A Writer’s Eye: Field Notes and Watercolors by Paul Horgan, and: Under the Sangre de Cristo by Paul Horgan, and: A Certain Climate: Essays in History, Arts, and Letters by Paul Horgan (review)

80 Western American Literature A Writer’s Eye: Field Notes and Watercolors. By Paul Horgan. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1988. 95 pages, $24.95.) Under the Sangre de Cristo. By Paul Horgan. (Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1985. 73 pages, $9.95.) A Certain Climate: Essays in History, Arts, and Letters. By Paul Horgan. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. 257 pages, $16.95.) Few American authors have both the breadth of subject matter and the staying power of Paul Horgan. For over a half century Mr. Horgan has turned out novels, short stories, histories, biographies, poems, plays, librettos, essays, and speeches—all of them extolling, in the most beautifully turned phrasing and dedicated artistry, the potential glory and innate dignity of humanity much in need of spiritual kinship with God and nature. Highly regarded as a writer’swriter of the American scene both East and West, Mr. Horgan is held with special regard as a writer about the American West, and particularly the Southwest. He isone of the earliest and most endur­ ing “quality” writers about that region who has proven time and again in such award-winning works as Great River and Lamy ofSanta Fe that to portray the West adequately in words demands the most intelligent, the most receptive, and the keenest, mind, heart, and eye possible. Mr. Horgan’s three most recently published books, A Writer’sEye, Under the Sangre de Cristo, and A Certain Climate, offer further testimonial to his continuing powers as a prose stylist, to his unique abilities as an artist to render history into living story, and to his overall watchfulness and caring, as an individual with definite and distinctive opinions, about the “climate” of humanity’s silly and profound strivings. A Writer’s Eye is a beautiful gathering of Mr. Horgan’s field notes, done mostly in India ink and water colors, for Great River, Conquistadors in North American History, and Lamy of Santa Fe. Horgan began his early student days in New Mexico with the potential to become a painter, a musician or a writer. His good friend during those days and throughout subsequent years, the late Peter Hurd, developed into one of the Southwest’smost renowned painters. Horgan’s “painter’s eye” soon became more fully a “writer’s eye”; however, traces of Hurd’s spare, realistic style and subject are recognizable in these drawings of the river itself and of the towns along the Rio Grande valley. Horgan traveled the length of this great river at least three times during research on the Pulitzer-prize winning history, ever willing, as he phrases it, “to travel five hundred miles for a proper sentence.” It is clear when looking at his watercolor notes that the bases for the prose pictures in Great River and Lamy especially come from first-hand awareness of the land itself and the architecture it fostered. Horgan is fully convinced, in practice and theory, that the writer’s role is to enable the reader “to see”—thus his great descriptive cogency. The watercolors in A Writer’s Eye also lend considerable credibility to his writing. Reviews 81 The essays in A Certain Climate take their theme from Mr. Horgan’s own climate of mind as much as from the sublime vastness of river, desert, and mountain which make up the Southwest. Horgan seeks to reconcile the ecology of the drawing room with that of nature—the climate of books and ideas with that of geography and grand historical action. Such attempted reconciliation creates much of the tone of Mr. Horgan’sown books, most especially his narra­ tives which seek to justify history with story, the greatest of lives with larger social and cultural forces of race and institution. Aside from the many fine essays on the pros and cons of the writing of history, the uses and misuses of libraries, the mindlessness of certain aspects and stylizations of popular (not populist) culture, the good art and, at times, mean fun of civilized conversation, one essay, “Willa Cather’s Incalculable Distance,” on the influence and significance ofWillaCather—to Horgan and to American letters generally—is in and of itself worth the price of the collection. Horgan interrupted...