Goyen: Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)

Goyen

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Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series Published from the collections of the HRC Stuart Gilbert, Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert’s Paris Journal, ed. Thomas F. Staley and Randolph Lewis. 1993 Ezra Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. Ira B. Nadel. 1993 Nikolay Punin, Nikolay Punin: Diaries: 1904–1953, ed. Sidney Monas and Jennifer Greene Krupala, trans. Jennifer Greene Krupala. 1999 Aldous Huxley, Now More Than Ever, ed. David Bradshaw and James Sexton. 2000 Stanley Burnshaw, The Collected Poems and Selected Prose. 2002 Laura Wilson, Avedon at Work: In the American West. 2003 Kurt Heinzelman, ed., The Covarrubias Circle: Nickolas Muray’s Collection of Twentieth-Century Mexican Art. 2004 Megan Barnard, ed., Collecting the Imagination: The First Fifty Years of the Ransom Center. 2007 Sanora Babb, photographs by Dorothy Babb, On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps, ed. Douglas Wixson. 2007

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Goyen Autobiographical Essays, Notebooks, Evocations, Interviews William Goyen Edited and introduced by Reginald Gibbons

University of Texas Press Austin

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Copyright © 2007 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2007 The Northwestern University Research Grants Committee has provided partial support for the publication of this book. We gratefully acknowledge this assistance. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goyen, William. Goyen : autobiographical essays, notebooks, evocations, interviews / William Goyen ; edited and introduced by Reginald Gibbons. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center imprint series) Includes index. isbn-13: 978-0-292-71491-5 (alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-292-71491-2 (alk. paper) 1. Goyen, William. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Goyen, William—Interviews. 4. Authors, American—20th century— Interviews. I. Gibbons, Reginald. II. Title. ps3513.097z46 2007 813'.54—dc22 [B] 2006023811

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Permissions Acknowledgments

Texts and photographs copyright © 2006 by the Doris Roberts and Charles William Goyen Literary Trust. The translation of the interview with William Goyen originally published in the French journal Masques is copyright © 2006 by the Doris Roberts and Charles William Goyen Literary Trust. The interview with William Goyen by Robert Phillips was originally published in The Paris Review (No. 68, winter 1976) and is © 1975 by The Paris Review, reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency The interview with William Goyen by Reginald Gibbons, originally published in TriQuarterly magazine (Northwestern University), No. 56, 1983, is copyright © Reginald Gibbons and the Doris Roberts and Charles William Goyen Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission. The editor offers heartfelt thanks to the staff at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, who over the years have assisted in gathering some of these materials and in related projects. Thanks also to the University Research Grants Committee of Northwestern University for financial support of travel to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and to Doris Roberts for financial support of this project.

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Contents

Introduction by Reginald Gibbons xi

Part I: Autobiographical Essays 1 The Belleek Swan 3 An Autobiographical Work: “Six Women” [prospectus] 8 Frieda 10 Brett 18 Mabel 22 Margo 24 Millicent 29 At Lady A’s 32 While You Were Away (Houston Seen and Unseen, 1923–1978)

39

Two Last Lectures 53 Autobiography in Fiction 53 Recovering 63

Part II: Three Interviews 71 The Paris Review 73 Masques 103 TriQuarterly 110

Part III: Evocations 141 Early Evocations 143 Notebook Entries 143 A Crossing 159 Where Are We Traveling? 161 Some Children and Teachers 164

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Late Evocations 169 I Spent All My Time in Texas . . . 169 Dear George: The Salt? The Wrath? The Salvation? 170 Notebook Entries 172 Epilogue: On Francis Mockel’s Etching “Suite funèbre I” 183 Chronology 185 Index 189

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Introduction Reginald Gibbons

To write fiction is to place before the reader the objects of one’s own attention and curiosity and passion. This is just as true of fiction that does not seem to be based on the writer’s own experience as it is of autobiographical fiction. In fact, as all writers of fiction, even the most impersonal, know, it is nearly impossible not to write autobiographically, not to imply one’s own deep concerns and allegiances, enthusiasms and losses, one’s own stake in life. When the fiction is very close to the writer’s own experience, writing opens ways for the writer to enter imaginatively into more remote identifications and to explore them as well. When a writer of fiction writes autobiographically, perhaps what we see is not the previously half-hidden emotional life revealed fully, but simply another, more explicit, way of giving it expression. Several emotional notes together form the chord of the writer’s temperament and moods, sounded in each work in different ways, but in the case of a writer who has that greatness that comes from focus, access to feeling and the unconscious, and a great ear, this sounded chord, however different in each work, whether in autobiographical or impersonal fiction, is recognizably that writer’s own chord and no one else’s. Without doubt William Goyen is such a writer. Even in a brief, fairly late nonfiction prose piece that Goyen wrote for the brochure of an exhibition in France (“On Francis Mockel’s Etching ‘Suite funèbre I,’ ” presented herein as the epilogue) one sees the ostensible subject give way to some of Goyen’s long-standing personal preoccupations—in this person of passionate friendships and extravagant alienations, the preoccupation with the reconciliation of two persons, one of whom has gravely wounded the other (as in his 1976 story “Precious Door”); in this Texan who was forced to wander across oceans during World War II and who then left Texas once more and encountered persons and places that significantly affected his writing (especially Taos, New Mexico, and New York City, but also the

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Pacific Northwest, London, Rome) the feeling of being “the passerby, the glancer” whom he mentions in several places as a late key selfconception that he found reinforced in Beckett; in this man who was capable of unbridled, theatrical anger and haughtiness, yet also of spiritual calm and humility, the simultaneous feelings of threat and tenderness; in one who fell in love with both women and men the sense of being a forever divided being, such as we see in the title character of his last novel, Arcadio. Goyen wrote fiction with a deliberate and conscious method that transformed his own most intimate experience and inner life into something impersonal. In creating fiction he freed the human experience that he underwent and also observed in others from the happenstance of reality so that it might represent some shared aspect of our humanity, whether that aspect was very ordinary or astonishingly visionary. We are not surprised to encounter a preoccupation with the past in any writer who must work—even if at the pitch of imagining the as yet unseen—from the repertoire of feeling and thinking preserved in some especially dynamic chamber of memory and imagination; from the beginning, the author of The House of Breath pondered the problem of how to think about the past, about the life of feeling that one had had in the past—that whole ghostly scenario that seems still to be alive, somewhere, but not here, not now. Perhaps explicitly autobiographical writing was an inevitability in such a writer as Goyen; however, he was also the inventor of a “lyrical” form of the novel that did not at all depend on prolonged or sequential narration, so it is no surprise that he did not, or could not, write of his own life as a chronological passage through stages of human experience. He did outline such a work, but he never wrote it. Yet he commented, “Everything is auto-biography for me” (“Recovering,” presented in Part I as the second of “Two Last Lectures”). It was tempting to include in this autobiographical collection Goyen’s short stories “The Horse and the Day Moth” and “The Moss Rose” from his Collected Stories (1975), because they seem to speak so directly of Goyen’s own daily experience of feeling, of his exploring the emotions aroused by ordinary experience in search of the flashing light of a feeling, even a small one, that could serve to shape a story—one’s own or someone else’s, real or imagined—and to draw from a moment of emotional intensity some small meaning that redeems loneliness and sorrow. But on the other hand, the great thing about those two stories is that with the fiction writer’s modest device of writing in an autobio-

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graphical mood but in the third person, Goyen has already transformed the materials of his life into finished and impersonal works, because that small device fundamentally, however subtly, transforms the impulse of writing from being one’s own cry or call into a drive to shape, to form, to “adumbrate” (as Goyen wrote in a little unpublished sketch, “A Crossing”), “which means casting forth the shadow and shape” of life, of a moment in a life. For Goyen, his unique prose style was simply a kind of transformation of his materials, or, as he put it in my 1982 interview with him (published in TriQuarterly in 1983 and reproduced here as the third interview in Part II), “Style is, or has been, for me, the spiritual experience of my material,” a dimension of the spiritual that he defines in opposition to craft; he says that to write a character he must have “a spiritual revelation of the human being that I would not have got by studying the work of other writers.” And he says simply that the “spiritual” is that which is “not physical.” “Style is a spiritual manifestation of the experience of the story, for me.” When Goyen was writing, it was this transformation that he always sought with such steadiness and stamina—despite disappointments, frustrations, and self-thwarting, both artistic and professional. One might even say that without achieving this sort of transformation of his material—which would of course be much harder to do if the piece being written were autobiographical rather than fictional—Goyen was nearly unable to write. He sustained for decades a creative method that functioned in two stages: he said that he had to hear a voice narrating for him, within his imagination, before he could then narrate for a reader. Hence the paradox of the difficulty, for him, of writing an autobiography, in which “I” must seem to be not an other but one’s supposedly single self. One aspect of Goyen’s early life as a writer (through 1950, the year of the publication of his first novel, The House of Breath) that made his delicate, tentative, impassioned, and ultimately triumphant attempt to create a new novelistic form even more difficult was that his family of origin, and especially his mother, persisted—in a way that was naive but understandable in less educated people—in seeing all of Goyen’s fiction as autobiographical and in reacting with horror, shame, and anger to what Goyen had so painstakingly crafted and envisioned with love and art. Yet very early, Goyen thought through and held to a position from which he never moved: that he must see himself as an artist (a rare and highly suspicious creature in most of his native Texas, generally, and entirely foreign to his family of origin), not as a person

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Goyen and his mother at the house on Merrill Street, Houston

obliged to remain silent for fear of offending a member of his family—or anyone. Even when Goyen set down straightforwardly autobiographical sentences—either contemporaneously with his experience in notebooks and small unpublished pieces or later in retrospective finished essays—he felt the impulse to make clear the artistic basis of his work: this was the contradictory combination of his kinship of spirit with impersonal Modernists like Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett and his intimate voicing, which came from his experience of the expressive language exemplified in the humble practice of informal storytelling and in the vitally necessary activity that, thanks to his showing us its nature, we might call storylistening. An East Texas Modernist, he repeatedly located his artistic origins in remembering or re-imagining the storylistening experience of his early childhood; he spent his early childhood in the small town of Trinity, Texas, and then his parents moved to a whole neighborhood of small-town, talkative exiles in the growing city of Houston. For example, he writes: I remember them lined in their chairs on the front porch at dusk, some womenfolks in the swing, talking of kinfolks and farms and nearby towns, the fortunes or failures of sawmills and roundhouses and packing stands, or weal or woe of carpentry, smallcrop gardening, road-building and time cutting, or crises of drought or gulley-

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washer. They were describing and creating for the imagination of the young who were listening, a world that was folk drama; and so was passed on the small-town Texas inheritance, talked down on porches at twilight through the generations. It was all so gentle and melodious, this speech and its burden, rising and falling and singing, a kind of choric keening on the ways of the world, its weather and families, destinies and patterns; it bore a heroic shape for me, was a winding, swelling and murmuring saga of more than a breed of human being toiling on the landscape of a region in the world. It was grand and sweet, this lyric despair that rose from a ground-tune of clear-ringing faith chanted by these old people on the porch, born “right here and around here,” breakers and finders and blazers, prevailers. (Unpublished HRC Manuscript)

Yet this was the realm of family and social intimacy that was least able to embrace or even comprehend what Goyen was trying to do as an artist and that in the person of his parents reacted with shock and anger to his early writings. Despite Goyen’s lifelong pondering of the autobiographical impulse, but perhaps because he invested so much artistic energy in transforming autobiography into fiction, Goyen did not write an autobiographical book. He left us a few autobiographical essays and fragments; in the last years of his life, he was by fits and starts writing an autobiography, but he struggled so with the form of it, and for so long, that at first glance it seems to be only a sketch of something larger. Goyen also made certain to preserve what may be almost all of his notebooks and letters in research archives; others that he carried around as he worked with them in his last seven or so years have been preserved. In that last period, which began when he stopped the alcoholic drinking that had progressively debilitated him over many years, he began to write fiction again, and he achieved once more his brilliant and passionate originality—in both his novel Arcadio (1983) and in his last stories (some of which were included in a posthumous collection, Had I a Hundred Mouths, 1985). Again he created his visionary emotional openness and his Modernist lyricism of ordinary speech. Yet even while Goyen again felt very creative and productive in his last years, he also felt the accumulated toll of his life of creative and vital struggle, and his mood was of a valedictory reflectiveness about the life of writing and the writing of life.

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Goyen was thinking about and planning an autobiographical work and talking to his literary agent about it at least as early as 1977, when he typed out a prospectus for it. This prospectus he repeatedly revised, and on July 7, 1982, a little more than a year before his death, he retyped it as a preface for an editor who might read the brief sketches that he had so far completed of his Six Women, sketches that he was trying to see as the seeds of a larger work. But I think that, if he did wish to get access to more of his recollections and feelings about the subjects of these six sketches, and even if he was disappointed that he did not finally do so, nevertheless it was not only illness and his deep engagement in writing and endlessly rewriting Arcadio that forestalled his writing a larger version of Six Women. I think that in these compressed scenes of the six women he had already found a finished albeit very elliptical work that exists as a collage of fragments—or as he might say, a quilt of medallions. The sketches are mostly elegies—and how long can an elegy be? This series of elegies, then, may really have been the work that Goyen wanted to write. So despite the additional passages and episodes that he mentions in his prospectus for a whole book that was to be based on these sketches, the impulse behind the pieces is not a chronological narrating filled with information about this place and that, this person and that. Goyen’s temperament, given to the most intense compression of narrative, the most evocative illusion of the speaking voice, and the most resonant use of symbol and image, must have made it extraordinarily difficult for him to remake himself into the writer who could put one event after another in a text that followed the ultimately arbitrary logic of temporal sequence instead of the artistically freer and more expressive paralogic of association, narrative, dramatic surprise, and feeling itself, especially the erotic. Yet Goyen seems to have kept trying to think of the autobiographical work that others might wish him to write and reward him for writing. This seems evident in the language of the 1982 preface, in which, below, I italicize the phrases that signal Goyen’s intimate, necessary connection to the six women—his choosing of them in order to strengthen, restore, tend, his sense of his own dilemma as an artist: What I’m writing is six separate but over-woven or interlocking (through me, the narrator) biographical narratives. What follows are presentations of six women as introduction to them. The six biographical narratives really ride over, or under, a larger, encom-

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passing autobiographical narrative that will, in the whole, constitute a social and literary document covering the years in which I knew the people (1945–1981), but also covering the span of each life (i.e., Frieda Lawrence in Germany, Mexico, etc.), Katherine Anne Porter in Texas, Paris, Mexico, New York, etc. These lives that my life encountered and involved itself with and was notably influenced by are, I believe, interesting if not extraordinary. A couple were revolutionary in influence and action; all were unique individuals out of the mainstream following their own way, not yet known, or not written about in any depth of scope if they are. They were women of style and fashion (Millicent Rogers), art (Dorothy Brett), theatre (Margo Jones), Letters (Katherine Anne Porter); all seemed to me to be searching for, enjoying or fleeing an image of life that was counter to the conventional one of woman as Serving Wife, Listener Only, Mother.

Goyen did try to construct that chronological narrative, even if it would be focused on other lives; he wrote that altogether the lives he would narrate would be “those of Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Margo Jones, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Millicent Rogers, Katherine Anne Porter, Ann Green, my father, an American editor (Robert N. Linscott of Random House), a distinguished British poet [probably Stephen Spender], a great European critic and translator of my first novel (Ernst Robert Curtius), Anaïs Nin, and more” (unpublished HRC manuscript “Note on an Autobiography in Work”). Two names are notably absent—those of the men with whom Goyen had important relationships: Walter Berns, with whom he served in the U.S. Navy and lived in Taos, later a political scientist; and Joseph Glasco, a painter. The cause of this absence might lie as much in Goyen’s creative psyche as it does in his prudence. Goyen said in our 1982 interview, “It’s often a woman’s voice talking to me” (TriQuarterly interview in Part II). He would speak of his contradictory relationship with his mother, whose emotional blackmail had made him suffer and yet whose Texas voice remained one of his great sources of life and art. “As a literary person I truly am the offspring of my mother and women like my mother,” he said in an interview (published in The Paris Review and reproduced here as the first interview in Part II). “Hers was a singing way of expressing things, and this I heard so very early that it became my own speech; that’s the way I write. I love spending money to talk to her on the phone in Texas an hour at a time because it’s just as though

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the curtain that came down on an opera last night goes right up when I call her tonight. The aria goes right on; it’s wonderful.” Yet he also told of how, not long after he had returned at last to Texas from the Navy and World War II, his mother had fallen ill—perhaps, we might think, partly in order to keep him from leaving her. She had been hospitalized, he told, and during her recovery he had become more and more apprehensive about staying in Texas; he really could not bear it and had to get out. What would evoke in him his artistic work was elsewhere; what she and Houston then evoked in him was oppres-

Goyen and his mother

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sive and stifling. On the day when he brought his mother home from the hospital to the little house at 914 Merrill Street, in the old Houston neighborhood called the Heights, she saw, as soon as the two of them entered the front door, Goyen’s small cardboard suitcase standing in the front hall. Containing the very little that he owned, it was packed, and he was ready to leave. “What is that?” she had asked. “I’m leaving,” he replied. “If you leave, I’ll die,” she said. And he replied: “If I don’t leave, I will die.” A monitory, prohibiting, emotionally exhausting figure of woman was threatening yet at the same time vital to his creativity. Among his manuscripts is a single typed sheet, dated March 15 but not by year, on which Goyen wrote: In the doctor’s office—a sudden trance, illuminations into dreams, memories, all relating, one leading into another, so that a mass of experiences came upon me, many layers, faces, houses, living presences, living spirits invaded my consciousness. I was almost overwhelmed and when I came to, or out of it, I felt lost for a moment, did not know where I was, or quite who I was, amnesiac, could hardly think of how to get home, where home was, when I had left home to come to the doctor, or what time it was. This morass of deep memory of dreams hovered over by the spirit, figure, presence of a woman. The visions in this trance-state had to do with physical sickness, something about blood, somebody who was supposed to come but didn’t arrive . . . and much more that I cannot now recall; but each vision brought on another, and so I was overwhelmed, when I came to, by a loss of sense of place, identity, time, reality.

The sheet was probably typed when Goyen lived in New York, for in a few handwritten words beneath the typed paragraphs he mentions his wife, Doris Roberts, whom he married in 1963: “Was the woman Doris, faith, my mother, my sister, the pervading Woman Presence?” I do not know if he meant to capitalize “faith” as a proper name. But a kind of yielding faith to what cannot be proven, or perhaps even understood, in this case in the form of the presiding (female) spirit that Goyen here characterizes, produced an effect on him that was sometimes necessary for creation, for he often said that for him writing was

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a being possessed by an other, a listening to another voice speaking. In a notebook late in life he summarized this in a way that also recalls his statement, above, that in his vision there was “somebody who was supposed to come but didn’t arrive”: 1. Writing and waiting (for:) 2. Finding the voice Hearing the voice. Story is told to me, I tell it to you. Otherwise I don’t write—or can’t write.

It is not surprising that Goyen’s prospectus of short autobiographical pieces represents only the first six persons—all of them women—of his full list. But then in a typescript dated April 12, 1983—that is, in the last months of his life in which he was able to work and while he was finishing Arcadio, he outlined a third conception of a proposed autobiographical work, returning to the persons he had named in his longer list and even adding others, but this time following a conventional chronological unfolding of his own life: Autobiography of William Goyen I. Texas, Small Town (1920’s). II. Texas, Young City (1930’s). 1. cf. “While You Were Away,” letter to father, as model. 2. Margo Jones. III. South Pacific. War life on an aircraft carrier (1940–1945). IV. New Mexico (1945–1957). 1. Building adobe house with Taos Indians. 2. Kiowa (D. H. Lawrence) Ranch. 3. Frieda Lawrence. 4. Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge, Millicent Rogers. V. New York in the Fifties and Sixties. 1. Writing and Publishing. Robert N. Linscott, Capote, McCullers et al. 2. Katherine Anne Porter. 3. Easthampton. A writer living among painters (Abstract Expressionists). 4. Early Yaddo. Elizabeth Ames, Elizabeth Bishop, Eleanor Clark et al.

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VI. Another Man’s Son. Marriage, Step-fatherhood. 1. New York Publishing. On being an editor. 2. Illness. The dark. VII. New Life, New York. The palms of Los Angeles. The light.

To read this now seems to me painful—Goyen, ever more valedictory, tries to imagine a way of making his autobiography, and thus his own artistic accomplishment, more acceptable to the conventional appetite for chronological sequence while suppressing not only his writerly impulse, which would have created a work more in keeping with his artistic method, but also (again) any mention of two important relationships. But recall that Goyen turned twenty in 1935 and lived for decades of love and writing in danger of public humiliation and even penalty if he were to acknowledge his love of both women and men. And recall that he knew the publishing business very well from his years of working at McGraw-Hill and understood what kinds of books that business wanted. Perhaps to help him locate himself in chronological time, where Goyen was not always best at dwelling, he also typed out a one-page aide-mémoir that he titled “Address of residence of period from January 1, 1960 to June, 1963,” in which he noted in detail his apartments, hotels, rented houses, travels. (In conversation in the last years of his life, he would cite this thought from Beckett, “The writer is a passager”—a mere passing figure in this world.) Even though at some moments Goyen wanted nothing more than to be permanently settled, hidden away in a “nest,” as he would put it, he also tried repeatedly and at least sometimes successfully to encourage himself by thinking of figures and instances of isolation and transitoriness, by using the thought of his own isolation and, as he felt it, near invisibility as a writer, as a kind of reassurance that this apartness, whether he wished it or suffered it, freed him artistically. Taped onto the first page of a notebook dated 1978 and 1979 is a tiny newspaper clipping that reports Vicente Aleixandre’s comments after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1977: “The Nobel Prize is an honor . . . but it is also an accident, one which cannot touch the substance of the poet. I have my own world. I have completed and am completing my destiny. To be a poet is to be. The Nobel prize has not changed my life in essence. I have been working for 50 years. I continue working.” The clipping is torn off, leaving this final, incomplete fragment expressing what was for Goyen a complete thought: “Mr. Aleixandre, little known outside the Spanishspeaking world until . . .”

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Somehow arising out of Goyen’s sense of isolation, of forbidden as well as permitted love, and of being in transit is his artistic method of writing in voices. Or perhaps it is the writing in voices, which he pursued almost from the beginning of his artistic career, that added to his sense of isolation and of being a passager. In a notebook, Goyen copied out the following passage (which he identified only as coming from a biography of Beckett), and he underlined the last sentence: . . . Jung spoke of the complexes that form personalities of themselves, appear as visitors and speak in voices which are as the voices of real, definite people. Beckett has often called his prose writing a series, with each character supposedly evolving from all the preceding ones. His characters speak with different voices, sometimes assume different names and identities, tell their own stories and sometimes tell the stories of each other . . .

Interesting enough in itself as an articulation of a concept of fiction with close conceptual affinity to Goyen’s, however different their work is in manner, this account of Beckett is even more telling where it appears in yet another place, copied out by hand on a loose sheet from a lined 8.5-by-11-inch pad where, at the bottom of the page, it follows this quotation, which was evidently taken from a letter that Goyen had received: Jean Wagner, Prof. of Amer. Studies Université de Grenoble III Domaine Universitaire de Saint Martin de’Heres BP 25X 38040 Grenoble Cedez “While we assumed that Berryben is the narrator throughout, we ran up against the character of Boy, of whom honestly we do not know what to make. Would you please be so kind as to give us some assistance in this respect? Who is he exactly? Some passages induce one to believe he is just an alter ego to Berryben, but this interpretation is not always satisfactory. Also, if this theory of a dual character holds true, is [this] the relevance of your quotation from Rimbaud, ‘JE est un autre’?”

