her attitude to her material is the opposite of her source, Howlett’s, who welcomes Americanization and is indifferent to Mexican and Indian culture. In Cather’s version, the Americans (like the murderer on the road to Mora, or the Smith family) are almost always unpleasant, and speak an inferior language. All the other cultures are carefully celebrated: the French for their order, civilization, domestic arts and graciousness, the Mexicans for their passionate, sensual generosity, their fierce pride or naive religiosity, the Indians as ascetic, ritualistic, dignified, courtly and reserved. Latour even takes pleasure in the possibility of an oriental ingredient in the note of his silver bell or the decorations of the Indian church. His aesthetic sensitivity to cultural strata and diversity is matched by both priests’ (but especially Vaillant’s) responsiveness to simple lives, ‘obscure destinies’: how they live, how they talk, what they eat and wear, what they believe.

  This cultural specificity has a latent ironic sadness. The French Jesuits are supposed to be reformist, and are balked by the fixed traditions of the Indians and the Mexicans. Yet Latour loves the old: he admires the figure of the decadent Mexican priest Martínez, whom he has come to supersede, as ‘something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past.’ [DA, p.141] It is Vaillant who is eager to bustle about the vast terrain, converting and improving. One cannot imagine Latour converting anybody; and the new church which is his monument is a nostalgic memorial to the traditions of the French Romanesque. The novel’s air of being in translation memorializes the cultural distinctions which Latour sees as they vanish. (In life, Lamy was less sensitive to the native culture.)

  But the language does not only serve a cultural purpose. It is a deliberate writer’s strategy which is trying to simulate what cannot be written. Cather’s manipulation of this paradox is more complicated than it looks. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a different proposition from The Professor’s House, with its contrast between a sophisticated Europeanized ‘written’ language of reflection, and a native ‘spoken’ language of action. Here the two are trying to be one. Cather’s admiration and longing for an oral culture has to be translated into a writing which will replicate it, through sophisticated means, as closely as possible.

  Death Comes for the Archbishop is not an anti-literary book (for all that it starts with a joke about the Spanish Cardinal’s romantic idea of America being drawn entirely from the novels of Fenimore Cooper). The Bishop reads St Augustine, Mme de Sevigné and Pascal, and both priests lament the problems of illiteracy in their flock. But it repeatedly shows where words fall short. Making its own ‘legend’ (in the sense of ‘a saint’s life’), it is full of orally transmitted legends: Father Escolastico’s version of Our Lady of Guadalupe, or the account of the 1680 Indian revolt as told by Martínez, who ‘knew his country, a country which had no written histories’.33 [DA, p.152] Just as the novel’s episodic collection of stories simulates these unwritten histories, so its vivid image-making invokes the importance of the image for those who cannot read – like the beautifully lifelike parrot (‘a wooden pattern of parrots, as it were’) which the superstitious old Father Jesus bought from an old pueblo Indian, for whose ancestors (like the Virgin Mary for good Catholics) the bird had always been an object of ‘wonder and desire’. [DA, p.87]

  But the book has to translate these images into words. ‘Legend’ originally means (from ‘legere’) ‘what is read’. There is a continual play between the unwriteable and the written. On his deathbed, the old Bishop wishes that he had written down the ‘old legends and customs and superstitions’ that were dying out [DA, p.277] and ‘arrested their flight by throwing about them the light and elastic mesh of the French tongue’. He hasn’t; but his unwritten writing is emulated by Cather’s, which tries to be as ‘light and elastic’ a form of verbal arresting as it can.

  A kind of joke is made of this tension between the unwritten and the written, in the matter of ‘last words’. In the days (Cather tells us, with the knowing authorial voice she occasionally allows into her legendary narrative) when the coming of death was seen as a ‘dramatic climax’, last words were important.

  The ‘Last Words’ of great men, Napoleon, Lord Byron, were still printed in gift-books, and the dying murmurs of every common man and woman were listened for and treasured by their neighbours and kinsfolk. These sayings, no matter how unimportant, were given oracular significance and pondered by those who must one day go the same road. [DA, p.170]

  So everyone gathers attentively round the deathbed of the miserly old Mexican priest, Padre Lucero. His mind, however, is not on the next world, but on his old sparring partnership with Padre Martínez (a comic travesty of the Latour–Vaillant relationship).

  After a facial spasm that was like a sardonic smile, and a clicking of breath in his mouth, their Padre spoke like a horse for the last time:

  ‘Comete tu cola, Martínez, comete tu cola!’ (Eat your tail, Martínez, eat your tail!) Almost at once he died in a convulsion. [DA, p.171]

  These last words are instantly turned into legend: Lucero, it is reported, has ‘looked into the other world’ and seen Padre Martínez in torment. The irreverent story, itself ‘like a sardonic smile’, grotesquely anticipates the point at which death comes for the Archbishop. Though his last words are intently listened for, his broken murmurs are not understood; ‘in reality’ he is back in his youth, urging Father Vaillant to leave with him for the New World. Both versions, the ridiculous and the sublime, illustrate the difficulty of writing down any legend that will be true to ‘reality’, of letting literature have ‘the last word’.

