Willa Cather
Page 30
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My Mortal Enemy was written quickly, in the spring of 1925, as soon as The Professor’s House was finished. That summer she and Edith set out again for the Southwest. In July, Cather was in New Mexico, correcting the proofs of The Professor’s House (which came out in September to better reviews than she expected) at the San Gabriel Ranch in Española, north of Santa Fé. After that she made her wary visit to the rich, eccentric, bohemian American hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan, on her Taos estate. Cather greatly admired Mabel’s silent, impressive-looking Indian husband Tony Luhan, who acted as a chauffeur and guide, and provided a model for the Archbishop’s Indian friend Eusabio. But she kept clear of what Lawrence (now miles away with Frieda and Dorothy Brett at the Del Monte Ranch, where Cather paid her respects) spitefully called ‘Mabeltown’. She stayed in the Pink House, set apart from Mabel’s social round, and she did not stay long.2
Her next stop was Santa Fé, still, at that time (for all the American building of the 1880s which her Bishop would deplore), a characteristically New Mexican town, full of adobe houses, set among ‘carnelian-coloured hills’ which ‘closed about it like two encircling arms’. [DA, p.255] The town was dominated by its golden, French Romanesque cathedral of St Francis, the 1880s work of the French Jesuit Archbishop Lamy, whose bronze statue Cather had often admired. Her feeling for French culture and architecture went back, of course, to her early reading and her first visit to Europe. And her interest in the New Mexican mission priests was an old one too: like most of her subjects, it had been saved up for years. Reconstructing her sources for Death Comes for the Archbishop, she remembered her meeting with a Belgian priest in 1912, in ‘the beautiful old church at Santa Cruz, New Mexico’, ‘where he raised fancy poultry and sheep and had a wonderful vegetable and flower garden’.3 This knowledgeable farmer-priest was of use in The Professor’s House as Father Duchene. And, just as her feeling for the mesas and the ancient Indian culture was saved, used, and then re-used, so her interest in the mission priests persisted. She told E.K. Brown in 1946 that she had once sat up by the Martyr’s Cross, east of Santa Fé, watching the Sangre de Cristo mountains colour in the sunset (a colour which the Bishop startlingly but characteristically compares to liquefying blood of old saints and martyrs) and realized suddenly that the real story of the Southwest was the story of the missionary priests from France, with their cultivated minds, their large vision, and their noble purpose.4 Now, in this summer of 1925, a chance discovery clinched her feeling for the Southwest and her interest in the missions. She came across a Jesuit biography, by a Father Howlett, of Archbishop Lamy’s right-hand man in New Mexico, Joseph Machebeuf, who later became Bishop of Denver. As the story of Richard Wetherill had done for Tom Outland’s story, it unlocked her subject, and enabled her to graft a historical narrative onto her private religious feelings.
The stay in Santa Fé was followed, that summer, by dramatic journeys to the Indian pueblo on the great rock mesa of Acoma, west of Albuquerque (via an enforced stay at a filthy hotel in Laguna, where they were trapped by rainstorms). The drive (they hired a chauffeur: Cather never learned to drive a car)5 took them past the Enchanted Mesa, the rock on which an Indian tribe had once built their village and been destroyed. Nearly twenty years before, Cather’s mid-Western boys had told each other this story in ‘The Enchanted Bluff’; now it would be told to the Bishop, for him to make into a spiritual parable of ‘the rock’ as ‘the utmost expression of human need’. Translated thus, from fiction to fact to fiction again, altered in its use from Turgenevian, impressionistic pastoral to a formal Christian trope, and appropriated from aboriginal American history into a modernist American narrative, the ‘rock’ now settles into the centre of Cather’s landscape.
