If the components of great art remain subtle and elusive, the springs of artistic creativity are even more so. How a writer produces an enduring fiction is a question even the writer cannot answer with certainty. But because unanswerable questions are the most tantalizing, we readers find questions regarding the components of a particular creative moment irresistible. Of all the teasers in American literary history, however, none has haunted me more than this question: How did Willa Cather write both My Mortal Enemy and Death Comes for the Archbishop within a single year's span?

My Mortal Enemy, as James Woodress succinctly puts it, is “the bitterest piece of fiction … [Cather] ever wrote.”¹ This shortest of her novels suggests that human relationships are not only endlessly complicated but also endlessly destructive. Cather, like a twentieth-century Hester Prynne, recognizes a nightmarish triangular relationship, only to find “no way out of this dismal maze,” no exit from the briar patch of mutual injuries and defeats which lovers and mortal enemies inevitably inflict on each other.

Yet before My Mortal Enemy was even past the galley proof stage, Cather was busily at work on Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel that transcends both nightmares and triangles. In fact, the second novel of her most significant twelve months as a writer remains a masterpiece of passionately won serenity. In contrast to My Mortal Enemy, it is her most compelling tribute to the possibilities of human achievement, the constructive potential of human commitment, and the enduring value of human institutions and relationships. How Cather could apparently sink to such despair, then rise immediately to such heights of affirmation—that is a riddle to meet Sphinxian standards. I should like to begin by sketching the outlines of an answer to this question, before moving on to other riddles concerning the Archbishop as a whole. From the beginning, however, I must acknowledge that attempting any answer will suggest Hawthorne's unpardonable sin—by prying into the deliberately hidden secrets of Cather's heart.

Practically, one must look for the essential Cather in her books. She destroyed as many letters as she could and forbade publication of any correspondence left extant. The books she polished and controlled were to be the only material available to her readers. No matter how zealously Cather covered her biographical tracks, however, she still left records of what she was thinking and suffering within the novels she published. Three crucial novels in her development appeared in three consecutive years—The Professor's House in 1925, My Mortal Enemy in 1926, and Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927. By tracing Cather's development of a cluster of themes in these three novels, we can make an educated guess regarding our central riddle. While the first two novels seem negative and pessimistic, we can find in them Cather's attempt to reach the bottom of her private slough of despond and to transform in into her own deep and pure Walden pond.

In The Professor's House. Godfrey St. Peter summarizes for a history class his life's wisdom: “Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course).”² St. Peter adds his opinion that the two have given man “the only happiness he has ever had,” and that modern science has not added a single significant item—neither a new sin nor a new pleasure—to the human horizon. Then, with his eight volumes of American history completed, and feeling without satisfaction that his life's work is finished, he concludes that if he lives into the future at all, he must learn to live without joy and without desire. Finding himself in a closed room which has been poisoned by escaping gas, he chooses not to open the window to fresh air. At what seems the moment of his death, however, he reflexively rises to his feet and then collapses. His fall is heard by his old servant Augusta, who rescues him.

Cather stated that The Professor's House was about “letting go with the heart.”³ Her ambiguous phrase seems to suggest both giving up and also jumping in or committing oneself with one's heart—taking a leap of faith. Such a leap, we surmise Cather knew as well as Kierkegaard, St. Augustine or Jonathan Edwards, is not an act of the rational intellect but of the emotions. At least what saves St. Peter is not the highly trained rational faculties which have already surrendered, but his visceral responses, aided by Augusta, who has more wisdom and religion, if not more learning, than he. This elderly servant cares for Godfrey, observes his unwilled movements, hears his silent cry, and drags him without delay to purer air.

St. Peter does breathe purer air at last, and discovers through his unwilled reflexes that he will continue to live, albeit without joy or desire. Though he knows intellectually that true pleasure must derive from art or religion, however, neither seems to sustain him as he faces his future. His knowledge does not seem to reassure his creator, either; for novelists and professors do learn eventually that saying something doesn't mean understanding it with the heart. Cather's next novel appears to bubble up from the bottom of the pit and witnesses to her deepening despair.

My Mortal Enemy leaves no room for hope in reference to human relationships. Its tangle of loves and hates provides no glimpse of lasting happiness for any way of life or human type. Male and female, young and old, married and single, professional and helpmate—all finally do little but injure and sustain injury.