That famous sentence from nineteenth-century France, in which the young poet Arthur Rimbaud asserts that “I” is in fact an “other,” is one of two epigraphs to The House of Breath. How was such a writer to pro-

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duce an autobiography, except at least partly by entering the being or at least hearing and then ventriloquizing the voices of others? Of his extraordinary first novel, Goyen says in our 1982 interview, “In fact, I am every one of the characters, men and women” (Part II, TriQuarterly interview). By being all of them in turn, Goyen could get at the ground of his own being: a lifelong struggle between conflicting and yet complementary impulses—not only between listening and telling, but also between woman and man, between creativity and despair. He wrote on a small sheet from a hotel notepad, without dating this thought: “A spiritual autobiography. Search for purity (of spirit) vs. Sensuality of body, & lust, and erotic sense of life.” And so these values and many others are legible in both Goyen’s fiction and the autobiographical writings in this volume—values that include a profound acknowledgment of the emotional wounds that life inflicts on us and indeed a tender compassion for the afflicted and wounded; a love of the sounds of the storytelling English of East Texas; an openness to the exaggerated, the magical, and fanciful, and the terrifyingly dreamlike; and a fascination with searching, waiting, passing through. In addition to Goyen’s writing, both fragmentary and finished, this volume presents three retrospective interviews. There is much more interview material, both in print and in Goyen’s papers, but these three instances seem essential to any volume that would give a sense of how Goyen saw his own development and achievement as he looked back. The interview in the French magazine Masques is one of the very few instances in which Goyen spoke directly about how he saw sexuality, which after all is of central concern to him in his fiction. The interview in The Paris Review, conducted by Robert Phillips and edited by Phillips and Goyen, fills in a great deal of biographical detail. The interview in TriQuarterly gives us his retrospective sense of what he had wanted to accomplish as an artist and what he saw as the meaning of that accomplishment. The reader should not expect perfect consistency in what Goyen says in the interviews or even consistency of manner, yet even though Goyen’s voice and emphasis may differ from interview to interview—understandably, given the three different interlocutors and occasions—it is always a most recognizable Goyen who is speaking. As his fiction shows repeatedly, Goyen was many. In this volume Goyen, the great listener to how human identity (including his own) is created in a way of speaking, Goyen the visionary ventriloquist, does his own different voices.

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In all the material in this collection that has been transcribed from unpublished sources, those typographical errors, idiosyncratic punctuation, and obvious omissions or repetitions of words that seem to me not to invite interpretation in themselves have been silently corrected. Some, however, have been left intact, precisely because of their interest—for example, Goyen’s misspellings of a few words. Goyen’s underlining in works left unpublished has been preserved, but in those works that were published, and thus for which Goyen corrected proofs, conventional italics have been used. Goyen’s handwritten corrections of typescripts have been incorporated into this published text except when the context and corrections convinced me that the handwritten words had remained for Goyen unresolved alternatives. In the fragments and in other unpublished works, Goyen’s habit of capitalizing certain nouns that seem to deserve special emphasis in country speech has been mostly preserved; the effect is of a kind of mild awe at a word of genuine moment. Of the previously published material reproduced here, the most difficult case has been the interview from the French magazine Masques. This particular textual problem is complicated—with his interlocutor, Goyen recorded an audio tape that did not capture the entire interview, which was in English; Goyen or his interlocutor or both of them apparently then compressed the meandering conversation very greatly and elaborated some additions; the resulting text, which was evidently rather different in many small ways from what Goyen said on the tape, was then translated into French. The original raw interview, newly transcribed by me from the audio tape, is not suitable for publication; this retranslation into English of the published French text has been corrected by reference to Goyen’s original words in English when passages are parallel but the French version clearly includes a misunderstanding of what Goyen said or mentioned in English. But nothing in the French that was added to what was originally spoken has been removed now, and when the two sources diverge from each other more substantively, the retranslation of the French into English has been preferred because I have assumed that Goyen approved of this compressed version either before or after it was translated. The previously unpublished work in this collection is all drawn from William Goyen’s papers in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I offer special thanks to Cathy Henderson, who many years ago first began to help me with the Goyen papers; to Kurt Heinzelman, who invited and aided this project,

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and to Eric Lupfer, who assisted; to Thomas F. Staley, the director of the HRC, whose custodianship of these papers and the innumerable other priceless manuscripts in the collection makes possible our detailed attention to the process of literary creation; to Emma Stapely, for her draft of the retranslation from French back into English of the interview with Goyen in Masques; and to Emma again and to Brian Garfield and to Kyrra Rowley for research assistance. In what follows, reference is occasionally made to William Goyen, Selected Letters from a Writer’s Life, edited by Robert Phillips (University of Texas Press, 1995), as Letters.

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Goyen

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Part I

Autobiographical Essays

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Goyen on visit to Houston, late 1950s, with father and brother, Jim

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The Belleek Swan

[There are two typed drafts of “The Belleek Swan” in Goyen’s papers, dated “7/21/70” and “8/4/70.” Goyen’s father died in 1968. Even ten years later, Goyen, dissatisfied with his repeated attempts to write of the little china swan from Ireland, was still occasionally mentioning his desire to complete this piece. In it he meditates, as he does in the finished and published “While You Were Away” of several years later, on his father. But here he explores not the world in which his father lived but rather his father’s inwardness and the effect on him of his father’s death. It is typical of Goyen’s way of thinking as a writer that he was more likely to meditate over an image, an object, a person, than to narrate a story. Although he could indeed narrate brilliantly, as he seems to have decided simply to prove in his very early stories “The White Rooster” and “Tapioca Surprise,” he usually follows a different impulse in order to work out the poetic logic of his own desires as a writer. In the second draft, Goyen added the opening paragraph—it appears to be a “ring” device of opening and closing with something that is the same, and this would not be surprising in his work, since he often liked to set a “telling” within a frame of retrospection. Perhaps a further draft would have “closed” this ring by returning to the later moment of retrospection, evidently occasioned by a feeling of failure in the classroom (where unavoidably Goyen himself must take on a fatherly role). What follows is the second draft, which Goyen corrected here and there by hand. In Part II.2. I have changed Goyen’s “abrase,” a word he may have thought was the root word of “abrasion,” to “abrade,” and yet the sound of “abrase” suggests a softer wearing away than does the sound of the correct word. It is curious that rather than using Arabic numerals alone for the subsections, Goyen several times wrote the abbreviation “No.” before the number. This seems like a repeated unconscious negation, as if to indicate that each step he took was wrong, somehow, in his attempt to recover the meaning that the china swan had held for his father.]

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I asked too much out of my own hunger. I needed answers. I felt that they, the young, had answers. I must have overpowered them in my intense and hungry craving for answers, and in my desperate driving questions, to which I got silence and they turned off. What can I learn from this? While ragingly telling people answers, I am really crying out with questions. The Belleek Swan—Hippocrates, who cured many diseases, himself fell sick and died. The Chaldeans foretold the deaths of people, and then Fate caught them too. Alexander, Pompey and Julius Caesar, who had destroyed so many whole cities and in battle cut to pieces so many thousands of horsemen and foot soldiers, themselves, too, at last departed this life. Heraclitus, who speculated so much on the conflagration of the universe, was swollen with dropsy and died in a plaster of dung. Vermin destroyed Democritus, and another kind of vermin killed Socrates. What does all this mean? You have taken ship—you have made the voyage—you have come to port. Disembark!

Part I. 1. I hold in my hand a precious little swan made of painted china. The swan is so small that I can cup her in my hand, close my fingers over her completely. How the swan came into the house where my father lived, I do not know. 2. I took from my father’s house and for his memory the Belleek Swan and nothing more! Why? The swan is an imperial creature of grandeur and refinement. Had I looked for something from his house to represent him absolutely, I might have taken a crude boll of cotton that had burst roughly into a ball of doughy white, which he had picked from a field near his birthplace in Mississippi, near Hattiesburg, where he once made a return—finally, after swearing to do so for some years. Or a piece of yellow pine—a staunch, splendid tree, which he sold for many years. (Think of a man selling trees!) For he was a yellow pine salesman, traveling through Texas, working sawmills and small backwoods lumber yards in Nacogdoches, Grapeland, Longview, Lufkin—all in Texas. My father was a man of simple realities: hard days’ work, providing family needs. He was a man of simple generosities and deep unselfish affection for friends and kin. He was a man of woods and earth. What had he to do with this elegant and aqueous bird? What had she to do with him?

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Brought into my own home, far from my dead father’s—I would try to find out! In my memory of my father the swan glides before me as though it were conveying my true Father back to me—the winged ferry from the far side where I am now struggling to regain this man since his life on earth is finished, [and] it can now be shaped from beginning to end and framed—totally contained. # 3. Here in my own home, the Belleek Swan, fragile and sweet and charming, is trying to bespeak my vanished father. Surely it represents the sweet grief and poignant sorrow that filled his house so soon after his death, and which touched my mother and me, my brother and my sister. Well, it is unaccountable and unexpected that such a delicate object would take upon itself the audacity to hold for me his memory and to stand, somehow, for his life, and this is the theme of my examination. No. 4. How the swan came into the house where my father lived, I do not know. It is one of those adornments of inexplicable origins found in houses where families have lived for a very long time and which for a time seemed to have nothing to do with their surroundings, [and now] seem out of place. I remember her from my earliest days in that house, I played around her and gazed at her, but never touched her. She sat in a frozen gliding, tiny and precious in shining colors of pure white and burnt gold, breakable, but miraculously preserved through all the years of the boisterous life of children. Her delicate neck is proud, her tiny head erect, her plump little body perfectly shaped for gliding on water. Part II. No. 1. A slope of grass-fleeced ground lies over him where he sleeps under it, with his bent swatch of hair at his cold temple. We could not straighten it as he lay in his coffin. When my mother reached to the stony forehead to try to wipe back the lock, she said to him: “Go on now—you go on!” No. 2. He sleeps a dull, blind, seedless stupor. The ecstatic spurt from which I came is dried up in his ducts. Until Nature rots his face away we will come to his grave knowing that that ancestral face lies close

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under our feet—until the lime and acid of earth, the waters and chemicals, seeps of rain, the mold and rust of loam will cut into his flesh and abrade his features that were as familiar to us as our own faces in a mirror, until the humid heat will loosen the stony flesh that we touched in the coffin, until it is foul meat on soft bone. No. 3. Go featureless, dear man—go featureless! What life drew on your face, death will rub out! Life clawed your character on your face and death, through Nature, will take it away. Vile death! The family mole at the side of your nose will disintegrate. We all wear it yet—that mole— our inheritance from you—and the bent lock of hair untamable even by the mortician will straighten. No. 4. Go! that paternal and ancestral face, so that when we finally come to your grave we will know that it is not there, close under our feet. Better we come to a rotted box with your debris scattered in it, a few articles of nail and bone and hair. We wait, mourning and holding patience, until you slough away into the slag of your lost wholeness, so that the image, from memory of you, can be pure and we won’t have to think of you there in the ground. Now that death has removed you from life, let Nature utterly remove you from death. Melt away into the ground, for we are distressed by that thing of you lying whole in the ground. Go on now—you go on! No. 5. The Belleek Swan is pure spirit—pure gliding spirit! Harmony, tranquility, pure grace, pure spirit! And now I see that I am seeking to make of you pure spirit and I cannot, in my travail, make pure spirit of you with your body lying whole in the ground. Turn, my father—to dust! No. 6. Now I free myself of you and return to my only Father. Your seed made my body, but He created my soul. Now I stand face to face with Him. I am another man’s son! I have my own voyage coming closer to me through you. The little swan you left behind will take me on that voyage. It is my transfer—my conveyance. It is a vehicle for the voyage toward my own soul—toward my own true Father! I am left alone—nothing between me and death.

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The Belleek Swan

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Goyen in his father’s arms

Now that you are gone, you can no longer, as father, protect me from death, as a child believes. No. 7. I will make the journey—the Swan is my vessel, it is my ark. I am in it; my father is in it; my father’s father—my grandfather! No. 8. The little Belleek Swan holds and carries us all in that journey. Let us embark—for now I see that the Swan has something to do with being reborn and that is why I took it from my father’s house, after he left it—the Belleek Swan. Go on now—go on!

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An Autobiographical Work: “Six Women” [prospectus]

[“Six Women” exists in more than one typescript. This version appears to be the last. “Margo” was published in TriQuarterly magazine; excerpts were published as Three Women: A Memoir by William Goyen, a pamphlet, by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (1999). The complete text was published as Six Femmes in a French translation by Patrice Repusseau by Actes Sud in 1997. About the women portrayed: (1) Frieda Lawrence (1879–1956) was the widow of D. H. Lawrence. After she left her husband and children to live with Lawrence, the two of them eventually settled on land in Taos, New Mexico, given to the Lawrences by Mabel Dodge Luhan in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. After Lawrence’s death, Frieda remained in Taos. (2) Lady Dorothy Brett (1883–1977), a painter, was an English noblewoman who abandoned the milieu of her birth to follow D. H. Lawrence to Taos. (3) Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962) moved to Taos after living in Greenwich Village, Italy, and elsewhere, serving as a patron for artists, writers, and revolutionaries; in Taos she married Antonio Luhan. (4) Margo Jones (1911–1955), a Texas theater director, staged a play by Goyen in Dallas and directed plays on Broadway by Tennessee Williams and others. Her early accidental death shocked and disturbed Goyen. (5) Millicent Rogers (1902–1953), another resident of Taos, was admired by Goyen for her sense of “style and fashion.” (6) “Lady A” is Katherine Anne Porter. Perhaps to Goyen’s mind, there was something talismanic about the number six. In his Paris Review interview he mentions that one of his discarded titles for The House of Breath was Six Elegies, and another was Six American Portraits.]

Some lives that my life encountered and involved itself with and was notably influenced by, are, I believe, uncommonly interesting if not extraordinary. A couple of them were revolutionary in influence and action—not only on me but on a whole time, if not an era. All were unique individuals, out of the mainstream, following their own way. A few are not yet

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known about, or are not written about in any depth or scope. They were women of style and fashion, art, theatre, Letters; all seemed to me to be searching for, enjoying, or fleeing, an image of life that was counter to the conventional one of woman as Serving Wife, Listener Only, Mother. I will tell the story as it happened to me, in terms of my own life; the structure will therefore be that of my own life. The central stories are those of Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Margo Jones, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Millicent Rogers, Katherine Anne Porter. These lives naturally draw others into the fray and so the story opens to take in some men and other women. And as they come up out of periods of my own life, the story becomes my own: memoir and history. I am the teller of the story. Sometimes the story is told to the reader forthright, sometimes the story of one of the characters is told to another character in the form of a letter: the letters are not always written to the addressee herself but to another about her; e.g., I tell Frieda (deceased) about Brett’s old age and death. Sometimes where the characters had known each other and I (obviously) both, news of one is told to the other in sections addressed to that listener. For instance, I’m eager to tell Frieda Lawrence about Margo Jones and about my relationship with her. The kind of historical portrait of Margo Jones I look for is possible in this way, and more interesting to me. Also a Memoir of her in my life becomes alive and bright when I see her against the personality of the listener (here, Frieda); and the lives of two women so unalike— one an East Texas primitive and the other a Bavarian Baroness—rise up sharp and striking. The letters also tell these women (and men, where they come up in the story) things never told when they were alive: “I did not tell you then, or could not. Neither was it the time nor did I have the words for it; or I just forgot or was afraid to—or I guess I figured that there would always be enough time. ‘Later’, I thought.” Speech found now (so much later) for what was not (or could not be) spoken then. I’m looking for an intimacy, a directness and an immediacy of telling about relationships of people in this odd community, each to each, if that was the case, and each to me, which was always the case. Not just a conventional chronological biographical exposition. The form is, then, creative-documentary, biography-autobiography, memoir-history. So that controlling titles like “While You’ve Been Away,” “Since You’ve Gone (Been Away),” apply to the concept of the work. Los Angeles December, 1979

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Frieda Lawrence’s seventieth birthday (Goyen at right)

Frieda The frail ship of the war—on that water—and me surviving in it—is another story (how many times I told you stories of that ship and of the men in it; you cried and laughed with me; “Tell about the moon, Ja! tell about the moon, the moon!” like a child you’d plead). It is when I left that water, at war’s end, was freed and started from Houston on a frosty morning in January, 1945, that I was on my way to you, Frieda, though little did I know it. And one morning, on a road I’d climbed all morning, in a 1932 Chevrolet, the earth broke open before me, filling my eyes with a blue-white and sepia-colored valley under white and blue-green mountains: Taos. I had no knowledge of Taos Valley, no image of it; I had no idea that you, Frieda, were down there in that valley, or that you were any place at all. The War that had liberated me brought me to your place. An earlier war had liberated you and brought you there. You’d been there since 1923, you and Lawrence and Brett and Mabel and Tony, and Spud and Ruth Swayne and Trinidad and Rufina. I knew nothing about your community, nothing about the local legends of you; and very little about your husband’s writing; I had scarcely read him. I vaguely thought of him as an overwrought preacher who repeated him-

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self. And once Katherine Anne said to me, “Whenever I heard that the Lawrences were arriving within a thousand miles of wherever I was, I packed up and went farther.” And there you were, in Taos, in the village of El Prado, in the first months of 1945. And here you are, now, in the late months of 1975, in your big wide grave up here on the mountain, lying in your mouldering finery since we put you there on August 14, 1956, weighted down by the massive blanket of cement that Angelino covered you with as a tomb, with your family crest rudely engraved by you across its brow. I remember when we came here a week after your burial and found this grave hot and dry with clods of earth—the kind we made adobe bricks with, down below in the valley—lying over you. You were uncomfortable looking and we made it cool and dark for you with boughs of fir and pine and left you in some peace, I felt. Have you still got your velvet cap on, that you made for yourself ? Surely it’s a cap of dust by this time. Dumb woman! Lusty widow of a man who wrote about sex, living “intimately” with an immigrant Italian in a foreign country—and America, of all places, and the West, to boot! No wonder the Immigration Officers came up to Kiowa Ranch and accused you of “moral turpitude” (their words). Dumb Woman! Running off with an antiwar writer of “Fascistic writings” (their words), abandoning husband and children to go with him; German, and in a time of war against Germany, and cousin to a German ace airplane fighter, to boot. But darling Frieda! Though your image has been that of a coarse Hausfrau, a biergarten Fräulein, virago that hurled plates at your husband’s head, flaxen-headed, big-breasted odalisque on a bed reading all day and chain-smoking, I found you to be something else. Living with you at Kiowa Ranch—wild place on the side of the mountain that you once tried to give to me, given to you and Lawrence by Mabel Luhan in exchange for the manuscript of “Sons and Lovers”— was as primitive as it had been in the days when you and Lawrence lived there. You did your washing by hand, sheets, pillow cases, your own dresses, and laid them out on the ground to dry under the hot mountain sun. In the summer there were wild turkeys and birds of all kinds, deer, bears, foxes; and there were wild strawberries, raspberries and beautiful mountain flowers like the Mariposa Lily and Gentians and Michaelmas Daisies and wild Columbine. Do you remember how you loved the wild mountain? I slept in the “Big House” that Angelino had built for

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you after Lawrence’s death. In it most of the Lawrence paintings hung unnoticed and untended, those fierce besieged naked men and women, “Fight With an Amazon,” “Rape of the Sabine Women” (over my bed! I finally had to remove it), “Flight Back Into Paradise,” “Red Willow Trees,” “The Boccaccio Story” (which we later removed to your house in the valley, in the village of El Prado—and my village for fifteen years). In a safe on the outside porch were the Lawrence manuscripts in typescript and in impeccable longhand in his composition books, “Women in Love,” “Sons and Lovers” (Mabel had never claimed it), “The Second Lady Chatterly,” “The Woman Who Rode Away,” and many more. You lived in the rude little cottage that you and Lawrence had lived in. You were proud that Lawrence had made a lot of the furniture, rude, plain, solid chairs, heavy tables, a cupboard, thick bedsteads. You embroidered, or washed the floors, or lay on your cot and read and smoked cigarettes, sometimes all day. We would come together in the evenings and cook our dinner. Remember? Then we would have our nightly visit. By the light of a kerosene lamp you talked of your life with Lawrence, of your wanderings and hardships, of your life as a restless young mother and unhappy wife in the university town where your professor husband taught, how you fled the house after dark, running through the village roads that “smelt of rotting cabbage”; and of your children, how after you’d left them you’d sometimes go to their school and watch them at recess through the iron school-yard fence; how Lawrence hated your longing for your children, how later your youngest daughter went berserk with an obsessive crush (“Schwarm” you called it) on Lawrence; of Lawrence’s physical frailty, how you held hold of his frail ankle as he lay dying and how you finally let it go; of your powerful sexual love; of Lawrence’s erotic obsession with some men, his need for a deep bond with another male and of his mischances and disillusionments; of your promiscuity—“jumping into haystacks” was Brett’s description of you—of the bitternesses of the life of writing as you and Lawrence experienced it. You died on your birthday, August 11, 1956, in the house across the road from mine, in El Prado, New Mexico, in a rented hospital bed sent out to you by Mabel Luhan, under “The Boccaccio Story,” Lawrence’s painting of some nuns coming unexpectedly upon a naked peasant sleeping under a haystack (many said the naked peasant was Angelino). It wasn’t a bad death, or so it seemed to me; God knows it could have been worse the way you smoked, though it was the gasped-out end of a whole huge

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life of a man and woman. You died sort of—courteously. Towards the end, Angelino was masculine and tender with you. Do you remember his touch? He once asked you in the deep night, when you were in your misery, if you would like to see “the big stars” that you loved so much and when you murmured “Ja,” he held you up with your poor dead arm falling and your sagged mouth and crazed-looking cocked eyes, and pointed through the window toward the great glimmering silver gobs of Western stars and whispered with a soft lover’s voice, “Ecco, the big stars that you love. See Frieda? See? The big stars.” “Ja,” came your lost whisper. And in a little while, on that last night, Angelino got into bed with you and held you to him tenderly. He smiled and asked, so softly, “Isn’t that good, Frieda? Isn’t that good? You like, Frieda? Remember how you like?” And came again, like an adieu, that “Ja, Ja.” “You mule! Ja, you are a mule!” you’d bellow at him. He did plod about the place in El Prado; he seemed slowwitted, slow to catch on; you complained that Angie had no intellect, no imagination; you’d made a terrible mistake in bringing this young man, simple-minded and pure, out of his old home country and away from his family, his wife, a Professor in a high school in a small Italian town; his children, two sons and a daughter. Angelino knew nothing of literature and poetry, of music; he was a stonemason who had become a Captain in the Italian Army, a peasant who sang his Italian love songs and his soldier songs. But you had run to him to meet him on hidden afternoons while the infirm Lorenzo dozed in hot tubercular comas, and at nights after the sick and dying Lorenzo had suffered into sleep, this handsome and virile young officer who might have been a character in some story by Lawrence and whose photograph, showing him sexual and stunning in his uniform, stood in its frame on a table in your bedroom. I sat at your deathbed because I loved you and I sat with Angelino because he was my friend, a man I felt close to, misplaced, hurting with jealousy of a famous dead man whose presence was in your very presence, witness to the continual D. H. Lawrence turmoil, over royalties, over rights, over criticism; over arrogant visitors, impertinent professors, Eastern literary charlatans, Western literary mediocrities, over crackpots and impostors and Lady Chatterly Freaks, the constant flow of tourist-visitors; over the Ranch at Kiowa, ghost of an old notorious romance, shrine to the dead famous man (Angelino would not go there any longer by the time I had arrived; he never again set foot on that mountainside or laid eyes on the clumsy Italian Chalet, uneasy and out of place in the Western mountains, that he’d built for you. You told me

