Tag Archives: American Literature

LITERATURE

Cather’s Death Comes For The Archbishop: A Good and Faithful Servant

I enjoyed Willa Cather’s My Antonia so much, I immediately started reading her Death Comes For The Archbishop. They are completely unrelated to each other, except they are both concerned with how people lived on the frontier of nineteenth century America. Death Comes For The Archbishop is set in the mid-1800s in the new territory of New Mexico. A young Roman Catholic priest, Jean Marie Latour, has been named bishop to this enormous, wild, and mostly lawless area of the southwest. He sets up his base in the small settlement of Santa Fe. 

From the title, one might think this is a mystery novel, but it is not that at all! Rather, it is the story of how two Roman Catholic missionaries from France serve various peoples with grace, sensitivity, and love. Latour’s best friend, Father Joseph Vaillant, accompanies him in his new placement. They first met in seminary in Clermont, France, and became fast friends, even though they are almost polar opposites. Physically, Fr. Vaillant is short, unattractive, and full of restless energy. Fr. Latour is tall, handsome, graceful and intellectual. Where there is a spiritual need, Vaillant wants to rush in to address it, while Latour tends to observe, take stock of the situation, and consider the long game.

Cather makes the point that these two approaches complement each other, and both are necessary for effective ministry (I owe this insight to Joel Miller’s excellent review of Death Comes For The Archbishop on his Substack, Miller’s Book Reviews.) The ministry Latour and Vaillant are assigned is daunting to say the least: a huge territory that encompasses most of what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. There are villages of Catholics that have not seen a priest in years. Men and women have paired up, without being married. Their children have not been baptized. 

Another pressing issue is Father Martinez of Taos, a very powerful and corrupt priest who refuses to recognize the authority of Bishop Latour. When Latour visits him, he flaunts his women and children and asserts that celibacy can no longer be enforced. He is also responsible for inciting a raid on the new American authorities where several men and women were brutally slaughtered by natives. As the famous Kit Carson relates to Latour, 

Our Padre Martinez at Taos is an old scapegrace, if ever there was one; he’s got children  and grandchildren in almost every settlement around here.
(Location 855, Standard ebooks edition)

Martinez tries to set up a schismatic church, but rather than force the issue, as Vaillant urges, Latour chooses to let Martinez slowly lose influence and followers as the true Church reasserts itself in the region.

While reading Death Comes For The Archbishop, I was impressed with the efforts these French Catholics take to serve their parishioners. They traveled literally thousands of miles on horseback through some of the most inhospitable land on earth. Often, there were no roads, let alone any maps, and every trip was life-threatening. And yet, Latour’s and Vaillant’s love for their flock enabled them to effectively administer to a diocese that was thousands of square miles in size.

One of Latour’s most impressive qualities is his ability to connect with wildly different groups of people. He relates to the lowliest Mexicans in his diocese, the wealthy landowners, and the various indigenous peoples like the Hopis and the Navajo. He forges deep friendships with members of all these constituencies. As far as the Native Americans go, he respects their traditions and doesn’t try to make them “European”. There is one fascinating chapter where he and his Indian guide, Jacinto, get caught in a deadly snowstorm. Jacinto manages to reach shelter in a cave. There is something about the cave that immediately causes Latour much discomfort. Jacinto tells Latour he must never reveal that he has been in this cave. He sees Jacinto carefully fill in a hole in the wall from which a stench is issuing. Latour is aware of tales that Jacinto’s tribe has offered human sacrifices to a “giant serpent” who lives in the mountain. However, once again, Latour doesn’t press the issue, and we never learn just what it is that causes Latour his distress.

Vaillant feels called to go to believers in Arizona, and there is constant tension between Latour’s desire to have his best friend nearby and allowing him to satisfy his calling. As the novel progresses, both men see the hand of God in the decisions they make. Early on, there’s an interesting conversation between them about the Virgin of Guadalupe:

“Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he [Latour] 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.”
(Location 572, Standard Ebooks edition)

Just like in My Antonia, Cather does a masterful job of describing the beauty of the southwest desert. She truly is a visual artist whose medium is words:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still – and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
(Location 224, Standard Ebooks edition)

As the title says, death does eventually come for Archbishop Latour, but not before we have an opportunity to reflect on a life well-lived. He served God and the Church to the best of his ability, and he left an extraordinary legacy in the wild expanse of southwest America. I’m not a Roman Catholic, but this book made me profoundly grateful for the unsung heroes of that Church who risked everything to bring the Faith to the most inaccessible areas of the world. Cather’s novel is a beautiful tribute to them.

fiction, LITERATURE

Willa Cather’s My Antonia: A Beautiful Ode to Prairie Life

I’ve been intending to read Willa Cather’s My Antonia for a few years, since my writer and historian friend, Bradley Birzer, raved about it. (You can read his brilliant take on Cather here.) It’s in the public domain, so I had no excuse and downloaded a free copy. And here I have to confess that I regret having waited so long to read it! From the opening sentence, I was captivated by Cather’s clear and succinct prose. 