At the end of My Mortal Enemy the heroine Myra Henshawe appears to glimpse the possibility of succor when she announces with characteristic passion, “in religion, seeking is finding.”⁴ It helps at this point to recall that Cather must also be remembering, as she fashions Myra's pronouncement, what St. Peter concluded before her: art and religion are the same thing in the end. For Myra, pretending to seek religious solutions to the hated facts she must face about her own mortality, is actually seeking a strategy through art, not religion. She simulates the scene on Gloucester's cliff from Shakespeare's Lear, then sets up an apparent death scene, expecting the gods to rescue her as they did Gloucester. Though she throws herself away with the same abandon as Gloucester, however, the scripted rescue does not materialize. She dies.

What Myra has done in her last hours is to place her faith and hope in literary art which she believes can show her a way to doublecross fate, to hedge her bets, and to prolong her own life. What she fails to account for is the presence of Nellie Birdseye, one of her loving friends and mortal enemies, who guesses where she is and what she is up to and then decides to let Myra play it her way and die. Nellie, however, has a final lesson to learn as well. For as she reflects on Myra's last moments she concedes that Myra has finally accomplished a heroic and successful act: Myra has willed to live until she could see the dawn.

Of course, like any great creative artist, Willa Cather plays all the major roles in her own dramas. She is therefore not only Myra and Oswald Henshawe but also Nellie Birdseye, the cold and deceptive observer. As Myra, Cather turns to art as her religion, to prolong an increasingly painful and diseased body and spirit; for Myra uses both art and religion as tricks to fend off death. Then as Nellie does, Cather sees the trick, rejects it, and kills off that part of her driven self which Myra represents, the part which had such a passionate capacity for joy and desire. After jettisoning Myra, however, all Cather is left with is Nellie Birdseye.

It is as if, having told the tale, turned up the cards like a gypsy fortune teller, and taken the trick, Nellie Birdseye, the cold observer with the chilled heart, herself has no life left worth living. She no longer has anything to lose, nor anything to sustain her except that last desire to live long enough to see a dawn. So the Birdseye observer in Cather tries the trick Myra has played. Cather's life at this point not only imitates art; she imitates her own art. Knowing with St. Peter that art and religion are the same thing in the end, she tries Myra's artful literary strategy and looks to religion as she hurls herself into the void. With nothing worth preserving left to lose, she affirms that art and religion are the same thing—passionate attempts to understand mystery. She chooses to believe that through art one can find a religious purpose, can reencounter joy. Then abandoning all other hope, she takes her leap of faith off her own Gloucester's cliff. The trick works. She seeks and she finds the state of mind which can create, miraculously, the masterpiece that lives as Death Comes For the Archbishop.

In the first chapter of the Archbishop, Latour is wandering in a triangle-dominated geometrical nightmare of a desert, sick and faint. His soul cries, “I thirst.” The pain of that thirst is like Christ's on the cross. Being a priest who is “sensitive to the shape of things,” Latour can recognize the symbolic significance of a tree shaped like a cross. He can also relate his own suffering to the form of significant suffering. Thus, when he surrenders himself to the symbols his heart knows are valid (for the heart has reasons which the mind knows not), when he “lets go with the heart”—both giving up as the Professor does and also taking a leap of faith as Myra does—he is saved. He kneels to pray, submitting to the final logic of his own life and imminent death, and his exhausted mount sniffs water. Thus he is carried—moving always in nature—to relief.

This first chapter introduces every philosophical question the novel seems to exist to explore: what is man, what is faith, what is significant form, where is hope, what is miracle, what are the repercussions of desire, where does one find art, in what forms does art reside, and finally, how do desire, art, form, faith and miracle contribute to the ongoing of life, to continuity? As a moving treatment of such universal issues, as well as her answer to her own needs at this point in her life, Death Comes for the Archbishop becomes Cather's miracle and her masterpiece.

That the heart has its reasons unknown to the intellect is a truth articulated most memorably by Pascal, who is identified in the last chapters as the Archbishop's favorite writer.⁵ Pascal, a fellow citizen of Bishop Latour's hometown, is the one he quotes often to his students. In this ostensibly casual, though repeated, reference, Cather adds a significant resonance not treated by other critics to her work. For both as a person and as a thinker, Pascal provides a model for this novel's protagonist. For example, as a historical figure Pascal distinguished himself first in geometry and devised significant theorems about both cones and triangles. His Essai pour les coniques “demonstrates the properties of conic sections considered as perspectives of the circle, and provides a basis for the deduction of all conic properties by means which include a famous theorem, to the effect that if any hexagon is inscribed in a circle, the pairs of opposite sides intersect, respectively, in three points which are all on one straight line.”⁶ Pascal's projective geometry, according to Brome, touches esthetics, as well as mathematics, because it is concerned with perspective.⁷ Further, Pascal also did pioneer work in the mathematics of probability and in fact devised “Pascal's Triangle” as a way to understand occurrences otherwise necessary to attribute to blind chance.⁸

