Copyright © 1990 by the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation ISSN 0197-663X Fall, 1990 Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter VOLUME XXXlV, No. 3 Literary Annual RED CLOUD, NEBRASKA Death Comes for the Archbishop: what as she used the statue of the Auvergnat Bishop Lamy A Map of Intersecting Worlds which inspired her. Evelyn Hailer, Doane College Clearly, "the life-size bronze" In her invocation of God’s or genre clusters relate to and statue before St. Francis ca- plenitude -- "He takes all reinforce each other because thedral became a monumental forces, all space, all time to fill she found a subject ideally bronze, if not a colossus, in her them with universes of beauty" suited to her interests and her imagination. It was "something ("Moral Music" 178) --Willa technique. fearless and fine and very, very Cather anticipated a model that The first of these genre well-bred m something that she herself used in writing visions is Franco-centric and spoke of race" ("On DCA" 7) -- Death Comes for the Arch- qualified by apologetic bio- that the statue communicated to bishop. She achieved credibility graphical tracts. The second her that inspired her to structure in this narrative, as she pre- medieval and characterized by her "biography" of Bishop Lamy ferred to call it, by invoking the iconography and hagiography. toward heroic myth. A visual rules of a variety of genres The third, Mexican, contains disparity between Lamy the which provide differing visions elements such as folklore, the bronze statue and Lamy the man of the cosmos -- a term more tall tale, the ballad of violence becomes clear when one com- accurate in this instance than and sex -- all anticipatory of pares the three-dimensional "world views." By juxtaposi- magic realism. This cluster in- heroic image with the portrait of tion, the four cosmic visions cludes references to the rites of Lamy in the Palace of the Gover- the Penitentes and the practices of the morada (their meeting- house); folk art appears as in religious wooden carvings called bultos and two-dimen- sional images called santos. The fourth cluster, the Indian world of myth and ritual drawn from oral and pictorial tradition, includes ancient practices from several tribes, including the Anasazi, the Zuni, and the Hopi. The point at issue in this delineation does not concern what Cather believed or did not believe, but how she made a literary structure for her arch- bishop. ]’hat Cather adapted history as found in William Joseph Howlett’s 1908 biog- raphy of Bishop Joseph Mache- beuf (the basis for Father Vaillant) and other sources can be demonstrated by comparing her novel with Paul Horgan’s 1975 biography Lamy of Santa Coatlicue: Museo -- Nacional de Fe. The differences suggest that Virgin of Guadelupe: Taylor Museum Mexico Cather used "history" some- of Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center ~ge15 nors showing a worn old man himself is a tower and an order- covertly that because Indians with a narrow mouth and erased ing principle. But the centrality had overcome oppression in the features. As E. K. Brown sug- of the bishop in the world of the past, there might be hope for gested almost fifty years ago, novel as well as in our con- them in the 1920s. During the Latour corresponds to Cather’s sciousness corresponds to the writing of the novel, Secretary ideal of a person of aristocratic Hopi notion of living at the Albert B. Fall of the Interior sensibility at peace in an center of the world in "the Department and his Indian aesthetically severe landscape middle" among six points: the Bureau were victimizing the and provided a subject that cardinal points of north, south, Pueblos -- an assault which suited her profoundly (192-93). east, and west as well as the was not resolved until 1933 At the center, then, of zenith and the nadir. Here we when the old Indian Bureau was Cather’s novel is the 1statue of have a triple intersection: the overturned. Though Cather Bishop Lamy standing in front of Hopis’ understanding of what it could not have known that out- his golden cathedral -- a truly means to be alive; the hier- come, she refers to a nineteenth- golden structure ("Yellow, a archical world of hagiography century parallel in the Govern- strong golden ochre, very much and iconography, and the world ment’s relocation of the Navajos like the gold of the sunlight that of historical fiction based on to the Bosque Redondo: "At last was ,tow beating upon it" [Arch. European values, such as his- the Government at Washington bishop 240]) in contrast to the tory being the biography of great admitted its mistake -- which grotesque illusions generated