One Writer Leads to Another
In our May discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, my attention was drawn to the author’s recommendation of the writing of Paul Horgan. A quick search brought me to his Pulitzer Prize winning Great River (a history of the Rio Grande), a book of his Clerihews (Chesterton wasn’t the only one who delighted in these clever poetic biographies of notable men and women), and the three novels known as the Richard Trilogy, which I read as a whole, thankful to have the entire story of its protagonist at hand. In Things as They Are (the first of the three autobiographical-voice novels, about Richard’s childhood), I loved the story of his priest’s recruitment of altar servers from Miss Mendtzy’s fifth grade class.
““You!” he shouted at the boy in front of me. “If you had the stomach-ache and absolutely knew you couldn’t get out of bed that day, would you have the guts to ignore how you felt, and get up, and get dressed, and go out in the snow, and hurry to the cathedral in time to serve six o’clock Mass for me?”
“I don’t know, Father,” said the boy out of honest confusion.
Father Coach threw his hands and let them fall against his long thighs and said, “What did I tell you? Is there anyone here with the heart of a soldier and the will of an athlete who thinks he could serve Our Lord however hard it might be?”
We threw ourselves forward against our desks and reached our hands toward him, snapping our fingers in the air to be noticed individually, aching to be chosen.
“Me, Father,” “Yes, Father, here, here,” “Me, me, Father!” He let us snap and pant for a long moment in the agony of our desire to prove him wrong about us. Then slowly he began to nod. He murmured aloud as though to himself, and we heard Greatness musing.”
Horgan’s descriptions of place and of persons are evocative and beautiful, carrying the reader deeply into the story. In The Thin Mountain Air, Richard sees his family home with new eyes as he prepares to leave:
“I grew more acutely sensitive to our house. …I was sensible of the individuality of the house – any family’s house, and how much what was often unnoticed gave character to its atmosphere. I had always taken for granted the comforts and the mild beauties which my mother had arranged; a sense of how the rooms downstairs glowed with light, silvery through wide windows in the daytime, golden in the evenings, with curtains drawn and exactly convenient lamplight playing over soft colors of pale rose and ocher and gray, and firelight, gleaming wood, pictures and mirrors, walls of books, and prevailing little tyrannies of order in the events of meals, parties, and quiet times alone. What contrasting moods, too, left their lingering tones in the atmosphere of memory. Intimacies. Health and illness in their seasons. The odors of the body – our bodies – in the common humanities of physiology; the density of bedroom air after the night; the coffee-in-the-morning kisses; petty estrangements and patient misunderstandings, and occasional ruefulness drifting in the shadows of the house, to be dissipated by the fresh winds of joyful moments scenting the drafts of air all the way from the open cellar door to the living room, and up the stairs to the upper halls, and into the attic itself, from which the mystery of the unused was never quite dispelled. The times of my wickedness and punishment, the festivals of birthdays and holidays; the gaze-widening, bowel-changing, greedy ecstasy of Christmas in childhood gradually giving way to the calmer satisfactions of “thoughtfulness” in useful gifts of later years. Above all, a house as a garment habitually worn but consciously owned as the most protective and precious of all possessions.”
Later in this account of Richard’s adulthood, the young man describes the ranch foreman who will be his boss for a month of arduous work meant to toughen up a college boy:
“His face was like a piece of miniature landscape such as we were bumping over, with its gullies, buttes, ragged brush, pittings, sunned to a brick color. Every slow word from his dust-whitened lips was matched by his slow gestures. Every word, however simple, became weighty because of his authority of experience in matters however trivial. His pale eyes were folded over at the corners by slants of flesh after a lifetime against the sun. Until he’d made his point, his humor was stone-faced; then it broke open and you knew you must laugh. Life with animals and their mute contrariness had hardened his sinews; the work of survival in the ungiving land had sharpened his values. He was marginally literate except in referring to the Bible, and then he expertly echoed its style. Talk was his medium. In this he had dignity, which came from the belief that his days and his world were of as much interest to everyone as to himself. He must have been handsome in his youth, like a crag seen from a distance. Now in his years he was impressive as an earth feature seen close to. A curious childlike sweetness lay about his light eyes in the form of heavy dark lashes. His hands were like roots of an old tree, and to make a point he would elevate them with spread fingers, and a sideways jerk at the air, where invisibly his ideas seemed to loom for him. “For as the Lord telleth, then must man abide by the telling and bow his head unto the orders of the Lord,” he remarked, with his right hand hanging up between us.”
There’s something nuanced and powerful about Horgan’s writing. Flannery might have attributed it to the author truly seeing, and so placing vision into words so that we can see not only the man, or the house, but the meaning, or deeper significance of the ordinary. She advised that a writer should learn to paint so as to see more fully what his eyes might otherwise register as shallow surfaces. Horgan’s book A Writer’s Eye: Field Notes and Watercolors gives an inside look at this seeing and painting that is behind the scenes of his novel.
Walker Percy described Horgan’s gift as the power of “showing both the beauty and ugliness of the world, both the unique ugliness of oneself, as one sees it, and of others, and that special grace of growing out of it and into a common humanity. It is the humanity of terribly beautiful and terribly flawed creatures…”
My first taste of this author’s artwork (and how could I have waited through many years of reading Mystery and Manners before discovering him??) has left me looking forward to his novel The Fault of Angels and his thoughts on writing in Approaches to Writing. I’d loan you my copy of The Richard Trilogy, but I’m gifting it to an aspiring novelist!