Cather's novel opens with the troubled archbishop wandering lost in a featureless country or rather one “crowded with features, all exactly alike” (p. 17). Full of “conical hills” in which “every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones” (p. 18), the landscape's “red sand hills … the shape of haycocks” are “so exactly like one another” that Latour seems to be wandering in “some geometrical nightmare” (p. 18). Cather insists, “The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over” (p. 18). They confuse Latour, and he must close his eyes against “the intrusive omnipresence of the triangle.” Like Pascal, however, Latour is a man “in a thousand” (p. 19). He can recognize in a natural object such as a juniper tree “the form of the Cross,” and as Pascal once wrote, “The perceptions of our senses are always true.”⁹ Latour, like Pascal though unlike Myra Henshawe or Godfrey St. Peter, is wise enough to kneel and surrender willingly to his God. In such a surrender lies his salvation: “Empowered by long training, the young priest blotted himself out of his own consciousness and meditated upon the anguish of his Lord. The Passion of Jesus became for him the only reality; the need of his own body was but a part of that conception” (p. 20).

Having endured the cross, Latour gains the crown and rises to new life. By submitting within this geometrical nightmare, he transcends it. Conical hills are again referred to when Joseph leaves for Colorado (p. 253) and, finally, Latour's cathedral rises from such hills with a purpose so strong it was like action (p. 272). Latour himself blends into the cone-shaped hills as much as his cathedral does. For Cather implies about lives what Latour accepts about architecture: “either a building is part of a place or it is not” (p. 272).

Pascal's solution of geometrical problems in mathematics becomes for Cather an analogy or image for Latour's solution of a problem in philosophy. For Cather, having read Pascal and knowing something about his achievement, appears to have plucked from his mathematical work an image she could use regarding her hero's faith. The paired but opposite elements of his circumscribed and anxiety-producing triangles intersect in such a way as to map a straight line, a purposeful action based on a faith. And knowing Pascal helps readers understand the line of Latour's spiritual development which Cather is tracing.

Pascal the believer and geometrician furnishes more than a personal parallel to Latour, however. He also furnishes a key to the singular structure of this novel. Pascal's Pensées begins with an explanation of “The difference between the mathematical and the intuitive mind.” In the one, we are told, “the principles are palpable, but removed from ordinary use.” In the other, “the principles are found in common use, and are before the eyes of everybody.”¹⁰ Pascal explores at length the difference between the human types while he respects both kinds. What the first of his Pensées does for the Cather reader, however, is to offer another explanation for Cather's decision to build this particular novel around two protagonists, both sympathetically presented, though they are opposite each other: Latour represents Pascal's mathematical, as Vaillant represents his intuitive, mind.

Cather's two equally admirable priests, Latour and Vaillant, are opposites in almost countless ways. Latour is a man of reflection, for example, while Vaillant is a man of action. Latour is careful and thoughtful while Vaillant is impulsive. Latour loves a few very well while Vaillant is sympathetic with many people. Latour is an organizer while Vaillant is a builder and proselytizer. Latour is an aristocrat while Vaillant is a baker's son. Latour is a scholar and Vaillant is a preacher. Latour gardens while Vaillant cooks. Latour identifies with the Indians while Vaillant identifies with the Mexicans. Latour finds building a cathedral work for the head while Vaillant seeks lost souls “without pride and without shame” (p. 262). Latour tries to curb excesses while Vaillant uses lax means for good ends. Latour acts expediently while Vaillant is dogmatic. Latour dies once of having lived and dies quietly as Indians squat silently in the nearby courtyard, while Joseph cheats death repeatedly and then attracts thousands to the funeral which is not unlike a circus. Such a list of differences, though already long, could be extended much further. But what is important is that Cather, like Pascal, accords her opposites equal respect; she concedes that neither is perfect and that each needs the other to function effectively.

Cather's choice of two opposite but equally worthy protagonists (though finally the Pascal-like Latour is the more important and central figure, as so many have asserted) is reflected in still another structural device. For Cather begins her novel twice, first with a prologue and then with a first chapter. The two openings—like intersecting triangles—begin Cather's own interesting study in perspective with paired yet opposite sentences, which provide the points of intersection through which one can map a novel's straight purpose.

