Things As They Are
By Paul Horgan

408 Pages • $12.95

Things As They Are
By Paul Horgan

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

In Paul Horgan’s novel Things As They Are, life is good for Richard, a sweet, likable young boy growing up in comfort in turn-of-the-century upstate New York. His cheerful, youngish parents love him ardently. He lives in a spacious home in a pleasant neighborhood. He is liked by his teachers, neighbors, friends, and extended family. He lacks only one thing: knowledge of the real truth about things.

Things As They Are recounts how Richard loses the innocence of childhood and learns the facts of life. The novel consists of ten episodes that expose him to injustice, cruelty, fear, forbidden longings, treachery, and other evils. But Richard does not encounter criminals, psychopaths, or other monsters of sin. The ugly truths are conveyed by ordinary people: schoolmates and neighbors, parents and relatives, priests and policemen, and other admired adults—all behaving badly.

Fittingly, Richard’s initiation into “things as they are” involves ugly truths about himself. The five-year-old Richard impulsively drowns a kitten for the sheer perverse thrill of it. He is tormented by memories of what he did. He finds some relief when he finally confesses to his father, but confession does not entirely lift the burden of guilt. He wonders whether he can be faithful to his vow to sin no more.

The succeeding years bring Richard more surprises. Schoolmates behave with appalling cruelty toward a fellow student. Neighbors neglect their child. A beloved uncle is revealed as a spendthrift and a drunk. Richard’s father is betrayed by his business partner. In the last episode, Richard surprises a couple locked in a passionate embrace in the drawing room of his home. The woman is a cherished aunt who is married to someone else.

Things As They Are depicts the drama of original sin, though Paul Horgan carefully avoids religious language in the telling of his stories. Adults grow accustomed to sin and are made cynical by the vicious things that people do. By depicting sin through the eyes of an innocent and somewhat naive child, Horgan invites us to see how perverse it is. Why do we hurt other people? Why do we act contrary to our interests? Why do we do the things we hate? Sin is mysterious. The only sufficient explanation for its existence is a spiritual one.

Horgan explores these somber themes in prose of “piercing beauty,” as one critic wrote in the New York Times when the book was published in 1964. The novel is exquisitely crafted and written in spare, evocative language. At the end of the book, Richard is not so innocent, but he is still likable. “I was full of chagrin at the fall of man,” he says. He knows about evil, but evil has not mastered him.

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About the Author

Paul Horgan was born in 1903 in Buffalo, New York, but moved with his family to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1915 because of his father’s tuberculosis. Horgan was a student at the New Mexico Military Institute, in Roswell, as a teenager. He returned to New York and in 1923 entered the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, to study music. He lasted a year, then left school and spent two years as a theater designer. He returned to New Mexico at the age of twenty-four, determined to be a writer, and took a job as a librarian at his former school in Roswell with the hope that the job would give him time to write.

While in Roswell, Horgan wrote poetry, fiction, essays, short sketches of life in the Southwest, and even a history text on New Mexico. He also engaged in his other passions: painting and drawing. In all, he wrote ten books before he left in 1942 to serve in the army as an officer in charge of distributing information to troops. He left the military in 1946, taught at the University of Iowa, returned to Roswell for a time, and then received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to concentrate on historical research and writing. This work culminated in his 1954 book Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Horgan’s career continued to reflect his diverse interests and enormous talent. He wrote more books of history, including The Centuries of Santa Fe (1956); Conquistadors in North American History (1963); The Heroic Triad (1970); and Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times (1975), about the nineteenth-century archbishop of Santa Fe, for which he was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize.

Horgan wrote more fiction, including the novels A Distant Trumpet (1960), about the Apache wars of the 1880s, and the Richard Trilogy, of which Things As They Are is the first volume. He also wrote short stories, reviews, essays, autobiographical works, and a well-regarded book on Igor Stravinsky, Encounters with Stravinsky.

Paul Horgan moved to Connecticut in 1960 to serve as director of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University. In 1976, he was awarded the Laetare Medal, given annually by the University of Notre Dame to a lay Catholic of outstanding accomplishment and faith. At his death in 1995, he was professor emeritus of English and author in residence at Wesleyan.

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Links for Paul Horgan

Essay by Ralph McInerny

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