Tradition and Individual Talent in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop

Bishop Jean Latour's interpretation of French culinary history in Death Comes for the Archbishop reflects both the language and the spirit of T. S. Eliot's influential essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). Poets who wish to "obtain" tradition, Eliot argues, must have "the historical sense," which involves "a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." This historical sense "compels a man to write...with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (Selected Prose 38). Decades earlier, Willa Cather had foreshadowed Eliot's ideas about the "simultaneous order" composed by Homer and his European successors.¹ In numerous articles and reviews written from 1893 to 1902, she expressed her adoration of "the wholly human poetry that first thundered in the resonant verse of Homer" and that "has found in France its most perfect expression" (The World and the Parish 584). Implying merely that French writers had been the most expert, not the exclusive, practitioners of this "wholly human poetry," Cather also hinted at the principles of tradition and the taste for selectivity that would appear in her later critical writings and in novels such as Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Not following from, but rather aware of and in dialogue with Eliot's essay, Cather presents Father Vaillant 's recipe as an analogue for the history of French literature going back to the Middle Ages. Yet even if Latour looks back only at his own national history, Cather gazes more distantly and broadly into the past, back to the numerous literary links that, beginning with Homer, share a "simultaneous existence" with her own work. As Cather peers into the history of European literature, Death Comes for the Archbishop comes to exceed what Eliot calls mere "conformity between old and new," achieving a more productive give-and-take in which the "ideal order" of literary "monuments" undergoes a change brought on by a new work of art. "The existing order," Eliot explains, "is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted" ("Tradition" 38-39). For Eliot, simply to imitate "would be for the new work not really to conform at all," since "it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art." Similarly, Cather professed that art "is always the search for...something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values" (On Writing 103).

In the case of Vaillant's soup, the new and untried take the form of onions as a substitute for leeks, an improvisation that Vaillant finds unsatisfactory but that represents the introduction of southwestern influences into a tradition that Latour traces back to medieval France. What might be called Latour's own improvisation, his adaptation of Catholic orthodoxy to the socio-historical conditions of his diocese, is not a new idea for readers of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Though eminent in the narrative, it functions alongside Vaillant's soup only as part of a larger design through which Cather thematizes European literary history. This technique, however, works also as a disguise. Cather's esteem for tradition finds expression in a French Jesuit priest through whom the author channels European and Catholic multi-nationalism into a search for the origins of her own modernist American story.² Rather than duplicating Eliot's self-exile in Europe with a narrative that takes readers from the New World to the Old, Death Comes for the Archbishop brings Europe to the nineteenthcentury American Southwest, where ancient traditions and histories merge with necessity and individual will to form a microcosm of the conflict and compromise that helped to build the United States. Here a figure like J. Alfred Prufrock would seem conspicuously out of place, yet...