The Antonia of the title is a young Czech woman whom the narrator, Jim Burden, sees on a train heading out to Nebraska in the late 1800s, probably around 1880. Jim is ten years old, both his parents have died, and he is leaving his home in Virginia to live with his grandparents on their farm on the prairie. Antonia Shimerdas is fourteen, and she is traveling with her family – newly arrived to America – who hope to make a new life farming in the same vicinity as the Burden’s. Her family consists of her father, mother, older brother Ambrosch, and her little sister, Yulka. From the start, they are at a disadvantage, because they overpaid for a sod house and land that they hope to farm. Poor Mr. Shimerdas is out of his depth – he was a skilled weaver back in Eastern Europe, and he knows nothing about farming. Ambrosch is a haard worker, but mistrustful and a little devious. Mrs. Shimerdas is very proud and has an extremely difficult time adjusting to their new circumstances. For Antonia, however, life is a grand adventure. She and Jim immediately strike up a friendship, and she quickly picks up English. Her openness and sincere delight in everyone and everything around her are her best qualities. 

As I read My Antonia, I was really struck by how important community was to prairie dwellers. During the first winter, a severe snowstorm hits, and Jim’s grandmother, Jim, and their indefatigable hired hand, Otto, brave the elements to bring some food and supplies to the Shimerdas. It’s no exaggeration to say this act of neighborly kindness saves Antonia’s family from starvation.

The prairie itself is a major character in the book. I loved Cather’s vivid descriptions of it in all seasons. Here’s one set in autumn:

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red and gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.
(Location 488, Standard Ebooks Edition)

Each chapter is a self-contained vignette that adds up to a powerful and satisfying whole. Jim’s grandparents decide to rent their farm and move to the local town of Black Hawk, so Jim can attend school. Antonia doesn’t go to school, because Ambrosch insists she work on their farm, as well as hire herself out to other farms when they need an extra hand. She is very proud of her ability to do a man’s work, but she regrets not getting a good education.

Grandfather Burden gets Antonia a job keeping house for his neighbors in town, the Harlings, and Antonia thrives there. She helps with the children, the cooking, and the cleaning. She also falls in love with dancing under a big tent that is set up in the town square for that purpose. Jim also enjoys dancing with the girls and Antonia on the weekends. Their friendship deepens as they both grow older, but it never tips over into romance. It comes close, though! 

Another important aspect of prairie life was faith. Here’s how the Burden’s celebrate one Christmas:

On Christ­mas morn­ing, when I got down to the kitchen, the men were just com­ing in from their morn­ing chores—the hors­es and pigs al­ways had their break­fast be­fore we did. Jake and Ot­to shout­ed “Mer­ry Christ­mas!” to me, and winked at each oth­er when they saw the waf­fle-irons on the stove. Grand­fa­ther came down, wear­ing a white shirt and his Sun­day coat. Morn­ing prayers were longer than usu­al. He read the chap­ters from St. Matthew about the birth of Christ, and as we lis­tened, it all seemed like some­thing that had hap­pened late­ly, and near at hand. In his prayer he thanked the Lord for the first Christ­mas, and for all that it had meant to the world ev­er since. He gave thanks for our food and com­fort, and prayed for the poor and des­ti­tute in great cities, where the strug­gle for life was hard­er than it was here with us. Grand­fa­ther’s prayers were of­ten very in­ter­est­ing. He had the gift of sim­ple and mov­ing ex­pres­sion. Be­cause he talked so lit­tle, his words had a pe­cu­liar force; they were not worn dull from con­stant use. His prayers re­flect­ed what he was think­ing about at the time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feel­ings and his views about things.
(Location 951, Standard Ebooks Edition)

Life was very hard, yet for most people young Jim came into contact with, there was much joy. People had few possessions, yet they had rich lives. As the quote above makes clear, those living on the prairie considered themselves better off than city dwellers. They were responsible for their own entertainment; for example, Mrs. Harling and her daughters were accomplished pianists who loved to play for people. When a traveling troupe comes to town one summer to offer dancing lessons, all the families flock to them and make it a festive event. I would say the defining feeling of the time was optimism – in a relatively young America everyone had boundless hope and a belief that they could succeed.

In the final section of the book, Jim – who has gotten a law degree and moved to New York City – returns to Nebraska to see if he can find Antonia. He does, and he gives us this tender portrait of her in her middle age:

She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
(Location 3684, Standard Ebooks Edition)

My Antonia  is deservedly a classic of American literature. As Jim and his friends mature, so does the country, becoming less agricultural and more urban. The pace of life increases, and modernity begins to intrude. My Antonia is a paean to a bygone era of American life when life was fraught with peril, but also held out almost infinite promise. In our own day, it’s common for neighbors on the same street of a city to not know each other at all. In Antonia’s time, everyone knew everyone and felt some responsibility for each other’s welfare. At the close of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we have so much in terms of material comfort, but we have lost much, as well.