As she left New Mexico, all the materials for Death Comes for the Archbishop – Mexican, French, American, Christian, Indian – were falling into place. After a meeting with Roscoe and his family in Denver, and then (as usual in the summers of the 1920s, and as usual without Edith) a visit to Red Cloud to see her parents and her brother James’s and sister Jessica’s families, she went back to Jaffrey and started to write the novel. The autumn was interrupted by two lectures at Chicago University and the Women’s City Club at Cleveland on ‘The Tendency of the Modern Novel’ – the kind of appearances Cather undertook reluctantly but carried out efficiently. (She gave short shrift to a Cleveland reporter who tried to find out about her next novel, but who elicited one revealing remark: ‘America works on my mind like light on a photographic plate’.)6 By March 1926, when My Mortal Enemy was published (to a puzzled and lukewarm reception), she was well under way; she was to describe the writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop as ‘a happy vacation from life’, a source of daily pleasure.7
In May she went back to its setting – for the last time, as it turned out – visiting the dramatic site of the Canyon de Chelly, in Navajo reservation land (a long car and horse ride from Gallup), and the strange landmark nearby, a high rock shaped like a ship. This finale to her Southwestern travels was fitted, like a coda, into the last part of the novel. Back in Taos, Cather took advantage again, briefly, of the Luhans’ hospitality, and also of the Californian novelist Mary Austin’s offer of her house in Santa Fé. (When Austin, in her mystical and self-regarding 1933 autobiography, Earth Horizon, boasted that Cather wrote all of Death Comes for the Archbishop in her house, and at the same time criticized its Francophile enthusiasm for the cathedral which had been ‘a calamity’ for the local Spanish culture, Cather was not pleased.8) In the autumn, she made a short and uncharacteristic stay at a writer’s colony in New Hampshire, where she was not remembered for conviviality,9 then travelled up to Grand Manan, the wild Maine island she had fallen in love with in 1921, to oversee the start of the cottage that she and Edith were having built there. For the rest of the autumn she was back at the Shattuck Inn in New Jaffrey, finishing the novel, as she wrote wistfully a year later, ‘in a lovely place’.10 By Christmas Death Comes for the Archbishop was finished, and serialization began in January.11
Death Comes for the Archbishop is marked out and moved along by the mission priests’ enormous, adventurous, arduous journeys, the novel’s substitutes for a sustained plot. These huge journeys were true to the history of the pioneering priests: the biographies of Bishops Lamy and Machebeuf are full of them. But they also drew Cather to their lives through a sense of affinity. The writing of Death Comes for the Archbishop was, she said, a reflection of her pleasure in wandering and riding through the Southwest over many years.12 When, in a letter of 1925 from Santa Fé, she compared the pleasure of writing to the pleasure of a pack trip through desert and mountain country,13 she was not just playing the outdoor, un-genteel, anti-intellectual American writer: this novel really was an attempt to make these pleasures correspond. It enacted, though, not only her pleasant adventures in the Southwest, but the formidable long-distance travels almost annually entailed by family claims and her pursuit of remote writing retreats. She divided these experiences between her two hero-priests. Father Joseph Vaillant (the novel’s name for Joseph Machebeuf) has her stoical energy and appetite for travel, Father Jean Latour (Archbishop Lamy) her aesthetic and historical feeling for what she sees.
