NOVEL OR BIOGRAPHY?
Halac, Dennis
NOVEL OR BIOGRAPHY? DENNIS HALAC Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times PAUL HORGAN Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15 Death Comes tor the Archbishop WILLA CATHER Knopf, 1927 and various subsequent...
...He was not the contemplative sort to spend his retirement writing memoirs...
...Latour is cut out of wholly different cloth-while Lamy had little time to read, he invariably chose sentimental hagiogra-phies and homilies-Latour's tastes are Cather's: Mme...
...famous garden was both beautiful and instructive...
...de Sevigne, Augustine, Pascal...
...He brought nuns and vestments across the plains but also dozens of saplings, switches and seeds to demonstrate the desert's fertility...
...Virtually all of his pastorate was Spanish-speaking or Indian, sequestered in pueblos and hamlets over thousands of miles...
...the monumental missions in romantic ruin...
...and after eleven years acclimatization there and in the hinterlands of Ohio and Kentucky, Lamy was asked to be the Vicar Apostolic of the newly-won American territory of New Mexico...
...Latour is softer, more mon-daine than the rough-and-ready bishop who settled in hell-for-leather Santa Fe...
...He was a pluralist voice in a nativist desert bending every effort to preserve pueblo traditions against intruding Americanisms and, yet, stubbornly insisting that his cathedral be built and designed by Auvergnats...
...Scrupulous in his sifting of the materials, slightly too diligent in the presentation of the disputes with the Durango see, surprisingly careless with minor names and locations, he has probed every possible source to create -a definitive biography...
...Horgan has collected documents from archives in the Vatican, Santa Fe, Durango, Paris, and South Bend, Indiana ever since he decided to "save" Lamy for an expanded biography from the pages of his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Rio Grande...
...In 1839 Cincinnati, flush with river traffic, was having its turn as the ambitious American metropolis seeking to outshine New York...
...and, most of all, Catholicism, raw and revitalized, cleansed of its Syllabus of Errors...
...a sidetrip by young French missionaries to Niagara Falls where they reflect upon Chateaubriand's impressions, which were popular then...
...Lamy's own travels kept him away from official correspondence for months at a time...
...He is the pious reincarnation of the agnostic Godfrey St...
...Latour gets not one but two gardens, the legend of Acoma is given a garden plot, and scenes as disparate as Rome and Sonora are invested with gardens, grand and small...
...Sante Fe had slept under successive layers of pueblo, Spanish and Mexican administration with little change, it being the Ultima Thule of imperial Spain even more than California...
...Lamy made a triumphal entry into Santa Fe in 1851, the grateful Catholics having set up pine trees to mark his progress and then proceeding to an amiable and discordant fiesta...
...She also invests Latour with a new persona...
...The book is filled with these inspired innovations which flesh out a story that, in less sensitive hands, could become tedious or spotty...
...sources for her recently published novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, purportedly based on the first bishop of Santa Fe...
...It isn't that Cather's characters are all similar-they are all tending the same garden...
...When death came for him in 1889, he had revived a dormant religion and expanded its base for three cultures, Hispanic, Indian and American...
...It is written independently of Cather's novel...
...in American New Mexico an echo of the ancient struggle of the Teutons vs...
...Her favorite symbol inevitably drew her to Lamy whose...
...Having allowed these items to settle, she then proceeded to muddy the waters by calling her work a "narrative biography," a sort of mirror-image of Capote's "non-fiction novel" of a few years ago, and pleaded the cause of imagination in any work of literature saying that "too much information [is] rather deadening...
...Latinity...
...News took months to reach it from Mexico City, two thousand miles away along the tortuous El Camino Real-one stretch called "Dead Man's March" is still forbidden territory (the site of the first atomic explosion...
...Lamy appears to have that effect on writers...
...An honored, though uneven, novelist, Horgan is considered to be in his best element with Southwestern history...
...Death is now conceded to be her masterpiece, but it has taken a half century for a "straight" biography to assess Latour's prototype, Jean Bap-tiste Lamy, and to separate the person from the legend...
...Some of the clergy he inherited were barely literate...
