Recent repeated excursions to New Mexico (if only in my mind and photo archives) resurrected thoughts of another essay long wanting to be written. If you remember the listing of literary luminaries who enjoyed Mabel Dodge Luhan’s hospitality and patronage from my post If These Walls Could Talk, Willa Cather’s name was among them.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was one of America’s best-known and most widely read writers in the first half of the 20^th century and joined the pantheon of Pulitzer prize-winning authors in 1923 for her WWI novel, One of Ours. My husband and I set out on a literary pilgrimage to Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska, in the autumn of 2015, and I summarized my impressions in a previous post, A Visit to Catherland.

During that trip I became the proud owner of Willa Cather’s fictional creations and subsequently read one volume after the other. Apart from One of Ours, My Ántonia, one of her so-called prairie novels, might be most familiar as it has been required reading for generations of America’s students. She will be forever connected in the public’s mind with Nebraska’s Great Plains, but several stories play in different settings—New Mexico among them, which she explored multiple times and whose natural and cultural landscapes intrigued her.

In Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, by Edith Lewis, Willa’s companion of over 40 years, Edith relays an episode that says much about both Mabel Dodge Luhan and Willa Cather (to whom she always refers formally):

On one of Willa Cather’s returns to Santa Fé from her journeys about the country, Mabel Luhan called on her and asked her to visit her at her hacienda in Taos. With one or two exceptions, Willa Cather never visited anyone; and at this time especially she wanted to be absolutely free to follow her own devices. But Mabel Luhan was very persistent, in a quiet persuasive way. She offered Willa Cather one of her guest houses to stay in…and promised that she should never be bothered by anyone….Willa Cather finally agreed to come for two or three days….Although Willa Cather had intended to make a very brief visit, we stayed for more than two weeks.

Her two visits to Mabel Luhan—for she stayed with her a second time the following summer—were very rewarding to Willa Cather. Mabel Luhan—essentially an artist herself—knew the conditions that contribute to an artist’s work, and was able to create them. She had, too, a large, ungrudging generosity toward people she admired; one felt that she enjoyed helping them toward their aim and seeing them realize their desires.

Tony Luhan, Mabel’s husband, captivated many visitors who stayed with the couple and Willa Cather was no exception. Edith describes his influence as follows:

Willa Cather was very much impressed with Tony Luhan, and felt an instant liking and admiration for him. He was a splendid figure, over six feet tall, with a noble head and dignified carriage; there was a great simplicity and kindness in his voice and manner….from Tony, Willa Cather learned many things about the country and the people that she could not have learned otherwise. He talked very little, but what he said was always illuminating and curiously poetic. Although Eusabio in “Death Comes for the Archbishop” is a Navajo…, I think his character was essentially drawn from Tony Luhan.

Incidentally, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis also stayed with the Lawrences on their ranch north of Taos during one of those trips (click here for my post D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico).

During her repeated sojourns in New Mexico, Willa Cather absorbed everything she could about the land and its people and turned it into grist for her creative mill. When I first saw the book title of Death Comes to the Archbishop, thoughts of a murder-mystery came unbidden, even though I should have known better, based on what I had already learned about the author. And while the titular archbishop does not suffer murder, the narrative delves into the mysterious world of faith and religion by following the peregrinations of a Catholic priest in New Mexico in the 19^th century.

The lives of numerous Native tribes at home in the Americas were upended with the arrival of the Spanish, who occupied vast expanses of land and claimed it for the Spanish Crown after the 1521 conquest of the Aztec Empire, thereby establishing New Spain. New Mexico was one of New Spain’s kingdoms and when Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, New Mexico lay in the territory of that new nation. After the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, it was ceded to the United States. 1850 saw the creation of the US Territory of New Mexico, and on January 6, 1912, New Mexico became the 47th US state.

With the Spanish Conquistadors came Catholicism and about 34% of New Mexico’s adult population still identifies as Catholic today.  Willa Cather, who grew up Baptist and later became Episcopalian, was fascinated by Catholicism and its influence in New Mexico. In Death Comes to the Archbishop, she fictionalizes the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), a French-born Roman Catholic priest and eventual Archbishop of Santa Fe, who becomes Jean Marie Latour in her novel.

