Editor's note: This essay was originally published in America on May 25, 1957, titled "Character and Form in Creative Writing."
On May 2 in New York, the Campion Award of the Catholic Book Club was presented for the third year. Jacques Maritain had received the inaugural Award in 1955; Helen Constance White was the recipient in 1956. The superb Campion medallion, symbol of long and eminent devotion to Catholic letters, was presented this year to Paul Horgan.
Before a dinner-audience of some 250, including representatives of 26 publishing houses, authors, friends of Mr. Horgan and members of the Catholic Book Club, Mr. Horgan responded to the citation read to him by Rev. Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., chairman of the Editorial Board of the CBC. Following the tradition of the past Awards, America is privileged to publish here in full Mr. Horgan’s remarks.
By way of introduction, Mr. Horgan thanked “those who judged my work to be worthy” of the Campion Award, his publishers and his agent and readers “who have given me their interest and support through the years.” He paid his respects to “the superb craftsmen of the intellect and of the art of letters whose successors I am in the annals of the Campion Award,” and then led into the main body of his speech with this lovely paragraph:
And I give my thanks to Him from whom we all receive whatever share may be ours of faith and vision, love of life and desire to celebrate it in acts of creation through the artist’s passion and the craftsman’s discipline. I give my thanks for whatever of these may dwell in me by His favor, and by His favor may move me to my daily task.
The text of Mr. Horgan’s memorable address follows.
The body of his work is the anatomy of any writer. As we can least estimate our own appearance, so, probably, is a writer least qualified to describe the quality of his work or its effect, or even its outline. But what perhaps he can do is try to find in it whatever unifying practice may be there—the mark of his chisel, the workman’s signature, as it were—and to elucidate this for others. I propose to try something of this sort in your company this evening.
This little job would be a much simpler one if in the three decades, more or less, of my working life as a writer so far, I had been content to be one of a kind—a novelist, or an historian, or a short-story writer, or a modest experimenter in belles lettres. But I was not so content, and I worked in many forms, at different times.
When I try to get to the reason for this, I find that, in my experience, a subject for literature creates its own form. The very idea, in occurring to me at the outset of a new work, carries with it the terms, the architecture, of its fulfillment. I do not present this note as an original or a momentous discovery, but only to make the point that when I imagined a set of human circumstances in a specific setting, the result had to be a fiction, long or short; and when out of a real landscape there emerged for me through study a sequence of actual happenings, the product of this must be a piece of historical writing; and when an idea or an emotion struck me as music would, I, having no other music, made a poem.
In other words, form is inherent in the writer’s material and must be released from within it; and cannot in many cases be successfully imposed upon it from without. As we continue to write novels, we learn more and more of the poetics of fiction, and it is this cumulation of learning which may well lead us to write better novels the longer we try. But beware—so I instruct myself—beware of trying to use again in a new work whatever method seemed effective in an earlier. We must learn and earn our technical vocabulary over and over again as we work—though, to be sure, and for better or worse, the voice through which we speak remains our own, as it always was and will be.
So within given forms, we not only meet, we court variety in literary creation.
But what of a broader diversity when we look at a body of work which embraces, as mine has done, with arms perhaps more ardent than discreet, a number of literary forms? We see at once that diversity of feeling is now further complicated by diversity of shape and intention and address. If a man is so taken with literary premises and the wonder of God’s plenty of materials to be worked, that now he is a novelist, and again, an essayist; now a teller of short stories or long, and again, a chronicler of true history, how are we to find, in his variety of works, any common or unifying technical principle?
Gazing, by your grace and for your occasion, at my own volumes, I think I find one or another of these unifiers. Let me try to catch it.
For, whether in writing fiction or history or whatever, I think I see that my intention as a workman emerges—as it can better do after the fact than during or before its accomplishment. And I think my intention, as illustrated by my main efforts, is always this: to make a work of literature out of a deep absorption in character and a loving attention to design.
Before we test this notion in respect to its various applications to my work, let us say that character—and I do not mean to limit this term to human personality alone, as we shall see—character is that which yields warmth and vitality in the work; and design is that which gives it appropriate and beautiful shape. One without the other would fail to interest us—character without design might all too often produce an exercise in sentimentality, and design without character might well result in nothing more intrinsically enthralling than a table of contents. But together they supply the major ingredients of an act of life in a work of art, be it great or small.
Character in Design
Now, to look at the making of novels—my novels, since it is I who by force of circumstances beyond my control now have the floor and the subject—I have always, in writing fiction, been moved firstly by human character. If I could bring to page what I see and imagine and love or try to understand about human beings, then I surely must end by capturing character in words. Then, how people would rise up off the page, and take us into their mimic lives! How wonderfully plausible—once they were really living in the imagination—would be anything they might do to live out the story in which I must follow them. What sweet likenesses, or bitter, to the life of all about us, with its purities and its troubles and virtues and sins, would they bear! What an act of love, to create them in as complete a life as I could imagine for them! How dear, and various, and troubling, and noble is human character. What glorious despair the artist must know as he tries to find its amplitudes—and its limits.
For he must fix its limits if his portrait of character is to be contained in any sort of form; and here enters design, the other half of that team of attributes which, if I may claim it, is the unifying element in my work.
Design determines more than outline or limit. It governs proportions, and it illustrates growth in the sequence of events in fiction, and by its control of raw material it casts significance upon what it reveals, and permits the parts of the whole to exist together in harmony and justice. It makes atmosphere possible by making a segment of life seem as complete as life itself. If a good book is like a tree, then character is the genus, and design is the structure which embraces air, makes leafage, stretches its branches as far as it can and no farther, and in any season, stands clear in anatomy, whether bare in winter or clothed in full summer.
