SOURCE: “Latour's Schismatic Church: The Radical Meaning in the Pictorial Methods of Death Comes for the Archbishop,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 71-88.

Shortly after Death Comes for the Archbishop completed its serialized run in Forum magazine in 1927, Willa Cather expressed doubts about the novel's reception. In a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an old Nebraska friend and fellow writer, Cather cynically wondered: Could a novel featuring the Virgin Mary as its leading lady hope to survive in a world of motion picture romance and glamour?¹ Although it had been widely read in Forum, Cather evidently had become less certain about the novel's popular appeal by the time it was due to be published in book form than she had been when she first delivered her manuscript to Knopf. Alfred Knopf recalls that Cather was initially so convinced that Death Comes for the Archbishop would sell longer and better than any of her previous novels that for the first time she insisted upon higher royalties.²

However uncertain she may have been about its public success, Cather never doubted her artistic success in the novel. An earlier letter to Fisher confirms what Cather told her biographer, E. K. Brown, shortly before her death: Death Comes for the Archbishop was not only her best book but the book she found most pleasure in writing and re-reading.³ That Cather regarded this novel so highly is not surprising, for it clearly represents a culmination of the experiments in literary pictorialism which Cather pursued throughout her career, from Alexander's Bridge (Cather's first novel, which she described as her “studio picture”) to such mature later works as The Professor's House (with its unusual narrative composition inspired by Dutch genre painting).⁴ More specifically, Death Comes for the Archbishop perfects the painterly methods of spatial composition Cather first explored in the simple juxtaposition of two separate stories—“Alexandra” and “The White Mulberry Tree”—in O Pioneers!⁵ In an interview published in Bookman in 1921, Cather explained O Pioneers! in pictorial terms that vividly anticipate Death Comes for the Archbishop. Working to “develop a kind of writing” suited to the vast silence and space of the western frontier, Cather discovered a model for her new narrative form in the spatial dynamics of still-life arrangements:

From the first chapter [of O Pioneers!], I decided not to “write” at all … in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my part. Just as if I put here on the table a green vase, and beside it a yellow orange. Now, those two things affect each other. Side by side, they produce a reaction which neither of them will produce alone. … I want the reader to see the orange and the vase—beyond that, I am out of it. Mere cleverness must go. I'd like the writing to be so lost in the object, that it doesn't exist for the reader. …⁶

The vases and oranges in Death Comes for the Archbishop—the multiple religious legends, biographical sketches, and historic and fictional stories within the novel's nine books—are juxtaposed like a series of implicitly related but individually isolated pictures. Dispensing with the narrative manipulations that would connect her diverse characters and scenes into a single, continuous story or plot, Cather allows the “things and people” in this novel to “tell their own story” through the appositions of her spatial design.

The story that Cather tells through the strategically juxtaposed “things and people” is immediately suggested by her Prologue (“At Rome”), in which Cather hints that pictorial art informs the subject as well as the style of her novel. Essentially, the Prologue introduces Cather's story of Archbishop Latour as a story about the artistic perception of a painterly “arranger” or composer.⁷ Pictorial art not only dominates the central action of the Prologue as a major topic of the discussion among the prelates who meet to appoint a vicar for New Mexico, but it also composes and frames the scene where the action takes place. Cather emphasized this pictorialism in her most important published comments on the novel. In a well-known and frequently quoted letter to Commonweal and in a later, less familiar, article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Cather acknowledged that the title, Prologue, and narrative style of Death Comes for the Archbishop were all inspired by pictures. In Commonweal Cather claims that she titled the novel after Dürer's “Dance of Death” series of woodcuts. She further explains that the purposefully undramatic style of her narrative is an attempt to capture in prose the effect of Puvis de Chavannes' murals:

I had all my life wanted to do something in the style of legend, which is absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment. Since I first saw the Puvis de Chavannes frescoes of the life of Saint Geneviève in my student days, I have wished that I could try something a little like that in prose; something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition.⁸

Cather conveniently forgets a great deal in writing this, a circumstance that in itself is evidence that her ideas on composition and design developed as she worked out the formal nature of her novels. Cather's first references to French muralist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes in reviews written for two Pittsburgh newspapers suggest that she did not always admire the flat linearity and muted tones of Chavannes' “unaccented” murals. Particularly interesting in light of her later comments on Death Comes for the Archbishop is Cather's review of Pearl Craigie's Schools for Saints in the Pittsburgh Leader. Nothing that Craigie's novel is “singularly lacking in directness and continuity” because the incidents of her plot are “loosely strung together with small regard for their relative importance,” Cather proceeds to criticize Craigie for creating the effect she later described as the goal of her own “best book.” Schools for Saints, Cather complains, reads like a prose version of a painting by Puvis de Chavannes: “Mrs. Craigie seems never to have dreamed of subordinating any one part of her story to throw another into bolder relief. … She does not attempt to make all the threads of her rambling plot strengthen each other for her own purposes. Her characters … sit about in individual isolation like the figures in Puvis de Chavannes' canvases.”⁹