...DENNIS HALAC Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times PAUL HORGAN Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15 Death Comes tor the Archbishop WILLA CATHER Knopf, 1927 and various subsequent editions In 1927 [Nov...
...In the early years, mail was available only once a month...
...Peter in The Professor's House as well as all the other characters who reiterate her theme of civilized men transplanted to new soil...
...Lamy's pious view of Rome contrasted by a contemporary account of Henry James...
...He is indeed a legend in legendary times, the mid-nineteenth, century West, as well as that ram avis among fervent missionaries-one who is not too embarrassing for modern times...
...23] Willa Cather ad-dressed the readers of this journal to discuss the...
...We now Know that Lamy/Latour are not one and the same but two separate identities sharing a common space like fraternal but unidentical twins...
...Horgan does better than serve his subject...
...For her Lamy's saga was immensely appealing-and familiar: the vast yet surprising landscape...
...and she elevates his family to a tradition of scholarship and preaching instead of Lamy's peasant origins...
...Horgan too has had to use his imagination while eschewing the fables that Cather incorporated...
...From the remote if central French province of Auvergne, Lamy came to America with his lifelong friend, Joseph Machebeuf, under the influence of John Purcell, Cincinnati's pioneer bishop...
...Gardens, gardens, gardens...
...Whereas Lamy had some of the dour, flinty outlook of the Au-vergnat stereotype, she creates splendid childhood visits in Provence for Latour where he can dream of peaches inhaling the sun, the lissome grace of an Avignon afternoon above the Palais des Papes, the stale and ancient air of Romanesque cathedrals...
...During those years he visited Europe a half-dozen times, begging for missioners and money, and the East Coast more often, each trip taking weeks and months away from his chancery...
...This illuminating study rises out of its regional interest, not only because of its associations with Cather and Horgan, but as a work of biographical art...
...the hero, Bishop Latour, appeared too allusive to be real-yet too historic to be fictive creation...
...The new American administration was not expected to affect so vast a region (ultimately the source of six states...
...With her usual directness and simplicity, Cather listed her sources ranging from local informants to an obscure biography of an altogether different bishop to her personal experience in the Southwest...
...I cannot recall a biography that uses its material so suggestively, not with distortion or as mere embellishment but to knit it into one piece...
...It had excited and somewhat confused readers with its obvious historical foundations and its strange yet evocative lyricism...
...But Latour is much more clearly a Cather characterization, one of those drifted souls locked in a paradox like a seacoast in Bohemia...
...Here he has ample opportunity to mine the resources of history and to exploit his narrative skill...
...The result is a novel biography just as Cather's was a biographical novel and the readers of Commonweal can at last understand why Cather's letter was a plaintive plea to appreciate that the imagination must ultimately vein the story.ately vein the story...
...It remains to this day a hulking stone incongruence in a city of adobe...
...It is now much clearer how much more imagination and how little "deadening'' information Cather incorporated...
...although Horgan is obviously fond of her, he wisely avoids any comparisons and her novel is mentioned only in a footnote-and as such satisfies the appetite of both historical and literary curiosity...
...The journeys contain the usual litany of shipwreck and massacre, illness and depression, and even hallucination...
...He made long visitations, usually alone, into areas with hostile Indians or across unknown trails...
...Horgan has had to innovate, and it is this innovation which brings him close to the spirit of Cather's narrative...
...But then, how many sources can a frontier bishop be expected to have...
...An outsider-perhaps the secret of his success-he insisted his French clergy speak Spanish and English even in the rectory and fretted about the lack of Indian priests...
...The finest touches in the book are Horgan's "improvisations:" the ceremony of Lamy's investiture derived from the ordinals...
...The reader is given an excursion into Lamy's life, much as Cather travels in his mind, not simply to fill the space of some neglected diocesan library but to express a biography with the finest literary standards and, thus, the greatest possible satisfaction...
...Contrasting emotions marked and marred the first years of Lamy's episcopacy (he became bishop in 1852, archbishop in 1'875) where he fought the usual battles of sacramental and fiscal administration plus the more unusual problems of dissenting clergy, heresy, territorial disputes with Mexican bishops, Vatican bureaucracy and the touchy relations with often anti-Catholic Americans...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 7