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Goyen with Frieda Lawrence on the steps of the D. H. Lawrence chapel in New Mexico

how he’d cry at night in his homesickness: “Let’s go, Frieda; let’s go back home, to Europe, to Italia.” And I stood with him as you drew your last deep hoarse breath, letting it go from you with a profound sigh. I stood with Angelino as he saw you die and he fell upon your body and wept in your yellow hair, “Frieda! Frieda! Don’t go! Don’t leave me! Frieda, Frieda! What will I do now? Where will I go, now?” Now he seemed truly alien and adrift, this sudden inheritor and controller of one-half the royalties from all that monumental body of writing, co-owner of those literary copyrights, and inheritors suddenly, too, two Italian young men, his sons, and a young Italian woman, his daughter—though not yet aware of their new power and wealth, in their northern Italian village which they had never left— who read no English. While I heard Angie tearing through the file cabinets in the next room, crying out in his Italian for the help of God and then again to you to please come back and then just to the heavens for help in his fear and abandonment, searching for the Will, I helped the men from the local funeral home who came to lift you from your bed and put you on a litter. The way your legs bounced, as if they were rubber, made me know

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that you were dead. My old companion! “Frieda!” I cried out in my own heart. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me! What will I do now?” I felt very close to Angelino. They carried you away in the hearse to the funeral home and Angelino ran wailing behind the hearse in the August dust. Then he and I sat together and he sobbed out, like a boy (he was in his early sixties), his story. “But I never want to come to America with Frieda. She made me come. I never should have come. I always want to go back to Italy,” he cried. “I couldn’t even speak English!” Frieda’s Will was in his lap. “But Frieda always want me to make love with her, always, even a few weeks ago before she fall down with her colpo, stroke you say, she beg me to make love with her, but I couldn’t do that. She was too old. It hurt me to disappoint her. I should have done! I should have done! Now she is dead. Poor Frieda is dead. I hated that Lorenzo. Lorenzo, Lorenzo, all day all night. Lorenzo Lorenzo!” That’s what he shouted, Frieda, the inheritor of one-half of Lorenzo’s royalties. “I never read one of those books. I didn’t want anything to do with him. Always Lorenzo Lorenzo! I had nothing to do with that. Now where will I go? I’m old, now. Now where will I go?” Well, Frieda, he went back to Italy, rich, to his small town in the northern mountains, to his old Professor wife, now retired from the High School, to his two sons and his daughter, whose godmother you were. Lorenzo, Lorenzo! Where else had he to go? And how could he ever tell his family there, to all of them in his village who knew him as a young man, where he had been, all that had happened since he’d been away—some forty years. Before returning he sold the Lawrence paintings here, there, destroyed papers, letters belonging to you, and generally cleaned house—and then sold the very house and land. Lorenzo, Lorenzo. Now Lorenzo was out of his life. Angelino Ravagli would only be reminded of D. H. Lawrence when the royalties arrived or requests for permission to reprint the works of the man he feared and detested. This Angelino, loyal friend and good husband to you, and my honest friend that I loved, tried to hold his own in a country and a world alien to him, homesick peasant. Brett said he was “just a sexy village Italian” who had to “scratch in the sagebrush” with woman tourists and local hospital nurses. We took your new clothes to the Funeral Home, and your teeth, and in the late afternoon when the town came, they saw you lying full length and grand in your coffin, wearing all the regalia you’d just newly sewn from the silk and velvet Angie had recently brought you from Rome!

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Your pale rose and gray silk dress; on your feet some purple shoes— large, you had big feet—he had bought for you in Rome; and on your head a soft Florentine-looking cap which you had made of purple velvet. We put a number of things in the coffin with you. Where are the two rings we put on your left hand, Lawrence’s wedding ring (Angelino wanted that there) and the ring bearing your von Richthofen family crest (a crown with nine points)? Where is that ring we put on your left hand, that ring fashioned out of a brooch that Lawrence had tried to give to Lady Ottoline, made of some stone from his native Nottingham, and that you intercepted in a wave of jealousy and flung across the room? And that Brett, who was present, had retrieved and you let her keep it all these years. Now Brett produced the ring and slyly asked me to slip it into the coffin in the hope that you, grown more benevolent over the years, might return it to Lawrence. “Okay, but Frieda will never do it,” I heard myself saying. Angie, innocent to all this, put the ring on your finger when I asked him to. Around your neck was a necklace of glass beads, blue and earth-colored, which you adored, bought for you by Lawrence at a Fair, when you were so poor, when you were fugitives “living in haystacks,” as you told me. On your wrist was a turquoise and silver bracelet and in your hand a little silver comb you loved. I wonder are they there; of course they are and will be for a thousand years, lying in your dust. And a sparkling fan with silver and crimson radiants was fanned out over your stomach so that it looked like some brilliant wild wing. At your left side Millicent put a curious necklace of polished wood. Attendants at Taos Funeral Home were disturbed by your get-up and Angelino’s meddling with you—they wanted to give you the standard treatment—we were suspicious that they might give you a beehive hairdo the way they did some local women—and some townspeople thought it sacrilegious. It had taken them years to get used to you two, this foreign couple who had come to this valley to live together and married only after the Immigration Officers threatened to take their Passports. But I thought that in your coffin you looked like a Giorgione woman or a Tintoretto goddess in the Milky Way, rosy and golden and glimmering in the Mortuary light. Well, I haven’t been back for all these years. When you left—and what a lavish exit—I left soon after. And now here you are, buried beneath Lawrence’s chapel on Kiowa Ranch. Indians had, that day, dug a huge grave for you—big enough for three. To report on your burial: the chapel doors were opened wide and we bore you up the steep hill to it. It was a brilliant Western day. Behind your coffin Angelino trudged. Many Indians were standing on

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each side of the hill and Mexican folk were squatting along the Chaparral that bordered the ascent. Some had come on horses and the horses were grazing there. Indians and Mexicans were dressed in all their beauty with brilliant beads and silver and turquoise and feathers and headbands and serapes and colored scarves. They stood in sorrow and friendship as we passed. I remember how they had loved to come to your place and sit and talk and smoke with you and hear you laugh loud and hear your booming Ja!’s. Standing near the open grave were old-timers waiting for you—Rachel and Bill Hawk of Delmonte Ranch, Ted Mackey, old general store owner of San Cristobal, the valley below the Ranch, where supplies were bought by Brett and Lawrence, and where you and I used to visit, you sitting on a barrel of feed dangling your big foot hanging from those skinny legs, and smoking while the ranch folk and Mexican folk bought shoes for their children, canned milk, feed and sugar and coffee. Behind the coffin, following Angelino, came slowly and proudly up the steep hill a procession of your friends; some of your oldest were in their eighties. The flowers were mostly from your plain garden or from the fields, and one friend had gone up into the high mountain meadows to find the Gentians that you and Lawrence loved. Halfway up the hill I felt I couldn’t go any farther, for the emotion I felt; and the coffin was leaden. I sank to my knees and suddenly a dark flashing figure, a Mexican cowboy with flashing black eyes and bracelets of leather and turquoise at his wrists, in studded chaps and silver-studded boots, rushed in to take hold of the coffin where I had faltered. He continued with me in silence, gripping the handle of your coffin and passionately sighing; I thought he would weep. And we went on up the hill together. Was he an old lover of yours? A dusky passionate man from one of Lawrence’s stories? Later I was told that he was Pablo, your adored and hot-blooded ranch-hand in the days with Lawrence at Kiowa Ranch. A yellow bird—was it a wild canary? a hummingbird?—darted about the flowers that banked the open grave, and when your coffin was placed over the grave, the bird flew into the chapel. I said, “Frieda, we’re all here to say farewell and to leave you in the place that you loved best in all the world. I want to read Lawrence’s poem for you and then the 121st Psalm that you loved.” And then I read Lawrence’s poem, “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through” (“Not I, not I but the wind that blows through me, a fine new wind is blowing the new direction of time”); and then the 121st Psalm. We all joined in the Lord’s Prayer. And then I said, “Good-bye Frieda” and other voices all around

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me, up and down the hill, murmured, “Good-bye Frieda, Good-bye Frieda . . .” Then they lowered you into your grave and that was all. The weather was quiet and cool and a faint wind soughed in the great thick trees. As we walked away, down the hill, the huge Western sun was setting, blazing orange, away across the lonely landscape of purple ridges and red humps and golden desert lake-like stretches all vast and eternal-looking, your prospect, now, along with Lawrence’s, as you lay in your velvet shoes, ready in your velvet hat, beautiful with rings and bracelets and fans and combs and necklaces. Here I had sometimes stood with you and as we looked together at this landscape, I’d hear you speak to the open distances, softly, “Ja, Lorenzo. You’ve had your victory! Ja!” And now you’ve had yours.

Brett In the end she was alienating, just enough to keep you a foot away from embracing her, full-blood; she was, finally, forbidding, oddly nonhuman. Perhaps her deafness caused her isolatedness, her vague perversity; there was something faintly uncouth about her. It was physical as much, almost, as anything: her clown-like body which shaped the slapstick clothes she wore; her huge low, sack-like breasts, making her look as if she were padded and round from chest to thighs in front, a comic Santa Claus figure; lopsided hips, flat buttocks; a jester’s round sparkling face on which she daubed bright spots of red rouge; a cap of thin curled hair. She carried her hearing-aid amplifier in a container the size of a cereal box in the crook of her arm and against the huge breast the way a woman carries a lapdog. She, not Frieda, was to me like the great mother of this enchanted and often terrifying world of northern New Mexico. Frieda was the woman, the romantic woman, man’s companion, lover, bed-mate. Brett would lie at night under her lamp in the crooked room that was built for her by neighbors and friends on the piece of land given to her by Frieda, with her large animal Polimar, an animal hound named by her Indian friends and meaning “stranger-friend,” that came to her from Taos Pueblo to befriend her, lying on her bed beside her, as large as she, almost like another human. A nest of cozy mice, continuing for generations, flourished happily deep in her mattress, safe from the “Day Pussy” who occupied the bed during the daytime, but occasion-

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ally made uncomfortable (the mice, that is) by the “Night Pussy” who claimed the bed—and Brett—at night. In this world out at El Prado in the nineteen-forties and fifties, lonely, surrounded by Indian pastures, close against the Sangre de Cristo mountains and across the fields from Taos Pueblo, in this world, it was as though Brett, of wizard authority,in touch as a sort of Caliban with the mysterious elements of nature or a malformed, slightly malevolent Queen of the Night, pulled all the stars over this sky like a shade she had drawn; or breathed out the rainbows we saw (and that she painted); wrought rain or snow; had something slightly uncanny to do with the moon. The insects—flies and wasps—seemed to originate from her house, like a hive. Accomplice of nature, she stood rocking but firm against blizzard or tornado, safe with nature, and she made me safe in my little handmade house, whose mud walls had been rubbed smooth by my own palms. Brett, the ugly charmer and adored companion of Lawrence, eternal annoyance of Frieda, was the jolly friend of the Indians who would suddenly and silently arrive on horseback or on foot, in blankets or army surplus from Apache Land, Navaho Land, Santo Domingo, or from Taos Pueblo just across the pasture. She was the documenter of Indian Ceremonial Dances, her large paintings were magical and precise representations of American Indian life in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s—she had watched the great dances and the ritual games for fifty years. She was the daughter of Viscount Escher of World War I, sister of the Ranee of Sarawak; runaway from London society and royalty in the 1920’s, was brought to Taos by Lawrence and Frieda, who were invited then by Mabel Dodge in the 1920’s, and she remained until she died there on August 24, 1977 at the age of 93. Friend to Aldous Huxley, Stokowski (her many paintings of him were from sketches she made from the wings during concerts of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra), Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, Virginia Woolf, she heard what she pleased from them, but always worshipped those she loved, followed them, had crushes. Sooner or later most of her adored ones came out to Taos to see her in her dirty adobe studio, loud with flies and wasps in summer, wheezing with the winter mountain wind. Her deafness had beset her since her girlhood when she resolved at dinner table not to hear any longer the conversation of her father and his royal guests. True deafness followed. She made the most of deafness, hollered at her listeners and forced them to yell back, staring impishly into their white eyes or strutted faces. For years she carried an imperfect and outmoded “Ear” which made piercing

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screeches. Witty, magical, gauche of body but graceful of feet and hands, fairy-like and clown-like, wrongheaded, impish and gay, she smelled of fish at dinner tables. Brett was a crafty fisher in mountain streams, appearing at back doors with already-cleaned brook trout, offering the dinner she hoped to be invited to share. (In thirty years I never saw her cook her own catch.) In her eighties, with the money from the sale of a large Indian painting, she bought and kept ready at her doorstep, a Camper fully stocked and alerted to leap to a start on unknown journeys. It was never used, although she often sat in it and invited friends into it. She was beloved of Indians and they told her their secrets. Young artists loved her and got trust and courage from her. Although many made fun of her paintings, her paintings have come to recognition not only as expressions of the poetry of American Indian life, but as documents of often unrecorded Indian ritual, and several now hang in the Tate Gallery. For sixty years she had watched the great dances: rain dance, snake dance, deer dance, buffalo dance. And thousands of American tourists own her “potboilers,” created specifically for them; some were constructions of copper wire, Indian beads and abalone shell, others swift and brightly-colored images of local life: a dashing horse, a blizzard coming down off Taos Mountain, Indian women and babies. Shortly before her ninety-second birthday, in September, 1975, I spent a week with Brett in her studio that had amazingly lasted. There was the old easel, there were the dusty Stokowski paintings hanging in the same place, the World War II airplane “sparklers,” made of copper wire and shell, the mystic altar-like arrangement of glass and stone objects gathered around a bluish Buddha figure (I never knew what this was and never asked). There was a deep mystic side of Brett which I occasionally shared with her; it was quite apart from her pantheism. There was a mysterious woman who befriended and attempted to “heal” Brett in the late fifties: Tiny Mother was her name. Tiny Mother once saw to it that Brett’s soiled heart was removed by loving Spirits and taken to Heaven where all one night, as Brett lay, heartless, upon her bed with Polimar the stranger-friend and the Night Pussy and the happy family of mice, under a dim, scarf-veiled lamp, those attending Spirits “cleansed” that heart of all old pain. As Brett was being purged, Tiny Mother took me to her car, parked outside Brett’s house, and spoke to me of my anxious nature and how I could be cleansed of it. At this visit, in 1975, I found Brett’s studio unchanged, except that the mice family had run out its generations, Polimar was long dead and his grave, along with two

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Goyen with Dorothy Brett in her studio in Taos

smaller graves, marked by two tall weathered crosses on which were painted “Day Pussy,” “Night Pussy,” could be seen through the crooked bay window. I found Brett horned and whiskered, shriveled, giving off that special odor of senility—sour, lightly foul, and breathing off a rancid sexual aroma (who can describe the odor of ancient humans?), a look of insanity in her eyes, the old clown’s body humped and shrunk, the great breasts flat like deflated water-wings across her chest. Her gaiety and plain clownishness shone out at moments. She spoke of her loathing of decrepitude. “When will it end?” she implored. “Why don’t they just take me? Why do they allow me to go on like this? What a bore!” To move, she pushed a homemade walker of a weighted Safeway shopping cart. In it was a pair of high-powered binoculars. Peering at the mountain with the binoculars, peering at me, she admitted that she could no longer see the beloved mountain she had watched so closely for all these years. She said she saw me as clearly as ever—well almost; that same old “pot face” was visible to her. We laughed. I saw tears in her filmy eyes—and felt them come quick into mine. She spoke of death and remembered that when Lorenzo was dying he whispered that he could no longer feel his arms.

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Mabel Mabel Dodge was a Buffalo, New York rich girl who had a salon in New York City in the early nineteen-hundreds where artists mingled, a villa in Florence a little later on to which she invited poets and painters, and in the beginning of the twenties an adobe compound, which D. H. Lawrence called “Mabeltown.” She married a Taos Pueblo Indian named Tony Luhan and became an early fighter for Indian rights. People knew Mabel as a plain, roundish little woman with a sullen whispery voice, black pageboy bangs, and dressed in lace and white embroidered ankle-length cotton with a colored silk sash. Her considerable power was feminine, sexual, mysterious, often self-aggrandizing but generally benevolent. She died in Taos in 1962 at the age of 83 and is buried in a country graveyard among Mexicans, Spanish Americans and pioneers of Taos Valley. When I arrived in Taos in January, 1945, Mabel’s vitality was already waning. She kept pretty much to her Byzantine-looking adobe palace on a broad mesa under foothills behind the village, more local legend than the anti-progress fury she had once been, axing highway billboards in the night, shattering neon signs over the liquor store and cantina. We were distant friends for many years thereafter. Mabel was a woman practically nobody liked. This didn’t seem to matter to Mabel. She went right on. One exception was Brett, who remained Mabel’s loyal defender to the end. Yet the loyalty of friends often counted for little to Mrs. Luhan. I’ve seen Brett in tears after being turned away from Mable’s table because she smelled of fish. And Brett had caught, cleaned and brought the fish to Mabel’s table. Mabel and Tony feasted on the mountain-stream trout while Brett, whimpering—and reeking, indeed, of fish-scales—ate a stew at my humble table, sitting in a stately Florentine chair that had once belonged to Mabel. Mabel was a deadly serious woman with pretensions that reached into nearly everything: she had, as they said in Texas, the word on it: prophètesse, clairvoyante, pretender to a mystic Will that drew the gifted and famous to her (these included D. H. Lawrence, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein). She knew her animal prey at first glance, often; yet she was not always able to discern the genuine from the seductive phony. She was self-centered and often selfish; yet she was moved to impulses of humility and shaken by outbursts of generosity. Frieda, her old natural opponent, died on a rented hospital bed provided by Mabel. (It appeared one morning, without warning—soon after Frieda fell with the

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stroke that was to take her life—in a dusty pickup truck whose driver handed a note to Angelino Ravagli.) But Lawrence was shy of Mabel’s munificence and called her “another ‘culture carrier,’ a big white crow, a cooing raven of ill-omen, a little buffalo.” “We are still friends with Mabel,” he writes in the same letter to Frieda’s mother. “But we do not take this snake to our bosom.” She was not grand enough to be first rate Blue Stocking nor malevolent enough to commit more than sometimes serious mischief. She was not rich enough to be powerful, she was not elegant enough, beautiful enough, talented enough. Despite her anti-commercialism, she was ironically responsible for the metamorphosis of an enchanted village hidden in the vale of a mysteriously beautiful mountain into a sort of Great Neck of mercantilism, cheap furniture stores and A & P’s and J. C. Penney’s. Taos became a tourist trap of beads and pottery, ne’er-do-well artists in serapes and Indian moccasins, drifters, hustlers, back biters and Indianfuckers. Ex-movie star hippies made a commune of Mabel’s great house in the early sixties, the rich and idle and elegant built “ranches” in the late sixties, the world’s most beautiful and expensive ski resort rose from the wild slopes of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the seventies. The most surreal of Mabel’s fears have materialized. When William Carlos Williams visited Taos during my long life there, he was scheduled to meet Mabel and asked me what I thought of her. I answered, “She’s my friend. A malicious meddler. Never known another like her.” Mabel and I had only the night before quarreled in the Big House, her adobe palace in “Mabeltown,” after dinner—it was one of the few times I ever sat at Mabel’s table or got into conversation with her. Her local tyranny was insufferable to me, a young newcomer (it was 1945) who was being questioned by this intrusive woman as to why he was coming to live here, away from the world. I believe I said something to the effect that her day was done, that she was living beyond her time, that her literary opinions, among others, were sadly out of date, that she was already dead and remained only to be buried. I would gladly speak her eulogy if she’d just give up and let them bury her. Tony, her Indian husband, was unfazed by this and went on holding up a New Yorker as though he were reading it. The next morning she herself arrived on my piece of land, sitting, dressed immaculately in her white embroidered grandma dress, her costume, in the dusty pickup truck which was bringing to me two handsome Florentine chairs—leather, gilt and gold fringe, “authentic Medici”—as consolation gift. They were the first—and only, for quite a while, except for bed and

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table—furnishings of the little adobe house I was building. The famous quarrel, indeed, had risen from Mabel’s interference in this building project, which was closely related to Frieda, the landowner and donor, and Brett, my neighbor sharing the land. The chairs were lowered and I sat awkwardly in one. Mabel was my strangely warm friend for a moment as she gazed, almost in a motherly way, but certainly with a feeling of warmth—and almost of approval—upon me, young nobody newly arrived and already in the embrace of Frieda, sitting wanly in the regal chair. And Mabel was my strange friend for years to follow, friend of few conversations and partner in many silences, both of us held in a friendly standoff of buried attraction and undeveloped curiosity (for I was Frieda’s). “Well,” the poet answered, “I heard she used to be so sexy that men got a hard-on when she came in a room.” “That hasn’t been my experience,” I said. I never heard whether it had been Mr. Williams’. But I wished him well. It was always easy to be snide about Mabel Dodge Luhan. Her autobiographical volumes, Intimate Memories, Lorenzo in Taos, Edge of Taos Desert, and others, now a sort of Americana, are ridiculous and pretentious, but on their own ground show a woman who was an antic original, stumbling over her own assets and knocking into other people’s walls with a devilish energy for moving people around and moving herself within a kind of goofy but recognizable destiny. The cranky vitality of her journals creates a cloudy presence almost materializing into a clear force of a woman of talent, taste, sensibility. These journals are a sort of folk literature left us by a woman whose social and political actions were sometimes, as in the case of Indian rights, pioneering; and, as in the case of marrying a Red Man in the 1920’s, somewhat revolutionary; and whose reachings towards men and women of vision and accomplishment, fumbling and manipulative though they may have been, came from a vision of her own.