Criticizing Craigie for her loosely connected incidents and her undramatic evenness of tone, Cather provides an excellent description of her own narrative “without accent” thirty years before Death Comes for the Archbishop was written. If Cather's admiration for the subdued monotones and friezelike spatial constructions of Chavannes' murals was evidently an acquired taste, the very different art that shapes the Prologue of Death Comes for the Archbishop points to the significance of her aesthetic conversion. The opening of Cather's novel is colored not by the dull shades of Chavannes' murals but by the rich crimsons and scarlets of a more conventionally “composed” canvas. As James Woodress has recently observed, several years after she acknowledged that her narrative method in Death Comes for the Archbishop was influenced by Chavannes' “Life of St. Geneviève,” Cather pointed to a more obscure French painting as the principal source of her Prologue. In an interview with Harold Small of the San Francisco Chronicle, Cather remarks that the opening scene of the novel was inspired by an anecdotal painting by Jehan George Vibert (1840-1902):

It was a painting … that made the first scene of that story for me. A French painter, Vibert, once did a precise piece of work in the manner of his day called “The Missionary's Return.” It showed a gorgeously furnished room with cardinals in scarlet, sitting at ease with their wine and speaking to them, telling of the hardships and glories of missionary work in some far part of the world, a pioneer priest, his garments dull and worn out, but his face all alight.¹⁰

Significantly, Cather's memory of Vibert in the Chronicle interview is triggered by a comment about her use of El Greco in the Prologue. Cather's Prologue generally recreates the scene of Vibert's painting: a company of cardinals linger over after-dinner wine as they listen to a visiting missionary from America. Father Ferrand, the missionary bishop in Cather's scene, does not entertain his audience with colorful stories of the “hardships and glories of missionary work,” however. Instead, he presses the business the company has met to discuss, urging the appointment of Jean Latour to the newly created vicarate in New Mexico. Laughing at Ferrand's persistence, the host of the dinner, Cardinal de Allande, asks if Latour is a man of “intelligence in matters of art” (p. 11). Allande proceeds to explain his question with the “little story” of his great-grandfather's lost El Greco.

Some years ago, Allande recalls, a Franciscan priest from New Spain begged his grandfather to donate a painting to decorate his mission church at Pueblo de Cia. Evidently trusting that the uncultivated taste of the “hairy Franciscan” would lead him to choose an inferior work, Allande's grandfather invites the priest to select any painting in his gallery. To the old man's dismay, the missionary chooses the masterpiece of his collection, a “young St. Francis in meditation” by El Greco. The missionary silences his benefactor's protests with a reply that later became a saying in Allande's family: “It is too good for God, but it is not too good for you” (p. 12). Cardinal de Allande ends his story by observing that the missionary church at Pueblo de Cia had since been destroyed. While letters from the bishop in Mexico informed him that there was no evidence that the painting had been saved, Allande admits that he continues to hope the St. Francis might have survived in “some crumbling sacristy or smoky wigwam.” If the new vicar is a man of discernment in art, the Cardinal concludes, he might keep the El Greco in mind.

Cather mentions El Greco in her Chronicle interview in a humorous note about the trials of authorship. Dozens of letters from readers who believed they had found the El Greco in their basements or attics convinced Cather that she had made a mistake in using the name of a real artist in her story of Allande's “lost treasure.” Cather's “mistake” is important, however, because El Greco emphasizes the significant way she revises the painting that inspired her Prologue. Substituting the plein air setting of Allande's mountain terrace for Vibert's “gorgeously furnished” dining room, Cather tacitly links the scene of her Prologue to the scene of El Greco's painting. The “mere shelf of rock” where the four clerics dine beneath the upper terrace of the Cardinal's villa evokes the traditional setting of paintings portraying St. Francis in meditation, a stone grotto in the hills of Assisi.

The connection between Allande's “hidden garden” on a rocky ledge of the Sabine hills and the grotto of his lost “St. Francis in Meditation” is reinforced by Cather's careful composition of her opening scene. The Prologue of Death Comes for the Archbishop is visually presented as a framed picture. Twin balustrades—one protecting the clerics from the “steep declivity” beneath the shelf of rock where they dine, the other twenty feet above them, along a hilltop promenade—are connected by a vertical stairway, forming a frame for Allande's hidden garden like the picture frame that encloses the stone grotto in El Greco's “St. Francis.”

