A Certain Climate: Essays in History, Arts, and Letters

This book by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner treasures books and those who write them. IT is a work of literature about literature. It is, in a sense, autobiographical because what Paul Horgan says here of other writers is true of himself, Words on a page are the central obsession of his life.

A Certain Climate is tripartite and muti-faceted: One, Toward History, about the writing of history, the collective human biography; Two, After-Images, essays in the biography of diverse individuals from Willa Cather to Rouben Mamoulian to Alice Roosevelt Longworth; and Three, A Certain Climate, about the value of books, literature, and writers.

Throughout, certain central concerns recur: - The individual vision reaching farther than his art can express ); - The relation of form to substance ( Historical writing that is not literature is subject to oblivion ); - The significance of style ( an indispensable element of all lasting aesthetic achievements ); - The relation of intuition and imagination to fact and demonstrated proof (only a power of reconstructive imagination can keep memory memorable ), and of feeling to art ( I believe that no artist can fulfill his own vision unless he loves the world ); - The capacity of literature to create reality ( an artist s words once read become part of our own truth and our own qualifying memory ).

Paul Horgan s distastes are a reflection of his tastes. Thus, for example, he eschews pedantry and cant, that is, an exclusiveness that seems to disdain the general reader ; cynicism as too cheap a response to the marvels of life to yield an act of art ; and cultural orthodoxies, for the intellectual slang of a given period, with its reigning critical modishness, is rarely capable of enclosing the aesthetic judgment.

The work of an acute and sophisticated intelligence and a rich and passionate mind, A Certain Climate is civilized company of a high order.