Margo Well you said you wanted to learn to paint. And so we brought you the oil paints and the easel and the canvas and showed you a few things and you went to it. I know it was a celebration, everything was—or used to be, in the earlier days when you felt better. Now it was bad for you most of the time. You felt bad, things went bad. But you never said so, you never said you felt bad. “Honey it’s okay, everything’s wonderful.” To

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be naked and drink vodka out of the bottle and smoke and paint bright wild “pictures” all night long with “Daphnis and Chloé” playing and “The Firebird,” was a way to just go to hell; and who cared? Sweet choir-singer in Livingston Methodist Church, Livingston, Texas, you had that Texas-girl sweetness and a full-faced smile, that Texas ready belief, that quality of listening, that gentle willingness of Texas youth as I remember it, that courtesy. You were also, you told me, one of the first girls in Livingston to smoke with the men out behind the churchhouse between anthems at choir practice; and even in the place of worship you had some of the Devil in you—and some of the Devil’s plans: to get out of town, out of Polk County. And you already liked a little booze. You were also a hardheaded hellion that simply could not be shut up once you started talking about something you had to have. You stood up before the City Council of Houston and said to them, “Honey, I don’t care what it costs, you got the money. Houston’s got the money. Give me the Grand Ballroom in the Lamar Hotel. What the hell’s a ballroom when you haven’t got a damn ball? When you can have theatah, when you can have plays. Wonderful, magical plays. Honey we got to have some magic, some wonder. Give me that ballroom.” And you got it. They couldn’t get all the colored paint off your face. You’d used a lot of purple and green. Your hair—you had a big head of wiry hair shocked over a bulging forehead—your tangled hair was streaked red, green, yellow, purple. Scratched your head, didn’t you Margo, when you couldn’t figure out what to paint next; grabbed your face when you were crazy and despairing and wiped the tears of your sobs away with painted fingers; and you stroked your body a lot, you must have hugged yourself and clawed yourself a lot. They said they never could get all the colored oilpaint off your body. The agony you died in, in your forty-fourth year—bewildered pain—was still over you for those who came to see you in the casket before they closed it. You were, they said, my dear, a bit gaudy in your casket, but who the hell cared, you’d have asked. You just would not hold back that wild night, naked and crazy in the Stoneleigh Hotel in Dallas, raging with hurt and failure and disappointment and booze and pills, with the Ravel playing and the Stravinsky. You were gaudy and wild-looking and puffed up, painted and strutted with late chaos. They closed your casket as if to hold you in, rising like a loaf, and face like a face in a painting, DeKooning, Dubuffet—you had become a painter; indeed, you were your own first and last work, you had created

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a head of a panicked woman, your times, and they buried you like that, in East Texas, under a live oak tree in Polk County, in Livingston. And oh honey it’s goan be so beautiful, goan be beautiful, honey it’s goan be magical in the theatah, I just cain’t tell ya, and we goan cahst it real right; honey we goan get beautiful actors; nobody’s goan tell me I cain’t cahst this play way I dream of it, honey it’s my dream. This is the theatah, honey, this is the magic and the wonder. And oh honey please don’t leave me, where you goin honey, oh please don’t go; wait a minute till I can get up and get me a cup of coffee, go get me a cup of coffee, oh honey I didn’t go to. What’d I do? Baby we uz all drinkin; did I say anything? Oh was it about Joe’s design for the set, that it looked like a goddam tourish court, a goddam motel; oh baby wait lemme get a cup of coffee, please don’t leave me alone and mad at me like this, oh baby. Well Margo, I had to go. And as I turned back to look at you in your bed, insane with hangover and still half-blind with blackout, shaking and crazy and dying (you knew it), I did not know that I would never see you again. We talked once more, on the phone, long-distance, and I yelled at you while you called back Oh Baby, Baby, please please listen to me, don’t hang up, don’t go away, don’t leave. And I hung up, Margo. I cut you off. I never heard your voice again. And they buried you back in East Texas, casket closed, in Polk County, before your wild body would rise up bursting, and they couldn’t ever get all the paint off you, gaudy and unquiet, wild-looking, just arrived from violence and strife, as if you had just been thrown, struggling, into the casket, snatched out of violence as if your house had been on fire or had exploded, snatched out of strife and bound down into a coffin, strutted with wild thwarted hopes, stopped from your dream, kept back, held down, drunk and doped out of your living mind; you, Margo Jones, fantastic figure lying under the leaves of the live oak tree since 1955 in Livingston Cemetery beckon to me, betimes; but I won’t follow. When you came to the loft where I was living with the painter, on West 23rd Street over the used-piano store and a block away from the Woolworth’s where the old Macaw languished in the Pet Department for want of a purchaser—he was too expensive and Woolworth’s would not come down on the price of him—when you came trembling with your excitement and sparkling-faced and shining-eyed from what you called the “wonder”; when you came that morning and I, daubed then with

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paint that I could not even see, I was so blind, and you said, Why Baby you’re covered with paint, it’s even in your hair; then, when you came that day I showed you the story of the great fallen dead horse by Central Park, by the Plaza Hotel and you wept and said Oh honey, honey, and I wanted to tell you, then, how bad it was and how I wondered if you could take me away, if I could go away with you, into the service of your wonder, be in some show, made-up in grease paint and lit by colored lights, away from that drab city of fear and noise and poverty. And when we sat downstairs in the Paradise Bar and Grill on West 23rd Street and you drank and I listened—it was the first time I’d been out of the dark loft for many days—you said, Baby there’s paint on your eyebrow and paint on your elbow and even under your fingernails, here lemme see can I get it off. I was surprised; I had not known, in the winter darkness of the loft. But would you help me get away? Get away was what I always wanted. Get away. Would you help me get away, to where you were, to the show? I told you about the dancing shoes hidden in my closet on Merrill Street in Houston when I was fifteen, about the magical makeup box of grease paint that smelled in the Texas humid nights, hidden there, too. And of the afternoons I rode around the city of Houston with the top down, in the convertible, between shows, in our makeup, with the Vaudevillians from the Metropolitan Theatre, Johnny Tap, the fastest tap-dancer in the world and beautiful Carmelita the Spanish dancer, Queen of Castanets, the dancers and the singers, people of enchantment, four-a-day people. We rode past Central High School that I was absent from most days that year to hide backstage in the shadows of the wings, in my painted makeup that the Vaudevillians had transformed me with, into something extravagant, sitting in the darkness of the wings in my colored makeup, that I had on even now, in the daylight, in the convertible, and looked out at the drab building of Central High School that I had fled, past my father’s office building, drab sober building where he sat earning his poor pay that couldn’t move us from our little house on Merrill Street, where my tap shoes were hidden and my grease paint and my secret cardboard piano that no one could hear when I played it—hello Dad, look at me, I’m something glorious, all golden and rosy and purple-eyed and brilliantine slicking back my hair; hello Dad this is how I am, something marvelous, to hell with your Texas yellow pine and cheap clothes and your poor low-down family from the Mississippi sawmills, they won’t break my heart anymore, why have I cried for them in the night, a boy crying for a whole family, for

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the doomed generations, wondering how on earth he can ever save them from sickness and poverty (he ought to be thrashing with a young hard-on and jacking off to the promise of life); yet “Oh my people!” I heard that voice in me utter, “Oh my people, I will make it all right, you’ll see! Lean on me. I will make it all right and give you beauty for ashes, joy for the oil of mourning.” In my makeup, riding along Main Street of Houston in the open convertible in the company of wonder people, I ached with guilt for my secret and whispered I’m forsaking you, my father, I’m abandoning you, my family, I’m departing you, my little drab house that smells of collard greens and oil cloth, I’ve got my suitcase packed, I’m leavin. Oh my people! Already I felt a warm hand on my thigh and the new breathlessness of desire. Shivering with desire and transported from old dead places, painted and beautiful and full of my early thrilling confusion, now drawn apart and ready (and sixteen), I flung back my head in the hot afternoon sun of North Main Street in Houston, and saw us passing Woodland Heights Methodist Church— there where the old piano was, church-house on Sunday afternoons (“Practice?” I hadn’t even learned in the basement—the Young People’s Department; the very key was in my pocket that the preacher gave me secretly so that I could practice the piano and hear it—this one wasn’t a paper piano—hear it tinkle and boom in the empty anything; it was all by ear and blurted-out rhapsody); there where I sang in the choir and took the body of Christ on my tongue and came up the aisle one morning to stand up before the congregation, vowing to serve the Lord as a missionary to China. Oh Lord, I thought, in the convertible, passing that church, look at me, I’m going away; are you coming with me? The Vaudevillians were drinking out of a bottle now, not much, a swig here and there, but I smelled the terrifying fumes of whiskey that had crazed my grandfather and killed my uncle Ben and one time my own father kicked out a window on a half-pint, we saw him praying on his knees by his bed, kneeling in the broken glass, and I was afraid. But we rode on, on a spring afternoon in the open convertible, down the sunny streets of Houston and saw the white azaleas blooming and the camellias and all the yellow roses, and we were free and splendid and faraway from everything out there beyond the open car, we were beautiful and rosy and glittering and there was a show coming soon, in the afternoon—a show in the afternoon! with colored lights and costumes and music and we belong to that, you on the sidewalks carrying your briefcases and your purchases from Foley’s Department Store, that’s where we’re going: to the Show, back to the Show.

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It was on one of those afternoons, Margo, that I kept the bottle and did not let it pass me by, and turned it to my mouth, there in the Metropolitan Theatre, in the enchanted shadows of the wings under a silvery light filtering from a blue and silvery stage, and music of a saxophone waltz, huddling, painted and trembling, with Eddie and Johnny Tap, and Carmelita. Out of me flared up a wild and thrilling being, a grand and wild and ready being of flesh and heat; and I didn’t care, I let go, I was ready to go. And flaring with whiskey and trembling with new tenderness, I gave up myself and found, for the first time, painted and caught in the silver and melancholy music, a bursting away of unhappiness and an ease of longing; and a kind of dying. When they saw that I had brought my suitcase and was ready to run away with them, with the Show, they brought me home, passed out; and when I came to in my glaring makeup, with all the neighbors and my parents gathered around me, I called “Johnny Tap! Carmelita!” and saw on the floor my forlorn suitcase. You’d been gone for many years, Margo Jones, when I got to Newport Beach in California in 1976. You’d turned a thousand bottles to your mouth and finally fallen to your painted death. You’d been twenty years in the ground in Livingston Texas under the liveoak tree when I got to that Newport Beach hotel in California. In that hopeless night, there in that Newport Beach hotel, I saw before me many departed; and I saw your fantastic figure, crazy rainbow hair, face color slashed and strutted, beckoning to me. And I, too, fell to my own floor in that beach hotel in California, saw in the haze of my sinking away, shining on my hands, my feet, my naked body, red, green, purple, yellow. And the miracle that drew like a siphon that deadly color out of me, those countless pills soaked in gin, and saved me there, has kept me here to speak to you now, has given me mind to remember, vision to see some meanings, tongue to speak amends of love.

Millicent No one in the world would have thought to bring Millicent Rogers and Brett together as friends and companions. Like Brett, she came to Taos Valley to find her feelings, sick to death of the life of money and society and cities. A woman of style, she sought old styles of life, friendship, dress. She became a good friend of Frieda’s and a kind of amused

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Millicent Rogers

patroness and plain pal of Brett’s. Brett idolized the beautiful sombre and sullen Millicent. She was often Millicent’s guest in the family mansion on the James River in Virginia; and once Millicent and Brett spent some weeks in Jamaica in Millicent’s compound there, bringing along two Taos Indians, Benito and Trinidad. This caused wide unrest, both in Jamaica and at home in Taos Pueblo. Mabel Dodge wrote a letter to Millicent suggesting that she leave Taos and let the Indians alone (Mabel had long courted and finally married her own Taos Indian, Tony

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Luhan). This letter was brought to Frieda by Millicent and an interesting arousal of feeling was evident in the actions of the women Frieda, Millicent, Brett and Mabel. Millicent had found at the Pueblo a beautiful young Indian lover named Benito and brought him to live with her in her adobe villa she had built on the mesa. The early Vogue model (she was called the “Ashcan Heiress” because of a photograph in an issue of Vogue showing her in an ashcan after a party in New York—this was Vogue’s discovery of Millicent, it is told)—the early Vogue model and Standard Oil heiress collected and wore fabulous turquoise and coral and silver; and she dressed in Navaho and Apache skirts combined with Schiaparelli and Mainbocher designs (there was an exhibition of her Indian clothes in “American Women of Style” at the Metropolitan Museum in December, 1975). Her gold jewelry and other pieces are in the Brooklyn Museum. (Very little—and nothing of any size or depth—has been written about her.) She died in her Taos adobe villa in 1953 at the age of fifty-three under bizarre circumstances in the care of a nurse who converted her to Catholicism on her deathbed. (Millicent’s mother was Jewish.) Her burial in a weedy backlot of a Taos graveyard was attended by the rich and the celebrated from various parts of the world. Her Indian lover was berserk with grief and was held back from the dead woman’s grave and her family—a brother, mother, three sons from Virginia, Jamaica, New York. One of the sons was dressed in a formal cutaway. In the funeral procession Brett, overtaken by her grief, got ahead of the hearse and led the whole procession as she zigzagged across the road in her driving fashion. There had been put into Millicent’s coffin a lot of her collection of silver and turquoise. But not the great rope of turquoises which she’d bought, after several days of cajoling, from an old Indian man she’d passed on the road in Navaho Land, wearing the necklace—an ancient family possession. She took a motel room on the highway near the Reservation and each day made new offers to the old Navaho man. Finally he brought a grandson who wanted to go to college and had persuaded his grandfather to take the money from the turquoise; what was an ancient string of beads when you could go to the university in Denver or Salt Lake City? Millicent was buried in an Apache-Schiaparelli dress, and the great Concho belt that weighed many pounds was around her waist and there were rings of turquoise and other precious stones on all her fingers. What couldn’t be put on her body was simply put into the coffin. The ceremony was a dreadful small-town ceremony in the graveyard,

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produced by the local funeral home—the plain little funeral home where Frieda had lain, too. A sort of Muzak chimed a mawkish hymn. We all gathered round while the Priest said his words, and a brilliant Game Rooster suddenly leapt to a fence just to one side of the grave and crowed. When the brief ceremony was over, Benito the young Indian who had been in love with Millicent, wild, with flowing black hair to his shoulders and flowers in his hair and bedecked with bracelets, necklaces, beads, and drunk, and who had been held back, sullen and grief-stricken until now, rushed from the background and broke through the crowd toward the grave, crying out. But he was caught and held back by other Indians. Benito was left an inheritance by Millicent and within a year was found dead in a frozen ditch near the Pueblo. He had become the town derelict.

At Lady A’s We were in Lady A’s apartment drinking wine, and she was speaking of “muddlers,” in her incessant and indefatigable style of long unpunctuated utterances, stumbling sometimes through heavy underbrush of her laughter but triumphantly blazing her trail out again with chopping hatchets of phrases into the clear sunlight and treeshade of her discourses. She was a nervous and beautiful little trailblazer and wilderness-breaker of a woman whose conversation—or monologue— was a physical exercise which gave her a good workout, taking such control of her at times that it would throw her into fits of coughing and collision with objects in the room, vases, chairs, ashtrays; but she fought it through, as though she might be chasing her conversation about the room; and in the end it lay exhausted on the floor, among the breakage and the casualties of the pursuit, while she, puffing and straightening her hair and her clothing, lighted another cigarette with the final “you see”; and here her witness, her listener, was able to rush in, a stretcherbearer to carry the whole thing away, a “yes!” “You will not let a thing alone until you have nudged it and tickled it and excited it into such a sensational, moiled-up mess that you no longer know, yourself, what it meant at first, and it takes hold of you; you will not let a thing follow its own life, you twist it and wrench it and hurry it and blow it up until you make it true and you have us all believing it is true, until, one by one, we find you out. Deliver yourself of this infernal idea, honey, come down to your human race that

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Katherine Anne Porter, inscribed “To Dear Bill-From Katherine Anne. This was made in Santa Monica the year you came to see me.”

inhabits the earth, that walks on the green ground; you are so sweet; that look in your face; that adorable face; have some more wine, honey. When I was in Paris in the Twenties I drank only this good wine; and yesterday, just suddenly, I found it again in a little shop on Lexington Avenue and bought a whole case, made the man go straight down in the cellar, honey, and bring up the whole goddamned thing; I know a good thing when I see it, and what I love finally comes round back to me, isn’t it strange how what we love and lose for a long time comes back

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again? Suddenly there it is, honey, and all we have to do is reach out and take it back for ourselves. Just pick it right up. Oh honey I spilled a little, that precious good wine, but that’s all right, just lean down and lick it up, honey, hahahahaha, that’s right; oh honey don’t we have a good time? Honey it’s a man’s world and look what they have done to it, debased and insulted the women until they no longer have any dignity, womankind; betrayal that’s what it is and that’s my theme. And English is my mother tongue. I am in the legitimate line. Pure Elizabethan is my native language and my literary instrument. Why honey women where I come from leaned over fences and spoke to each other in pure language of the Elizabethans and what these nasty writers do to our good English language, argot, filthy words; jews and homosexuals. And honey they won’t whip me, the nasty little clayeaters—once they taste the stuff, like those clayeaters in Georgia, they won’t take anything else. Oh hón-nee!—don’t look that way, why do we live so badly when we’ve got all God’s green world; hón-nee drink your wine. That good wine has all Paris in it, has all the Twenties in it, has all the people I loved and was gay with in it, it’s like seeing old friends again to drink this precious wine; it’s a bad world, honey, we’ve got now, a vile heap of bones, I want to die, how I despise the world we’ve made for ourselves, honey, where is our human life? Don’t you be another basket case, do you hear me, you stay good and true, you’re strong honey though when I first knew you I thought the world would kill you if you just walked down its streets; but you’re tough, darling. If you’d just listen to me, I don’t know why you don’t listen to me—now I’m talking like your mother, honey, but I don’t feel about you like a mother, you understand?—and get this idea out of your head and grow into the man you were meant to be, what did your mother and father do to you when you were young that you haven’t grown into the man you were meant to be? What did somebody do to you? Hon-neeee! There’s not a thing I can do for you, you won’t listen to me, you won’t let me tell you something, I can’t do a thing in this world for you, hon-neee! You won’t let a thing alone until you have killed it . . . oh hón-neee! hón-neee! Drink this good wine.” I have just come from a party at Lady A’s. I must say that the quarrel between Lady A. and her friend, the literary one with the pearl on a silver chain around his neck, threatened to usurp the evening from the other guests—the quarrel was, again, about men’s betrayal of women— until he, the “Brother” of what he and Lady A. call their “Brother and

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Sister Act”: they frequently amuse Literary and Ladies’ Groups in the city with lectures and aesthetic opinions—finished the whole thing by saying, passionately, “If our women are suffering because of this breakdown in their men, their relations with them seem to be acts of terrorization in the ruins, of carpet-bagging and vandalism.” And someone, the woman who ran an art-gallery, I believe, laughed so loud and rushed so into an opinion of her own that I was unable to hear the rest. The art gallery woman, who had a weeping voice and a competitive temperament towards her artists, was saying how she thought young painters ought to share the experience “of their time”; and I answered that the experience of an artist’s “time” was his own experience and that no one could “want” an artist to “have experience”; that he finds his own. But the gallery woman went on to say that the homosexuality of so many young artists doomed them. Lady A., far away at the other end of the long room, caught that word and responded, rushing over to the conversation. “They have never really done anything lasting,” she chimed. “Somerset Maugham has said that what they do has only the glitter of tinsel . . . As for the artist’s experience, look at the Twenties.” I answered that there are many ways of love and that it might seem true that any way of love, however outside the pattern of the majority, might be less destructive than the perversities of lovelessness. Lady A. rankled across at me and said, through her laughter, “Honey why don’t you go on over to their side, you’re always defending them . . .” At this point there was the ring of the doorbell, and when the door was opened, in flapped a beaky woman as though she had been let into a cage of birdseed, who cried out, arms in the air, “New York, New York!” She was a kind of newspaper writer about art, a journalist who wrote pieces about the new painting (“the trembling reds, the pulsing yellows, the vibrant ultramarines and siennas, the subtle mauves, the electric etc. etc. etc.”) who had got herself into the theatrical circle as well and felt she had worthy opinions about plays and performances. “I am late and I need a drink,” she explained, pecking hellos to the party people and hopping about the room in a cabbagey taffeta skirt. “A friend of mine is trying to leave her husband and I have been going through all that” (she had her cultivated mannerism of growling words she wished to emphasize) “all evening—it made me miss my dinner, but I hope you all had something exQUIsite” (she growled again). “As for me, I had olives and gherkins—out of my martinis—and I need more.”

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She was doused momentarily with a drink, but, the first gulp down, she flung herself directly into the competition of opinions that was flourishing in the room, had something to say about every subject that was brought up, had seen this preview, had read the script of that new play, knew, even, the author, he was a “fabulous person,” “quite mad,” a poet, and Broadway was “too literal” for him, Broadway was not “ready for him, yet,” but she had “met him at drinks” yesterday, bringing to one the image of a water trough, and said, among other things, to him, “Don’t you know an artist has to be tough, he has to be a fighter?”; but, nevertheless, he had gone on one of his drinking cycles despite the injections the famous new woman doctor in the city had been giving him. It had ended with his vomiting on the floor at Cheerios. She was there, and a good friend from TIME who was in his same corner at Cheerios, singing the same song “Mama don’t low no boy-girls in here,” and then bursting out in rages of attacks on the job he had been forced to take with that magazine and which was killing him, but he would die in Cheerios or, if that was too crowded, in Costellos, “exercising his elbow.” The hoary old publisher, over from England, was commenting to a few listeners on that young American writer, tragic and delicate and very ill, who was “taking England”—as though she might be sacking that country, as Alaric had Rome; and he ended by asking, “Who will stop her?” so that one was sure that she was invading England. “Will she ever write again?” he asked; and added a few comments on the history of the passport, how someone should write a book about that. His wife, a gawky and towering woman dressed entirely in red, with a wide flannel mouth, red again, stood by absolutely silent and grievedlooking and she appeared to be an effigy of herself already in flames. An anthologizer was there, and he brought up poetry; and they were all going to have talk about that. It began, and I withdrew as I heard the woman art writer telling everybody that she knew the British poet X personally and had met him at drinks last week and told him that he ought to write a long ballad about New York, he was the one to do it. I withdrew to a corner chair below a modern painting of a nude young man—except for ballet slippers—of large sex and a boyish face. I was glad the blonde woman named Lucy came to join me soon, and we began to speak about living in New York. “It is a dangerous place, I know,” she said, twisting her cigarette round with thumb and forefinger as though she were dialing a safe. “But there are its little coves and caves one can take refuge in.” “What do you do here?” I asked.