  Language takes its most problematic shape in Latour’s attempt to understand the Indians, which (like all the most satisfactory acts of possession in Cather) is a successful failure.34 The Indian culture has no written language. Instead, as the Bishop observes, it has ‘a strange literalness’. There is no making of metaphors or parables in Indian thought; the white man’s mental tendency to translate and allegorize is entirely foreign to them. Their relation to the landscape, both physically and conceptually, is not to ‘make it over’, but to ‘pass and leave no trace.’ [DA, p.233] Things, for them, are their meanings: ‘they had their idea in substance’. [DA, p.98] Their legends are not against nature, like Father Vaillant’s miracles, but are contained in natural phenomena, like the legend of the Shiprock, the boat-shaped crag near the Canyon de Chelly which the Navajo Indians believe to be ‘a ship of the air’ that came bearing their first parents to their destined home. [DA, p.295] Unexpectedly, Latour’s last retrospection is not of his church or his ministry, but of this Canyon, and of the Navajo’s fight for the land which they knew, from the legend, to be inalienably theirs. Latour’s dying optimism on behalf of the Navajos now reads like a piece of wishful thinking on Cather’s part. But the placing of this coda is crucial: it gives the Indian story equal weight with the Catholic.

  This alternative story makes itself felt most eloquently in the scene where Latour takes a language lesson from his Indian guide, Jacinto, as they make their camp, at sunset, outside the pueblo of Laguna.

  Behind their camp, not far away, lay a group of great mesas. The Bishop asked Jacinto if he knew the name of the one nearest them.

  ‘No, I not know any name,’ he shook his head. ‘I know Indian name’, he added, as if, for once, he were thinking aloud.

  ‘And what is the Indian name?’

  ‘The Laguna Indians call Sn
ow-Bird mountain.’ He spoke somewhat unwillingly.

  ‘That is very nice,’ said the Bishop musingly. ‘Yes, that is a pretty name.’

  ‘Oh, Indians have nice names too!’ Jacinto replied quickly, with a curl of the lip.

  Jacinto at once withdraws from his momentary hostility by congratulating the Bishop on his youth; the Bishop responds by asking his age, and whether he has children.

  ‘One. Baby. Not very long born.’

  Jacinto usually dropped the article in speaking Spanish, just as he did in speaking English, though the Bishop had noticed that when he did give the noun its article, he used the right one. The customary omission, therefore, seemed to be a matter of taste, not ignorance. In the Indian conception of language, such attachments were superfluous and unpleasing, perhaps.

  They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse….The whole western sky was the colour of golden ashes….High above the horizon the evening-star flickered like a lamp just lit….

  Jacinto threw away the end of his cornhusk cigarette and again spoke without being addressed.

  ‘The ev-en-ing-star,’ he said in English, slowly and somewhat sententiously, then relapsed into Spanish. ‘You see the little star beside, Padre? Indians call him the guide.’

  The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary mesa cutting into the firmament. The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the darkness….

  ‘Many stars,’ [Jacinto] said presently. ‘What you think about the stars, Padre?’

  ‘The wise men tell us they are worlds, like ours, Jacinto.’

  The end of the Indian’s cigarette grew bright and then dull again before he spoke. ‘I think not,’ he said in the tone of one who has considered a proposition fairly and rejected it. ‘I think they are leaders – great spirits.’

  ‘Perhaps they are,’ said the Bishop with a sigh. ‘Whatever they are, they are great. Let us say Our Father, and go to sleep, my boy.’ [DA, pp.90-93]

  No ‘language’ can translate the Indian story to the European mind, or the other way around. The scene concludes, very beautifully, in tolerant inconclusiveness: the saying of the prayer does not give the Christian language the status of a superior ‘last word’, but is felt to be, simply, one possible language of belief. Yet, even though translation is impossible, the passage is full of mutual attempts at linguistic understanding: of the Indian name for the mesa, of the Indian use of pronouns,35 of the European and Indian names and meanings for the stars. Silence, their ‘usual form of intercourse’, is felt to be waiting all the time under the conversation; and silence, in this setting, is attractive too. (Meanwhile, the quiet language for the coming-on of darkness is a reminder of all human beings’ ultimate silence.) But the gestures towards cultural reciprocity which break the silence do make speech out of what cannot be translated, and thereby stand as a paradigm for Cather’s whole attempt in this novel to write the unwritable.

