Paul Horgan: The Historian as Artist and Philosopher

Paul Horgan’s long and varied career marks him as a man of the Enlightenment in the Jeffersonian tradition. He is distinguished alike as scholar, teacher, and critic, historian, novelist, man of “letters,” and artist. And yet it is not diversity but unity which characterizes him, for all of his careers and activities are illuminated by a consistent philosophy.

It is probably as historian that Horgan is most eminent, and this though some of his novels may well survive even his historical volumes. If there is one explanation of his eminence as an historian more persuasive than any other, it is that, as with most historians who have an impact on their own day and on posterity as well, he brings to the study and interpretation of history the same luminous imagination, the same curiosity about human nature, the same sympathy and compassion that suffuse his novels. History is, after all, the faithful reconstruction of the past. That re-creation of the past can be fully achieved only when devotion to the scholarly principle of knowing “what actually happened” is animated by a creative imagination--something that the Annales school of French historians is now busy teaching the rest of us.

For it is imagination that most distinguishes the historians who survive in the affections and the allegiance of later generations--a Froissart, a Gibbon, a Michelet, a Macaulay, a Francis Parkman; it is imagination, rooted in the soil of research, that assures to a Winston Churchill and a Samuel Eliot Morison generations of grateful readers. All these historians of the past knew that if history is to live, it must go beyond science to poetry. It is with this goodly company that Paul Horgan is associated.

Horgan’s re-creation of life along the Great River (Editor’s Note: Horgan won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for the two-volume history “Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History”) combines History as fact, History as narrative, and History as a disciplined and inspired imagination. It is his imagination which enables him, and persuades his readers, to enter into the lives, the minds, perhaps the very souls, of the Indians of the American Southwest who first took over this land and adapted themselves to it; of the Spanish conquistadores who conquered it, and their incongruous associates the padres, who bore not the sword but the cross. And because he is a scholar of broad sympathies, and in a sense a participant in the drama which he recounts, he understands with equal insight, almost with clairvoyance, the American invaders, the successive waves of “Anglos”--those seeking land, those seeking copper and gold, those seeking health, or those seeking only an escape from the East--and describes how they invaded and conquered and ruled and ravaged the ancient land. In a long succession of novels and histories, he has conjured up for us with sympathy and deep insight the story of successive and conflicting rather than harmonious civilizations.

In his talent for portraying contrasting cultures, in the breadth of his literary embrace, and in the delicacy of his moral perceptions, Horgan is a kind of modern-day William Dean Howells. Both Howells and Horgan spent much of their boyhood and youth in what were, at the time, geographical and cultural frontiers--Howells in the Ohio of the 1840s which he has re-created in “A Boy’s Town” and “The Leatherwood God”; Horgan in the New Mexico of the early years of this century, a frontier whose artistic aridity he has recalled in the touching “Preface to an Unwritten Book” and, more painfully, in a long series of novels including the almost Faulknerian “Far From Cibola.” Both men headed East--interestingly enough, to Connecticut; both managed to play an important role in the literary and cultural life of both New England and New York--and, finally, of the nation; both were prodigiously productive--and in the most varied fields of letters; both ventured into biography, Howells in his affectionate portrait of Mark Twain and his perspicacious criticism of Henry James, Horgan with interpretations of frontier heroes like Bishop Lamy and Josiah Gregg. As critics both were rooted in the Victorian tradition and comfortable with it, but both proved able to surmount it and to welcome challenges to that tradition--Howells in his appreciation of Zola and Turgenev, Horgan in biographies of Peter Hurd and Stravinsky. Both embraced, in the end, the whole American scene, the American character, and with almost theological sanctions, American morality.

For it is not only history and geography which give unity to Paul Horgan’s literary world: the unity is philosophical. As with other traditionalists from Hawthorne to Howells, from Henry James to Willa Cather, it is moral solicitude and moral anxiety that provide unity to Horgan’s literary opus. It is this, in turn, which assures him a place not only in the history of American literature but in the study of the American character. Moral solicitude and apprehension is as pervasive in the pages of Horgan as in the pages of Henry James, for consistency is one of his more reassuring qualities. It is there in the history of the Rio Grande, and in the numerous volumes, both of history and of fiction, which are tributaries to that river, such as “The Heroic Triad,” the biographies of Bishop Lamy and Josiah Gregg, the long shelf of novels culminating in the Richard trilogy and, most recently, “Mexico Bay.” How could it be otherwise when the very founding of New Spain and particularly of New Mexico was, in a sense, an act of God, and one which Horgan is peculiarly fitted to understand.