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She told me she was a writer. She said she wanted to leave the party shortly to go Downtown to hear some jazz, and would I like to go with her? I said I would like it. We left shortly, and quietly, only nodding to Lady A., not wanting to disrupt the discussion now, which sounded to be about Hemingway. The woman art writer was telling how she had met him in Havana and discussed Miró with him. Lucy and I came to the apartment building in the Village. When the door opened, there was an assortment of young people huddled together in the large room where the saxophone player lived, whose name was Jack. Jack kissed Lucy hello and greeted me. We came into another conversation. A youngish, rather tortured-looking red fellow was telling the others about his views on sex. “A faggot should be screwed at least once by a woman . . . ,” he said, just like that. “Just try it Baby and see where you get . . . ,” a tall, yellow, wildlooking girl replied; and the group laughed a little. They were drinking beer and Lucy and I were given a glass of it. The conversation went on . . . where was the jazz? . . . and it was about writers and sex, the sexual habits and predilections of those present. Writers were named— “Him? Oh sure! He’s gay as pink ink.” “D . . .? Well, that’s another thing. D’s afraid, but he’s queer, you can be sure of that. I know people who know . . . .” “In New York, sex is no problem; you can have what you want and you can find it anywhere,” a young man with a scarf wound round his neck declared. “He is Paul Plovers,” Lucy told me, “and his first novel was a best seller.” She named it but I had only heard its title. “But as for me, I’ve had enough to last me awhile,” the young novelist divulged. “I’ve got to get out of this fucking Village; it’s killing me.” “Where will you go, Pauly baby?” the wild girl, who was now sitting astride his outstretched leg with her arm around his neck, asked his mouth, and then kissed it. “Rome,” he said. “I can’t work here.” “That’s where they all are,” the girl said. “They’ve moved their camp there for the winter.” She purred a second, purred then mewed, “But Baby what will I do?” “Listen to this woman,” the novelist told the others. “I know what you’ll do, honey; what you can’t live without doing and what you can

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do best. Fuck. You love it too much to do without it. That’s why I love you,” he added, patting her thigh. . . . The bunch laughed; and then the discussion was about contraceptives. They argued them, some in favor, others cursing them. I was not so much embarrassed as I was self-conscious, and particularly because of Lucy. But Lucy whispered to me that there was nothing wrong with such a conversation, to “quit being so sensitive.” Suddenly there was the sound of two conversations, one cutting across the other, and it was because Jack had pulled out his recording machine from under the bed where he had recorded the whole conversation. The group hushed. The conversation played on, and its hollow resounding gave the feeling that the speakers were all in a deep cistern, talking and talking and talking. Finally the red young man shouted “Turn off that goddamned thing, I didn’t say that!” He leaped from his chair and ran for the recording machine. But Jack intercepted him and they grappled and struggled, while the others sat perfectly calm and still and the conversation played on and on . . . Lucy and I crept out. As we walked down the street, I said to Lucy, “You’re tough.” “Sure. I had to get that way. This city nearly killed me at first, and I had to get tough. You will, too.” We went by taxi to her apartment and I took her up four flights to her door; and though I was longing to go in with her and stay the rest of the night with her, I held back, and so did Lucy; and we said goodnight, dishonestly, at the door.

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While You Were Away (Houston Seen and Unseen, 1923–1978) A Letter to Charles Provine Goyen, Distinguished Early Citizen of That City

[Goyen presented this essay as a talk at the Houston Public Library on April 24, 1978, as a part of its project entitled “City!—Our Urban Past, Present and Future.” It was published as a pamphlet by the library.]

Dear Father: I have been asked to speak about the city you brought me to. Houston! I could not speak of Houston without speaking of you. For in the image of my boyhood and young manhood, Houston is you and you are Houston. Though you are, for me, one of the founding citizens of this new metropolis I see around me in 1978 when I come to deliver this communication, you did not “build” Houston; you had no realtor’s “vision” of Houston’s destiny. You did not even “grow” with Houston. For you were a “failed” man in a boomtown. Your earnings did not triple, or double, you gained no commercial power in a city of commerce. You did not own a bank or try to get one together (in a city of banks); you did not cut a new street through woods for a subdivision with your name on it, did not start an insurance agency, get the franchise for a car dealership, buy up some land by what might be an airport. The Houston I saw, dear Father, on my daily journeys through it by foot, from other people’s automobiles by hitchhiking, above all from the automobile you drove, was the Houston of the Nineteen-Twenties and Thirties. After that, from the Forties to the present, I left and came back, left and came back, year after year. You were always, until you died, waiting for me. My daily travels were spiritual journeys; that is, I was experiencing a place deeply, on my own secret terms, as I moved through it. Where I was going, why I was going there, and when, will compose this letter to you. I was not just a walker in a growing city.

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Goyen and his sister

I was in a kind of flight from my place, a fugitive from the very scene I traveled; I saw later that I was, from the beginning, saying good-bye as I said hello, in the same breath—already giving up what was being given to me. And so the places I passed, on my way, the houses and buildings, were symbols of my intimate feelings, the state of my mind, of someone longing (and planning) to get out of where he was into some other place. Dear Father!

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Goyen’s mother with him and his sister, perhaps at their house in Trinity, Texas

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You brought me to the young city of Houston when I was eight years old, in 1923, and you guided me and led me through the changing place, I, “growing with Houston” as the slogans on billboards began to tell me, watching the changes from your company car (did you ever own one of your own?) on my daily schoolboy and job routes (you even drove me to pick up my first date and I remember that I asked you in my timidity and fear, to go in and get her for me). But car-less in the sawmill town, we had walked to church through the fields or strode along on sandy roads to neighbors and kin, back up somewhere in a clearing. You walked the railroad tracks to the sawmill, walked through pastures to the store in town, walked me to the little doctor’s office, walked me with my mother to Trinity school. Transferred to a new place, you were my driver, my conductor, chaperone to my early simple journeys; and in my later returnings you gave tours of the new, the wonders rising up and stretching out and over the city you loved and felt so much a part of, showed me year after year the replacement of old disappeared places, after I’d left your house and gone away—into a world that you could not comprehend, beyond Merrill Street, beyond Houston new or old, beyond Texas. Proud watcher of the city of Houston, your city passed over you, even while you were giving to it, never giving you back very much, taking more and more from you, a swift town passing over a man who could not catch hold of it. You were one of those young men come up out of a large poor family in a poor place, lumber people in your case, Mississippi in your case, that moved from work place to work place: mill towns. You started work early, after you finished the fifth grade. When your family moved to East Texas for the sawmill at Trinity, you found my mother there (she had been born there, her father was Postmaster there and her brother and sister worked in the Trinity Post Office—mail for 900 people). When the sawmill petered out, you moved us to Shreveport for a few months, then on to the small city of Houston where you could sell lumber for a Houston lumber company. You sold lumber for this company for over fifty years, and when you recently died, you were still in the employ of that company on your deathbed. You were the possessor of no pension, no company “benefits.” At your death your annual salary was less than the cost of a good Cadillac. You had finally paid off, when I was forty, the mortgage on the house on Merrill Street, whose buying price was no more than the cost of a good Cadillac. We lived briefly in two little houses before we settled down for the rest of my Houston life in Woodland Heights, on Merrill Street. For

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Worshippers at Woodland Methodist Church, Houston; Goyen at right

a while we lived on Yale Street in the Heights, in what was called a duplex—a two-family house—and I remember especially the faint sour smell of gas always in the air; and I saw, when we went riding, the natural gas reservoir with lights strung on it at night, not far from our house, over around Thirteenth Street, I believe. (Later, the more pungent odor of a paper mill hung in our five rooms.) Next we lived on Morrison Street, off Bayland Avenue in Woodland Heights, in another duplex, and I remember our church just behind us, the Woodland Methodist Church on Houston Avenue to which I could get quickly through a vacant lot. Down the street was a boy whose father had a portion of the concession to rustproof parts for the Niels Esperson Building. I dipped a million bolts in a chocolate-colored liquid one summer for a dime an hour. Later when I saw the grand Esperson Building, with its bluelit little pagoda on top, I felt a part of it, deep in its innards. In a few months you found for us the little two-bedroom frame house on Merrill Street, number 614, that was our home, enlarged to include a sleepingporch and a breakfast room, until you died, not long ago. Your Azalea and Lily garden was your pleasure there. We couldn’t afford an electric fan for a long time. There was some machine in the attic that rumbled and roared and brought in bug-studded cool air. When we were being cooled off we could not hear what each other was saying. In those days (1923–24) Woodland Heights was like a soft woods with little houses in close rows on dusty streets. There were few cars; we

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played in the street. Merrill Street was a little street that ran nine blocks long, east to west, and it was a neighborhood of shy immigrants from small towns, like us. Merrill Street ended at each end in a school, and from 1923 to 1929 my simple daily itinerary during school months led me down the sidewalk east to one of them, Travis Elementary School, and west to the other, James S. Hogg Junior High School. What I saw and felt as I walked through this neighborhood from the ages of eight to fourteen became a part of the foundation of my writing for the rest of my life, whether I lived in Zurich or Chicago, Rome or New York. What caught me up so early and made me feel that I had to be a voice for it was the sense of exile, misplacement, the poverty, spiritual and material, of city living, the growing hell of automobiles, the loss of open nature of woods and rivers, the simple lyric yearning of people out of place. This was the lament I heard from these gentle uprooted people in their singing speech, their poignant outcry (my mother’s joined them, often led them); “When we go back one day to Red River”; “When we all go home to Polk County.” Or to Honey Grove, or to Lovelady, Tyler, Big Springs. Houston in those early days seemed to me a place of the half-lost and the estranged, even the persecuted. The theme in Mother’s household, my dear Father, was the very same. You know well how it was often gloomy and so sad, sometimes threatening to a young man like you, hardly thirty and feeling his thrust (“I’ll just take the children and go back home and you can stay here in your Houston, without us. We’ll be all right, don’t you worry. At least we’ll have a little breeze in the early mornings and be able to sleep without the sirens scaring us to death at midnight”). You consoled her, and us, and, looking to the new city, promised that it would be better, that we would buy an electric fan, and a Hoover, have a chickenyard and some chickens, a garden of peppers and greens and tomatoes like we had back home; that we would have us a car and ride through the city or park on Main Street in front of Munn’s or Kresses and watch the people walking on the sidewalk; or ride back to Trinity to see the old place and all the kinfolks. Dear young man my father, you had your young spirit in you, keen-eyed and ready in a young city. You were going to grow with Houston, provide for us from the good things it had to offer, give us a new life in a new world. Houston! “Where seventeen railroads meet the sea”—we heard them say it on the radio. You consoled, and made us promises. (Few materialized.) The young city boomed and spread and rose up. This longing for place, spoken at dinner table and sobbed softly from beds in the nighttime, became Eden-like in my vision of it, a sweet

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Goyen with his mother, father, and others, August 1954

place where everything would be all right again if only we could go back to the familiar fields and the dear river and the river bank, the brethren trees and the gardens of vegetables, of East Texas flowers, the kinfolks in their houses up the dirt roads, the church meetings and the family reunions. I was infused with such a sense of a lost country, with such a feeling of being foreign and alien and transferred, against my will, that the city of Houston represented a kind of internment, Merrill Street a kind of inner city, in those early boyhood days. Naturally, my dear old man, I began to fabricate, to devise ways to break out of that captivity when I was able; and I, too, was growing along with Houston, with life itself, getting more and more courage to be free inside, and beginning to look for ways that would give me that inner freedom, if not yet outer. By the time my daily walks to the eastern end of Merrill Street had ended and I began my way toward the other end, to my junior high school, I was able to express a little of these feelings I had now taken on for myself, which had been given to me, indeed had been mine, too, from the very start, now I knew. And I was beginning to write down these feelings of homesickness, of loss of place, reveries of my beginnings, of a countryside that now seemed like the Garden itself, like a country of Paradise. A world I had lost became the world of my dreams and a world to go out and search for when I could. It was the only solace

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I knew and the only beauty. The city got rawer, harsher. When a girl from our Sunday School at Woodland Methodist was knocked down by a car on Houston Avenue and lay dying in the Church vestibule, I cursed the city and wept for the peace of my town and vowed I would run away. I must tell you again, dear father, what you knew so well later and grieved over, that my search began for physical escape within the confines of my young city; and already I knew the bitter feeling of being torn between plans for flight and the certainty that I could not abandon you. Already the lifetime torment had begun: I couldn’t leave and I couldn’t stay. I used to talk to you about this. But it was only when I began to write about it that you began to understand, to take my book and sit away with it and begin to understand. And oh my beloved father you saw yourself in me, your plight in mine, when it was too late to change your own—if ever you could have. Every morning at 7:45 we left Merrill Street, you and I in your company Chevrolet. Our destination was my high school, Central High School soon to be changed to Sam Houston Senior High. Our trip to school led us over a low-lying road along the bayou that was often flooded, once so disastrously that the markets and warehouses along its side were waterwrecked ruins for some years after. We passed the S. P. Hospital, passed a structure whose sign read “Bemus Bag,” rode by the shantytown built of fruit-crates and towsacks in the bayou bottoms shaggy with weeds and lush with trumpet vines, honeysuckle, blooming morning glory. “Lots of Cottonmouths in there,” you told me. “Coming home some nights I’ve seen ’em crossing the road.” We crossed a bridge over the muddy bayou and arrived at your office building in the Union National Bank Building on the corner of Main Street and Franklin Avenue. And let me recall with you, my father, the day we came upon your own father, the silent and defiant little man with the crooked foot and the Roman head and a pint in his back pocket, selling The Houston Post on that very corner, sitting on a nail keg—but not for long. We crossed Main Street and saw the old City Hall and when you got to Louisiana you turned on that and went on, in the stinging tropical heat of early morning through a city sprouting up out of its own castaway like a new plant, past boarded-up facades, empty buildings under renovation. Something new was rousing and stirring, fast and visible. “Houston’s going to be a big place, Son,” you told me. “All kinds of opportunities. Get your education.” But already, Sir, I was dreaming of escape, release, brightness, dazzle—some unknown, un-nameable beautiful thing. And

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there, at the colorless brick building that held what was called High School, you put me out and watched me go into the dark entrance. In the afternoons I stepped into the little Watson streetcar at the corner of Main and Texas, from a little island in the middle of the street. Rice Hotel seemed the largest building I had ever seen; it was cool under the quiet arcades. The after-school ride home on the Watson streetcar in the early Nineteen Thirties has been a part of my sleeping dreams for many years. We rocked along on narrow streets so close to the little houses on either side that we could see in the poor kitchens and shabby bedrooms. Two brothers drove the Watson streetcar and they were the riders’ and the neighbors’ friends. The little car made its way to noisy Washington Avenue then to wide Houston Avenue until somewhere near Luna Park it turned into a neighborhood of poor houses with tin roofs and clothesline washings and barking dogs running along with us, roosters crowing. When the little ringing car came out of the neighborhood like a local toy, it slowed to prepare itself for a trip that seemed always to be hazardous and frightening—like a tightrope walker poised before he begins his feat. The Watson streetcar felt its way upon what seemed the narrowest highest bridge in the world, a trestle over Buffalo Bayou and its wilderness below. Sometimes boys would be caught on the trestle and have to hang by their fingernails until we passed. When we had successfully accomplished this crossing, we came into a neighborhood that received us intimately like something of its own, and we rolled and rang on to the end of the line on very Merrill Street. But month by month the turmoil was building. I recall scenes of street jams of trucks and cars, of beginning traffic lights in places, and accidents. Our Watson streetcar conductors said it was going to get worse and that eventually the automobile would drive the little streetcar off the street. Now my dream was changing, Father. I longed for the splendid, the magical, the exciting, the melodramatic, the fantastical. Where would I find this in a city of plainness, in a neighborhood of lower-middle-class exiles? I began forays on my bicycle out into a wilderness of thick woods and cliffs. This wilderness lay at the end of Eleventh Street, beyond Heights Boulevard. It took me no more than thirty minutes’ bicycle ride to get to this wild place. There I took my notebook and wrote fantastical passages. It was in these days, Central High School days, that I began a hidden life of reaching out, most of which you never dreamt, dear father Charlie. I began to feel a new boldness, born out of hunger. I was secretly making my way to the Houston Conservatory of Music far out, it seemed, on Caroline Avenue, where

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I announced to Dr. Hoff man, the Director, that I had ambitions to compose musical creations; and closer by to the Lamar Hotel Ballroom where Mrs. John Wesley Graham sat, as if she were expecting me, at a long narrow grand piano flanked by palm trees. I had to walk all the way across a shining slippery waxed ballroom floor to arrive at her, positioned at her Grand, flounced out in an organza evening gown with a large Gladiola corsage bristling under her chin. It was here, in this undreamed-of spacious hall, by these palms and at the side of this piano, that I heard the hoarse but tender voice of Mrs. Graham inform me of my talents, imperfections and potential. “You have a singing talent, Billy,” she reminded me. “Only thing is, you’ll have to do something about a bum operation on your tonsils. The damned doctor in your one-horse town left a piece of tonsil in your throat. It affects the action of your vocal cord, holds the bubble down. That bubble’s got to rise, Billy.” “Oh,” I said. “Never mind honey,” Mrs. John Wesley Graham went on. “We’ll do what we can with a piece of tonsil sticking into your vocal cavity like the tip of an asparagus. Sing! ah-ah-ah.” And oh I sang ah-ah-ah, dear Dad. If you’d known this, or could have seen me there by the palm trees in the Lamar Ballroom, singing in Houston, age fifteen, what on earth would you have done? Nothing, I guess; but I’d have surely quit Mrs. John Wesley Graham’s singing lessons and let the left-over tonsil have its way if you’d asked me to. Just as I did in the case of my secret music lessons at the Houston Conservatory of Music when you discovered my music book of Chopin Preludes (I had had about six lessons on the “Dewdrop,” still can play about six lessons of it). It hurt you so, it was just—I said so, much later—the kind of thing you could not comprehend—that’s it, my father, you just had no comprehension of it. You sat away from me for a long time, we were strangers for some days and nights; I was already entering a world you could not comprehend; you had no words for anyone. “Why’s your daddy grieving?” my mother came to me to ask. I simply could not say. The morning I asked you to drive me to the Houston Conservatory of Music to turn my music in to Miss Tree, my piano teacher, and to tell Dr. Hoff man, the Director, that I would have to quit my composition class and he said, “It’s too bad, Billy, because you have a lot of talent,” that changed you. After that you were all right. Remember, Dad? In 1932 we began another daily morning trip together. You were proudly escorting me out a long distance to my university. Rice Institute! Straight out Main Street we’d go, gathering hitch-hiking students

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At Rice Institute graduation, 1937

as we went past the main hitch-hikers’ location. Main and Lamar. Arriving at the ivy-covered gate, you’d make a half-circle and stop there, at the entrance, at the long path that led far back to my place of learning that would change everything for us, make life different from what it had been for you. You put me down, out of your automobile, onto the path tenderly but strictly; and you waited, watching me move away from you. When I’d turn around I’d see you there; I’d wave and you’d wave back. And far down the gravel walk I’d turn again and see you there, in the distance, see your old felt hat, see the shadowy shape of your company Chevrolet, dear dear Father. Days at Rice, a quiet awesome place of only three buildings standing in a meadow on the edge of town. The end of Main Street was not far beyond—there was Bellaire Boulevard, and beyond was prairie and mud roads. Across from Rice, across Main Street was Hermann Park, a wilderness where I spent most of my days during the first year. You never knew that most every day after I saw your automobile drive away, I turned away from that cold campus and went back on the gravel path,

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in flight. In the empty park I sat under trees or wandered through the empty spaces. It was usually raining, soft Gulf rain, warm and melancholy. From the little zoo a couple of lions uttered a forlorn roar. Their sound often fell over my reading in the silent stacks of the library in the days after, when I had abandoned my wilderness for a corner with a table and books (you had triumphed, dear Father, though you never knew what a close call you suffered—your boy of the wilderness had a close call). Studying at late night in the room on Merrill Street, I heard the sound of the freight trains haunting the quiet neighborhood. It urged me, as the distant roar of the lions had stirred me. And as I learned and grew and matured, I saw my peers training for commerce in a growing city of opportunity; I felt estranged; I had found, in the library and classrooms of my university, poetry, words for feeling, what seemed like salvation for me. I heard the lions’ call and the trains’ sad whistle. You, dear young Charles P. Goyen, slept on in the back room: we had come a little way, together, more than we both knew. But you had brought me, under your gentle force, to what would free me, and free me from what bound you. You armed me for my beginnings. Thank you, Sir. Not only Rice University but S. Hurok and the City Auditorium freed me for the great world. As an usher—Rice students were given free admission with this job—I saw from aisles, from the back of the house, from high balcony seats, what I at first could not believe to be true: The San Carlo Opera Company. La Bohème, Madame Butterfly, Tosca, and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo! Les Sylphides, Giselle, Gaîté Parisienne. When the performance of Danilova and Eglevsky was over and they had departed, I wandered through rainy Houston in a trance, feeling forsaken, as if lovers had left me. Their world would be my world. What was Houston? What was Rice, Merrill Street? A city of automobiles and oil, a neighborhood of sadness and drabness. (But both had given me my feeling—and both were giving me, day by day, now, my freedom.) You stood in the street, Franklin Street, behind your office in November, 1939 and saw me, flanked by hundreds of young men, march away from you. It was the war. I had been drafted. As I marched away, I didn’t dare acknowledge your fear and your heartbreak—nor my own. That was the beginning of my leavings and returnings, forevermore. In the years that followed, of going away and coming back, going away, coming back (“Why don’t you stay here, Son? Sure wish you’d come on back. Don’t know why you have to live all over the world, Houston’s got everything any place else has”), in all those years until you died you’d

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Goyen with his parents and sister

give me a tour of our changing city. Spokesman for a flourishing city, the conscience of it, you’d show me the changes and wonders on the way to Merrill Street. (Merrill Street hadn’t changed; our house was the same. Each year it was clearer that you were not going to move to a larger house in a new part of town, that you hung back in your old neighborhood—where few of your old neighbors lived: they had moved to new subdivisions, to modern little air-conditioned brick homes; you lingered back in the old place.) You told me to look up in the night at aerial strips of cement hanging, unended, over an old Henke and Pillot’s grocery store; we were suddenly speeding on elevated pavement below which I saw landscaped bayou banks; suddenly we descended onto a little street of whitewashed houses and canna lilies. Each time, more had risen up out of the bayous. The new laid its shadow on the old. Each time, the whirling shapes that seemed to be built of automobiles, folding under and over and running on like a river of fuming cars and trucks, turned over and around my old places like a living stream that was pulling down into its current the little houses, the backyards, the chinaberry trees, the drugstores and barbershops and barbecue stands. “When did they do that?” I asked you. And you answered, “While you were away.”

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Yes, my beloved father, so much happened, so much changed, so much vanished forever, while I was away. And while I was away one time you vanished, vanished out of Houston in the twinkling of an eye; and one of my returnings was to honor your burial in the ground of your cherished city, out on the way we used to drive to the Ship Channel on a Sunday afternoon. The airplanes you used to meet, that brought me back so many times, fly over your grave in a wooded cemetery. And so I’ve written you this letter, beloved man, to tell you that this is what my stories, which sometimes hurt you then, are about, and that now it is very clear that what they are about is what you gave me, what we shared, hard and unhappy, what we had come to in our life on Merrill Street, what came to us to bear, in your own restless city, thankless, too, where, standing on the threshold year after year, no door opened for you. All I saw in that kind of dying, far away from home, a vision of my mother’s lost town: two towns, two places stamped upon my senses—one without the other would not have meant as much, the city without the town, the town without the city—two places shaping my life, shaping my art, two places as we saw them, now wiped away, hers the little lost bitter town that hurt so much, yours the wild ungraspable one, that hurt, too. The last time I came home I stayed high up in a new glass hotel overlooking a Freeway. From a window looking northwest over packed acres of houses, streets, shining buildings holding sunlight and cloud in their mirror walls, I saw way out what ought to be our old neighborhood on Merrill Street. A white cloud wrapped around it and was so low that it swaddled down into the thick green that must have been, as clearly as I could see from that distance, those ancient live oaks on Bayland Avenue that have not been uprooted.

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Two Last Lectures

[“Autobiography in Fiction” was first a talk delivered at New York University in The Writer at Work series on April 6, 1982. It was published in The Texas Observer of October 29, 1982, along with articles on Goyen’s work by George Hendrick and Gary Borders. Goyen gave another talk on writing at NYU in April 1983 that he might have called an adumbration of the first; it is entitled, with undertones of both hope and resignation, “Recovering.”]