men. governments seldom do. After by the greed of the Conquista- Why is this pluralism, these five years of exile, the remnant dores. Like gold beaten to "an four worlds or dominant cosmic of the Navajo people were per- airy thinness" to illumine visions at the heart of Cather’s mitted to go back to their sacred medieval manuscripts, the novel novel? "Everything goes by places" (Archbishop 296). on re-reading is bathed in a fours with our people," a Papago Moreover, the Archbishop’s last golden light. As Clinton Keeler woman stated (Peck and Waiters discernible words spoken in the observed, "[A]s in a legend, light 218). And again, "Four is both a text are: "God has been very is a correlative of belief .... The ceremonial and a magical num- good to let me live to see a sun!ight and distance .of the ber with the Pueblos; if one is happy issue to those old Southwestern landscape are im- asked a question four times he wrongs. I do not believe, as I portant subjects of the narra- is compelled to answer" (Tyler once did, that the Indian will tive" (126). 6). The Southwestern culture is perish. I believe that God will saturated with such multiplicity, preserve him" (Archbishop 297). The novel’s intersecting Here I disagree with Bernice worlds are akin to medieval and Cather was drawn to the Southwest, spending many Slote’s suggestion that the levels of meaning or, perhaps novel signals the "changing of more appositely, concentric months there at intervals be- tween 1912 and 1926. She was gods" ("First Principles" 110); circles, for that scheme also instead, I find a simultaneity or approximates the Indian layered not a casual visitor; she wanted to learn what she could of the synchronicity of the gods, for view, and Cather relates Bishop ancient gods are fixed to places, Latour’s life through a cyclical ways of the native people. She developed a friendship with a as Bishop Latour sympathetical- pattern whereby, from a medie- ly heard Chief Manuelito ex- val perspective, all time is pres- Belgian priest, Father Halter- mann, who lived in Santa Cruz plain. Some may be transported ent as it is to God. On the other and "drove about among his like Aeneas’s lares, but others hand, if we combine Latour’s eighteen Indian missions with a continue to live in "those inac- name (the tower) with the linear spring wagon and a pair of cessible white houses set in structure of traditional biog- mules. He knew a great deal caverns up in the face of cliffs, raphy -- which Cather said she which were older than the white was doing when she compared about the country and the Indians and their traditions" man’s world .... Their gods the movement of her narrative to were there, just as the Padre’s that of two white mules moving ("On DCA" 4). By 1916 Cather slowly forward (letter to had absorbed a considerable god was in his church" (Arch- amount of information about the bishop 295). I would suggest Foerster) -- we joumey on a that rather than being "a Catho- Dantean spiral.~ On re-reading, Indians, some of it from Norden- skjold’s book, as shown in her lic novel" -- an idea Cather set we observe the working out of a straight by writing to the editor foregone conclusion: the salva- Mesa Verde essay written for The Denver Times.3 of Commonweal ("On DCA" tion of Latour. Glen Lick ob- 3-13) -- her novel is the work of a serves that Tom Outland is like Perhaps another matter was pluralist, delighting in plenitude the tower in the ruin, the order- at issue: contrary to her usual and multiplicity. The signs in- ing principle in The Professor’s reluctance toward political dicate that Cather’s earth- House; just so Bishop Latour statement, Cather intimates yearning visions are congruent Page 16 with those of an ancient tribal in a ’multi-verse.’ Indians don’t kneels before a cruciform tree, people rather than the dominant believe that there is one fixed putting himself within the white view. As Frank Waiters and eternal truth; they think human nature of Christ to makes clear, "the Hopi [will not] there are many different and imagine what He experienced view.., the universe as an in- equally valid truths" (5). during His life on earth. But it is separably interrelated field or By the end of Death Comes Vaillant who finds the bell from continuum [in a way to] be quite Chaucer’s time whose ringing for the Archbishop we have transports Latour to Jerusalem palatable to those who tacitly found not a synthesis but rather accept the role of man as a ra- where he has never been. Later an overlapping of spheres with when Vaillant sets out to the tional entity created to stand each retaining its integr.ity in apart from nature in order to new mission field of Gold Rush large measure.