Buckskin Beatitude

DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCH-BISHOP--Willa Gather--Knopf ($2.50). A large part of Miss Gather's pre-eminence as a novelist is due to her ability as a scholar. Her offering for this season is more scholarly than creative--a reconstruction of the episcopal works of the first Roman Catholic bishop of her beloved New Mexico, Jean Marie Latour.* She draws him with esthetic reverence, an immaculate conception of a missionary in buckskins who, lost and athirst in the desert, still retained elegance, distinction and "a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt and the God whom he was addressing."

The juniper tree was cruciform. Some hours after his prayer, young Bishop Latour found hidden water. Brother Joseph Vaillant, the scrawny but indomitable baker's son with whom Jean Latour stole out of France to make comradely conquests for God in the New World, and who later became bishop of tumbled, rocky Colorado, might have greatly elaborated this miracle, introducing the Virgin in colored robes when he related it. But not Bishop Latour. He was not a visionary ascetic. He wrought humbly with Nature, not beyond her.

This spiritual politeness of her subject is doubtless what brought Miss Gather, who is not a Catholic, to write his story. His nature leaves her free to chronicle every aspect of the vast country in which he worked and where she, three quarters of a century later, annually repairs for enlargement of the spirit. Into his pious story she can bring a wealth of unchurchly anecdotes because, trekking around his desert diocese on his cream-colored mule, Bishop Latour was respectfully studious of its folklore. He was austere towards priests like Padre Martinez, the bison-shouldered Mexican at Taos, brazen in fleshliness. But when Jacinto, his Indian guide, led him through a blizzard to shelter in a secret, tribal, mountain cave, the Bishop honored the inscrutable and did not ask if the vibrant mystery of the place was, besides a buried river, some ceremonial monster, an infant-devouring serpent as legend said.

The book is filled with colorful people, rainbow scenery, amazing weather. The lean, kind, sandy figure of Kit Carson welcomes the Bishop at Taos. Navajos, Zunis, Acomas, remnants of the cleanly pueblo tribes, move quietly about in smaller villages, vivid as their blankets and pottery, drawn with the patient accuracy of an archeologist. Cornelian hills circle Santa Fe, where the cathedral arises like a golden butte. Windstorms smother the bishop on the plains, cloudbursts drench him among the peaks.

Everywhere history is made to move in a living atmosphere, for that is the highest excellence of Miss Gather's writing, her mastery of intangibles. Just as the maturity of her mind has led her, in character-drawing, beyond the emotions to a spiritual emphasis, soi the maturity of her senses has brought her to dwell upon qualities of air, shadow and faint fragrance in her objective scenes. When she paints a mesa, she remembers the cloud mesa above it. Two bronzed runners passing over some sand dunes remind her of "the shadows that eagles cast in their strong, unhurried flight."

It was the dry, aromatic lightness of New Mexico's air that drew Jean Marie Latour back, when his work was done, to die there "of having lived," instead of drawing out his days, as he might have done, in sociable comfort abroad. The New Mexican air is Miss Gather's necessity too. ". . . One could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world. . . . Something soft and wild and free, something that . . . released the spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning."

NON-FICTION

Annie Oakley

ANNIE OAKLEY--Courtney Ryley Cooper--Duffield ($2.50). "Little Sure Shot," Indian Chief Sitting Bull called Annie Oakley (1866-1926). All over the U. S., all over the world, other people marveled at the slim, brown-haired lady who could hit four glass balls tossed in the air together. Now Author Cooper, onetime friend of Buffalo Bill Cody, makes from Annie Oakley's diaries a shrewdly sentimental history. A history of the times when she hunted quail in Ohio; when she shot an apple off a poodle dog's head; when she shot the ash off Kaiser Wilhelm's cigaret; when she beat the Grand Duke of Russia in a shooting match and made him stop courting an English Princess; when she, well past middle age, taught little rich children how to handle rifles; in all, a history of brave days, brave figures and brave, prodigious gunplay.

Murder Crimes

TWENTIETH CENTURY CRIMES-- Frederick A. Mackenzie--Little Brown ($3). Non-murderers, eager to identify themselves with victim or assassin, eager to hear in their own minds the angry drumming of strange terrors or desires, will read eminent Reporter-Criminologist Mackenzie's recountals with a creepy wonder. Having read them they will comprehend the greedy, grimy twists of whim or hatred that caused "Gyp the Blood," "Lefty" Louie, "Whitey" Lewis and "Dago" Frank to kill a gambler called Rosenthal. They will be able to wriggle upon the same tenter-hooks that pricked Loeb and Leopold, to share the sarcastic denials of Landru, the French bluebeard; most intensely of all they will feel the play of fear and fury that killed Rasputin, Russian minister monk, and the wind of horror and despair that howled around the Czar of Russia in a shambles at Ekaterinburg.

*Name in real life: John B. Lamy, appointed in 1853.