The significance of the pictorial framework that structures Cather's Prologue is illuminated by the literary framework of Cardinal Allande's reference to “smoky wigwams” in the Southwestern desert. As he dismisses the missionary bishop's gentle correction (“Down there the Indians do not dwell in wigwams, your Eminence”), Allande explains that his vision of life in the American West is framed by the “romances of Fenimore Cooper”: “I see your redskins through Fenimore Cooper, and I like them so” (pp. 11-13).

If the arid Southwest desert contradicts the picturesque forest landscapes of Cooper's fiction, it still more radically deviates from the classical conventions of the art that frames Cather's Prologue. The difference between the pastoral vista of “soft and undulating” countryside which the four priests admire from their shelf of rock and the world “cracked open into countless canyons and arroyos” which is the principal topic of their discussion is the difference defined by Archbishop Latour in the final book of the novel:

The old countries were worn to the shape of human life, made into an investiture, a sort of second body, for man. There the wild herbs and the wild fruits and the forest fungi were edible. The streams were sweet water, the trees afforded shade and shelter. But in the alkali deserts the water holes were poisonous, and the vegetation offered nothing to a starving man. Everything was dry, prickly, sharp … (pp. 277-78).

Like the cave that surrounds St. Francis as if it were a protective shell or “a sort of second body,” the niche-like space of Allande's lower terrace is a vivid image of the “safe little Mediterranean world” Latour contrasts to the hostile desert. Sheltered by overarching oaks, surrounded by fruitful orange trees and grape vines, and illuminated by a gentle golden sunlight that glows across “shining folds of country … with a ruddiness as of much-multiplied candlelight,” the Roman landscape of Cather's Prologue is composed in the pastoral tradition defined by the golden arcadias of Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin (p. 4).

The pastoral landscape Cather depicts at the opening of Death Comes for the Archbishop underscores the importance of Allande's seemingly irrelevant question about Latour's “intelligence in matters of art.” While Father Ferrand wonders aloud how a “discerning eye” for art could possibly be of use to the vicar of a desert, throughout the dinner Ferrand himself has portrayed Latour as an artist who will “order” or compose the landscape of New Mexico (p. 8). Characterized by the “sense of proportion” and sensitivity to the “logical relation of things” that distinguish French “arrangers” from the more scientific “classifiers” of Germany (p. 9), Latour is presented by Father Ferrand as the ideal artist for a country still waiting to be “arranged … into a landscape” (p. 95).

The disparity between the “dry, prickly, [and] sharp” world that awaits Latour in New Mexico and the “soft and undulating” countryside of “In Rome” vividly defines the challenge confronting Latour as the artist appointed to compose “fiercely hostile” canyons, mesas, and plains into a landscape. Contrary to Allande's hope that Latour will “keep … El Greco in mind” as he orders his new vicarate, Latour's success as a “great organizer” clearly depends upon his ability to put El Greco completely out of mind (p. 13). A country without rivers of sweet water or the natural shelter of picturesque trees and grottoes, Latour's landscape demands a repudiation of the established frameworks of art El Greco's “St. Francis” represents. To create a landscape where “Spanish bayonet, juniper, greasewood, [and] cactus” take the place of “spreading ilex oaks” and verdant pastures, Latour must invent an art antithetical to the pastoral tradition that shapes the “safe little Mediterranean world” of Cather's Prologue.

Cather's comments on her use of pictorial art in Death Comes for the Archbishop imply that the transition from the Prologue to the nine books of the novel proper is a movement from Jehan Vibert to Puvis de Chavannes. The version of “The Missionary's Return” that Cather presents in the conventionally framed and composed scene of Allande's dinner party is succeeded by a narrative like the murals of Chavannes, “with none of the artificial elements of composition.” In contrast to the brilliant colors and illusory depth of “The Missionary's Return,” Chavannes' St. Geneviève panels are distinguished by emphatic flatness in both composition and color. Chavannes not only dispenses with the foreground-to-background spatial recessions that would give three-dimensional depth to his paintings, but he also complements his flattened perspective with a color scheme of flat monotones. Cather's passing reference to the “pale, primeval shades of Puvis de Chavannes” in an art review published in 1900 accurately describes the Pantheon panels, which she first saw in Paris in 1902.¹¹ Marked by an evenly subdued, grayish tone that avoids strong contrasts or vivid colors, Chavannes' four-panel “Life of St. Geneviève” shares the stony pallor of the marble frieze that surrounds it.

Cather retrospectively explained her attempt to imitate Chavannes' paintings in prose as an effort “to do something in the style” of medieval saints legends.¹² More important to understanding Death Comes for the Archbishop on its own terms, however, is the explanation of artistic form that Cather immediately provides in the opening of the novel proper. Book I, “The Vicar Apostolic,” introduces Bishop Latour in 1851, three years after the meeting in Rome which decides his appointment to the New Mexican vicarate. The opening scene of the book presents Latour traveling alone on horseback “through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico” (p. 17). On his way back to Santa Fe from Durango, where he has gone to receive papers verifying his episcopal authority, Latour has mistakenly strayed from the Rio Grande road. The landscape of the Bishop's lost wandering is portrayed through Latour's eyes, eyes which are “sensitive to the shape of things”:

The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless—or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. … They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks—yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens … (pp. 17-18).

