You nominated the contenders –
now reader Matthew Spencer pits Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop against
Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned
The last bout saw Thomas
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 triumph against Carson McCullers' The Member of
the Wedding. Who will be next to make it through to the next round?
I'd recently read Fitzy's tight
masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, and embarked upon the Beautiful and Damned with
an eager heart. Whilst they share the same themes of tragedy and failure and
the dangers of a material existence, Gatsby has that perfect structure. The
Beautiful and Damned is a bit more flabby but no less stylish. Fitzgerald's
main character Anthony Patch has, like most of us, an artistic temperament
without an artistic talent. He is the heir to his grandfather's fortune and is
afforded a generous allowance that he uses to wine and dine and run around New
York with his beautiful and carefree friends.
As time moves on, so do most of
his friends into positions of responsibility and success. Anthony and Gloria
remain stubbornly carefree, waiting for their payday. But Anthony's
grandfather, the sober social reformer, becomes impatient with his wayward
grandson and disinherits him and his frivolous wife. While the first half of
the novel is an exercise in frippery, a well-written farce of high living, the
second half becomes dark and brooding and much more up my street. Fitzgerald's warnings
have not been heeded and we still live in an increasingly materialistic world
obsessed by youth and beauty.
But Oh, Willa Cather: this was
my epiphany. Death comes for the Archbishop is the story of two Catholic
priests, two Frenchmen, dispatched to New Mexico to awaken a slumbering
Catholicism in the harsh desert. It is a place populated by Indians, Mexicans
and frontiersmen and governed by derelict priests roving endless prairies.
It manages to surpass one of my
favourite novels, Charles Portis's True Grit, in its depiction of the ragged
density of frontier life. It is less a flowing, single story than a series of
vignettes that give a a glorious insight into the early racial mix of America.
The civilized Frenchmen bring fine food and good manners as much as doctrine,
and the saintly Latour goes about his duties gently but with a determination of
spirit that is forcibly embodied by his more pragmatic friend, the Father
Valliant. I was blown away by the simple power of Cather's storytelling. She basks
in the details and the story, and for that I am forever beholden. This is a
book to be read again and again.