Proponents of Order: Tom Outland and Bishop Latour

M A Y N A R D F O X Fort Lewis College Proponents of Order: Tom Outland and Bishop Latour Sarah Orne Jewett in 1911 advised Willa Cather not to be deceived by superficial appearances: I want you to be surer of your backgrounds,—you have your Nebraska life,—a child’s Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the “Bohemia” of newspaper and magazineoffice life. These are uncommon equipment, but you don’t see them yet quite enough from the outside,—you stand right in the middle of each of them when you write, without having the stand­ point of the looker-on who takes them each in their relations . . . to the world.1 When Miss Jewett thus advised her friend, Miss Cather was at the threshold of her career, but still unformed as a literary artist. Her first novel (Alexander’s Bridge, 1912), not yet published, was to prove a failure. Although Miss Cather published eight books in the period 1913 to 1927 and used the “uncommon equipment” she possessed, her success resulted in part from the background which she acquired after 1911. That background was her experience in the great Southwest and her sense of its meaning for twentieth-century man. In the mesa experiences of The Professor's House (1925), particularly in the central third of the book—“Tom Outland’s Story”—and in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Miss Cather demonstrated that she knew how to develop a perspective, how to select a sig­ nificant emphasis from a welter of material, and how to see her material from “the standpoint of the looker-on.” Miss Cather’s early rejection of the West in her bitter stories “A Wagner Matinee” (1904) and “The Sculptor’s Funeral” (1905) gave way in her novels of the 1920’s to a mellowed acceptance of 1The Letters of Sarah Ome Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Boston, 1911), pp. 248-249. 108 Western American Literature the West and to an understanding of its possibilities for human fulfillment. In both The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop Miss Cather proclaims the efficacy of order and, its corollary, the destructiveness of disorder. On the side of order stand the landscape as an image of God’s purpose, the life of the sensitive spirit imbued with hope, and the Garden and Paradise; on the side of disorder stands a confused secular civilization given over to greed, gluttony, materialism, doubt, hopelessness, and des­ pair. Above all, the meaning of the landscape is dominant; but the reader’s grasp of that meaning depends on his recognition of the contrasted qualities, order and disorder. The emphasis upon order no doubt arises in part from Miss Cather’s inherent conserv­ atism. Innovations by the native priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop appear again and again as manifestations of evil. Per­ haps for this reason, some critics charge Miss Cather with an un­ healthy traditionalism. John H. Randall, for example, views Miss Cather’s preoccupation with order from a sociological bias and from an unsympathetic view of the Catholic emphasis on tradition. Thus he develops a brilliant but derogatory view of Miss Cather’s work.2 However, the various appearances of order in the novels take on a different sense Xvhen viewed as literary images and figures. In the examples that follow, this sense becomes apparent. In his “Story,” Tom Outland tells how he discovered on the Blue Mesa of the ancient cliff dwellers an idea concerning order that secular man needs; this idea he transmits to his sophisticated university professor, Godfrey St. Peter. Similarly, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, the French priests discover in the New Mexico and Arizona deserts significant ideas of order related to their re­ ligious vocation. In both books the contrasts between order and disorder are frequent and impressive; but, in the former, Tom’s help to his professor comes too late to bring the strong affirmative note we see in the latter book. For some readers the affirmation in Death Comes for the Archbishop is too easy; for others the dis­ content of Professor St. Peter is too ambiguous. Illumination of...