“Featureless” in its lack of distinct landmarks and “monotonous” in its pervasive clay coloring and uniformly “flattened” shapes, the design of Latour's landscape is a graphic image of the design of the narrative “without accent” that it introduces. In contrast to her later account of the “legendary” style of Death Comes for the Archbishop, at the outset of the novel itself Cather roots her experiment in form not in literary history but in the landscape of the American Southwest. Cather instantly reinforces the suggestion implicit in the scene of Latour's “geometrical nightmare” in her description of Santa Fe. The image that dominates Latour's memory of his first view of Santa Fe—a mental picture of poplars swaying “like gracious accent marks” against carnelian-colored hills (p. 22)—explicitly links narrative and visual art in a way that suggests a vital connection between Cather's plain narrative style and the “featureless” desert plain she depicts.

Throughout Death Comes for the Archbishop Cather identifies the Chavannesque “flatness” of her prose as an attempt to meet the challenge that she defines in her Prologue: abandoning the “splendid finish” of Old World pastorals, the spare art of Death Comes for the Archbishop reflects the indigenous nature and culture of a country “still waiting to be made into a landscape.” Cather provides an explicit metaphor for her attempt to embody in prose the “monotones” of Latour's desert in her portrait of Eustabio, Latour's Navajo friend. Described as the “landscape made human,” Eustabio represents the experiment of Death Comes for the Archbishop in miniature; in her narrative as a whole as in her characterization of Eustabio in Book VII, Cather strives to embody landscape in art. “Unobtrusive” in demeanor and distinguished by a “quiet way of moving,” Eustabio incarnates the emphatic “flatness” of Cather's unobtrusive, uninflected narrative voice. Similarly, the Navajo's unhurried pace mirrors the novel's slow movement. En route to Santa Fe with Eustabio as his guide, Latour is surprised that the Indian “stopped so often by the way,” seemingly unconcerned about reaching their destination in good time (p. 232). Through her numerous narrative digressions, Cather follows the missionary journeys of Latour and Vaillant with the same timeless pace that marks Eustabio's journeying in a world outside the “march of history” where “no wagon roads, no canals, [and] no navigable rivers” facilitate travel, and where countless “stony chasms” positively impede it (pp. 199, 7).¹³

Insofar as she represents her unhurried and unaccented prose as a response to the timeless and “featureless” Southwest landscape, Cather presents Death Comes for the Archbishop as a fictional autobiography. “Sensitive to the shape” of the unfamiliar landscape and life-styles of New Mexico, Cather's Latour is a self-portrait of the artist who, as the narrative “composer” of the novel, develops new forms and conventions to match the “shape of things” in the new world she depicts. The connection between Cather and Latour is most evident in the “geometrical nightmare” that introduces Latour in Book I. The way Latour carefully revises his initial description of the endless red hills dotting the desert sand instantly suggests that Cather's novel is the portrait of an artist who “designs” or composes as Cather does, according to the changing “shape of things.” While at first Latour observes that the monotonous hills are the shape and size of haycocks, minutes later the significantly changes his terms of comparison: “Flattened cones, they were, more exactly the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks—yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brickdust and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees” (p. 18). Shifting from haycocks to clay ovens, Latour abandons an image derived from the fertile, cultivated landscape that Cather presents in her Prologue and adopts a metaphor rooted in the native life of his vicarate. Unlike European haycocks, “Mexican ovens” wonderfully capture the indigenous heat, color, and sterility of New Mexico. Like many later metaphors of Latour's subjective vision and Cather's more objective descriptions (such as the yellow hand of the native banjo player in Book VI, which loses all form and becomes a whirl of matter in motion “like a patch of sandstorm” [p. 183] or the raindrops Latour considers to be “the shape of tadpoles” in Book II, a comparison that alludes to the Navajo legend of the frog who created rain [p. 64]), Latour's image of hills like Mexican ovens represents a conscious attempt at taking a strange new world on its own terms.¹⁴ Like Cather, Latour recognizes the truth in Padre Martinez's warning about the dangers of imposing “French fashions” or European forms upon his new diocese. Latour will never succeed in building a “living Church” in the Southwest, Martinez cautions his bishop, unless he resists the temptation “to introduce European civilization” there (p. 148).