After the 1927 publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop, the author explained her motivations for writing it to her admiring audience:

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 St Genevieve in my student days, I have wished that I could try something like that in prose; something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition. In The Golden Legend [a medieval collection of hagiographies] the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt on 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.

It is in this spirit of slight detachment that in Death Comes to the Archbishop, New Mexico’s geography, flora, fauna, and humanity are presented through the eyes of a Catholic priest who comes here from a different world. And even though his responsibility is to convert nonbelievers, and to bring religion and ritual back to those Catholics who lived without the ministrations of priests for decades, if not centuries on account of their geographical isolation, the fictional Latour does not belong to the group of “fire and brimstone” clerics and is depicted as a rather sympathetic figure who is interested as much in nature, culture, and human accomplishments as in religion. While some Catholic priests are portrayed as selfish and exploitative of their flock, one looks in vain for criticism of the Church as a whole, or its role in the often forced conversion of America’s Indigenous groups who had practiced their own beliefs and traditions for centuries, if not millennia.

In order to illustrate this book’s (beautiful-to-my-ears) style, and to cover a range of topics, I chose several rather longish quotes:

The traveler dismounted, drew from his pocket a much worn book, and baring his head, knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree. …A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man, —it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence. His brow was open, generous, reflective, his features handsome and somewhat severe. There was a singular elegance about the hands….Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth—brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.

In all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between….The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush, —that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.

The two priests rode side by side into Los Ranchos de Taos….The inhabitants were all gathered in the square before the church. When the Bishop dismounted to enter church, the women threw their shawls on the dusty pathway for him to walk upon and as he passed through the kneeling congregation, men and women snatched for his hand to kiss the Episcopal ring. In his own country all this would have been highly distasteful for Jean Marie Latour. Here, these demonstrations seemed a part of the high colour that was in landscape and gardens, in the flaming cactus and the gaudily decorated altars, —in the agonized Christs and dolorous Virgins and the very human figures of the saints. He had already learned that with this people religion was necessarily theatrical.

In the working of silver or drilling of turquoise the Indians had exhaustless patience; upon their blankets and belts and ceremonial robes they lavished their skills and pains. But their conception of decoration did not extend to the landscape. They seemed to have none of the European’s desire to “master” nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect….The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Bishop Latour had one very keen worldly ambition; to build in Santa Fé a cathedral which would be worthy of a setting naturally beautiful. As he cherished this wish and meditated upon it, he came to feel that such a building might be a continuation of himself and his purpose, a physical body full of his aspirations after he had passed from the scene.

The narrative ends with the death of the aged Archbishop Latour of natural causes, after the completion of his dream church in the center of Santa Fe (minus the steeples on the two towers, which have remained unfinished). This corresponds to the real life of Archbishop Lamy, who was responsible for the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, starting in 1869, and where he was buried in 1888 following his death of pneumonia at the age of 73.

Built in a Romanesque Revival style by French architects and Italian stonemasons, the edifice is strikingly different from New Mexico’s predominantly adobe-style churches. The cathedral was built at the site of a previous church with roots dating back as far as 1610. The original structure was replaced in 1630, but was destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. In 1714, a new church was erected only to be replaced by Lamy’s cathedral, with the exception of a small preserved chapel. This is dedicated to La Conquistadora (Our Lady of Peace), a sculpture brought to this continent from Spain in 1625 and thought to be the oldest representation of the Virgin Mary in the United States.

Willa Cather’s visit to this Cathedral served as one of her inspirations to write Death Comes to the Archbishop. Having read her “legend” inspired us to visit what has become one of Santa Fe’s best-known landmarks.

To enlarge a photo, click on it. To read its caption, hover cursor over it.

Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. Two planned steeples on the towers were never finished.

Bishop Lamy statue from 1915

Interior of cathedral

Main altar of the cathedral

Altar in the Chapel of La Conquistadora with the sculpture of the Virgin Mary