In Webster County, Nebraska, the prairie rolls in waves, following the contours of a tableland gouged by rivers and creeks. At the southern edge of the county, a few hundred feet north of the Nebraska-Kansas border, is a six-hundred-acre parcel of land called the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie. Cather spent much of her childhood in Red Cloud, six miles up the road, and for many people who love her writing, and perhaps for some who don’t, the Cather Prairie is one of the loveliest places on earth. You park at the top of a hill and follow a path down to a gulch, where a creek widens into a pond. At the bottom, you no longer see traces of modern civilization, though you can hear trucks on Route 281 as they clamber out of the Kansas flats. The land here was never plowed, and with careful cultivation it preserves the prairie as Cather roamed it, in the eighteen-eighties—an immemorial zone of grass, trees, birds, water, and wind. You can picture one of Cather’s pioneer women—Alexandra Bergson, the canny farm owner in “O Pioneers!”; Thea Kronborg, the budding operatic soprano in “The Song of the Lark”; Ántonia Shimerda, the buffeted heroine of “My Ántonia”—coming over the top of the hill. When I was last there, in June, the sky was a blaring blue and the hills were a murmur of greens. The air was hot and heavy enough that thoughts evaporated from my mind. I lay under a cottonwood tree and listened to leaves and grass swaying . . .
Et cetera, et cetera. The only person capable of doing justice to the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie is the woman who engendered it. In “My Ántonia,” the orphaned young settler Jim Burden delivers a rhapsody that many Cather fans can recite by heart:
Visitors to the Cather Prairie are a varied lot. In June, I encountered a woman who was struggling to maintain a farm in Kansas after her parents’ death. The previous day, Laura Bush, the former First Lady, had gone for a walk in the tall grass, with members of the Secret Service standing watch.
The occasion that brought the three of us to town, along with several hundred other Cather People, as locals call the literary tourists, was the opening of the National Willa Cather Center, a seven-million-dollar facility with a climate-controlled archive, apartments for scholars, museum exhibits, and a bookstore. The complex is the dream project of the Willa Cather Foundation, which is based in Red Cloud. Bush was the keynote speaker, and she recounted how Cather’s “strong, self-reliant women” had appealed to a girl growing up in West Texas. Bush recalled her grandmother Jessie Hawkins, who had driven a dairy truck and learned to lay brick. At this festive occasion, Bush omitted the most Cather-like element of her grandmother’s story: when Hawkins was young, her father killed himself on his farm, with a shotgun. Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia’s father, does the same. Bush quoted another indelible Cather sentence: “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened.”
Red Cloud, which has a population of about a thousand and retains a farm-oriented economy, belongs to a select company of literary towns that are permanently inscribed with a writer’s identity: places like Hannibal, Missouri (Mark Twain) and Oxford, Mississippi (William Faulkner). Cather depicted Red Cloud in six of her twelve novels. The town is called Hanover in “O Pioneers!”; Moonstone in “The Song of the Lark”; Black Hawk in “My Ántonia”; Frankfort in “One of Ours”; Sweet Water in “A Lost Lady”; and Haverford in “Lucy Gayheart.” There is always a main street running through the town center, with the wealthier residents to the west and the poorer ones to the east. The railroad always cuts across to the south. Often there is a one-and-a-half-story house off the main street, where, up in an attic room, a girl dreams of being somewhere else. One of the first achievements of the Cather Foundation, in the nineteen-sixties, was to preserve the family home, and up in the attic you can see the wallpaper that Cather installed when she was a child—a pattern of “small red and brown roses on a yellowish ground,” as she writes in “The Song of the Lark.”
Cather transplanted entire Red Cloud households into her fiction, often with physical characteristics and personalities intact. Many of the families Cather wrote about still live in the area. In June, I stayed at the Kaley House, an opulently restored bed-and-breakfast owned by Jay Yost, who grew up in Red Cloud and now works as a private banker in New York. When Yost and his husband, Wade Leak, are in town—Yost is on the Cather Foundation board—they convene mildly raucous gatherings of local family and friends. The first night I was there, I met Brad Sherwood, of Omaha, a great-grandson of Carrie Miner, whose family inspired the prosperous, upright Harlings in “My Ántonia.” At the Cather Center the following day, I spoke to Antonette Willa Skupa Turner, the ninety-seven-year-old granddaughter of Annie Sadilek Pavelka, the Czech immigrant who inspired Ántonia herself. Turner, an uproarious woman with a raspy voice, didn’t immediately remind me of Cather’s weathered heroine, but she exuded elemental force.
“Miss Cather caught my family very well,” Turner bellowed at me. “How my grandmother took life! She never had any teeth, but she’d eat meat no matter what. She said she’d live her whole life the same way again, even with all its tribulations, because that’s the way the Lord wanted it to be. But the book gets one thing wrong—in the scene where Jim Burden kills the snake. My grandmother killed the snake!”
You can tour the Cather home, with its dusty Victorian décor; you can visit the Red Cloud Opera House, a modest second-story theatre where Cather fell in love with the stage; you can drive out to the rural cemetery where the writer’s paternal grandparents are buried. You cannot, however, see Cather’s own grave. That is found in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she liked to work in the autumn months. Buried beside her is Edith Lewis, her longtime companion. The absence of Cather’s remains in Red Cloud is significant. When tour groups arrive at the old railroad depot, which is now a museum, they see a prop coffin in the stationmaster’s office. This is a cue for guides to discuss Cather’s 1905 story “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” in which the body of a celebrated artist is brought back to his hometown, amid innuendos about his “ladylike voice” and his “trapseing to Paris.” Such talk elicits a rant from a heavy-drinking lawyer with a generous heart: “It’s not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter waters.” Cather—who never publicly identified as gay and never pretended to be straight—may have foreseen a similar scene at her own burial, and chosen not to be brought home.
In the decades after her death, in 1947, Cather was in danger of falling into the ranks of regional writers, the rhapsodists of limited geographies. Increasingly, though, scholars treat Cather as a major modernist who rivals Woolf and Joyce in complexity. These days, especially, her tense relationship with the mythology of the American heartland commands attention. Laura Bush rightly said that Cather helped forge a Western identity, but it was not the same West that male bards of empire extolled. Cather introduced a new way of seeing, placing us in landscapes of “obliterating strangeness,” of saturating color and light. When you walk the Cather Prairie, you move not only backward in time but also out into symbolic terrain, one in which the self becomes a “something,” in which a moment of supreme bliss is indistinguishable from death.
The talk in Catherland these days is about the letters. Cather’s will forbade verbatim quotation from her correspondence, probably in an attempt to keep scholars at bay (“information vampires,” she called them). The Cather estate lifted that restriction to allow the publication, in 2013, of “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather,” edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. In January, when Cather’s letters enter the public domain, the Willa Cather Archive, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will begin to publish her complete correspondence online, drawing on a collection of more than three thousand items. The letters echo her voice—“confident, elegant, detailed, openhearted,” as Jewell and Stout describe it. She was, they admit, a “rather histrionic character.” She is abrupt, candid, self-pitying, given to dubious generalizations (“People who go and have grotesque accidents are clowns”), and relentless toward her publishers (“The blue behind the lettering seems to me rather dark and heavy for a jacket,” she writes to Knopf). Although illness and loss shadow her final years, the fire never dies. In 1943, she compliments a college student on his style, but the words “the world beautiful” elicit a rebuke: “That is the only bad phrase in your letter. But it is bad. It is what I call ‘women’s club phraseology.’ You could have said that better, had you tried.”
The Nebraskan was first a Virginian. She was born in 1873, in Back Creek Valley, near Winchester, on the north end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her background was deeply Southern. Three of her uncles had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and several of the family’s African-American servants had been enslaved in her great-grandparents’ household—histories that Cather brought to life in her final novel, “Sapphira and the Slave Girl,” published in 1940. Cather’s father, Charles, managed a sheep farm; when the barn burned, in 1883, the family moved to Nebraska, following other members of the wider Cather clan. They first lived on a homestead north of Red Cloud, then in town, where Charles Cather made a respectable living selling farm loans and insurance. Less than fifteen years earlier, only a few white families had occupied the area; now a community of twenty-five hundred people had sprung up.
The transfer west came as an enormous shock: Cather felt as if she had been cast out of civilization. “It was a kind of erasure of personality,” she later said. Jim Burden, who replicates Cather’s childhood journey in “My Ántonia” and also goes back East as an adult, feels similarly: “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.” Yet Cather soon made peace with this strange new life; erasure permitted self-invention. At around the age of fifteen, she flirted with a male persona, signing her name William Cather, Jr., or Wm. Cather, M.D. She settled on the given name Willa, a variation of her baptismal name, Wilella; she later added the middle name Sibert. On display at the Cather Center is the family Bible, open to the page on which a mature editorial hand has changed Wilella to Willa, added Sibert, and altered her date of birth from 1873 to 1876.
The young Cather was a fury of enthusiasms, scouring her corner of the world for information. As she rode her pony from farm to farm, she found tenacious clusters of European immigrants: Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Czechs, and Germans. Through them, she absorbed a far more variegated cultural experience than she would have encountered in Virginia. The immigrants did not come from high social stations, but many carried with them considerable learning. Jim Burden declares, “There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Ántonia’s father.”
There was also music. Not long ago, while researching Cather’s lifelong love of Wagner’s operas, I came across a hitherto unseen trace of Red Cloud’s Europeanness. Several sources mention that Cather studied piano with a music teacher named Schindelmeisser. This man served as the model for the character of Wunsch, in “The Song of the Lark”—a dissolute but impassioned immigrant musician who is among the first to glimpse the talent of Thea Kronborg, destined to become a leading Wagner singer. After digging through newspaper archives, census records, telephone directories, and shipping manifests, I concluded that he was Albert Schindelmeisser, the son of Louis Schindelmeisser, a distinguished German composer and conductor of the mid-nineteenth century, and an ally of Wagner and Liszt.
The life story that can be reconstructed from circumstantial evidence is a rather sad one, suitable for one of Cather’s darker prairie tales. Schindelmeisser came to America in 1862, when he was twenty, and got a job teaching at Lawrence University, in Wisconsin. In an article for the Lawrence college paper, he wrote, “Of all arts music is the most pure and elevated, the most ennobling in its influences.” By 1870, however, he had left the college and established a pattern of being unwilling or unable to stay in one place for any length of time. He worked in Kansas and Iowa as a teacher and a piano tuner, then popped up in Red Cloud in 1884 and 1885. A notice of an event at the Baptist church, to which the Cather family belonged, said that “Mr Schindlemeisser, at the piano, showed himself master of the situation and called forth loud applause.” By 1886, though, he was back in Kansas. After that, the trail grows thin. Notices of unclaimed letters suggest that he passed through Kansas City and Macon, Missouri. He was in Nashville in 1898. The name does not appear in the 1900 census. He was known to be a heavy drinker, and alcoholism is likely the best explanation for his erratic career. In “The Song of the Lark,” Wunsch’s drinking eventually forces him to leave town, but his acknowledgment of Thea Kronborg’s talent encourages her to pursue singing.
From this roughshod Europe of the mind, Cather also emerged with a complex understanding of American identity. Her symphonic landscapes are inflected with myriad accents, cultures, personal narratives—all stored away in a prodigious memory. When she went off to college, at the University of Nebraska, she was already an imperious cosmopolitan, entirely unafraid to make her views known. She had thought of studying science or medicine, but her command of prose pulled her toward writing. In 1893, she published her first journalistic piece for the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal: thus began a two-decade run as a literary critic, drama and music critic, all-purpose reporter, and editor. She went on to Pittsburgh, editing a women’s magazine, and ended up in New York, working at McClure’s, the great American magazine of the Gilded Age.
Cather was a mercurial but brilliant critic, veering between ecstatic raves and brutal takedowns. The takedowns were disconcerting to performers who came to town expecting a docile press. The “meat-ax young girl,” she was called. An unlucky actress was characterized as an “unattractive, putty-faced, backachy, headachy little minx.” One actor, she wrote, “stops just where elocution ends and acting begins.” Her reporting was not always trustworthy. In a piece about the painter Edward Burne-Jones, she claims to have interviewed Burne-Jones’s former valet; no such person seems to have existed. But the writing tends to be more distinctive than in her apprentice fiction of the same period.
The prairie figures in some of Cather’s early stories, but she focusses more often on artists, actors, singers, and writers—denizens of the transatlantic world that she herself joined in short order. These are evocative tales, but the sketches of high-society types are sometimes breathless and thin. When the prairie does enter the picture, as in the 1904 story “A Wagner Matinée,” Cather regains her lordly confidence: “The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought than those of war.” She made her first European trip in 1902, in the company of a wealthy Pittsburgh friend, Isabelle McClung, with whom she was evidently in love. On a train ride through rural France, Cather experienced an epiphany: on seeing a “reaper of a well-known American make,” she imagined a girl sitting on it, between her father’s feet. She understood that Nebraska had already given her the stuff of epics. “O Pioneers!” appeared in 1913, and her mature career began.
The area around Red Cloud has long been known as the Divide—a geographical term for a plateau bordered by rivers. Cather titled one of her first important prairie stories “On the Divide.” Cather scholars have not been able to resist using the word in a symbolic sense. The late David Porter borrowed it for his 2008 study, “On the Divide,” which documents Cather’s painstaking construction of her public image, and in particular her attempt, largely successful, to straddle the divide between commerce and art. In 1926, Porter shows, she went to the trouble of inventing an interview with herself—a scene of a journalist badgering the author as she waits for a train in Grand Central Terminal. (It’s as if the younger Cather were buttonholing the elder.) Her world contains other figurative divides: between America and Europe, the Romantic and the modern, country and city, the political left and the political right.
The divides of gender and sexuality remain the most contested ground. The Cather biographer Sharon O’Brien opened discussion of the lesbian question in a 1984 essay, prompting a wave of queer-studies readings and an inevitable backlash. At a luncheon in Red Cloud, I spoke to Melissa Homestead, a scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who is working on a highly anticipated book about Cather’s relationship with the Nebraska-born, New York-based editor Edith Lewis. The two women met in 1903, at the home of a mutual friend in Lincoln—Lewis later wrote of Cather’s “transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze”—and began living together in 1908. Homestead told me, “Everyone wants to know what kind of relationship this was. I have been through all Cather’s surviving letters, and there is no ‘smoking gun.’ ” Homestead, who is lesbian, laughed at the phrase. “But what’s apparent, over and over, is that she and Lewis were thought of as a unit. She would write, ‘Miss Lewis is coming with me.’ People send their regards to both of them. So the question is: What kind of evidence is needed to establish this as a lesbian relationship? Photographs of the two of them in bed together? She was an integral part of Cather’s life, creatively and personally.”
Homestead is impatient not only with those who dismiss the possibility of Cather’s lesbianism but also with those who scan her work for evidence of her closetedness. O’Brien made much of a remark Cather made, in her 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé,” that fiction depends on “whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there . . . the inexplicable presence of the thing not named.” For Homestead, this emphasis on secretiveness is misleading. She told me, “People picture her as full of shame, destroying letters left and right. Yes, almost all her letters to Lewis are missing. But three thousand letters is still a lot, and the relationship with Lewis is all over them. If she wanted to hide it, she did a bad job.”
There is little trace of sexual attraction between women in Cather’s writing, but male homosexuality surfaces more than once. “The Sculptor’s Funeral” is one instance; another is “Paul’s Case,” the widely anthologized story of a young aesthete who chooses self-annihilation over the dreariness of a routine existence. We can read between the lines when Cather reveals that Paul’s night on the town with another young man begins “in the confiding warmth of a champagne friendship” and ends with a parting “singularly cool.” Other male friendships show erotic tensions. Godfrey St. Peter, the solitary intellectual of “The Professor’s House,” is plainly smitten with his student Tom Outland, with whom he liked to “sit and talk half through the warm, soft nights.”
In the end, however, sex does not dominate Cather’s imagination. True romance lies elsewhere: in her characters’ relationships with work, art, nature, and the land. In “O Pioneers!,” Alexandra is said to be the first person who has ever looked on her corner of Nebraska with “love and yearning”—to see it as a place to be nurtured, not as territory to be conquered. In sharp contrast to most women’s fiction of the day, the story of Alexandra is not one of marriage but of profession. Likewise, “The Song of the Lark” is, as Joan Acocella wrote in this magazine in 1995, a Künstlerroman—a novel about the emergence of an artist. This is not to say that Cather is a feminist. She exalts her exceptional women but is often scathing toward ordinary ones, and toward feminists themselves. One of her less lovely efforts is a satirical assault on the religious pretensions of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Cather’s stories were revolutionary all the same, abandoning the stereotypical register of the female voice.
“The great fact was the land itself,” Cather declares in “O Pioneers!” Humans merely scratch at its surface. Perhaps this enormous empathy for the natural world is, after all, a displacement of desire, though the feeling goes too deep to be psychologized away. An overwhelming attachment to place is often a sign of immovable conservatism, and Cather can get dangerously close to blood-and-soil lingo, as when Ántonia’s strapping sons are compared to “the founders of early races.” But her conviction that the land belongs to no one—“We come and go, but the land is always here,” Alexandra says—undercuts any tendency toward nationalism and tribalism.