If the transition from haycocks to ovens points to Latour's general recognition of the need to revise old-world “fashions” to reflect New World realities, the Santa Fe cathedral more specifically defines Latour's revisionary art in terms of the novel's Roman Prologue. Latour's major work of art and a symbol of the wider “living Church” that he leaves behind at his death, the cathedral is significantly identified not with the church of Rome but with the schismatic church at Avignon. When Bishop Latour takes Father Vaillant to the golden hill where he sees his cathedral in potentia, Vaillant remarks that the yellow stone is “something like the colonnade of St. Peter's” (p. 242). Correcting Vaillant, Latour points to the same historical precedent that Martinez cites when he rebels against Latour's authority and establishes a dissenting church. The rock is more like that of “the old Palace of the Popes, at Avignon,” Latour insists, than like the marble of Bernini's Vatican colonnade. He concludes that the “right style” for such rock can only be the plain Romanesque of Southern France (pp. 242-43).

The schismatic church evoked by the cathedral's ochre stone implies that Latour's ecclesiastic art represents a breach with the official church of the novel's Prologue. The nine-part design of the novel proper provides an important key to the nature of Latour's “schism” with Rome. More than any of her other novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop exemplifies the “flawless art” which Cather defined in a tribute to Sarah Orne Jewett: in this novel, as in Jewett's best fiction, “the design is the story and the story is the design.”¹⁵ Cather calls attention to the formal design of Death Comes for the Archbishop at the end of Book I. As Robert Gale first noted, the nine-book structure of the novel corresponds to the nine tolls of the Angelus bell that awakens Latour on the morning after he returns from Durango:

He recovered consciousness slowly, unwilling to let go of a pleasing delusion that he was in Rome. Still half believing that he was lodged near St. John Lateran, he yet heard every stroke of the Ave Maria bell, marvelling to hear it rung correctly (nine quick strokes in all, divided into threes, with an interval between). … Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees,—Jerusalem, perhaps, though he had never been there (p. 43).¹⁶

As a metaphor for the story in the nine-part design of Death Comes for the Archbishop, the “Ave Maria bell” not only suggests that Cather's portrait of Latour is related to the Marian imagery that pervades the novel, but it further suggests the dynamic pattern that organizes that imagery. In the nine books that chronicle his career as the architect of a “living church,” Latour moves from the Immaculate Virgin of contemporary Rome to an acceptance of the human mother beloved by his poorest Mexican parishioners. In other words, Latour's changing perception of the woman Cather ruefully described as the “leading lady” of her novel is an index of the respect for native traditon that distinguishes a “designer” like Latour from such imposers of European frameworks as Fray Balthazar, the Spanish missionary who builds a loggia and an enclosed cloister garden on the Ácoma Mesa as if he were “hung on a spur of the Pyrenees” (p. 102). Cather deftly develops her portrait of Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop through opposing images of Marian devotion (the Blessed Virgin of the official Roman church versus the Holy Mother of Latour's native Mexicans), and the pattern of this imagery suggests the extent to which Latour is himself shaped by the desert plains, mesas, and mountains that he shapes “into a landscape.”

The opposing Holy Mother-Blessed Virgin emphases of the Mariology that informs Cather's portrait of Latour are introduced in consecutive sections of Book I, “Hidden Water” and “The Bishop Chez Lui.” In the “mother-house” of the Mexican settlement of Aqua Secreta, Latour examines a mantlepiece Virgin which he finds “much more to his taste than the factory-made plaster images in his mission churches in Ohio”:

The wooden Virgin was a sorrowing mother indeed,—long and stiff and severe, very long from the neck to the waist, even longer from waist to feet, like some of the rigid mosaics of the Eastern Church. She was dressed in black, with a white apron, and a black reboso over her head, like a Mexican woman of the poor (p. 28).

Unlike the snow-white virgins of Ohio, the brightly painted Mary of Aqua Secreta is physically sensate (she is dressed like a doll, as if she were susceptible to cold) and emotionally vulnerable (she is a “sorrowing mother,” and not a marmoreal goddess).

Latour's attraction to the human Mary of Aqua Secreta indicates his sensitivity to native forms and traditions that oppose the “European civilization” he ostensibly represents as a vicar of Rome. The Old World orthodoxies challenged by the “sorrowing mother” of Hidden Water are compressed in the image of transcendent female divinity which dominates “The Bishop Chez Lui.” Writing letters as he awaits the Christmas dinner being prepared by Father Valliant, Latour pauses to admire the twilit night framed within the “deep-set window” of his study. The evening star that illuminates Latour's framed vision—Venus shines so brilliantly “that she seemed to bathe in her own silver light”—reminds him of a song he once sang in the Auvergne seminary, “Ave Maris Stella” (p. 37).