Cather explains her choice of these two historical figures, and of a narrative to suit them, in a fascinating open letter of 1927 to the editor of The Commonweal. Like all the public statements on her aesthetics, it insists, misleadingly, on the natural inevitability of her writing, while revealing a complex process of appropriation and selection. Cather gives a long list of sources for the story: her travels in the Southwest, the Belgian priest and his garden, the New Mexican mission churches with their wooden statues of saints (‘a direct expression of some very real and lively human feeling’), her growing curiosity about the distinguished figure of Archbishop Lamy, the discovery of Howlett’s book, the frescoes of the life of St Geneviève by Puvis de Chavannes (painted on the nave of the Pantheon in Paris in the 1870s), the ‘Golden Legend
’ (a medieval collection of saints’ lives), the language of Father Machebeuf’s letters, some conversations with a priest in Red Cloud, and Holbein’s ‘Dance of Death’, mentioned in passing as the inspiration for the title. The use she made of this mixture of personal, literary, oral and painterly materials is brought together in the passage on Puvis de Chavannes and the ‘Golden Legend’, a marvellous (and much-quoted) exposure of the deliberate strategies behind her seeming unartfulness:
My book was a conjunction of the general and the particular, like most works of the imagination. 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. In the Golden Legend the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance. The essence of such writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it – but to touch and pass on. I felt that such writing would be a kind of discipline in these days when the ‘situation’ is made to count for so much in writing, when the general tendency is to force things up. In this kind of writing the mood is the thing – all the little figures and stories are mere improvisations that come out of it.14
The ‘conjunction of the general and the particular’ was not a new departure: nor was the grafting of specific styles of art onto personal materials. But, for the first time, Cather was translating historical particulars into fiction. It is a long way from Father Howlett’s pious hagiography of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, via de Chavannes, Holbein, and the ‘Golden Legend’, to the ‘something without accent’ that Cather made of it; and it is extremely interesting to see how she transformed her historical source into ‘the style of legend’.15
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Father Howlett used Machebeuf’s letters to his sister, a nun in a provincial French convent, to tell a chronological story of a young Jesuit seminarian, son of a baker in the Auvergne, who in 1839 broke away from his family, with his friend and fellow-priest Jean Baptiste Lamy, and ran away to the Seminary of Foreign Missions in Paris. Both young priests were sent out as missionaries to Ohio, where they worked for ten years. (In 1844, Machebeuf went to Europe and had an audience with Pope Gregory XVI.) In 1850 Father Lamy was appointed Bishop Apostolic of the newly annexed American territory of New Mexico, and took Machebeuf with him as his Vicar General, as ‘part of the agreement we made’, (Machebeuf said) ‘never to separate’. (An agreement which would be set aside, to Lamy’s sadness, when in 1860 Machebeuf was transferred to Denver, to become a notable pioneer priest in the rough goldmining districts of Colorado, until his death in 1889, a year after Lamy’s.) Their early days in the Southwest were dominated by their dramatic confrontations with the suspicious, anti-American native Mexican clergy (some of whose lives, according to Machebeuf, were ‘scandalous beyond description’), their restoring of a Catholic faith in decline and of mission churches in disrepair, and their political programme of ‘detaching the church in New Mexico from its Mexican affiliations, and making it dependent upon conditions in the United States’. Howlett complacently attributes to the influence of such Catholic priests the ‘elevation of the New Mexican to his present conditions of comparatively intelligent, honest and moral civilization’.16
Nothing could be further from Cather’s impartial, apolitical tone. Her appropriation of this, the latest of her male authorities, is all in the direction of suggestiveness and evocation, away from propaganda and orthodoxy. Obviously, she switches heroes, making Howlett’s background figure of Lamy (a thoughtful scholar-priest) into her central character, and giving Machebeuf, the homely man of action, a second place. To make the shift more conclusive she altered the order of their deaths, so that Lamy/Latour can include, in his last retrospections, the funeral of his old friend. Their names, too, are adapted to her special needs. Latour’s tower (of strength? ivory?) contrasts with ‘Vaillant’ as pilgrim-knight-priest. There is a reminder of Professor St Peter in his attic room (or tower) musing on the valiant Tom Outland. And the meaningful names make a strong gesture, in this Catholicized narrative, towards the great Nonconformist text which so much infuenced Cather, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.17
So that Vaillant’s valour would not dominate the novel, Cather carefully toned down or omitted all Howlett’s stories of Machebeuf’s courageous exploits. His public confrontations with the recalcitrant native priests, for instance, are passed over; instead the emphasis is placed on their picturesque, allegorical qualities. Padre Martínez, a formidable embodiment of cunning, primitivism and sensuality, is connected with the sombre rites of the ‘Penitentes’ at Abiquiu (there is no mention of this in Howlett), and Lucero, his companion in revolt, is given a wonderfully extravagant, Browningesque miser’s deathbed scene. The legendary American scout Kit Carson, who in Howlett actively supports Lamy and Machebeuf against Martínez, figures in the novel only in glimpses. He is a friend to Latour and to the native culture (he has a Mexican wife, and is a highly intelligent man who cannot read – ‘he had got ahead of books’ [DA, p.75]) but plays no active part until the very end, when his ‘misguided’ war against the Indians surprisingly comes into focus. But mostly he slips through the book as a scout should, providing essential information, turning up when needed, and making himself scarce.