The Prologue's opening sentence contains eight or ten (depending on how one counts) words or phrases which point toward important themes. In pleasant summer twilight (spared the glare and heat of the earlier sun), three Cardinals, privileged princes of the Church, survey a much cruder missionary from America as they dine luxuriously in a garden overlooking the safely domesticated Sabine Hills while keeping Rome in full sight.

Now consider the opposite but parallel first sentence of chapter I: “One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico.” Hour, season, light, motion, landscape, number, occupant, emotion, location and effect are all antithetical to the opening of the Prologue; yet the kind of information given in the two sentences is exactly parallel. Both beginnings are equally important, though they remain exact opposites. Thus Cather sets up her structural perspectives from her two beginnings, and retains that structure till both protagonists die admirably at the end.

Further, from the “splendid finish” mentioned in the Prologue, to the “purpose as strong as action” which the cathedral has just begun to serve in the final chapter, Cather's structure appears as clear and carefully controlled as a geometrical figure. To be clear, however, it does not have to be simple, as the memory of Pascal's hexagon inscribed within a circle prods us to recall. In fact, several familiar explanations of her structure remain helpful. For example, her episodes move along without her “holding the notes,” as if they were panels from such a saint's legend as Puvis de Chavannes once painted of Saint Genevieve.¹¹ Or the novel's nine books parallel the nine strokes of the bell when the Angelus is rung correctly.¹² Both of these “keys” quickly open up the novel, without necessarily admitting the reader to all of its chambers. Or to use another metaphor, once one recognizes the complexity of Cather's mind and the structure it devises in this book, one does not expect a single geometrical figure to summarize her plan. One may well demand, however, that the figures enclosed in her whole circle intersect at some point, even providing in the intersecting points the base of a straight line toward some dominating theme.

In the Prologue we are told that “every sacrifice” and “quite possibly martyrdom” may be demanded of the missionary bishop to the Southwest (p. 10). In the first chapter, we see Latour suffering a thirst so intense it replicates “the anguish of his Lord” and becomes “the only reality” (p. 20). Throughout the novel, Latour artfully and painstakingly builds his life in the desert as carefully as if it were a cathedral; that artfully constructed life, like a cross-shaped cathedral, suggesting both intensest trial and intensest triumph, eventually rises from the surrounding conical hills “with a purpose so strong that it was like action” (p. 272). Given the care with which Cather builds these associations in her text, it surprises us neither that Latour's life contains as many trials as a cathedral contains stations of the cross, nor that its exquisitely-crafted triumphs are part of its treasures.

Latour's life stations of the cross begin as he experiences the lostness in his desert in which he has every evidence that God has forsaken him. He is rescued by the instincts of his mount, only to discover another “station” at Aqua Secreta. For in this “Bishopric in miniature” hidden in the middle of “hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert” (p. 32), Latour finds an ignorance so dense that the occupants can hold only one idea in their minds at one time. These natives illustrate for him the intensity of the needs he must meet as well as the quietly hidden sources of his own refreshment.

As he continues from station to station, not all the Bishop's days are filled with tribulations. He shares a restorative Christmas dinner with Father Joseph, hears the Angelus rung miraculously well on a beautiful bell, and even receives a beautiful mule for his future travels, thanks to Vaillant's zeal. But on the road to Mora he comes near being murdered, and soon thereafter, in visiting Father Jesus de Baca, he encounters the remnants of a faith which precedes even his own and therefore seems more “basic” than his. Further, Latour confronts superficial frivolity in Gallegos of Albuquerque, Indian superstition and religious intractability at Laguna, pride and personal ambition in the inappropriate church built at Ácoma, Nature's threat to “swallow him up” in Jacinto's snake cave, undisciplined lechery and sloth in Father Martínez of Taos, and avarice and the lewd speech of Lucero. Still later, Doña Isabella Olivares teaches him something about personal vanity, the terror of aging, and his own cruelty. And Joseph's absence leaves him periodically prey to periods of coldness and doubt and to the recognition that Joseph returns his love much less intensely than Jean gives it. The discovery of gold beneath Pike's Peak doubles his responsibilities as well as expanding his territory, just as he begins to get his first territory organized; and when he finally survives all these ordeals, Latour must face, for having lived, death itself—extinction as ultimate reward. Truly, in his life he endures as many painful trials and representative tests as his Master did. In enduring them, he incorporates them into his “living sacrifice” as Jesus and his worshippers have been required to do. “Either a life is part of a place or it is not,” we might paraphrase the bishop's architect. Yet truly, his life, as much as his cathedral, symbolizes his diocese, his faith, and his mission.