My metaphor can be turned through many mutations as we deal with fiction. I leave it to anyone to pursue it in its cheerful obviousness.
But since I have included in my body of work some volumes of historical writing, how do we pursue character and design in these?
River and City
Again, it is clear that the nature of the work must have determined its employment of the two attributes. To use as an example a large work of mine which had the Rio Grande as its subject, what had to be known to me first was the character of the book’s hero. In a chronicle ranging across centuries, this could be no individual life; it had to he the river itself. Without, I hope, lapsing into the easy and often rather blowsy sentiment of anthropomorphism, in virtue of which I would be obliged to style my river “Ol’ Man,’’ or “Mother,” or whatever, I think I can claim that the Rio Grande really possessed its own character and that it was so rich, so various, so strong and so significant historically that it must, in the course of my many years of study devoted to it, have become a living thing. Therefore, to discover its nature, and to become so familiar with it that some aspect of it must breathe through whatever detail of human history along its course I might treat, I set out to travel.
The river’s course measures almost two thousand miles from its source to the sea. I went this whole length three times, remaining as close to the actual stream as I could, though in some passages of canyon and desert the riverside was for me impossible to reach. I revisited various places along the river dozens, even hundreds, of times, and it seemed to me that I often traveled a hundred miles or more for a single sentence. I made over a hundred drawings in color of what I saw, knowing that later when I came to write of the river landscape, these field drawings would do two things for me: they would remind me, if no one else, of what I looked at; and they would recall to me what I felt about it at the time, as being involved in the act of trying to capture what I saw, my emotion of the moment would be as much part of the record as the record itself.
I made a system of the seasons by which I saw all the great different physical terms of the river terrain in the grand varieties of light, color and mood which the seasons put over them. Imperfectly, to be sure, and within the limits of my vision, yet truly, I came to feel the character of the river and, it seemed, I could count on it to be felt by my readers as it lived and moved in the imagination behind all the isolated human activities along the river’s shores throughout its centuries of time.
As for design—time was here the determinant. It was tempting to consider various original schemes and designs; yet nothing ever seemed so irresistibly just as a scheme of chronology, and it was in simple sequence of time that the river’s written history took form. The facts of this history were my allies in finding the final design; for the book, being long, needed two volumes. By fortune, the chronicle broke in halves, each half containing 261 in natural sequence two of the four major divisions into which history has divided the human occupancy of the Rio Grande—Indian, Spanish, Mexican and United States. My efforts on behalf of character and design seemed in this example of my historical writing to be consistent with my whole body of work.
In another trial at history, I undertook to capture the quality of a city—the city of Santa Fe. After dealing, in the Rio Grande work, with an earth-feature as hero, it was pleasant to return to a search for character among men and women. Each epoch of the old city’s life had its own, its individual and pungent flavor, it seemed to me; and it seemed to me that if I could find, for each epoch, precisely the individual man or woman whose experience and temperament appeared to express that flavor, then I could tell the story of Santa Fe through a series of portraits.
Character here in effect became the very design. But my individuals were not so patly to be had from among known historical persons of Santa Fe’s past. In a given period, some real man or woman could be identified with certain aspects of the life of Santa Fe, but not with all aspects. My solution of both character and design lay in creating for each period of the chronicle an anonymous protagonist composed of attributes, experiences and traits drawn from the real lives of his time. So my portraits had enrichment from many sources, and soon their persons moved, for me, as participants in the actual events of history.
Character was to me so important in this scheme that not until I had my protagonists fondly in mind was I able to receive the emotion properly expected from a fairly thorough examination of the historical atmosphere of their respective epochs. As for design—the book would have remained merely a succession of sketches but for a passage in recapitulation. It was an epilog which resolved the centuries, the themes, the changes, of historic Santa Fe. The solution is difficult to describe. Those who have read the book will recognize what I indicate; and for this I thank them. To those who have not read it, I extend a hopeful glance.
The Archbishop
A few more words and we are done. I would like to refer to an unwritten book for which I am gathering material. It is to be a biography—my first excursion in this form. The subject of it is known to a great public through the appealing novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather. Her central character she called Archbishop Latour. I shall be calling him Archbishop Lamy, for that was his real name. He was the first bishop and archbishop of Santa Fe. He reigned there from 1851 to 1885, when he retired. His death came in 1888. My search for his life has long since begun. I have looked for him in many parts of New Mexico, and in France, where he was born, and I shall soon, I hope, be looking for him in Rome, and in other places in Europe.
Material of the sort needed for such a book is hardwon. It comes slowly. But as it grows, in notes and thoughts and ideas, so does its human subject. Presently, if I am blessed in this undertaking, he will be a man—a man full-grown, assuming that I have sufficient stature of spirit and feeling for life to foster that growth. He had wonderful goodness, of which probably he was mostly unaware; and humor, energy and love of life for others. He was perhaps the first great civilizer in the mountain West after the plains and the mountains of the Spanish Southwest became part of our country following the war with Mexico.
I wish I could linger upon him now for a little while, for as we have been talking of character, here is a superb example of it. But neither time nor my knowledge of him, limited so far by incomplete study, will allow of this. I cite him here mainly to illustrate again what it is that—I do think—in all my works of writing sets me off on a subject. Once again, it is character, that repository of style and energy in life which makes us turn our heads to see it if we encounter it in a crowd, or reread pages about it if we find it in a book, or makes us content to serve it when we find it in our superiors in the duties of life.
As for the archbishop and design—I am spared the effort of here describing how these will meet; for I do not know. It is too soon to know. I cannot think the book will be done for some seasons. But I do think this: to enclose this character suitably, my design must somehow have the simplicity and the strength, the purity and the joy, appropriate to the enclosure of perfect charity.