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Cather’s improvisation on themes provided by Howlett’s ‘Life and Letters’ are as revealing as her suppressions. Latour becomes her kind of hero:18 delicate and distinguished, chivalric, aesthetic, sympathetic (especially to the Indians, for whom Howlett has no time at all), nostalgic for France, in love with order and tradition, patient to the point of passivity, vulnerable, self-doubting, and in need of Vaillant’s support. (Their close friendship was a historical fact – Lamy recalls Machebeuf from Arizona, Howlett records, only because ‘he wanted to see him’19 – but Cather makes the most of it.) Machebeuf, similarly, is developed from every detail offered by his energetic letters into a characterization of an ugly, stoic, zealous Frenchman in the New World, with a love of good food and a talent for begging for the Church, a lack of pride, a democratic gregariousness, and a sentimental faith in the Virgin Mary. Some phrases in his letters, like his jovial complaint that Lamy always sends him to do the dirty work (‘à fouetter les chats’) [DA, p.162] are simply lifted, others give her the handle for a whole vivid scene. A mention of his love of olive oil and salads is expanded into his first appearance, cooking a French Christmas dinner for Latour and complaining of the lack of ingredients: ‘ “How can a man make a proper soup without leeks, that king of vegetables?” ’ [DA, p.39] Machebeuf’s reference in a letter to his begging two mules from a rich Mexican with the words ‘Bishop Lamy needs a mule as badly as I do’20 becomes, in the section called ‘The White Mules’, a self-contained story illustrating Vaillant’s mixture of candour and ruthlessness. In a bustling, high-coloured, comical narrative which fits its subject, Father Joseph briskly brings the Christian sacraments to Manuel Lujon’s benighted household of servants (‘ “No, I tell you, Lujon, the marriages first, the baptisms afterwards; that order is but Christian” ’); [DA, p.55] makes sure, to the amazement of his host, that his lamb for dinner is roasted saignant and not stewed with chillis; and wheedles the two mules, for the glory of God, out of the generous but reluctant Lujon. In the next scene, an obvious contrast, Vaillant and Latour, riding those same mules, are looking for shelter in the rain on a lonely stretch of the road to Mora; this time their host is a sinister American, a would-be assassin, with a terrified Mexican wife, who warns them away and escapes after them. There is no climax and no comment in either the jovial or the ominous episode, but a meaning is saved up from each of them: the mules beco
me a touching symbol for the two men’s friendship, and the criminal’s wife, Magdalena, rescued by the priests, turns into Mary Magdalene.
The mules, stolen from history for Cather’s own purposes, as Vaillant steals them from Manuel Lujon for his, set the pace of the book; she once said that she saw Death Comes for the Archbishop as a narrative, hardly a novel at all, which moved along on two white mules that were not in a hurry.21 Howlett’s history is transformed into a stylized narrative which avoids chronology and three-dimensionality. There is a plot – the two men make their long journey to New Mexico, they subdue the opposition of the native priests, they bring spiritual order to their terrain over long hard years, Vaillant goes to Colorado and Latour builds his cathedral. But that is not how we see it. We start with some subtle European dignitaries of the Church hearing from a missionary priest, over a very civilized Roman dinner, of the religious needs of the new territories. Then, as though walking through a frame into a different light (another version of the technique of The Professor’s House) we see a series of significant illuminated pictures. Here is the young Bishop lost and thirsting in the desert, praying in front of a juniper tree shaped like a cross which has ‘miraculously’ appeared in his path; now here is the Bishop, having been rescued and taken to a Mexican settlement, tellingly called ‘Agua Secreta’, sitting in the afternoon sun by the banks of the ‘life-giving stream’, reflecting on this village as ‘his Bishopric in miniature’: