Willa Cather Keeps Popping Up

 I find Willa Cather more than a bit intriguing. She comes between Edith Wharton and Hemingway. She hailed from Nebraska and wrote from New York. And I like most of what I have read by her — One Of Ours I found a bit cock-eyed.

 After reading Never-Ending Nostalgia: Who and What Inspired Willa Cather, I found here even more enigmatic:

Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School in June 1890. She came first in a class of three and accordingly delivered the valedictory address. Her spirited theme was “Investigation versus Superstition.” She hailed the former and damned the latter. “Since investigation,” she declared, “first led man forth on that great search for truth which has prompted all his progress, superstition—, the stern Pharaoh of his former bondage—, has followed him, retarding every step of the advancement.” For its framing of large concepts, its intellectual assurance, its sheer élan, the address would be extraordinary as a college valedictory. In one as young as Willa, here only sixteen, it is unnerving: “There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation,” she declared to her audience, “a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.”

While reading Kali Fajardo-Anstine's In Praise of Willa Cather and the American Southwest
On Death Comes for the Archbishop and Literary Neighbors left me thinking here was another who discounted Cather and then was surprised by the woman.

I first heard of Willa Cather as a teenage bookseller in North Denver, at a new, used, rare, and antiquarian bookshop that had once been a mechanic’s garage. At the bookstore, there was an entire section of Cather’s famous works, which I had labeled meticulously with colored markers on scraps of printer paper. I don’t remember hearing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Instead, I sold heaps of used copies of O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and occasionally The Song of the Lark. Years later as an English major, I would hear these books re- ferred to as “the Nebraska Trilogy,” and despite my father being born and raised in Omaha, I still found them to be of little interest based on the pastoral covers with their willowy fonts and watercolor prairies. Perhaps in that unconscious way we often do, I decided that Cather, as a white woman writer of the Midwest, was simply not for me: a Colorado Chicana, a mixed person of Filipino, Indigenous, and Euro-pean ancestry, a young woman trying and often failing to find herself in the pages of books. What could Cather and I possibly have in common? A lot, I was to find out.

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Death Comes for the Archbishop at its heart is an adventure tale inspired by the real lives of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and his vicar, Father Joseph Machebeuf. Following two French missionary priests, distinct in their complementary personalities, there’s reserved Father Jean Marie Latour and outgoing Father Joseph Vaillant. They journey throughout the American Southwest, the farthest reaches of the Santa Fe Trail, as power moves from the Mexican diocese in Durango to that of the recently arrived Americans in Santa Fe. The priests seek to spread the faith and build a cathedral in the desert while the land transitions, from one nation to another, with Old World European ideals butting against a newly asserted American dominance, but there is a deeper, more com- plicated cultural undercurrent to nearly every chapter of the novel. Throughout the novel, the narrative again rests at the junction of French, Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Middle Eastern, a cultural tapestry born out of layered conquest....

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My American story and the history of my ancestors is one of convergence. It does not begin in 1776. Our stories start elsewhere, in the center of our world. Death Comes for the Archbishop speaks to the idea of nation building. How are a people formed? Who gives us our common stories and how do those tales permeate into the collective? Perhaps it is through missionary priests, or a public school system, media, literature, art, but there is a guiding mythology that is curated to fit the needs of the nation. As a Chicana of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, defining my cultural heritage and the historical framework that created a person like me often proves difficult. Death Comes for the Arch- bishop made an aspect of my own history tangible through story. I have been confounded for much of my life by the American desire to place identity neatly into one box. I have been asked to narrow my cultural heritage, to make things easier, streamlined, avoidant. One of the most surprising aspects of Death Comes for the Archbishop is the way that Cather seems to predict the emergence of future generations born out of convergence. That shared glance, the acknowledgment of something destined to be. It’s as if the furthest reaches of the Cather imagination are somehow, nearly one hundred years later, meeting with my own.

I would suggest starting with Death Comes for the Archbishop, then branching out.  

sch 11/18