Fame being fleeting, Paul Horgan (1903-1995) seems now to be known only to a handful of fans, and most of his nearly forty books, once bestsellers and prize-winners, are out of print.  One way to dust off Horgan’s name is to look at one of the few of his books still in print, a novel called Things As They Are, first published in 1964.  It purports to be the recollections of an aging man named Richard.  Like Horgan, Richard (no surname given) grew up in upstate New York in an Irish-German Catholic family.  Because of these similarities, Horgan prefaced his novel with a disclaimer that it was not his autobiography.

Part of the magic of this story is the adult Richard’s skill at evoking the world of his boyhood in early twentieth-century Dorchester, New York, apparently Horgan’s fictional stand-in for Rochester.  One can see the trees and streets, clothing and furniture of that time and place.  Most of all, one sees the people.  One can see clearly the neighbor boy who is mocked by the other boys as “the dog-faced one,” a simple soul whose parents are ashamed of him, despite his devotion to them, especially to his mother, a word he can render only as “muzza.”

Also, one sees Richard’s venerable but formidable German grandfather, “with glossy white hair swept back from a broad pale brow, and white eyebrows above china-blue eyes, and rosy cheeks, a fine sweeping mustache and a full but well-trimmed beard which came to a point,” preparing to return to the Fatherland and solemnly presenting Richard with a gold pocket watch.  The old man is said to resemble Johannes Brahms in his later years, and Richard’s proud and austere grandfather had once been to Berlin to receive an imperial decoration from the Kaiser.

At one point someone asks Richard whether he likes going to Mass.  “Whoever thought of that before?” Richard the narrator asks of the reader.  “I neither liked it nor disliked it.  It was beauty and it was faith and it was like the day or the night, enclosing all.”  All he can find to say to the man, though, is, “I like to see the candles all lighted and the colors of the vestments and hear the music.”

A cradle Catholic attending a Catholic school, Richard wonders what it would be like to be a priest.  He serves Mass at his parish church, which happens to be Dorchester’s cathedral, and one day he gets an idea.  “One morning after Mass,” Richard recalls, “I lingered alone in the sacristy.  It would be half an hour before the rector of the cathedral, our pastor, old Monsignor Tremaine, came to vest for his own Mass at seven.  His vestments were all laid out for him on a wide deep counter above ranks of tray-like drawers.  His black biretta was there too, with its silky pom-pom of red violet.”  Richard tries on the stole and maniple and biretta and is pretending to give the final blessing when in walks Monsignor Tremaine.

“He came forward slowly,” Richard remembers, “looking at me with keen and serious brown eyes in his creamy pink face.  He usually smiled and hummed a continuous tune, but now he came silently and gravely to me.”  After convincing the priest that he was not making fun of the Mass or desecrating the sacred attire, Richard is sent on his way, Monsignor vesting for Mass.

Later, to test his vocation, Richard secretly spends the night alone in the cathedral and believes he has a vision of the Holy Infant of Prague.  Needless to say, Richard’s priests and parents find out and are not amused, but in the end he has an unexpected visit at home from Monsignor Tremaine.  His kind words go over Richard’s head.  “I did not understand at the time what he was trying to tell me,” Richard says, “I felt only his warm humanity, and the forgiveness it was made of.”

Then Monsignor turns to the boy’s father, who has been standing nearby.  “You know, Daniel, the whole thing looks like boyish nonsense, somewhat overwrought and feather-headed, and of course, it may be just that.  But never forget the chance in a thousand that there may be real holiness somewhere in it.  Only God knows which it might be.”  Being Catholic, he seems to be saying, means being open to mystery.

Like his contemporary Graham Greene (1904-1991), for example, Paul Horgan is one of those authors whose smooth and vivid writing style weaves a spell, causing one to shake one’s head and re-read a page to try to see how he does it.  Like catching a snowflake in one’s bare hand, though, the fine, translucent structure soon vanishes.  Appreciation comes only within the full context, letting the single snowflake, so to speak, fall and join the rest of the winter wonderland.  With Things As They Are and Horgan’s other books, one must take time to let it all soak in, and as with the stories of Greene, one comes away with the sense that only a Catholic could have written them.

Nevertheless, Horgan disliked being labeled as a Catholic author, but he was a practicing Catholic and wrote about Catholic themes, both in fiction and in non-fiction.  Sometimes a Catholic writer is a Catholic writing for other Catholics, but at other times a Catholic writer is a Catholic writing for a wider audience but still exploring ethical problems relevant to Catholics and others.  Either way, a Catholic writer shows the reader how a character, either fictional or historical, grew under his or her own experience of the cross of Christ.  Horgan’s subtle, elegant prose conjures those scenes as though they were part of one’s own experience.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.