Autobiography in Fiction I’m going to talk about myself—which, I suppose, is what is expected of me. But certainly not from the position of defending myself or even from that of a “writer of autobiographical fiction.” I’m afraid that definition of me would not be nearly enough. I’m way beyond that. Way beyond autobiography! I’ve passed on through and come out somewhere else— beyond myself—long ago. So I’m not taking a stand and I do not appear here as an exponent of, or even as a maker of, the autobiographical—except in my own way!—any more than as one of what is called “experimental fiction.” Yet for me everything I have ever written, just about, I guess, has been in the nature of experiment—most of the time. My question has been, and keeps being, “How in the world will I do it? Well, let me try this, let me try that.” I’ve really been experimenting to see if I could write—at all—what I had in mind, whatever vision I had, whatever it was that was obviously pushing me to get the design of it, to get some meaning of it—and some relief from it, some peace, so it would let me alone. So it’s all been an experiment—and, finally, invention, imagination, fabrication—way beyond where I started. And I ask myself—have asked many, many times in my writing life—: What would I ever have written had I not come from that place: what would I have ever written had I not heard those people speaking that

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speech, telling those stories?, had I not carried, after escape from that place and those people to other—foreign—places: a garden in Rome, a bed-sitting room in Zurich, a basement in London, the image of myself as an exile, the sense of myself as a refugee from a place and a people that haunted and called back? So I ask myself again, what would I ever have written had I not been born in that place among those people living in those towns and in those houses, speaking that musical speech, having those superstitions, telling those tales? Would my feeling about writing have been any different?: that to write is to recreate a place and a people, bring them back if they are gone, lay out losses, show (too late?) redemptions. That to write is to enter that long and close association with myself, the person closer to my own feelings than to those of any other, on that journey with myself, which is more remarkable than any other journey I have ever taken. What is autobiographical writing? Milan Kundera, the Czech writer (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) said in an interview that I read recently, “I always write of Prague, but Prague has become for me a kind of imaginary country. To write a novel you must be true to your obsessions, your ideas and your imagination, and these are things with roots in your childhood. It is the images from your childhood and youth which form the imaginary country of your novels, and this imaginary country in my case is named Prague.” The interview went on to tell that, although Kundera hasn’t lived in his home city for years—he lives in Paris and likes hearing the French language around him—he still sets his stories in Prague and writes about his people and in his own—and their—tongue. But Hawthorne writes in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables: “The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of this narrative. If permitted by the historical connection—which, though slight, was essential to his plan—the author would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature. Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment. It has been no part of his object, however, to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard. He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody’s private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in air. The personages of the tale—though they give

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themselves out to be of ancient stability and considerable prominence— are really of the author’s own making, or, at all events, of his own mixing; their virtues can shed no luster, nor their defects redound, in the remotest degree, to the discredit of the venerable town of which they profess to be inhabitants. He would be glad, therefore, if—especially in the quarter to which he alludes—the book may be read strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex.” My own romances have had more to do with the “actual soil” of the County of Charity, Texas, than “the clouds overhead.” And since the people of the actual soil where most of my stories start—or end (although they do, I believe, move in and through the great world) are natural talkers and use their speech with gusto and often with the air and bravura of singers; and since the language of their place is rich with phrases and expressions out of the King James Bible, from the Negro imagination and the Mexican fantasy, from Deep South Evangelism, from cottonfield and cotton gin, oil field, railroad and sawmill, I had at my ears a glorious sound. A marvelous instrument of language was given to me at the start. Why on earth would I want to invent a rhetoric of Parisians, Chicagoans, Londoners, or of a universal symbolic existential being? I was finally able to detach myself from my own native gift of speech so as to be able to hear it almost as a foreign language. This language, this landscape and folk I seized early, then, as mine to work with and to make some manner of art out of. This truly was, early, my absolute life’s work. In Europe, in nearly a dozen states of the United States, this was my work. Living in Rome, it was never more urgent, this faraway haunting landscape, this ringing speech, this tender and yearning, rollicking people, this notion, this vision of “home,” this ache of “homesickness.” It seems to me that I was always homesick. Standing before great paintings in Venice or Paris, I saw my own people in Rembrandt’s (they were his own people), my own countryside in Corot’s (his beloved landscape). Europa was my fat cousin in Trinity, Texas (pop. 1200), and the bull that was “raping” her was our own, named Roma (for some reason). When I was two-thirds through my first novel, The House of Breath, I announced to my editor, the memorable Robert N. Linscott, that I was going to live in Europe for a while. He was astonished that I would make such a radical move and was seriously concerned that the book would lose focus—or locus—since the novel was set in a little American town. I went. And what I saw in Europe I put into my novel; it fit very

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Goyen in Rome, May 1954, in front of apartment on Via Margutta where he lived with Joseph Glasco

well—ancient frescoes, grand avenues, plazas, noble ruins, they fit very easily into the little town of “Charity, Texas” that I was creating out of my own home town. In this way my Charity, like Kundera’s Prague, became a splendid imaginary town with real local inhabitants (I generally, with the ardor of the young first novelist, used their real names—this kept my feet on the ground, on that “actual soil of the county” of Hawthorne, on which my local inhabitants lived and walked). But better I had gone up into Hawthorne’s “clouds overhead,” since I was thrown into such disrepute in the county and several of my countrymen threatened to sue me or run me out of town and county if I ever came back. In the Old World I saw families as friezes frozen forever as figures of guilt, self-pity, sin, yearning, like those people on the metopes of the pediments of ancient temples and on the very breezeway of my very house; and in our pasture I saw Flights and Annunciations, Expulsions of Adam and Eve from the Garden, Turners and Delacroixs and Tintorettos. With one foot resting solidly in autobiography, the other foot—the roaming one—had already gone beyond. I was moving the ages, everything, home, where I could handle it, to a place I knew, and felt in command of, to a place I felt deeply for and—more than anything else—had a crucial struggle with. The crucial struggle is what I’m talking about—always—with home, with family, with beginnings. Without

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Goyen in Venice

it there is only a dead transference, “modernization” of classic myth, a church pageant, Oedipus in overalls, Cassandra in a sunbonnet. And later Ernst Robert Curtius, the distinguished German translator of this novel, wrote in his Preface: “The House of Breath, to be sure, tells us about Charity and East Texas; and when it does extend itself regionally it reaches only as far as neighboring Louisiana. And for all that, this book is different from a regional novel. No regionalism is offered here. The language and the landscape of East Texas are only foils to a fabric in which vital and neighborly human beings talk and move about. In the kitchen of the house in Charity hangs a map of the world. To the boy, whose story is being told, the outlines of countries and continents seem to be the organs of the human body. The organization and formation of the earth has imprinted itself upon the child’s consciousness, and in the most perceptual form. In sleepy Charity he had sensed the quality of the whole world and realized that he belonged to it. So it is that this novel of a childhood has become a book of universal scope.” So for me to write is to bring the world closer to me, to pass the world through me. It is of course a miracle of the transforming power of art that a world freed from the limits of self-aggrandizement, of a purely solipsistic, self-exciting passion such as one sometimes finds in D. H. Lawrence and my old early beloved Thomas Wolfe (to mention

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a few: the list would be longer than one thinks!)—that the great human world can emerge, and the smaller voice of the creator fade away. A literature in which the smaller voice of the creator does not fade away does not interest me. Dumb at first, writers get voice from other writers. Or at least I did. Until my own came clear—or until I was shown to accept my own—several other voices spoke through me, performed a kind of ventriloquism on me. When I read one night, voiceless in a humid room in Houston (I was 16), a book which I had taken from the Houston Public Library called The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, by William Saroyan, I was then and there given a voice, full and passionate. But not yet my own. I began at once to write of myself as if I were Saroyan. I sang a sort of duet with William Saroyan—quite what he wanted from his readers, I’m sure, singing partners all over the world! And when I read “Song of Myself ” for the first time, again I was given voice, resounding in the little Texas room: “Salut au Monde!” “O take my hand, Walt Whitman! Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!” I was given freedom to speak of myself out of long isolation and out of the captivity by my own family. I was 17. A secret writing life began for me. I filled pages with my own Manhattan, my own fish-shaped Paumanok—wherever those places were; mine were Merrill Street, my little neighborhood, the streets and woods and bayous of the small dozing city of Houston. I poured out of myself Saroyanesque and Whitmanesque longings and exultations, songs of my own daring, eager self reaching for life and love and feeling. Out of such a beginning I was, naturally, led headlong into Look Homeward, Angel and the stories of Thomas Wolfe. “And oh you musta been away, you musta been away. . . .” In full voice—or voices—and with new power of feeling and expression, I came into the stories of Thomas Mann and was given, with admonishments concerning the uses of control and of clarity, further permission to write of myself: “Tonio Kröger” became a lamp for my way in Texas, and I wrote of myself as feeling heartbreakingly apart from these Texans, yet longing to join the dancers on the floor. Through hundreds of secret pages and many voices, encouraged to feel my own feelings, I came to the courage to consider the material of my own beginning as worth something. And it was then that the life and work of Yeats and Synge entered mine and I saw how they had been grateful for the richness of their own place and people and had made a ringing poetry of it.

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I was overwhelmed by discovery when I read what Synge wrote in his preface to The Playboy of the Western World: “In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk-imagination of these fine people . . . This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form . . . In Ireland, for a few more years, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.” I was 18 and in college. Now came more, mostly poets: Rilke, Heine, Eliot, Pound. They were on journeys of their own and put their feeling to their own. Freedom to feel my own feelings, my own, and to express them in a literature, an art, a poetry, and freedom to write of my own, experience as it widened (though not wide enough, yet, to move me out of Texas) was the early gift that came to me from all these voices. But more and more—still (above all, still)—it was my journey that astonished me: that long and close association with myself, that journey with myself, more remarkable than any other journey I have ever taken. It was what happened to me that had, that took on, the quality and the nature of the miraculous, the wonderful, or certainly the astonishing: how things turned out, the magic of time passing, change, loss, survival. I sought a discipline, a precision that would save me from the self-destruction of self-concern, from sentimentality, from exaggeration. This was a literary discipline, one of style, an attempt to find structures within which I could understand what I was living through, give a meaning. Now the tales of my elders swam to the surface of my memory, the storytellers whose voices had been submerged in my head. Sometimes I retold their tales, slaved to get them clear and right. And then I began to attach my own stories, invented or coming from what happened to me, to their voices and tales. A rich mixing began. Whose voice told what? One voice began, another took up. Whose voice was

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real? It seemed to me that everybody was saying everything and everybody was one, one voice. And then an overpowering homesickness that has never yet been defined for me, no matter how much I write of it, took me, settled like a cornerstone in me. I saw that it was a feeling that I had always had, as far back as I could remember, and in the very embrace of home. It was the homesickness for a place, for a person, a lost time that came to rest in me like the stone foundation for whatever structure I could build upon it. It was the wanting to accept the present, to grasp what was happening to me now, in this world and the reality it presents to me, to make bearable what passes away. Not a “reliving of the past,” not “nostalgia,” those easy cliché labels frequently placed upon writers who feel such feelings; but a sense of an urgent raw presence in the very livid now, which seemed not enough—considering what’s possible or what has been—or at least seemed disappointing, sometimes completely unacceptable, leading to a kind of despair, but mercifully offering stairs and ladders up to a kind of faith, new trust, green life. For some time I have been writing—or trying to find a way to write— about the young Greek named Philoctetes. I found him not through any great knowledge of Greek mythology but through Edmund Wilson’s fine and didactic essay on him (“The Wound and the Bow”) and therein a direction to Gide’s clean and classic little play, “Philoctètes.” Philoctetes’ problems started when Herakles, dying, gave him a bow of great power. On a wild and uninhabited island where he and his fellows had stopped to ask help from the local deity, a snake bit Philoctetes. The wound was incurable and sent out an unbearable odor; what’s more, horrible seizures periodically rendered him frightening and his friends turned from him. He was abandoned on the forlorn island, outlawed. He hid himself further away from the world in a cave by the ocean. Philoctetes was so concerned with his wound that he forgot his bow. He knew absolute loneliness. But he had his wound, morbid companion. Suddenly he was urgently needed by others—a very important war could be won if he would contribute his bow and his prowess with it. In his cave he pondered. But there was the wound, he reasoned. He was of no use. A famous doctor was offered to cure the wound. Philoctetes refused. His friends—who had now, after ten years, reappeared on the island—were all sugar and cream. Naturally the prized cripple was cool to his old friends. His old friends now tried to steal the bow, but the bow was nothing without the archer. Cured or not, what was the archer to them without the bow? Philoctetes was now in a position of power.

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A person with an incurable wound and a priceless gift in demand by his society. I leave the story with you here. But one more thing about the Philoctetes situation. As I see it, the singer is the song; the poetry is the poet; the archer is the bow. Ex opera operandis. In the power of the work itself, the power of the person. The two conditions are inseparable. I do not mean that a person must be wounded in order to perform magic, although in the early days of my writing life, in the fifties, there was a cult, or vogue, based on the infirm artist, the crippled, the insane, the “lost,” the damned. Isolate either, the bow or the archer, and you have half a loaf. A person who sees life and others exclusively in terms of his own affliction is out of a literature we all know. Exclusive self-nursing, tending the “curse,” the “difference” that separates, produces darkness, a sunless, festering creation. Exclusive magic produces sentimentality, heartlessness, silvery confection, a doll. At any rate, there are a lot of questions I have to discuss with Philoctetes, for it has seemed sometimes that he and I have met with the same choice, suffered together that crucial struggle, lain day after day, night after night in the same island cave. And sometimes it takes most of the day, most of one’s time, to take care of the wound. Before you know it, it’s time to change the bandage again, take another pill for the pain, check the fever. The bow lies in the darkness, forgotten. But I get carried away by the crippled magician, and I’ll leave it at that, for the time being. I’ll go to Atlas, another figure who takes my mind lately. It is said that Herakles—the same man who left the mighty problem with poor Philoctetes—put Atlas into something of a predicament too (I imagine; there is no historical fact of this that I know of )—it is said that Herakles made a bargain with Atlas that he’d take the heavens on his back for a time—I keep trying to find out for how long but can’t yet find out: a day, two days, a week?—if he, Atlas, would go and get the apples of gold. Atlas’s journey interests me—the details of it as he traveled towards the Garden of the Hesperides. But what interests me more is his trip back. Why did he come back? Why didn’t Atlas run for his life? Who wanted to hold up the firmament? There were so many things Atlas surely wanted to do. But back came dreary, responsible Atlas, dependable man of his word, to take the whole world on his shoulders again. I identify. I’ve gone back to take up burdens whose relief I’d thought—if ever somebody would take them off my back—would make everything all right—a chance at last; free! A man in such a predicament as Atlas

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has lots of stories to tell. We all know the fabulous adventures of Herakles—those stories were our school lessons. But Atlas—what’s his story? Would he have told of his adventures or would he have spoken of himself, his feelings of being free, upright; about what he had gone through, alone, under the great load? Or had he become a bowed-over man walking forever as though he were still carrying the whole world on his shoulders. People have said such a thing to me. “You seem held down by something.” The invisible great stone of the universe! But who would have believed Atlas, on the road when he explained to someone who’d asked why he walked bent-over as though he were carrying the very world on his back, that he had, indeed, been doing just that and had a few days off ? Dear little Atlas! Could he have been anything else but self-centered, since he’d had such a task? A superman (a former Titan, really) was Atlas. Now he had a chance, for a little while, to be nobody, to be just a common wayfarer, traveler on the road West—for the Isle of the Hesperides, where the Garden was, was Western, bathed in the golden glow of the setting sun. And coming back! With the apples of gold! What were Atlas’s feelings? Would you, as writers, write of him— and Philoctetes, too—as pure reason, a symbolic being, moralizing and philosophizing, an existentialist creature, as Camus or Gide might? I’d write of Atlas as though I were Atlas, of course. For I’d identify with him, world-weary, shoulder-bent, burden-humped. And I’d put Atlas in a region I know and feel for. Where there is—or was—a gardenlike place that might grow a golden tree. Well, I’ve seen it. It slopes down to a river. Or used to. I’ve often longed to go back to it, to see it again. Maybe Atlas felt the same way about the golden Isle. With a story like Atlas’s to hang it on, I could write how I feel about that place, about the longing for it again, about its loss, probably. But since I can’t go back, and since it’s probably ruined now—I doubt that the river’s still there; I know that the one I loved is now sand—and there are probably oilwells or a petrochemical plant; I’d just have to remember it the way it used to be and describe it as faithfully as I could according to my own feelings. And I’d make Atlas a man of East Texas. My uncle, maybe. I would bring him as close to me as I could—to who I am, to where I come from, make him speak for me. Oh I’d have to be “autobiographical” about Atlas, I’d know no other way that I would really commit myself to, for long. And I do believe that in bringing Atlas closer to me I’d better be able to give him to the world. Because that would be what I was out to do: use my bow for him. Get out of my cave for him. And

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give him out to more than me but through me, transformed and delivered through me. And like me. How else? And finally the delivering sense of the solitary maker, belonging to no place, to no one, came to me through Beckett—a late but sort of capping discovery for me. When I read what he said (“Hommage à Jack B. Yeats”: “L’artiste qui joue son être est de nulle part. Il n’a pas de pays. Et il n’a pas des frères” “The artist who uses his life completely, throws it full into the tide, is of no place. And he has no country, he has no kin”), I was struck lonelier than I had ever been, yet for the first time felt that I belonged to everything, everywhere, everybody. I felt closer to Beckett than to any other writer I had known. For Beckett was saying that the artist has no claims and that there are no claims on him by family or place, by friend or foe, by Institution, Academy, Board of Censors, Committee. There is no debt his work owes, even to his homeland. He is free to choose his own stuff, to let ride his whole life, his creative being, on what he chooses: he is himself alone and he is alone. Only then can the artist truly write of others, belong to the world of men and women. So there are no debts, no claims, no bargains, no sly self-censorship to please the times and to keep safe, to get in favor. Only singleness and privacy and anonymity and freedom and wildness, untamed, unkenneled, a thing of itself. Out of this might begin to come a wild free unclaimable poet’s work, rooted in the fullness of life and belonging to life.

Recovering [In the following lecture, his last, Goyen again thinks about Philoctetes, suffering, and the spiritual dimensions of making art, this time setting the story in a different context. The lecture was delivered in The Writer at Work series, Gallatin Division, New York University, on April 13, 1983; it was published as a pamphlet by NYU and also in 1983 in TriQuarterly magazine.] The story—and travail—of two brothers has been on my mind: Jacob and Esau, twins. Esau was born first, “coming forth red and all his body hairy, like a mantle,” and Jacob followed, clutching onto his brother’s

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heel. As though he wanted to hold back Esau, pull him back and go on ahead of him, “supplant” him. For this Jacob was called “The Supplanter.” I suppose we’ve all felt the grabbing hand, the clutch on the heel as we were making our own natural headway, at some time or another; something—not good—pulling us back, stumbling us, even: a grasper, a potential supplanter. This is what Esau felt. These brothers were, then, struggling brothers from the start, contending, even, for very birthright and blessing, as you may remember. Esau was a hunter and a man of the field, Jacob a quiet, indoors man. At a time in their youth their brotherhood became murderous out of jealousy and disharmony—as though they had been cursed; and Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, heard of Esau’s vow to kill his brother and advised Jacob to leave home. Once, Esau, the red and hairy, had been so hungry when he came in from the fields that he offered his birthright to his quieter, domestic brother for some soup he was making. The brother, Jacob the Supplanter, accepted the bargain and so took his brother’s birthright. And another time—this time by deceit—the wild, red brother of nature lost his father’s blessing to his softer, more cunning brother. When the brothers’ father Isaac was an old, failing blind man (he’d been sixty when his twin sons were born), he craved some good venison soup once more before he died and begged Esau, his favorite, to provide it. Esau’s mother, Rebekah, whose favorite was Jacob, overheard the request and made the soup herself. Take the soup to your father, she urged, and thereby gain his blessing. A blessing was a powerful gift and coming from venerable beings or from certain people of unusual power was carried by the blessed person for a lifetime like an anointing, a protective benediction, a redemption, sacred. So Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, hoping for the blessing of Isaac upon her favorite son, made this suggestion to Jacob. “But he’ll feel my hands and see that they are smooth where my brother’s are hairy,” said Jacob, “and know that I am not his beloved Esau; and then he’ll curse me instead of bless me.” “We’ll dress you in Esau’s clothes and cover your hands and neck with the bristling skin of an animal,” the mother said. When Jacob brought the soup to his father, his father said, “The voice is Jacob’s voice but the hands are the hands of Esau.” So Isaac ate the venison and gave his impersonating son the vaunted blessing: it said that nations might serve him and peoples bow before him, receiving obeisance from his mother’s sons. Jacob, again the Supplanter, had stolen his brother’s blessing. But soon came Esau with his dish of venison. “Bless me, father,” asked Esau. “Who are you?” cried his father. “Who was it who has already

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brought me venison? I’ve eaten my fill and given that one my blessing, and on him the blessing will come. Thy brother, coming in disguise, has snatched thy blessing from thee.” “He’s rightly named the Supplanter!” cried Esau. “First he took away my birthright and now he has stolen my blessing. Father,” he implored, “have you no blessing left for me?” “No,” answered Isaac, “I have designated your brother your master, I have condemned all his brothers to do him service; I have assured him of corn and wine; what claim have I left myself to make for you, my son?” “But,” Esau pled, “have you only one blessing to give, father?” Esau wept. Then Isaac was moved and said, “All thy blessings shall come from earth’s fruitfulness, and from the dew of heaven. Thy sword shall be the breath of life to thee, but thou shall be subject to thy brother until the day comes when thou wilt rebel and wilt shake off his yoke from thy neck.” Esau begrudged this blessing and made a plan to kill his brother as soon as his father died. When Jacob’s mother heard of this threat, she sent her son Jacob away from home. Thus the hostile separation of the two brothers began, fed by deceit and jealousy and contention. But Jacob, the heel-clutcher, had got ahead of his brother. Years passed and Jacob had seen the fruits of his blind father’s misplaced blessing: he was very rich with cattle and sheep, wives and servants and eleven children. He had not seen his estranged brother Esau for a long time, but now a meeting was at hand. It was time to go home again, to reenter the promised land of home and to meet his brother, to make amends. Jacob was returning as a prosperous and successful man and sent ahead to Esau gifts of abundance, cattle and sheep and camels and corn and oil. This returning home again is hard when there has been no increase, no fulfi llment, no “success”; it is often bitter; as such a returnee I remember well some emptyhanded homecomings; but Jacob came back covered in glory. But his fear was great. He had wronged his brother and was afraid of him and had amends to make. His brother had vowed to kill him. He hoped to disarm his anger with gifts sent ahead, but he was going to have to face his brother whom he had cheated, deceived, swindled, impersonated, “supplanted.” The story, in the book of Genesis (32: 22–32), of Jacob’s return home to meet his brother, encloses the ancient and beautiful incident of an angelic encounter by a river. It is concerned with the themes of loss and recovering of self, of wounding and healing, of discovery of true self through spiritual struggle. It is about an all-night, mysterious wrestling between two silent men, opponents; or one silent man, himself his own contestant: which is it? The silent wrestling is broken only by