Seeing Latour's life as a structure which he methodically builds allows one to understand why Cather places such stress, in the prologue, on the need for the new bishop to the Southwest to have intelligence in matters of art. Obviously Cather believes in the sacredness of art, for she places some art object in every parish and significant location within Latour's huge diocese. Death Comes for the Archbishop, in fact, is not only an artwork itself; the novel functions like a museum or gallery containing other art of which the greatest work is the portrait of Latour. The whole book becomes Cather's enclosing cathedral.

From the beginning, Latour's taste defines excellence. Rescued, he is immediately interested in “the wooden figures of the saints, found in even the poorest Mexican houses,” which are “much more to his taste than the factory-made plaster images in his mission churches in Ohio” (p. 28). But because his taste is exquisite, Latour displays “a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts,” and toward all objects, even in the desert (p. 16). Upon his return, he chooses his study for its “agreeable shape” and lives in a kind of sacred artwork, perfumed by piñonwood smoke which smells like incense. Much later still, he receives a present which will be good for the eye, as Joseph is given something good for the palate. In all these ways, in fact, Cather calls attention to the importance of beauty, of beautiful art objects and decorations, and of the Archbishop's ability to appreciate them.

Religion is certainly a major source of beauty and art here, so much so that religion itself comes to seem, by the end, the highest art of any culture. Thus the novel leads to a deep respect for all religion, as for all sincerely functional and indigenous forms of art. Truly, in this novel, “art and religion, they're the same thing in the end.” As Padre de Baca's parish christianizes the ancient parrot, so the Ácoma Indians paganize the painting of St. Joseph. But both artworks remain vital symbols because they are integral parts of a surrounding culture.

Finally, art and religion are not only the same thing. Both art and religion are forms of miracle. In fact, a central theme of this—as of Cather's next novel, Shadows on the Rock (1931)—is the nature of miracle. Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant understand miracle in different and opposite ways, Joseph's miracle always running against, as Jean's occurs within the predictable bounds of, Nature. Both, like Pascal before them, nevertheless recognize that miracles occur, and more often than many think. As Joseph says, “miracle is something that we can hold in our hands and love” (p. 50), and as Jean confirms wisely, “Where there is great love there are always miracles” (p. 50).

Finally this book, built as carefully as a cathedral, presents the lives of two dedicated men in a reverent and therefore artistically and religiously satisfying way. It leaves the reader, in fact, with two opposite conclusions, either of which may summarize the novel: they are just men, after all, and that is enough; or they are just men, finally, and that is a miracle. But the ultimate miracle, one we can hold in our hands and love, is the novel that exists with a purpose as strong as action and witnesses that Cather's artful spirit has risen to new life, through faith.

Notes

1. Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 213. The facts of Cather's life at this period are also provided by Woodress' biography: “By December [of 1925] she was back on Bank Street working like a steam engine and happy” (p. 212). “Willa Cather's next novel was My Mortal Enemy, published in the fall of 1926, but … written more than a year earlier—before her day of wrath had completely passed. … But of all her works, it has the most obscure provenance. … one can only conclude that she was reluctant to discuss the materials that went into this book” (p. 213). “[S]he may have seen in Myra Henshawe a glimpse of what she might have come to if she had not had her art to sustain her. It was not long after this that Elizabeth Sergeant was astonished to have Willa Cather ask if she thought psychoanalysis might do her any good. Nothing came of this inquiry, however, but My Mortal Enemy seems to have provided a final catharsis. By the time the book was published, she had retreated into the past and was well along with Death Comes for the Archbishop” (p. 216).

2. The Professor's House (New York: Knopf, 1959), p. 69.

3. Stouck, quoting Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, reminds us of the note Cather wrote in a copy of the The Professor's House which she gave to Robert Frost: “This is really a story about ‘letting go with the heart but most reviewers seem to consider it an attempt to popularize a system of philosophy.” David Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 100.

4. My Mortal Enemy (New York: Vintage, 1961), p. 94.

5. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927; rpt. New York: Knopf, 1959), pp. 267, 276. Hereafter all references will be cited in the text.

6. J. H. Brome, Pascal (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), p. 48.

7. Ibid.

8. Brome, p. 49

9. Blaise Pascal, Pensées/The Provincial Letters (New York: Modern Library, 1941), Pensee # 9, p. 7.

10. Pensées, pp. 3-5.

11. Clinton Keeler, “Narrative Without Accent: Cather and Puvis de Chavannes,” American Quarterly, 17 (1965), 119-26.

12. Robert L. Gale, “Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Explicator, 21 (1963), 75.