Unlike the Aqua Secreta Madonna, which resembles a Byzantine mosaic, the stellar Virgin of Latour's hymn is Roman (“Ave Maris Stella” is Latinate both in its language and in its mythic source: “Maris Stella” is a Catholic Venus). The east-west opposition of these two Marys critically clarifies the course of Latour's reverie at the end of Book I. The Aqua Secreta Madonna is tacitly linked to the “pervasive sense of the East” which overcomes Latour when he hears the Angelus ringing. “Maris Stella,” on the other hand, is tied to the vision of Rome that fades from Latour's mind with each succeeding toll of the bell. Latour's Angelus dream thus traces a psychic journey as significant as all the missionary journeys of the novel. In the course of his dream, Latour moves from Rome to Santa Fe in sensibility; he arrives in Santa Fe imaginatively as he arrived physically the evening before his reverie. In short, the progression of the Archbishop's dream defines the evolving art of his governance. Far from imposing “French fashions” on his new vicarate, Latour is so deeply moved by the “shape of things” in New Mexico (the “sorrowing mother” of Aqua Secreta) that he gradually surrenders the traditions of his beloved Auvergne (“Maris Stella”).

The radical difference between the celestial Virgin of Latour's hymn and the peasant Madonna of his parishioners points to the heresy of the Archbishop's regard for the native traditions of his diocese. The second stanza of “Ave Maris Stella” describes this difference most succinctly. After an opening supplication to “heaven's fairest portal,” Latour's hymn pays tribute to Mary with a clever play on words:

Taking that sweet Ave
Erst by Gabriel spoken
Eva's name reversing
Be of peace the token.(17)

Praising Mary as a diametric “reversal” or revision of sinful Mother Eve, Latour's hymn elevates the “very human” Madonna portrayed by Mexican artisans into a realm of absolute divinity. Exempt from the human mortality and sinful “fetters” of Eve's descendents, the heavenly Virgin of “Ave Maris Stella” is not the common woman worshiped in New Mexico but is instead an ethereal “lady.”

Cather stresses the importance of Latour's divine “lady” in her story of Dona (“Lady”) Isabella. The design of the novel formally relates Dona Isabella, the woman who provides the title and the focus of the second section of Book VI (“The Lady”), to the empedestaled stone statue of the “Lady Chapel” in the corresponding section of Book VII (“December Night”).

The connection between the structurally paralleled stories of Lady Isabella and Latour's December night in the “Lady Chapel” is illuminated by the transitional chapter which links them. Titled “The Month of Mary,” this intervening chapter of Book VII shares the thematic focus of the chapter which follows it, “December Night”: the May-December sections of Book VII are paired stories about special seasons of devotion to Mary. The brief historical note at the opening of Book VII provides an essential context for understanding these paired Marian stories and their relationship to the story of secular Lady Isabella. Describing the problems in church administration caused by the Gadsen Purchase of 1853, the opening paragraphs of Book VII insist that the following chapters must be considered within the context of “external events” directed by contemporary “authorities at Rome” (p. 199). The Gadsen Purchase generally sets the stage for both “The Month of Mary” and “December Night.” The illness that allows Father Vaillant to spend May in a special devotion to Mary for the first time since his arrival in the Southwest is a result of his fatiguing trip to a conference in Mexico convened by Rome to redefine diocesan boundaries according to the new national boundaries between Mexico and the United States. Vaillant's subsequent departure to work among the natives of Latour's new territory in Arizona accounts for Latour's acute loneliness in “December Night.” An “external event” more immediately relevant to Vaillant's May devotions and Latour's December “period of coldness and doubt” than the 1853 Purchase, however, is a roughly contemporaneous doctrinal pronouncement issued by “authorities at Rome,” the 1854 encyclical that made the Immaculate Conception an article of faith.

Never mentioned by name, Pius IX, the Pope at the time of Latour's tenure as bishop, is nevertheless an important presence in Death Comes for the Archbishop. The unification wars of the Italian Risorgimento, which drove the Pope from Rome a few months after the summer dinner meeting of Cather's Prologue, are evoked throughout the novel (pp. 13-14, 229, 246). Further, the Prologue explains Cardinal de Allande's retirement from Vatican politics as a quiet protest against certain “reforms of the new Pontiff,” vaguely suggesting an essential opposition between Pius IX and his predecessor, Gregory XVI, the pope Allande served faithfully until his death in 1846. Cather's historically accurate portrayal of Gregory as the greatest missionary pope of the nineteenth century indirectly suggests that the papal reform Allande regards as an “impractical and dangerous” reversal of Gregory's pontificate somehow impedes the missionary work that Gregory so zealously fostered (p. 5). The specific reform of Pius IX that discourages Latour's church-building is implied both by the setting of “December Night” and by the “important conferences at the Vatican” where Latour hears the story of Vaillant's first papal audience with Gregory (p. 229). Set “one night about three weeks before Christmas,” the story of Latour's vigil in the “Lady Chapel” with the peasant woman Sada is tied to the newly proclaimed feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8), the major subject of Latour's Vatican conference.