That philosophy put Cather at odds with the Western, in which maverick men claim the wilderness as their own. The most influential Western at the turn of the century was “The Virginian,” by Owen Wister, a Harvard graduate who was sent West to toughen up and returned with a quasi-erotic adulation of the cow-puncher—the cowboy. The nameless hero of “The Virginian” is introduced thus: “Lounging there at ease against the wall was a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips.” With one fond stroke, Wister created the cowboy style. He was also a repulsive racist who halted his narrative to praise the superiority of Anglo-Saxon stock and to claim that the Declaration of Independence enshrined “the eternal inequality of man.”
Cather undoubtedly read “The Virginian.” In the Cather Center archive, I noticed a copy resting on the library shelves: the inscription indicates that Cather had given it to a family member in 1912. In a 1915 letter, she pointedly observes that the “cow-puncher’s experience of the West was not the only experience possible there.” Wister was a tourist; Cather was the real Virginian. In her rendering of the Great Plains and the West, women achieve independence from restrictive roles; people of many countries coexist; and violence is futile, with guns most often fired in suicidal despair. As the scholar Susie Thomas writes, Cather “created an alternative to the male mythology of the West.” In place of Wister’s slouching cowboy, “O Pioneers!” gives us a “tall, strong girl” with a “glance of Amazonian fierceness,” wearing a man’s coat. She holds the same pose at the end, silhouetted against the landscape and gazing westward.
“My Ántonia” is the most complex of the prairie novels because the narrative passes through the consciousness of a male narrator. Jim Burden’s gaze is an objectifying, romanticizing one. Ántonia is made into an icon of tenacity: she survives her father’s suicide, the closure of the family farm, humdrum work as a hired girl, predatory males. Yet the full reality of her life escapes Jim’s grasp. He keeps in mind a succession of pictures of her earthy vitality—“like the old woodcuts in one’s first primer”—but his final glimpse of her, “waving her apron,” feels rote. As the scholar David Laird says, Jim’s way of telling the story cannot capture the “streaming immediacy” of a life lived day by day, with no great goal in sight. This failure is also a triumph, because you sense so strongly the presence of the thing not named.
In Red Cloud, a ceremonial ribbon was cut. The National Willa Cather Center was declared open, and Laura Bush was whisked away by the Secret Service. At the reception, the atmosphere was one of mild jubilation, mixed with a certain amazement that the project had come to pass. In the crowd was Margaret Ickis Fernbacher, Cather’s grandniece, who was probably the only person present who had met the author. “I have this memory of being in the presence of this—this great presence,” Fernbacher told me. “But I honestly don’t know if I actually do remember it or whether my mother told me about it.”
The journalist Matthew Hansen, whose uncle is Jay Yost, my bed-and-breakfast host, reflected on how the town had changed. He grew up in Red Cloud and then moved to Omaha, where he writes for the World-Herald. “I graduated from high school in 1998,” he told me. “Back then, it felt pretty dead—stores closed, buildings boarded up. As teen-agers, we’d ride up and down the empty streets. Now there’s a coffee shop, a wine bar—it’s all kind of surreal to me. The next project is to build a hotel, so we can handle tour groups. The town gets ten thousand Cather tourists a year, and it could get more.”
Political support would speed these projects along, but literary infrastructure is not high on Nebraska’s current list of priorities. Burke Harr, a Democratic state senator from Omaha, told me that he and others were trying to organize state funding for the hotel development, but that they had encountered obstacles. “There are some people who don’t like it that attention is being paid to Cather’s relationship with Miss Lewis,” Harr said. “And, believe it or not, there are families who are still angry about how Cather wrote about them. I don’t get it. I’d be proud if Cather made fun of my great-uncle!” Even in Red Cloud, some locals still think there’s something off about Cather and the people she attracts. If you stop by the lunch counter at Olson’s gas station, you might hear a farmer grunting at his paper, “I don’t like this Cather stuff.”
The idea that the red-blue divide would complicate Cather’s reputation is ironic, because she largely steered clear of politics. Her 1931 story “Two Friends” tells of the broken friendship of two prosperous citizens, one Democrat and the other Republican. They play checkers in the general store and debate issues great and small, until the advent of William Jennings Bryan, the barnstorming Nebraska populist, causes an irreparable rift. The Democrat grows fanatical; the Republican grows resentful, even though McKinley defeats Bryan in the election of 1896. Cather knew Bryan from her journalistic days; she was fascinated by his oratory but skeptical of his progressive economic agenda. In “Two Friends,” she subtly sides with the Republican, who cannot understand the change that politics has wrought in his friend. Ultimately, she belongs to no party, occupying the high middle ground.