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the approaching dawn, when each asks the other’s name, and by one wounding, crippling—“halting”—the other in order to subdue him, and by the subduer asking the subdued to bless him! The passage reads: “The same night Jacob arose and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok river. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh; and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ And the man said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel; that is, He who strives with God and prevails. For if you have held your own with God, how much will you prevail over men?’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Tell me, I pray, your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Phenuel (that is, the face of God), saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Phenuel, limping because of his thigh.” Jacob’s recovering his name and spirit, his redemption by the night river, is one of the most mysterious and enigmatic scenes of literature and has meant a great deal to me in the experience of recovering. Relating to my work it is direct metaphor. I’ve limped out of every piece of work I’ve done. It’s given me a good sock in the hipbone in the wrestling. My eyes often open when I see a limping person going down the street. That person’s wrestled with God, I think. I don’t know when I ever rose from that contest as hale and whole as when I began. For me every accomplishment of work has been a wounding that brought new strength, new vision. I’ve always felt new, changed when the work was done. And in a new—or different—relation with life. Work, for me— writing, that is—has been that renewal through wrestling, that naming, that going home, that reconciliation with old disharmony, grief, grudge. For me that was recovery. Now I am not here—thank God—to define functions and meanings of literature, of the art of writing for anybody but myself—and that only by way of sharing my experience in living the life of an artist, in creating fiction (which is and has long been a way of life for me). I am sharing my own very personal experience in writing life, in recovering life. I am speaking of recovery of spirit where it had been lost, of finding again, as though it were new, fresh,

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what had been thought to have gone; of renewed vitality where there was debilitation; of replenishment where there had been emptiness. That kind of wrestling. “Recovery” involves a transformation. It is not simply a dead replacement, a lifeless exchange of one thing for another. And the transformation I speak of is spiritual—of the spirit. Art recovers life through spirit—that is, not through physical action. Nostalgia, the use of flat memory, in recalling the thing itself, calling back what once was, and in self-pity, is not what I’m talking about when I speak of recovery, of recovering life as art. In nostalgia, the element of lifeless longing is present, and so it is sentimental in that it wishes, yearns for things to be once again the way they used to be, exactly—a dead transference from then to now, stamped down. The Now, the present moment, the livingness of life, the world of “lived, ordinary lives,” are dammed back, buried over by grieving over what was. I speak entirely from my own feelings and my own experience, from my own personal adventures. Everything is auto-biography for me. Long ago I knew that another could not give me my life, only help to find it. I could only know life through myself, or recover it myself. I continue to be astonished by my own history. My own experience keeps justifying living. Others’ experience in history has supported and inspirited me; but finally my own has got me through. The most I have been able to offer others and can now is this self-consciousness, ferocious protection of personal feeling. I am astonished by what has happened to me. More than anyone else, I am most curious about myself, my own hidden behavior, the secret services of my mind. Of all people, I am the person closest to my own feelings. It is, above all, my journey, that long and close association with myself that has been the signal value of my existence. The journey with myself is more remarkable than any other journey I have ever taken. Therefore, writing life for me is (and has been) a spiritual endeavor, and is transforming and redemptive. Wrestling and getting named and demanding “blessing,” I limp. In speaking of the writer recovering, one can ask, why recover? Why not just give back what was, as it was, what is as it is? Why recover? Why not just let everything alone? Why wrestle, why not surrender; why not die? The unhealed must think this. In the fifties there was a vogue of the unhealed and unhealable. The poet was mad and lost. Some feared that “getting well” might mean the loss of poetry. If addictions were removed, by the grace of God, would art be removed along with them? Did a poet’s songs live in speed and gin? These poets were exalted as lost and damned. Could writing heal them? Were

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poems cures? The recovering poet was the creating poet, the fertile, producing poet. I’ve sat in university halls and listened to visiting unrecovering poets who could not be understood behind drunkenness and dope. Could new poems heal them? If they could again in clear head write their poems, would they get well? Could the will, the willingness to make new poems, heal them? Ex opera operandis. In the power of the work itself, the power of the person. The unhealed. I have not only known the unhealed but have been among them and one of them. The unhealed will not let go of the sickness, that is, come awake. The unhealed choose the hypnotism of illness and will not only not wrestle with it but certainly not ask a blessing of it. But pain and affliction do carry a blessing in them, I believe. Illness is a spiritual condition. It brings us to see something we had not seen before—seeing the meaning of our suffering. Thus being healed— recovering—in this manner can cause great joy and even gratitude over having been sick. “Ordinarily, people feel sorry for themselves for having suffered,” writes Dr. Thomas Hora in Dialogues in Metapsychiatry; “but in cases where real healing takes place, there is a sense of gratitude for the experience because it has brought about a realization which is of great value to the individual. Once we understand the true nature of healing, there is a valuable lesson in it for us all. If we have a problem, we do not have to seek fast relief, or even a quick healing to get rid of the problem as soon as possible. We may embrace the problem and say the same thing that Jacob said: ‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.’ If we quickly get rid of a problem and find relief, we are missing an opportunity to learn something vitally important. The mode of beingin-the-world changes and our character undergoes a transformation. That’s the greatest healing.” I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. Dr. Hora and others have shown me that in my stricken life and in my recovering life there has been a deep change within me; I am no longer the same person; I am somewhere made new. And I make new things out of this vision and out of this reality. In no longer holding onto my sickness in isolation and self-nursing, I have let go and have found new prowess, a new relationship to life and to others. Which brings to mind, again, my friend the Greek archer: Philoctetes, about whom I have spoken before. Philoctetes was, you’ll remember, given a bow of great power—a blessing in terms of what we have been saying. On a wild island where he and his fellow warriors had stopped to pray to a local god, Philoctetes was bitten by a snake. A person with a magical gift had been wounded, lamed, “halted.” The

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wound was incurable, and what’s more, gave off an unbearable odor, which drove the gifted youth’s friends from him. More than that, seizures periodically rendered Philoctetes frightening—he looked and acted crazy. He was abandoned on the forlorn island. He hid himself further away from the world in a cave by the ocean. He limped. Philoctetes was so concerned with his wound that he forgot his bow. He knew utter loneliness. But he had his wound, morbid companion. Years passed. Suddenly he was urgently needed by others: a crucial war could be won if he would come again among his family and his fellows, return to his homeland with his bow. But, the young man reasoned with himself, there is this wound. Philoctetes refused to return; he was of no use. A famous doctor was offered. He would heal the wound. Philoctetes asked to be left alone; he rejected the healing physician. Philoctetes was now in a position of power. A person with a handicapping wound and a priceless gift in demand by his society! He could sleep on, in self-pity and sickness, or accept healing and come back to the use of his gift, doubly empowered by his long suffering, by the long contest with himself, by his wrestling. You know the rest of the story, or can find it. It is the situation of the unhealed that serves us here. For as I see it, the singer is the song; the poetry is the poet; the archer is the bow. In the power of the work itself, the power of the person. The two conditions are inseparable. I do not mean that a person must be wounded in order to use his gift. Isolate either the bow or the archer and you have no whole, a fatal division, a fragment. A person who sees life and others exclusively in terms of his own affliction is out of a literature we all know, and a seductive literature at that: we can name poets and novelists who have lured us into the darkness, given us opiate visions that have seemed to be life itself. Exclusive self-nursing, tending the “curse,” the “difference” that separates, produces darkness, a sunless, festering creation. Exclusive magic produces sentimentality, heartlessness, silvery confection, a doll. At any rate, there is a conversation I must have with Philoctetes, my brother. For it is clear that he and I have met with the same choice, suffered together that crucial struggle, lain day after day, night after night, in the same haunted cave, “unhealable,” dozing undelivered in the uterine glow, held by sucking death from pushing out into the explosion of life, heel in the grasp of a seductive supplanter. The deadly wound was all. The life robber, the death sore, had taken over life. The radiant, the life thrusting—the bow—lay untouched in the darkness. But brother Philoctetes, your healer arrived,

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the wound was closed, the bow won the battle; and O brother of the cave and the pain, I too have once again shaken free, flipped like a fish from the hand that stretches toward me; I kick towards light, but the finger touch is on my heel. Lend me your bow! Come before me! From what I have said, it is clear that writing—recovering life—for me is a spiritual task. No matter what the craft of it, writing for me is the work of the spirit. Style for me is the spiritual experience of the material of my work. Art and Spirit endure together. Art heals, puts the precious bow in our hands again; binds up and reconciles; recovers the dignity and the beauty in us that keep getting wounded by the wrestling with the angel in us, with the God in us, or—in the absence of angels or God—with the mystery in each of us, waiting in the night by the river that we shall surely come to, on our way home to meet our brother.

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Part II

Three Interviews

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I. The Paris Review (1976)

[This interview, also reprinted in The Paris Review’s Writers at Work series, was conducted by Robert Phillips. Although Goyen says here that he is at work on a memoir in which he is writing about his years as an editor at McGraw-Hill, he seems to have left no trace of that subject in his papers.] The interview with William Goyen took place on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June 1975—the spring of Goyen’s sixtieth birthday and also of the publication of the 25th Anniversary Edition of his first novel, The House of Breath, a book which became a literary sensation upon its first appearance in 1950. Since that time he has published Ghost and Flesh (1952), In a Farther Country (1955), The Faces of Blood Kindred (1960), The Fair Sister (1962), A Book of Jesus (nonfiction, 1973), Come, the Restorer (1974), and Nine Poems (1976). Goyen’s Selected Writings appeared in 1974, and his impressive Collected Stories late in 1975. Four of his plays have been produced. During 1976–1977 he was Writer-inResidence at Princeton University. He is married to the actress Doris Roberts. Taped over a three-hour period in the home of a friend in Katonah, New York, Mr. Goyen remained seated on a sofa throughout the interview, sipping a soft drink. He requested that baroque music be played over the stereo, “to break the silences.” There were silences—long, considering pauses between thoughts. William Goyen is slender, lanky, and a handsome figure at sixty. His aspect is intense and patrician, his manner gracious and courtly. Goyen’s hair is silver: he speaks with a strong Southwestern accent. interviewer: In the Introduction to your Selected Writings, you stated that you began writing at the age of sixteen, at a time when you were also interested in composing and dancing and other art forms. Why writing as a career rather than one of the other arts?

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goyen: My foremost ambition, as a very young person, was to be a composer, but my father was strongly opposed to my studying music— that was for girls. He was from a sawmill family who made strict a division between a male’s work and a female’s. (The result was quite a confusion of sex-roles in later life: incapable men and over-sexed women among his own brothers and sisters.) He was so violently against my studying music that he would not allow me even to play the piano in our house. Only my sister was allowed to put a finger to the keyboard . . . The piano had been bought for her. My sister quickly tired of her instrument, and when my father was away from the house I merrily played away, improving upon my sister’s Etudes—which I had learned by ear—and indulging in grand Mozartian fantasies. In the novel The House of Breath, Boy Ganchion secretly plays a “cardboard piano,” a paper keyboard pasted on a piece of cardboard in a hidden corner. I actually did this as a boy. My mother secretly cut it out of the local newspaper and sent off a coupon for beginners’ music lessons. I straightaway devised Liszt-like concerti and romantic overtures. And so silent arts were mine: I began writing. No one could hear that, or know that I was doing it, even as with the cardboard piano. interviewer: You weren’t having to write under the sheets with a flashlight, were you? goyen: You know, I was playing my music under the quilt at night, quite literally. I had a little record player and I played what music I could under the quilt and later wrote that way. So I did write under the sheets. interviewer: What was your father’s reaction to writing? goyen: Something of the same. He discovered it some years later, when I was an undergraduate at Rice University in Houston. He found me writing plays, and to him the theatre, like the piano, was an engine of corruption which bred effeminate men (God knows he was generally right, I came to see), sexual libertines (right again!), and a band of gypsies flaunting their shadowed eyes and tinselled tights at reality. When my first novel was published, my father’s fears and accusations were justified—despite the success of the book—and he was outraged to the point of not speaking to me for nearly a year. This could, of course, have been because the book was mostly about his own family—the sawmill family I spoke of earlier. My father, his brothers, his father, everybody else were lumber people, around mills . . . and forests. I went around the sawmills with him, you see, and saw all that. He loved trees so! My God, he would . . . he’d just touch trees . . .

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they were human beings. He would smell wood and trees. He just loved them. He knew wood. He was really meant for that. Poor beloved man, though, he later came around to my side and became the scourge of local bookstores, making weekly rounds to check their stock of my book. He must have bought a hundred copies for his lumbermen friends. God knows what they thought of it. Before he died he had become my ardent admirer, and my Selected Writings is dedicated to him. interviewer: Do you agree with the theory that an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts? Were you genuinely unhappy? goyen: How could it have been any other way? My own nature was one that would have made it that way. It was a melancholy childhood. It was a childhood that was searching for—or that needed—every kind of compensation it could get. I think that’s what makes an artist. So that I looked for compensation to fulfill what was not there. interviewer: How have the physical conditions of your writing changed over the years? What is the relation between the creative act and privacy for you, today? In your Note on the 25th Anniversary Edition of The House of Breath, you stated that part of the novel was written on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

U.S. Navy identification card

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goyen: Since my writing began in the air of secrecy, indeed, of alienation—as the work had to be done without anyone’s knowing it— forever after, my work has had about it the air of someone in solitude having done it, alienated from the press of society and the everyday movements of life. On the ship, where I continued working, I found that there are many hidden places on an aircraft carrier where one can hide out and do secret work. And this was easily achieved. Also on the night watches and so forth, there was a lot of time. There is a great deal of free time aboard a ship in wartime, ironically. This kind of tradition in my work has been mine all my life, and I have generally lived in hidden places. In New Mexico it was at the beautiful foot of a mountain (the Sangre de Cristo in the primitive village of El Prado), and also in a mysterious mountain (Kiowa Mountain—the D. H. Lawrence Ranch called Kiowa Ranch, over San Cristobal, New Mexico, near Taos). And in Europe—Zurich, Rome—I worked in backstreet pensions. Yet more and more, as I get more worldly and have the security of having survived, I feel that it is not necessary to be that far removed from the workings of daily life and the daily lives of people. Indeed, the older I get and the more I write, the more I feel it important to be a part of daily life . . . to know that it surrounds me as I work. I presently live in a large apartment on the West Side of New York City. One of those rooms is mine, and it’s an absolute hideaway, yet all around me in the other rooms the life of a family goes on, and I like to know that. I also like to know that twelve flights down I can step onto the street in the midst of a lot of human beings and feel a part of those. Whereas, in the old days, in New Mexico, I was brought up—taught by—Frieda Lawrence to see that simple manual endeavor is part of art. I would work in gardens and dig water ditches and walk in mountains and along rivers when I was not writing, and I felt that it was absolutely essential to my work. That’s changing for me now. I’m more city-prone. Maybe the world is changing, too. Maybe solitude is best had in the midst of multitudes. It’s amazing how quickly something gets written. Now, when it comes, it can be on a bus, or in a store. I’ve stopped in Macy’s and written on a dry goods counter and then suddenly had a whole piece of writing for myself that was accomplished, where earlier in my life I felt I had to spend a week in a house somewhere in the country in order to get that. Conditions change.

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interviewer: Some say that poverty is ennobling to the soul. Is economic stability helpful to a writer? On the other hand, do you think wealth can be harmful? goyen: It can be harmful. This depends on the stage in a writer’s life, of course. As a young man, for me . . . I speak now not as a wealthy or an impoverished man, but as a man looking back when he was younger . . . it was imperative that I live very simply and economically. Living in Taos where—who would have believed it—then fifteen or twenty years later, a whole migration of young hippies would come to live and meditate in the desert just where I had lived—I was totally solitary. It was imperative for me and my work that I keep everything simple and have practically nothing at all. I lived in just a mud house with a dirt floor on land that Frieda Lawrence gave me out of friendship. I built it with a friend and a couple of Indians. Yet, to live in absolute poverty all his life could harm a writer’s work. The hardship and worry over money in writers as they get older is a social horror; grants given to writers should be sufficient, so that they are able to live with amplitude and, yes, some dignity. interviewer: The genesis of it all goes back to that aircraft carrier, doesn’t it? goyen: I thought I was going to die in the war. I was on a terrible ship. It was the Casablanca, the first baby flattop. There were always holes in it, and people dying and it was just the worst place for me to be. I really was desperate. I just wanted to jump off. I thought I was going to die anyway, be killed, and I wanted to die because I couldn’t endure what looked like an endless way of life with which I had nothing to do—the war, the ship, and the water. . . . I have been terrified of water all my life. I would have fits when I got close to it. Suddenly—it was out on a deck in the cold—I saw the breath that came from me. And I thought that the simplest thing that I know is what I belong to and where I came from and I just called out to my family as I stood there that night, and it just . . . I saw this breath come from me and I thought—in that breath, in that call, is their existence, is their reality . . . and I must shape that and I must write about them—The House of Breath. I saw this whole thing. I saw what was going to be four-five years’ work. Isn’t that amazing? But I knew it was there. Many of my stories happen that way. It’s dangerous to tell my students this because then these young people say, “Gee, all I’ve got to do, if I really want to write,

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Goyen at the house he built with Walter Berns in El Prado, near Taos

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The finished house

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Goyen with shipmates on the Casablanca is wait around for some ship in the cold night, and I’ll blow out my breath, and I’ve got my thing.” interviewer: So this sustained you? goyen: It brought my life back to me. I saw my relationships; it was extraordinary. Lost times come for us in our lives if we’re not phony and if we just listen; it hurts, but it’s also very joyous and beautiful. . . . It’s a redemption . . . It’s all those things that we try to find and the world seems to be looking for . . . As a matter of fact, that’s the hunger of the world. So there it was on the ship and it just came to me. I saw so much . . .—that I wouldn’t have to go home and they wouldn’t have to suffocate me; they wouldn’t kill me; I’d find other relationships. interviewer: So after the war you didn’t go home.

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goyen: When the war was over, I just dipped into Texas and got my stuff and left and headed towards San Francisco. I had come to love San Francisco when it was the home port for my ship, the aircraft carrier, and I thought that it would be a good place to live. But I passed through Taos, New Mexico, in winter, in February, and I was enchanted. It really was like an Arthurian situation. . . . I couldn’t leave. It was beautiful and remote, like a Himalayan village, untouched, with this adobe color that was ruby-colored and yellow, all the magical colors of mud. It’s not all one color. It’s like Rome. Rome looks like that. And the sunlight and the snow . . . just about everyone on foot . . . a few cars . . . high, 7500 feet. interviewer: Did the D. H. Lawrence commune in Taos have anything to do with your staying? goyen: I didn’t know anything about the Lawrence legend. Had I, I might not have stayed at all. But I did and right away I thought that I’d better get a little more money for myself before I settled in to work. So I got a job as a waiter at a very fashionable inn called Sagebrush Inn. I worked as a waiter for a few months until I met Frieda, who came in one night and I waited on her. The whole Lawrence world came to dinner there: Dorothy Brett and Mabel Dodge, Spud Johnson, Tennessee Williams—he was living up at the ranch. They all came to my table. And then the owner of the Inn had to come out and say, this young man is just out of the war and he wants to be a writer. The worst thing I wanted said about me; it almost paralyzed me. Well, of course, Tennessee thought, oh, God, who cares about another writer. But Frieda said, you must come and have tea with me. She said it right away. I went and from that moment . . . we just hit it off. It was almost a love affair. It was the whole world. So it wasn’t Lawrence that brought me to her; circumstances brought me to Frieda and I found her a great pal and a luminous figure in my life on her own terms. I would go to teas with her. She would have high teas. In Texas we had a coke. But here it was the first time I met someone who baked bread, you know? She made a cake and brought it out . . . It was wonderful. She wore German clothes, like dirndls, and peasant outfits, and an apron. She was a kitchen frau. A few people came . . . Mabel Dodge had given her this great 300-acre ranch in return for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. That was the exchange. Except she never took Sons and Lovers away, so that the manuscript and many others, Women in

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Goyen with Dorothy Brett

Love, all holograph . . . were there in a little cupboard at the ranch. I could read them and look at them in amazement. interviewer: What sort of things did you talk about? goyen: We talked about the simplest things . . . Well, really about love, about men and women and about sex, about physical living. Of

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course, I didn’t know that I was hearing what Lawrence had heard. Because it was Frieda who gave Lawrence this whole thing and it overwhelmed me. The various people would come up in the summer and spend time with us, all kinds of people. Just simple people; Indians . . . She was close to Indians. I got very close to three Indians who were really like my family and helped me build my house. interviewer: And then people like Tennessee Williams came. goyen: Yes, Tennessee stayed up there with his friend, Frank Merlo. Tennessee told us that he heard Lawrence’s voice. . . . He was a haunted poor thing, but he did go a little too far. D. H. Lawrence was whispering things to him. Suddenly Tennessee had a terrible stomach ache and it turned out that he had a very bad appendix and had to be brought down to Mabel Dodge. Mabel owned the only hospital; built it and owned it. It was like a European town and we were the only Americans, and I went to this hospital to witness Tennessee’s dying . . . He was always dying, you know. He was dying in this Catholic hospital screaming four-letter words and all kinds of things with the nuns running around wearing the most enormous habits, most unsanitary for a hospital. Mabel was wringing her hands and saying “He’s a genius, he’s a genius.” The doctor said, “I don’t care; he’s going to die, he’s got gangrene. His appendix has burst. We have to operate at once.” Tennessee said, “Not until I make my will.” The doctor said, “How long will the will be?” “Well, everything’s going to Frankie,” so they sat down, with Frank going through an inventory of all Tennessee’s possessions. “What about the house in Rome? You left that out.” Tennessee was just writhing in pain. So they made a list of all the things. And then they wheeled him off and he indeed had this operation, which to everyone’s surprise he managed to recover from. Eventually he got out of there . . . interviewer: All this time you were working on The House of Breath. How did it get published? goyen: It got published through Stephen Spender, indirectly. He came to that little village where I was living. I had sent a piece of it to Accent, a wonderful early magazine; it caused quite a kind of thing. I began to get letters. Random House wrote me a letter and said that they hoped this was “part of a book.” (All editors do that, I later learned. They’ll say that even if it’s just a “letter to the editor” they’ve seen. That’s what editors have to do, God bless them, and I’m glad they do.) About that time, Spender, a man I scarcely knew, whose poetry I scarcely knew, arrived in Taos on a reading tour. A wealthy lady named Helene Wurlitzer