Long a matter of Catholic dispute, the belief that the Virgin Mary was without original sin from the moment of her birth or conception finally became church dogma in the mid-nineteenth century. Almost immediately after he was elected pope in 1846, Pius IX began to take steps toward defining the Immaculate Conception of Mary as official doctrine, efforts which culminated in a special conference of world bishops in 1854. In the encyclical that grew out of the conference, Ineffabilis Deus, Pius proclaimed that “the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary was preserved from all stain of original sin in the first instant of her Conception … has been revealed by God and must, therefore, firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful.”¹⁸

This particular “reform of the new pontiff” explains the significance of Latour's rapid movement away from Rome in the reverie inspired by the Angelus bell in Book I. To design a church which conforms to the “shape of things” in his new world, Latour must repudiate Rome's stellar “lady” and accept the more earthbound woman of Aqua Secreta. In light of the immaculately “reformed” Mary of Pius IX, Latour's efforts to build a “living church” on a foundation of the indigenous Mexican traditions represented by Aqua Secreta's “earthy” Madonna constitute an opposition to the Bishop of Rome as radical as the open schism declared by Padre Martinez. The seemingly “irrelevant” story of Dona Isabella is central to Death Comes for the Archbishop because Latour's role in exposing Isabella's ladylike deceptions dramatizes the completeness of his repudiation of Rome's ideal woman.¹⁹ Latour's actions in the court case brought against Isabella Olivares pointedly subvert the Marian “reforms” of the papal court in Vatican City.

A “childish” Southern lady who would rather lose an inheritance than admit to the age and maternity of a mature woman, Dona Isabella is presented as a secular counterpart of the Vatican's immortal Virgin. The denial of nature implicit in the art of Isabella's dyed blonde ringlets is the essence of the Immaculate Mary purified of Eve's mortal life proclaimed by Pius IX (p. 176). Both the Blessed Virgin of Rome and the First Lady of Santa Fe incarnate the “desire to ‘master’ nature” which Latour identifies as the distinguishing feature of European culture (p. 234). Specifically, in refusing to admit her age Dona Isabella embodies a desire to master time that parallels the imperial mastery of space asserted by heroes of the American Southwest from Coronado to Kit Carson (pp. 123, 293). Comic though it is, the court battle provoked by Isabella's lies about her age is crucially important because in the decisive part that he plays in exposing Lady Oliveras, Latour begins building his native church by rejecting the cornerstone of Western civilization: he repudiates the “desire to ‘master’ nature” which makes Isabella a latter-day Ponce de Leon (a sixteenth-century seeker of eternal youth) and akin to Coronado and Carson (who “master” frontier space as Isabella attempts to master time).

Latour becomes involved in the Olivares dispute because the interests of his church are at stake: the will contested by the Olivares brothers includes a bequest to the building fund for the new cathedral. Succeeding with gentlemanly diplomacy where Father Vaillant's outraged scoldings fail, Latour persuades Isabella to admit her fifty-odd years in a “cruel” scene that dramatically reverses the “reforms” of Pius IX (pp. 190-93). While the Bishop of Rome translates his Lady from the “sinful and sullied world” into the divinity of heaven, the Bishop of Santa Fe catalyzes an opposite metamorphosis in harp-playing Isabella. Latour comples Santa Fe's angel of the harp to descend to the realm of “earthy” life and human mortality.²⁰

The trial that transforms Dona Isabella from an eternal nymph into a middle-aged woman thus effectively highlights the schism with Rome implicit in the pictorial composition of Death Comes for the Archbishop. The “ashen” and pale flesh colors dominating the final portrait of a lady which Latour paints to win the trial recall the earthy, gray monotones of Puvis de Chavannes in a way that emphasizes Latour's aesthetic distance from the brilliantly colored scene in the Prologue (p. 189). Abandoning the pure crimsons and whites of the Prologue's framed “Missionary's Return,” Latour adopts the “primeval shades” of the sun-bleached desert. While Latour fails to discover Allande's lost El Greco “in some crumbling sacristy or smoky wigwam,” the whole of Death Comes for the Archbishop insists that this failure is a measure of his artistic achievement. Latour succeeds as an artist precisely because he neither seeks nor finds the “safe little Mediterranean world” of El Greco's “St. Francis” in New Mexico. Failing Allande, Latour becomes the artist or architect of a vital church because he sensitively adopts the shade and shapes of his new world.²¹

Notes

1. Willa Cather to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, August 17 [1927], Univ. of Vermont Library, TS. 42.

2. Alfred A. Knopf, “Miss Cather,” in The Art of Willa Cather, ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1974), pp. 209-10.