Like other expatriates, if we may invoke that somewhat dubious term--the Virginia-born Willa Cather of “A Lost Lady” and “The Professor’s House,” or the Henry James whose original theme of New World innocence and Old World depravity ended up, in “The Ambassadors” and “The Golden Bowl,” with the roles reversed, or like the Norwegian-born Ole Rolvaag, whose “Giants in the Earth” portrayed the spiritual rather than the physical cost of transplanting--Horgan is fascinated by the spectacle of the clash (perhaps only the juxtaposition) of cultures on the same physical stage. In the Spanish Southwest it was a clash which, sometimes ostentatiously, more often unconsciously, found expression in moral rather than in physical conflicts. How does it happen, so Horgan speculates, that the same environment can inspire and exalt spiritual values in one people and corrupt these in others; how does it happen that the same challenges posed by Nature, or by History, can exalt or degrade? He is not wholly prepared to accept the familiar and almost orthodox explanation that

No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:

We are betrayed by what is false within.

It is the nature and the ambiguity of that “betrayal” that fascinated Horgan, as it did Henry James. Horgan sees the betrayal as both personal and social. The personal betrayal is the product, more often than not, of confusions and pressures over which the individual has little control. The social betrayal, in turn, is the product of larger social and economic forces--ambition, greed, passion, racial and national animosities--which impose on both the individual and society a persuasive though false morality. It is the interaction of these dark forces which provides the warp and the woof of so many of Paul Horgan’s novels. What are called for here--and what Horgan provides, as in his way Henry James did as well--are understanding and charity. He knows that as men and women are confronted by conflicting loyalties, choices are rarely clear, and he knows, too, that as even the wicked cannot wholly escape the imperatives of a moral society, so those who are committed to virtue and purity cannot escape the pressures of an immoral society, and that a resolution of the most profound moral problems does not so much solve those problems as enable life to go on with them unresolved.

Horgan is generous enough not to impose his standards on mankind, but he is quite prepared to impose them upon himself, and upon those who are the purveyors and the guardians of culture. This attitude is explicit in those aphorisms which, he tells us, “reflect his interest in the artist’s own vision, and the inexhaustible legacy of the past.” He calls these aphorisms Approaches to Writing. They are really not so much approaches as principles, and they are principles relevant not just to writing but to conduct. They conjure up the maxims of a La Rochefoucauld, and, like these, they tell us a good deal about the author. Consider a few: “There is no essential difference,” he tells us, “between running after fashionable persons and running after fashionable ideas: both are harmless diversions, and either may feed satire”--but he refrains from the satire. Or again, he laments that “the public taste in the United States is so offensive--Muzak, commercial architecture, comic strips, rock music, most television, radio, movies, pornography--that it is enough to raise serious doubts about the stylistic trustworthiness of democracy.” This is an old complaint: one of the central questions which Tocqueville raised about the ability of a democracy to nourish a genuine Culture, and a question still unresolved. Other aphorisms are more positive. Thus, “the genius of the novel is to give an effect of life in large traits and in intimate details,” or the observation that “the most valuable writers are those in whom we find not themselves, or ourselves, or the fugitive era of their lifetime, but the common vision of all times”--literary judgments, these, which apply to a Turgenev, or a Henry James and, in large measure, to a Paul Horgan.

In the prodigious volume of Paul Horgan’s contributions to American history, literature, art and life, in the catholicity of interest which those contributions reflect, in the literary qualities they illustrate and the moral standards they exalt, in their understanding of the national culture, in their generosity and magnanimity, they constitute a national treasure--a phrase which applies with equal validity to Paul Horgan himself.

Reprinted from “Of America East & West: Selections From the Writings of Paul Horgan” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).