Word: horganitis
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...archbishop of the title, whom Cather called Jean Marie Latour, was the quixotic Jean Baptiste Lamy, first Bishop of Santa Fe. His affable Sancho Panza, Joseph Vaillant in the novel, was Joseph Machebeuf, later Bishop of Denver. After decades of research, Paul Horgan, novelist and Pulitzer-prizewinning historian (Great River), has attempted to separate the fictive from the actual. His triumph is due as much to a sense of place as to discernment of character. In his account, the shimmering, arid plateaus and the indomitable Gallic spirit are as palpable as they were in the novel-and as compelling...
...There is properly no history," wrote Emerson, "only biography." To reconstruct the New Mexican frontier of the 1860s, Horgan concentrates on Lamy. In the novel, the bishop experienced a constant inner joy: "He always awoke a young man ... One could breathe that [air] only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sagebrush desert." Horgan testifies to Lamy's love of Western saddle life, but concedes a sadder truth: "If he had any capacity to express exalted feeling, he left no record...
...Horgan's elegant, periodic prose, reminiscent of the 19th century histories of Prescott and Parkman, is at its most eloquent during these confrontations of culture. Horgan views the rebel Martinez as a tragic figure, lost "in the ashes of the old consuming conflict, in the pathos of learned agonies spent in a footless cause." The author also brings rich life to less dramatic episodes: his long, detailed accounts of the journeys over trackless desert and plateau develop a hypnotic rhythm of their own. Even minor ecclesiastical skirmishes are brilliantly employed-Lamy's exasperation with Vatican bureaucracy simultaneously reveals...
When death finally did come for the archbishop in 1888, when he was 73, Santa Fe - and Lamy himself - had changed. "Bishop Juan," as his requiem Mass called him, was mourned by Indian, Mexican and Eastern American alike. "It was," reports Horgan at the conclusion of this superb biography, "the end of a fine...
Playwright Paul Foster is not a newcomer to the stage. His Tom Paine (1968) enjoyed substantial popularity off-Broadway, particularly with younger audiences, thanks in part to Tom O'Horgan's flamboyant staging. In Marcus Brutus, Foster has followed Tom Stoppard's lead in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Just as R. & G. used Hamlet for its substructure, Marcus Brutus uses Julius Caesar...