The next morning, I had breakfast at the home of Dennis and Sally Hansen, Matthew’s parents. They live in a modern, spacious house outside town, with plate-glass windows that look out on the family farm and on a swimming pool backed by pine trees. In the distance, Matthew’s eighty-six-year-old granduncle could be seen operating a lawnmower. The Hansens gave me advice on what to see in the area: the Cather family cemetery; the site of their homestead; the spot by the road where Francis Sadilek, the prototype for the unhappy Mr. Shimerda, was buried. “Don’t forget the Dane Church and cemetery,” Sally said. “That’s where Dennis’s folks are, and that’s where we’ll be buried.” I thought about those words during the drive back to Omaha. As much as I love Cather’s writing, I will never know what it means to live a life in one inalienable place.
I am a recent convert to the ranks of the Cather People. I majored in English and American literature in college, but paid little attention to Cather, who was not in fashion. About a decade ago, I began reading the stories that centered on music. Then I read everything else. When I got to “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” the 1927 novel that Cather considered her best, I felt dismayed that I had lived without it for so long.
It is difficult to explain how Cather conjured one of the supreme English-language novels from scattered stories of the founding of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. Her principal characters, Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant, based on Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf, amble through a loose succession of scenes, undertaking missions in the Southwest. Cather’s prose, more chiselled than in her earlier fiction, refracts these tableaux into “something in the style of legend,” as she said. Latour emerges as a strange sort of passive saint, one who performs the miracle of seeing the world clearly and fondly. Miracles, he explains, result from “our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” Early on, he watches a flock of goats, which look back at him “with their mocking, intelligent smile.” Their bright coats remind him of the Apocalypse, of the whiteness of those washed in the blood of the Lamb. Such abrupt epiphanies arrive routinely, charging Latour’s experience of daily life.
“Death Comes for the Archbishop” stands apart from other Cather Westerns because of the prominence given to Hispanic and Native American characters. One troubling aspect of Cather’s prairie narratives is that Native Americans scarcely appear in them. What Cather writes of Alexandra in “O Pioneers!”—“For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning”—is, on reflection, outrageous. In “Archbishop,” however, reverence for the land predates the white invaders. Cather comments that Indians have no desire to master nature, instead “accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves.” The same cannot be said of Latour, who spends his later years overseeing the construction of a cathedral in the Romanesque style. Cather said that the novel’s title comes from Hans Holbein the Younger’s “Dance of Death” woodcuts, in which Death summons men and women both mighty and humble, a bishop among them. At the end of the book, as Latour falls ill, he is visited by Eusabio, a Navajo Indian whose acute intelligence and noble countenance match Latour’s. Eusabio has the aspect of the figure of Death who comes to take the Bishop away—not in retribution but in reconciliation.
A few years ago, on a trip to New Mexico, I spent a day or two retracing Latour’s steps. This is a familiar stage of Cather infatuation. “I seem fated to send people on journeys,” she wrote to a reader in 1943, noting “the number of people who have gone a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the ‘Archbishop.’ ” As David Porter observes, she was especially drawn to majestic masses of rock, like the mesa pueblo at Acoma (“Archbishop”); the cliff dwellings of Walnut Canyon and Mesa Verde (“The Song of the Lark,” “The Professor’s House”); and the promontory of Quebec City (“Shadows on the Rock”). I like to think that she pictured herself as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring,” stranded on a rock and surrounded by fire.
I visited the Bishop’s cathedral in Santa Fe, which looks centuries older than it is. I drove to the San José de la Laguna Mission, with its brilliantly colored adobe altar, and to Acoma, where the Acoma Pueblo lived in proud isolation until conquistadors slaughtered eight hundred people. The vistas around that shiver-inducing place, which a small group of Acoma still inhabit, have hardly changed since Cather saw them almost a century ago, and, as usual, her description is definitive: “This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.”
I then drove north to the Valles Caldera—a vast, craterlike formation that was created by volcanic eruptions more than a million years ago. The caldera does not figure in Cather’s writing, but it is connected to her in my mind. My grandfather, the geologist Clarence Samuel Ross, explored the area in the nineteen-twenties, on horseback, and described its volcanic history. It was a place he loved, and his ashes are scattered there. I have only dim memories of him: he was born in 1880, when Cather was six, and died in 1975, when I was seven. I recall a severe, taciturn man who looked at me with a certain curiosity. Before I went to New Mexico, my father told me that “Death Comes for the Archbishop” was my grandfather’s favorite book. It is the one thing I know about his inner world; somehow, it is enough. ♦