3. Cather to Fisher, [December 8, 1926], Univ. of Vermont, MS. 41; Cather to E. K. Brown, [October 7, 1946], Newberry Library TS.

4. Cather cells Alexander's Bridge her “studio picture” in “My First Novels (There Were Two),” in On Writing (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 91. She describes the Dutch genre paintings that inspired the inset structure of The Professor's House in “A Letter on The Professor's House” (On Writing, pp. 31-4). Cather's on-going interest in the literary uses of the compositional forms and iconography of visual arts is further suggested by her description of Shadows on the Rock as a “series of pictures” like Watteau's delicate pastels (Wilbur Cross, “Men and Images,” rev. of Shadows on the Rock, Saturday Review [August 22, 1931], p. 68; Cather, Letter to Cross, Saturday Review [October 17, 1931], p. 216); her account of the story “Two Friends” as a Courbet painting (E. K. Brown, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, completed by Leon Edel [New York: Avon, 1953], p. 222); and her prominent reference to Jules Breton's painting “Song of the Lark” in the title of her third novel.

5. Cather's account of the two stories that suddenly “came together” in her mind to form O Pioneers! is related in Elizabeth Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 90-2; and in Edith Lewis, Willa Cather: A Personal Record (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1953), pp. 83-84.

6. Latrobe Carroll, “Willa Sibert Cather,” Bookman, 53 (1921), 214-16.

7. Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 9. All further references are to this edition and are cited within the text.

8. Cather, Letter, Commonweal (November 23, 1927), p. 714. With one notable substantive change, this letter is reprinted in On Writing, pp. 3-13. In her original letter, Cather claims that the source of her title was “Dürer's Dance of Death”; when she included the letter in On Writing, the reference was changed to “Holbein's Dance of Death” (p. 11). It seems likely that the correction was Cather's. As D. H. Stewart has pointed out, Holbein's series of woodcuts depicting a jolly, skeletal Death summoning people from all walks of life includes a scene where Death comes for an archbishop (Stewart, “Cather's Mortal Comedy,” Queen's Quarterly, 73 [1966], 244-59). The pictorial sources of Death Comes for the Archbishop are also briefly described by Clinton Keeler, “Narrative Without Accent: Willa Cather and Puvis de Chavannes,” AQ, 17 (1965), 119-26.

9. Cather, “Books and Magazines,” Pittsburgh Leader (January 7, 1898), p. 13; reprinted in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, ed. William Curtain (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), II, 571.

10. Harold Small, San Francisco Chronicle (March 23, 1931), p. 19, as quoted in James Woodress, “The Genesis of the Prologue of Death Comes for the Archbishop,” AL, 50 (1978), 474.

11. Cather, “A Philistine in the Gallery,” Pittsburgh Library (April 21, 1900), pp. 8-9; reprinted in World and the Parish, II, 764.

12. Cather, Letter to Commonweal, p. 714.

13. Cather reflects on the deliberately slow pace of Death Comes for the Archbishop in a letter where she said that she liked to think of the book as “a narrative that moves along in a straight line on two white mules that do not hurry themselves” (Cather to Norman Foerster [May 22, 1933], Univ. of Nebraska, as quoted in James Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970], p. 220).

14. For the legend behind Latour's vision of frog-shaped raindrops, see Franc Johnson Newcomb, Navaho Folk Tales (Santa Fe: Museum of Navaho Ceremonial Art, 1967), chapter 13, “Frog Creates Rain.”

15. Cather, “Miss Jewett,” in Not Under Forty (New York: Knopf, 1936), pp. 77-8.

16. Robert Gale, “Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Expl, 21 (1963), Item 75.

17. “Ave Maris Stella,” from The Roman Breviary (New York: Benziger, 1964), pp. 154-55, as quoted in Richard Giannone, Music in Willa Cather's Fiction (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 196.

18. Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (Acta Pii IX 1.1:616), as quoted in E. D. O'Connor, “Immaculate Conception,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967 ed., VII, 381.

19. Representative of the critics who have regarded Dona Isabella as an irrelevant digression from Cather's main story of missionary church-building are David Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1951), p. 114, and John Randall, The Landscape and the Looking Glass (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1960), p. 287.

20. Isabella's harp not only emphasizes her aspirations to angelic immortality but also sharpens the pointed self-mockery in Cather's portrait of Madame Olivares. This section of the novels ends with a musical finale as Isabella plays and sings “Listen to the Mockingbird” (p. 195). The bird's joke is on Cather. Like Isabella, Cather chronically lied about her age. While she claimed to have been born in 1876, Cather family letters fix the date in as December 7, 1873. Leon Edel discusses Cather's birthdate and notes the connection between Isabella and her author in “Homage to Willa Cather,” in The Art of Willa Cather, pp. 185-98.

21. I am grateful to Professor Kent Bales for help in revising this essay.