Mexico Bay
Booth, Rosemary
Swift & sure MEXICO BAY Paul Horgan Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $12.95,240 pp, Rosemary Booth ' 'He finally decided to park his car on the bluff above the city and make a watercolor drawing of...
...It is left to the scholar-writer Debler, who serves in the war, to span the gap between Wentworth's opportunism and Ives's visionary art...
...Mexico Bay is well set in this tradition, a fictional synthesis of eastern and western landscapes over several decades, from a variety of viewpoints-or "distances," as above...
...His assigned post in the information bureau gives Horgan a chance to describe wartime Washington in the idiom of the patriotic well-to-do: Everybody felt it, the vast surge of new energy and purpose, then, which the sudden state of war brought with it...
...The great Gulf of Mexico...
...Thus there are given to it as manie characters as there be chroniclers...
...Howard Debler, historian and humanist...
...back into Washington, D.C...
...and Diana Mac-donald, sometime partner to each of the men...
...sky in golden light...
...or Mrs...
...His prolific outpouring has been catholic in another sense as well, encompassing numerous perspectives of time and place...
...The solitude of his stark vision disturbs the painter, who at times yearns to belong to "a working world alongside other men...
...it is a greate sea the whiche voyagers from farre lands observe onlie in its diverse parts...
...the vast deserts to the south where mountains rose and fell in profiles like lines of distant, unheard music...
...Ben Ives, a painter straggling simultaneously for respectability and self-respect...
...What he quested after . . . was the sense of men in a particular place...
...In it, Horgan's characters move through scenes of south coastal Texas in the 1950s...
...Horgan depicts Debler's power as an ability to unite landscape with human activity, to enliven landscape with meaning...
...In addition to rich and precise details of setting, the novel is strewn with artful descriptions of people, as, for example, Howard Debler's mother, who kept a shoe box marked "Pieces of String Too Short to Use...
...She is, however, believable as a woman of the 1950s reared under fairly restrictive circumstances...
...and forth toward a California future, always with a sensed backdrop of century-old occurrences...
...Ives, as an artist, observes the war first-hand and portrays it directly in sketches of soldiers and others in the struggle overseas...
...during the Second World...
...To Wentworth, the conflict is an opportunity for advancement and conviviality on a dutifully grand scale...
...Mexico Bay is primarily a story, full of speed and energy as it spins to a finish...
...The four main figures themselves bring different attitudes to bear on the events in which they take part: famous playwright and pragmatist Jack Wentworth...
...Like the bay, the war evokes a spectrum of reactions...
...Like Paul Horgan's other writings and like the great river of his study-the story runs swiftly and surely over its course to a full conclusion...
...the endless flat lands of mesquite brush and cactus...
...the fateful border of the Rio Grande...
...From the outset the historian knew that he "already had most of his facts...
...The characters are defined in their responses to the main event of the story-World War II-and also to its scenic analogue, Mexico Bay itself...
...A satisfying read...
...Florence Schrotke, proprietress of the Vista Bel Motel, whose face looked "like that of a glad sheep, with heavy makeup added...
...This search forms a framework for Mexico Bay, while Debler as protagonist resolves the contradictions posed by the other two men...
...All of this analysis can be taken too seriously, of course...
...the white and pink, blue and earth-colored Mexican villages where armies ebbed and flowed and families were victims...
...It is a novel dramatically constructed...
...Swift & sure MEXICO BAY Paul Horgan Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $12.95,240 pp, Rosemary Booth ' 'He finally decided to park his car on the bluff above the city and make a watercolor drawing of four distances-the buildings of the main part of town just below him, the protected deep blue of the inlet this side of the breakwater, the paling blue of the Gulf receding to the almost invisible horizon, and finally the limitless...
...PAUL horgan, now in his seventies, has published dozens of books, from juvenile tales, short stories, and trilogies, to cultural essays, biographies, and historical accounts, including a two-volume study of the Rio Grande in North American history, Great River, which won a Pulitzer Prize...
...the righteousness that gave energy to both sides of the war . . . Diana Macdonald is a more anemic character than any of the men, depending on them for security and self-definition...
...With all its disruptions and early bunglings, the mammoth heavings of a new national spirit stirring alive, the war pulled the great majority into a desire to take part in any way . . . An ambitious and privileged throng of the population converged on Washington...
...In their various ways, people believed that a 'just war' was upon them...
...as in this description of Debler's conversation with Diana: He made her see the immensity of the Northern lands of Mexico and the present United States Southwest, and how they were once all one...
...War years...
...This remarkable body of water, as Debler quotes from the journal of an early explorer, is "not a Baye in the guise of a shelter all compact from storme or pursuit, rather...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 17
