the last book I ever read (Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, excerpt nine)

from Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather by Benjamin Taylor:

In any case, she was about to turn her hand to something everyone would declare a masterpiece among masterpieces, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Stints of writing back in Red Cloud; at the Jaffrey Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire; on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy; at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; and of course in her alcove at the apartment on Bank Street brought the book rapidly into being. Never had she labored with more confidence and clarity of purpose. She nimbly thought her way back to nineteenth-century New Mexico; and this first historical novel pleased her sufficiently that she would write two more: Shadows on the Rock, which takes place in late-seventeenth-century Quebec, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, laid in antebellum Virginia. Feeling more and more out of phase with her time, Cather found in historical fiction a consoling refuge and fresh idiom. She would finish the Archbishop in the autumn of 1926 and see it through serialization in The Forum between January and June. Knopf’s handsome edition appeared in September.

Cather had for many years been noting down hints and suggestions for a novel about the Southwest, her adopted landscape. Then it came to her in a flash: It was to center on the nineteenth-century priests who came to New Mexico to restore a Catholicism degraded by priestly concubinage and other outrages to the faith. She took her cue from an obscurely published book by Father William Howlett, Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, D.D. “At last,” writes Cather in her open letter on the Archbishop, printed in the Catholic magazine Commonweal, “I found out what I wanted to know about how the country and the people of New Mexico seemed to those first missionary priests from France. Without these letters in Father Howlett’s book to guide me, I would certainly never have dared to write my book.” Machebeuf becomes her Father Joseph Vaillant, vicar general of the diocese of New Mexico. Father Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who brought order to Santa Fe, becomes the book’s hero, Archbishop Jean Marie Latour. Richly embroidered with inset tales (in the tradition of Cervantes) and passionate evocations of the uncanny Southwestern landscape, the novel tells of the friendship between these two men, sons of the Auvergne and friends from childhood, devoted to the same professionalism, the same piety. And each the chief event in the other’s life. “To attempt to convey this hardihood of spirit” was her aim, as she says in the Commonweal letter. They are Archbishop and Vicar General, superior and subordinate. Yet the emotion of friendship makes equals of them—as friendship does. Educated Frenchmen, they would know Montaigne’s irreducible and unsurpassable characterization of the beauty of friendship: “Because it was he, because it was I.” Add to this that the two missionaries are probable saints and you have the formula for the book.