  —

  The scene anticipates a more sinister version of Indian untranslatability. Near the dying pueblo of the Pecos Indians, (Jacinto’s tribe), where there are ‘dark legends’ of a perpetual underground fire, which saps the young men’s strength, and of babies sacrificed to a huge snake, Latour and Jacinto are caught in a terrifying snowstorm. Jacinto leads him to an underground cave, which they climb into through ‘two great stone lips’. Inside the cave, the Bishop is immediately struck by an ‘extreme distaste’ for the place, and Jacinto expresses anxiety at having brought him there, explaining that it is ‘used by my people for ceremonies’. Latour promises to ‘forget’. Jacinto then stops up a mysterious dark hole at the rear of the cave, lights a fire, and takes Latour to the source of a humming noise which, when Latour puts his ear to a ‘fissure’ in the stone floor, proves to be the voice of ‘a great underground river’, ‘moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock’. In the night, Latour sees Jacinto standing guard over the covered hole. Ever after, the Bishop remembers the cave with ‘horror’, and though he seeks information about it from an old trader who knows the Indians, he gets nothing but vague statements about ancient superstitions. Nothing is explained: the episode is ‘terrible’ [DA, p.130] and untranslatable.36

  A powerful feeling of inexplicable and alarming mystery comes out of this scene, which can partly (but only partly) be explained in sexual terms. Latour seems to have crawled through a giant vulva into an unpleasantly ‘fetid’ dark hole, with a darker smaller hole inside it, and a crack above rushing water – a place associated wth the sapping of male virility, the sacrifice of babies, and a snake.37 It is as though the underground primitivism of the Indian beliefs allows Cather momentarily to suggest what she covers over elsewhere. Death Comes for the Archbishop is a deliberately chaste book. Sensuality is safely placed on the periphery, in the frieze of sins and vices. Latour has a fastidious detestation of Martínez’s sloppily erotic household – he is extremely annoyed to find that what he takes to be a mouse in his room is ‘a bunch of woman’s hair’, the left-over of ‘some slovenly female toilet’. [DA, p.149] In his moments of discouragement he feels ‘barren’ and lonely. [DA, p.211] But these touches of sexual anxiety do not impinge on the central relationship between Latour and Vaillant. As the more vulnerable of the two, Latour has more feeling: he recalls Vaillant from Arizona because he misses him (‘why not admit it?’ [DA, p.223]), and grieves to see his eager preparations for his final departure. Even so, this is the most untroubled of Cather’s carefully de-sexualized relationships. And the successful sublimation of its underground sexual feeling is centred on a figure, which, in this later stage of Cather’s writing, now becomes of great importance: that of the Virgin Mother, Mary. Cather’s attraction to Catholicism (which understandably led many readers to suppose that she was a practitioner) is mainly explained by her pleasure in this image of Christianized paganism: ‘a goddess who should yet be a woman’. [DA, p.257]

  Mary’s appropriateness is both social and sexual. In her definitive book on the subject, Marina Warner observes that the worship of Mary grew up as a myth for the illiterate and the deprived: ‘When the Virgin appears to Catholics in obscure places, clinging to an old way of life that has come under strain, proof is thereby given that God has not altogether hidden his face.’ The miraculous appearances of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the poor Mexican, or of the Holy Family as Mexican shepherds in the desert, answer precisely to that description of the cult, and are part of Cather’s democratic passion for ‘obscure destinies’. Warner also describes the usefulness of Mariolatry as an aid to priestly celibacy. ‘Bad thoughts’ were cured by thinking about the Virgin. Since Mary could not sin, sinfulness was displaced onto the figure of Mary Magdalene – thus giving the Catholic Church, Marina Warner points out, its two models for female behaviour, virgin/mother and whore.38 Cather makes use of this doubling of Mary, placing her saved Magdalena in Father Vaillant’s Mary-worshipping May garden, and letting him call on her, jokingly, as a consolation for two men who ‘grow lonely when they see nobody but each other’. [DA, p.210]

  There is only one, strange, underground threat to the novel’s tranquil sublimation of sexual repression or anxiety into Mariolatry. Mary, like those ‘gods in exile’ Cather was once so interested in, is a Christianized version, she says, of a pagan ‘goddess who should yet be a woman’. Indian religions, then, may have their human goddesses. Cather does not say that the mythical snake of the Pecos is a female goddess, but it is clear that the cave of the snake, which Latour so much dislikes, is a female place. Oddly enough, the name ‘Guadalupe’, in ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe’, may have come
from the Mexican word ‘serpent’. Juan, to whom she appears, ‘exposed to Jesuit and Franciscan propaganda about the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, had merged her with the native snake mother goddess of the Indians’.39 It seems a long way from Latour’s terrible underground cave to the purity of the May garden and the evening star. But the power of myth is in what lies below it, ‘the thing not named’, underground and antediluvian.

  For the most part, though, the novel’s Mariolatry has no dark side, and makes a tender female version of this male story. It is not just that almost all the priests’ encounters involve a woman – suffering, working, rescued, praying – but that the priests’ own lives combine their stoic pioneering with a female, domestic quality. This insinuation of female life into an apparently male-centred narrative is beautifully illustrated by Vaillant’s letters home. In Howlett, Machebeuf writes letters to his sister referring gratefully to the vestments which the nuns at her convent have been making him. Cather picks this up, partly to illustrate Vaillant’s lack of interest, ‘like the saints of the early Church’, in ‘personal possessions’: [DA, p.227] the vestments are for worship only, his daily wear is ‘rough and shabby’. But those offstage nuns, doing their woman’s work of reading and sewing, are given a voice. It is the more feminine, empathetic Latour who reflects (retrospectively, as usual) on the nuns’ ‘destinies’: