Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century
by Annette Ferran
Death Comes for the Archbishop
The Modern Library’s list of 100 Best
Novels of the 20th Century includes 69 male writers and only 9 female
writers. Fortunately, Willa Cather
makes the list with her meditative novel Death
Comes for the Archbishop (#61).
This
is the story, based on historical events, of a French priest called Latour who
is sent to the Americas to rescue Catholicism from the local priests who’ve
gone rogue. Death does come for
Latour in the end, but only after a long and full life. When Death arrives, the
Archbishop is ready.
There
is something distinctly Midwestern about Cather’s storytelling. It is unhurried, deliberate, thorough
and intentional. Psychologically
and physically, every possible detail is portrayed, with an effect like the
layers of paint on an Old Master.
Her vocabulary is elevated—no advice from Strunk & White or Orwell
is followed in this story.
Five-dollar words abound, as do snatches of conversation in French and
Spanish, untranslated. The style is linguistically rich.
Cather
has this novel divided into sections she calls books, which give the story an
episodic feel. It proceeds like a rolling river, steady in pace, interspersed
with eddying and tumbling, and with white water action—violence, fright, lust,
sickness, exultance.
The
faith peculiar to Catholicism is the theme of this novel, and its protagonists
live lives completely foreign to this reader and, I imagine, to many
others. The story is set in the mid-1800s
to start (it spans some 40 years), in a part of the country, “New Mexico,” that
was only just barely annexed and hadn’t yet settled itself into a name. Culture
clashes are the rule of life there, between the native people, referred to both
by their own names and by the generic “Indian,” the Mexicans, the Americans
(including Kit Carson), and the European missionaries, and between the
established lifestyles of the people already living in the area and the
colonialist desires of many of the aforementioned groups. Languages mix, attitudes mix,
miscommunication is countered occasionally by transcendent connections. The
country itself—the physical land, its weathers, its animals and vegetation, the
rocks and the deserts, the distances between human settlements—threaten and
command the people with an overpowering strength. The historical explorations
exist side-by-side with explorations of the landscape.
On
top of the established Catholicism of Europe, the novel explores the ways in
which the religion merged with and was shaped by the mystic beliefs of the
native people the Church sought to convert. Saint worship, for instance, fit nicely into the practice of
ascribing natural processes to mythical entities. So the native people take into their practice tributes to
Catholic saints, in order to get good crops or healthy children, and the Church
in turn gains adherents and of course a gross influence on the country’s
development. It is a fascinating
slice of American history.
Cather’s
writing, particularly in this novel, presages that of Annie Proulx or Cormac
McCarthy, though it contains more hopefulness than theirs does. The hopefulness comes through Father
Latour, who is as enraptured by the people of this new land as he is by his own
deeply held faith. He lives by
God’s word in a place where the god of his understanding is an alien. He is patient and tolerant. He is persistent. He sees God’s hand in everything he
encounters and expects his fate to meet him at any moment, while also taking
every moment to forward the agenda the Church has charged him with. In repeated amusing events, for
instance, he marries couples in villages he visits, insisting on marrying them
all in the evening, and then waiting until the next morning to baptize their
children, following the proper order of things. Like Proulx or McCarthy,
Cather’s portrayals are observational and unsentimental. The lives and stories are harsh. But they are beautiful.
One
quite enjoyable aspect to this novel for me is the attention to food. The priests like to cook and eat. Their
meals are described with enough detail that you could probably recreate the
recipes. Of particular interest is
the comparison of French agriculture with the natural produce of the area of
New Mexico. There is quite a lot of discussion of lettuce (French; unknown, apparently,
in the new world) and of the comparative merits of peaches and apricots on
either side of the world.
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a
rewarding read. It is dense, rich, nuanced, and lyrical, and it provides, as
all great literature must, a portal to an unfamiliar world.
Annette Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania,
and works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also an editorial assistant
for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
