My Favorite Cather

            My favorite Willa Cather book is Death Comes for the Archbishop, which was published in 1927. Father Jean Marie Latour from Auvergne is the man chosen at the midpoint of the nineteenth century to be the vicar and then the bishop of the huge territory of New Mexico as it moves from Mexican to American control. From his seat at Santa Fe he travels enormous distances in the service of his church and his god, dealing patiently but eventually effectively with the recalcitrant Bishop of Durango, avaricious and concupiscent priests, an unforgiving desert, and the cultural conservatism of the Indians. He builds a cathedral at Santa Fe and eventually must say goodbye to his devoted assistant Father Joseph Vaillant, who goes to head dioceses first in Tucson and then in Denver.

            Cather has some peculiarities: she consistently uses the form drouth for drought, as if she were transcribing the way many Nebraskans say it; she takes pious capitalization so far as to include pronouns for Mary; she seems more at home with place description than with summary of action or character delineation; and she invests her French-born bishop with an attitude about the Indians that finds expression in odd imagery: “He felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells . . . . those shell-like backs . . . . rock-turtles . . . something reptilian . . . like the crustaceans in their armour.”

            My favorite passage tries to get at the feeling of the western landscape: “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longs for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”