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of the family who made the organs lived there and brought people into that strange territory to read, and give chamber concerts and so on. I never went to those things because . . . well, I didn’t have any shoes; I really was living on mud floors in an adobe house that I had built, utterly primitive, which I loved. I was isolated and terrified with all those things going on in me . . . but I was writing that book. Well, Spender heard that I was there . . . He heard through Frieda, who went to the reading, and so then he asked me if he could come to see me; he treated me as though I were an important writer. He had just read that piece in Accent and he asked if there was more that he could read. I showed him some other pieces and he sent those around. They were published and then somebody at Random House sent me a contract right away of $250.00 advance for the book, and then promptly was fired. But Spender was very moved by the way I was living there; he wrote a wellknown essay called “The Isolation of the American Writer” about my situation there. Nothing would do until Mr. Spender would have me come to London because he thought I was too isolated, too Texan, too hicky. . . . He really took it upon himself to make that kind of decision for me. It was a wonderful thing that he did. The stipulation was that I would bring a girl who had come into my life with me (this blessed girl has passed on among the leaves of autumn) and she was very much a part of my life there in London and together we were real vagabonds, embarrassing everybody—people like Stephen, and Cyril Connolly, and Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay, I mean, all of them . . . interviewer: You stayed in Spender’s house? goyen: I had a room at the top and Dorothy had a room in the basement, with the stairs between us, creaking stairs. It was an elegant house, an 18th-century house in St. John’s Wood. At 4:00 tea-time in the winter it was dark, and they pulled Florentine-brocaded curtains and turned on lights; it was a time of austerity still, but people came to tea. Veronica Wedgewood would arrive. Dorothy wouldn’t come up from the basement. She really hated this kind of thing. She vanished. She just wouldn’t participate. So I was really quite alone with this. I guess I must have kept her under wraps. I must have been very bad to her. I don’t know. I have to think about that some time. But here they would come: Natasha, Stephen’s wife, who was a gifted pianist and wanted to be a concert pianist, and so musicians came, and painters. Cyril Connolly was often there because he and Stephen were working together. Dame Edith Sitwell came. We went to her house and she read one night; she sat behind a screen because she wouldn’t read facing any-

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one or a group . . . behind a marvelous Chinese screen and you would hear this voice coming through the screen . . . all those people . . . That was a world that Spender gave me and was a great influence in my life and on my work. interviewer: What an extraordinary change. goyen: I was thrown into this elegant surround which was precisely the opposite of what I had been doing. It was right for me because my character, Folner, yearned for elegance. Suddenly my country people were singing out their despair in those great elegant houses. I saw cathedrals for the first time . . . I’d not really seen cathedrals . . . I was able to get to Paris and all around there. All this went into The House of Breath. I saw the Sistine Chapel—well, that’s the first page of The House of Breath, “on the dome of my skull, paradises and infernos and annunciations” and so forth. Europe just put it all right—everything that started in a little town in Texas, you see. It saved the book, I think. Because it made that cry, you know . . . It’s an elegant cry . . . There’s nothing better than an elegant cry of despair . . . interviewer: Did people worry what this tremendous change in venue—from Taos to Europe—would do to The House of Breath? goyen: Some people worried about it. James Laughlin of New Directions, when I had published a bit, wrote me, “You are ruining your work fast; the influences you are coming into are coming too soon, and you’re allowing your personality to overwhelm your talent. Obviously people find your Texas personality . . .” (and he could be a snide guy too) “. . . charming and you might be of interest to them for a little while. But you are writing a very serious book and this will be permanently damaging to your work.” He really wanted me to get out of there. interviewer: Were there other Cassandras about The House of Breath? goyen: Well, Auden had kind of looked down his nose at me. He said it’s the kind of writing where the next page is more beautiful than the one just read. “One is just breathless for fear that you’re not going to be able to do it,” he said, “and that makes me too nervous. I prefer James.” Christopher Isherwood said, “You know, my dear boy, you’ll never make it. That is what one feels when one reads you. You’ll never survive with this kind of sensibility unless you change, get some armor on yourself.” As a matter of fact, he wrote me and warned me again . . . He put it all down in a letter. And that did scare me. I was young and I was scared. But I knew that I had no choice. Then that feeling of doom

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really came on me . . . because I had no choice. I knew that I couldn’t write any other way. interviewer: When you began writing The House of Breath did you expect it to be published? Were you writing for publication? goyen: I was most surely not “writing for publication.” But I don’t think there is any piece of the novel except one that was not published in magazines before the book itself was published. interviewer: You said earlier your father was upset by the book when it was published. Had you been concerned about the family and hometown reaction? goyen: Concerned, yes. I fell out of favor with many people in the town, let’s put it that way, and was just about disinherited by my own family. I had nasty letters, bad letters from home and heartbroken letters from my mother and my father. Generally the attitude was one of hurt and shock. It was not until fifteen years later that I was able to go back to the town! And even then rather snide remarks were made to me by the funeral director and by the head of the bank. We met on the street. interviewer: So when you apply for a loan, you won’t do it in that town? goyen: No, and I won’t die there, either. interviewer: How long did you and the girl stay as Spender’s guests in England? goyen: I settled in for the whole year of 1949 . . . and I finished the book in that house at St. John’s Wood, in Stephen’s house. The girl was there until it got very bad; we had problems and so she moved to Paris; that made me have to go to Paris to see her there and we had this kind of thing that was going on. When I came back, bringing my manuscript on the Queen Mary, she came with me to New York. But then we had one visit with Bob Linscott, my editor, who said to her, “My dear, do you like to eat? Do you like a roof over your head? You’ll never have it; he’s an artist. I feed him and Random House has kept him alive and probably will have to from now on. Don’t marry him, don’t even fall in love” . . . and he broke her heart. He really did. Poor Dorothy. He was right; I wasn’t about to be saddled down. And so it broke away and that’s okay. Many years later I found a woman exactly like her. Her name was Doris and so often I say to Doris, “Dorothy,” and I’m in trouble. interviewer: That was quite a step for an editor to take. What do you think their particular function should be? goyen: Well, really caring for authors . . . not meddling with what they did but loving them so much and letting them know that he cares.

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Generally at that point, when you’re starting, you feel that nobody does. Linscott looked after you and if you had no money, he gave you money. Once Truman Capote met me at the Oak Room of the Plaza. “I’m embarrassed to sit with you,” he said when I sat down, “your suit is terrible.” I hadn’t really thought about what I was wearing. He said, “I’m not going to have you wear that suit anymore. But,” he said, “I’ve ordered drinks for us and if you’ll just wait, I’m going to call Bob and tell him that he must buy you a suit that costs at least $250.” And he did. Bob gave me money and he told me, “Well I guess he’s right.” He was lovable, Truman. He did sweet lovely things then. interviewer: Carson McCullers was one of Linscott’s authors, wasn’t she? goyen: I had first known her in this nest that Linscott had up there for these little birdlings of writers. Carson had great vitality and she was quite beautiful in that already decaying way. She was like a fairy. She had the most delicate kind of tinkling, dazzling little way about her . . . like a little star. Like a Christmas, she was like an ornament of a kind. She had no mind and she could make no philosophical statements about anything; she didn’t need to. She said far out, wonderfully mad things, that were totally disarming, and for a while people would say, “I’ll go wherever you go.” She’d knock them straight out the window. interviewer: What sort of people interested her? goyen: She had a devastating crush on Elizabeth Bowen. She actually got to Bowen’s Court: she shambled over there to England and spent a fortnight. I heard from Elizabeth that Carson appeared at dinner the first night in her shorts, tennis shorts; that poor body, you know, in tennis shorts and she came down the stairs; that was her debut. It didn’t last long. But that was Carson. interviewer: What was distinctive about her stories—as say compared to the other Southern “magnolia” writers? goyen: She would try to make her stories scary, and the word “haunted” was used of course, by the literary critics, “the haunted domain.” I think that was the French title for Truman’s first novel . . . Other Voices, Other Rooms. Les Domaines Hantés. But Carson was . . . she was a really truly lost, haunted wonder-creature. It’s hard to be that and grow old, because of course you either go mad out of what you see, or I guess you try to imitate that kind of purity. She was a bad imitator. So it was just a bore. interviewer: She was not a person to have as an enemy.

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goyen: She was . . . not tough but she had a nasty . . . well, she had a way of absolutely devastating you; the kind that hurt, that little kind of peeping “drop dead” sort of thing. She had an eye for human frailty and would go right to that; that’s why people fled her. They thought, who needs this? Why be around her? Then, of course, she was terribly affected by not being able to write. It was a murderous thing, a death blow, that block. She said she just didn’t have anything to write. And really, it was as though she had never written. This happens to writers when there are dead spells. We die sometimes. And it’s as though we’re in a tomb; it’s a death. That’s what we all fear, and that’s why so many of us become alcoholics or suicides or insane—or just no-good philanderers. It’s amazing that we survive, though I think survival in some cases is kind of misgiven and it’s a bore. It was written recently about Saul Bellow that one of the best things about him is that he survived, he didn’t become an alcoholic, he didn’t go mad and so forth. And that the true heroism of him lies simply in his endurance. That’s the way we look at artists in America. People said to me when I was sixty, “My God, you’re one of the ones, how are you. But you look wonderful. We didn’t know where you were.” They thought I was dead, or in an institution or something. interviewer: Could her editor Linscott help McCullers at all? goyen: Poor Linscott couldn’t get any more out of her and then he died before he could help her. I doubt whether he could have; no one could have. She was hopeless. She was just kind of a little expendable thing, you know? She would stay with me days at a time. I put her to bed; she had a little nightgown. I was playing sort of dolly; I was playing house. I sat with her while her ExLax worked. Two or three chocolate ExLaxes and three wine glasses, and about three Seconal. And I would sit by her bed and see that it all worked, or at least it all got going in her. And then she was off to sleep. She had some awful cancer of the nerve ends. This caused the strokes and she had a stroke finally on the other side until she was very badly paralyzed and then she had just a massive killing stroke. She was absolute skin and bones. They took her down there to Georgia, not far from where Flannery O’Connor lived, where they buried her. interviewer: Could she have written an autobiography? goyen: She did not have “a hold of herself,” as a person would say, enough to look back and see herself in situations. She never could have written her autobiography; it would be impossible for her . . . she had disguised herself so much . . . And what a past, you know? Her

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mother . . . the Mother of all these people . . . Thank God mine seems to be quite okay—I’d be raving mad at this point. Carson’s mother was an aggressive lady, all over the place, and she came here once and worked at Mademoiselle. She had a notorious time as a fiction editor there. She did the oddest things . . . rejecting stories in her own Georgian way, generally in terms of cooking. I think she wrote to a writer once, “The crust of this story holds its contents well . . .” (she was off on a pie), “but my dear, by the time we get to the custard, it runs.” The pie image went on and on. “This pie won’t do,” she said, “. . . came out of the oven too soon.” She was a self-educated lady from the South who very early on had read Katherine Mansfield, for instance, and had told Carson about Mansfield, which was the worst thing she could have done. Once I went with her to meet Carson’s plane. When she saw her daughter step out of the plane, she turned to me and said, “I seen the little lamp.” I thought, “That’s some allusion I’m going to have to find out about.” When Carson reached us, she said, “Carson, you know what I told Bill when you appeared?” (She was the kind of lady who would repeat a thing she’d said.) “I told him that I seen the little lamp.” Carson burst into tears. I said, “Please tell me what this is that hurts you so.” She said, “Well, it’s that beautiful story called ‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield. It’s the last line of the story. A poor little girl peeks in a garden at a doll’s house owned by a snobbish family, and she sees this glowing little lamp inside. Later when the little girl’s sister asks why there is a curious glow in her eye, she says, ‘I seen the little lamp.’” interviewer: What about your own mother? goyen: As a literary person I truly am the offspring of my mother and women like my mother. There’s no woman like a Texas woman in her eighties. It’s not Southern. She wouldn’t have a clue as to what a “Southern lady” was. Hers was a singing way of expressing things, and this I heard so very early that it became my own speech; that’s the way I write. I love spending money to talk to her on the phone in Texas an hour at a time because it’s just as though the curtain that came down on an opera last night goes right up when I call her tonight. The aria goes right on; it’s just wonderful. interviewer: What do you talk about? goyen: About how Houston has grown, and how she wants to go back to the little town she left fifty years ago. I write her expressions down; I have to do that to understand what they really mean; it’s almost another language. But she keeps breeding it. I mean, she’s writing all the time. I may not be writing, but she is. She’s alive . . .

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interviewer: Do you carry a notebook with you to put these things in? Or keep a diary? goyen: Oh yes, I always carry paper with me . . . something to write on, always. And I keep not so much a formal diary any longer, but, well, it’s a notebook, and in it I keep most things. interviewer: What do you do with those ideas that strike you in the middle of Macy’s, say, and you can’t record them fully or easily? Are they often unrelated to what you currently are writing? goyen: It’s rarely unrelated. When one’s really engaged deeply in a piece of work, truly writing it, it takes over almost everything else and you find you’re thinking about it constantly and it’s a part of everything that happens. Even the clerk in Macy’s suddenly speaks out of the novel that you are writing, it seems, or is a character in it. All the people in the world are suddenly characters in the novel you are writing. Everything contributes. The created piece of work has suddenly replaced what is called real life . . . life as it really is, whatever that means . . . so that it’s not surprising to have it come at one from all angles. Therefore, I know that if I’ve been writing all morning and I’ve got to buy groceries at noon, I better take paper with me, because I’m going to keep writing as I go down the street; you can write on the sack that your groceries come in, and I have! interviewer: What about the six years you were an editor at McGraw-Hill? Were you able to write, or did this interfere with your work? goyen: The whole McGraw-Hill period is one that I want to write about. I have been writing about it in my Memoirs (my next book). The writer in the world of publishing, and particularly me in the world of publishing, who had been so disillusioned and embittered by publishers . . . interviewer: You were disillusioned with your own publishers? goyen: Not my own per se. Just publishing in general—the making of books and the life of the making of books. All these things seemed so dead-end to me, without meaning. In this great place, this huge publishing house, I was a special person, in that I was a special editor. I was brought there to concern myself with serious writers and with new writers and what would be called Good Books, “quality writing.” I was so concerned with the writing of my own authors that I considered their books my own and I treated them as such. I entered into their creative process. Nevertheless, I was caught in the competitive crush and thrust of commercial publishing. There was no question of my own writing. I was

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relieved not to have to worry about my own writing. I scarcely grieved it, or mourned it. It had brought me so little—no more than itself. I suddenly was not a man who I had known. I was on the phone . . . I hate phones, I really can’t manage phones well. I won’t answer it generally and if I do I can’t talk very long; I just can’t do it. But here I was having to live and negotiate on the phone. Editors live that way. With agents and all that . . . Here I was doing this for the first two or three years. I was drawing up contracts and I never knew what a contract was; I didn’t know what they were about. But I began to fail after the fourth year. I got very disturbed for all kinds of reasons . . .—publishing, that’s a corrupt thing sometimes. I had my way for a while but then pretty soon night must fall and I was back with the old budgets and best-selling books and a lot of crap. interviewer: I take it your interest in your own writing increased during those six years? goyen: Yes, that was bound to happen. As years passed, I began to be hungry and I wasn’t quite sure what that hunger was. Well, of course, it was that I was not writing, and the more I exhausted myself with other writers, the more hungry I became to do my own work. This is an exhausting thing, being an editor, and I had no time left for my own work, no matter how much I wanted it. The demands made on me were almost unbearable. And that was when I left McGraw-Hill—or was asked to do so by Albert Leventhal. interviewer: That was in the ’60s. In the ’50s you were teaching at The New School. Did you find teaching just as demanding? Or was this a more satisfactory way to earn an income while doing your own writing? goyen: Teaching writing is draining too, of course. Especially the way I do it. You see, I believe that everybody can write. And in believing and teaching this, what happens, of course, is enormous productivity on the part of many students. One’s students produce so much that he is followed down the street by the mass of stuff he’s encouraged! I mean, he’s overtaken by it. And there’s that much more work to do and more conferences to hold, and it’s a depleting and exhausting thing. Just as exhausting as editing. interviewer: Is there an ideal occupation for the writer, then? Other than teaching? goyen: Probably teaching is ideal. Because there’s a community of writers there, and because the writer is respected and understood as a writer in colleges now. He’s brought there as a writer, so it’s understood

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why he’s behaving the way he does and what he’s doing when he’s not around; he’s expected to write. It’s well-paid, now, too—universities are paying writers well. It’s probably the best. It takes a lot of discipline for a writer to teach writing, though. But in the end, leading writing seminars and workshops is refreshing and exhilarating and creative and in touch with life. I consider teaching one of my callings. interviewer: What do you think of your students? goyen: The young people I’ve been involved with in my classes seem to have no sense of place. It bewildered me at first and then it caused me no little alarm. We’ve talked about it and what they tell me is often what I’ve presumed . . . that there isn’t much of a place where they come from. I mean, every place looks like every other place. Even suburban places—around here or in Ohio or wherever—all look alike . . .—a shopping center, a McDonald’s, the bank with the frosted globes on the facade, you know, that’s a given building. The repertory theatres all look alike. So that they really don’t have a sense of place except through literature. But when they begin to write they can’t write about Flaubert’s place. So what they’re writing about right now is the Princeton campus, and I’ve told them I don’t want to hear about that. I ask them, but didn’t you live somewhere before? Wasn’t there a room somewhere, a house? A street? A tree? Can’t you remember? There was always a sense of belonging to a place in my childhood. The place. We called the house “the place.” “Let’s go back to the place,” we’d say. I loved that. There was such a strong sense of family and generation and ancestors in it. It was like a monument . . . That’s what my impression was and I wrote about it as that. It was a Parthenon to me . . . with that enduring monumentality to it. But these students . . . They’ve had terrible family problems—they are dissociated . . . They’re so disoriented . . .—divorce, my God, divorce is a way of life in these generations. I ask them, don’t you have a grandmother? Do you ever go to your grandmother’s? Where does she live? Oh, they say, she lives with us; or she lives in an apartment; she lives in the condominium. These elegant old ladies, they don’t live in places anymore, either. interviewer: To get back to your own work, do you feel that music is reflected in your writings? goyen: It’s an absolute, basic part of my work, there’s no question, and I think of my writing as music, often; and of my stories as little songs. interviewer: “Little songs,” of course, is the literal meaning of the word “sonnet.” The Albondocani Press has just published an edition

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of your early poems, poems written before your first novel. What made you abandon poetry for fiction? Faulkner said that all short story writers are failed poets. Do you feel this is so? goyen: I think an awful lot of them are. I’m not a failed poet, I’m just a poet who made another choice, at a certain point, very early. Actually I’m so taken by the dramatic form, I’m really a playwright manqué! I still consider myself, after having written and seen produced four plays in the professional theatre, manqué in the theatre. And yet I continue to love the form and fear it more than love it. interviewer: Do you think your playwriting has been beneficial to your fiction writing? goyen: I think it has. I think it’s made me care more about writing fiction, for one thing. interviewer: Do you feel a compromise in the collaborations between director and producer and writer? goyen: No, no, that’s welcome to me, all that. I need all the help I can get! I never accept playwriting as a solitary thing. Once you do, you’re ruined: because from the beginning it’s a collaborative affair, and the sooner you can get it on to a stage, the better. The more you write at the table on a play, alone, the farther away you’re going to get from the play. So far as the theatre is concerned, it becomes a literary work the more you work on it. But writing for the theatre has made me understand plot. It’s helped me with plot in fiction writing. interviewer: What European authors and what American authors have meant the most to you? goyen: As for American authors, Hawthorne and Melville have meant a great deal. And Henry James. And two poets—Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot—have influenced me. interviewer: In what ways? They seem odd choices for a Southwestern fiction writer . . . goyen: I still read, I still study, the Cantos of Pound. I found Pound in Texas when I was eighteen or nineteen through a young friend named William Hart. Hart was one of those prodigies, enfants terribles, that materialize in small towns, young men bearing a sense of art and poetry and life as naturally as others bore the instinct to compete and to copulate. He had a great deal to do with my early enlightenment and spiritual salvation in a lower-middle-class environment in an isolated (then) Texas town, where a boy’s father considered him a sissy if he played the piano, as I’ve said, and questioned the sexual orientation of any youth who read poetry.

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William Hart was a true pioneer; he brought me Pound, Eliot, and Auden. He was self-taught, finding things for himself out of hunger. He had a high-school education, barely, but afterwards he came and sat in my classes at Rice and listened. He knew more than the professors did sometimes—he really did . . . about Elizabethan drama, and medieval romances. He knew these things. He was a delicate boy, obviously, but not effete. He was French Cajun, from a poor family, and he was on the streets, and could have been in trouble a lot. But he ended up in the library. They felt they had a revolutionary in there. In the Houston Public Library at nineteen he would get up and speak about literature, and Archibald MacLeish, of all people. And oh, how this man Hart spoke. The whole library would turn and listen. He became that kind of town creature, one of those who go down in cities, unheralded . . . They go down into beds of ashes. Well, he brought me Pound. Pound’s Cantos hold for me madness and beauty, darkness and mystery, pain, heartbreak, nostalgia. Some of the most beautiful and most haunting were written as a prisoner. He made, above all, songs, and he told his stories lyrically, as I have felt driven to tell mine. By ordinary speech, ordinary people. I mean that it seems to me that Pound sometimes speaks from a sort of sub-tone in his poems like a con-man, a back-street hustler, using pieces of several languages, bits of myth, literary quotations and mixed dialects and plain beguiling nonsense. There is a stream, flowing and broken, of voices in Pound, echoes, town speech, songs, that deeply brought to me my own predicament, in the home of my parents and in the town where I lived. He helped show me a way to sing about it—it was, as most influences have been for me, as much a tone, a sound, a quality, as anything else. The same for T. S. Eliot. He seemed then so much more American than Pound—but then Pound has the Chinese calligraphy and the heavy Greek and Latin. Eliot’s wan songs broken suddenly by a crude word or a street phrase directly influenced me as a way to tell The House of Breath; and doom cut through by caprice shocked me and helped me survive in my own place until I could escape; showed me a way of managing the powerful life that I felt tearing through me, and trying to kill me. I saw a way: “Cry, what shall I cry?”—the dark Biblical overtone of the great poem; “the voice of one calling Stetson!” Oh, Eliot got hold of me at that early age and helped me speak for my own place. The story-telling method of Eliot and Pound—darting, elliptical, circular, repetitive, lyric, self-revealing, simple speech within grand cadence and hyperbole, educated me and showed me a way to be taken

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out of my place, away from my obsessing relations: saved me from locality, from “regionalism.” I knew then that it was “style” that would save me. I saw Pound as the most elegant of poets and the most elemental. Both. His madness partakes of both (elegance and elementalness) and is a quality of his poetry: “Hast ’ou seen the rose in the steel dust / (or swansdown ever?) / so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron / we who have passed over Lethe.” That’s Canto 74, from the Pisan Cantos. interviewer: What of the Europeans? goyen: Balzac above all, if just for the sheer fullness of story in him, for the life-giving detail in his novels. The daily stuff and the fact of his writing helped me struggle against a tendency toward the ornate and fantastical and abstract. Then come Flaubert, Proust. Of the English, Milton—a curious choice, right? The minor poems of Milton, but Paradise Lost above all. Milton’s richness and grandness—his scope. I had an epic sense of my story, my material, and he helped me see it. Then Dante—the Inferno. Heine’s poems—their sweet-sadness. The beautiful lyric poems of Goethe. Thomas Mann’s stories, especially “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” and Buddenbrooks. And some of the lyrical poems of Wordsworth. Poetry has been a strong influence on me, you see. I read it as often as fiction. interviewer: You weren’t influenced by Faulkner in any way? goyen: No, not at all. His work is monumental, and extremely important to me, but not in any way an influence. It goes along beside me—Light in August; Absalom, Absalom—but not through me. I can’t say why, but I know that that’s true. Maybe he’s too Southern. If that is a tradition . . . I’m not part of that. Thank God for my southwesternness . . . that Texan thing. My father, I’m afraid, is a Southerner, a Mississippian, but my mother and her family for generations were native Texas people . . . so that was a strong influence. I knew a lot of my father’s family; they’re the people I’ve really written about in The House of Breath. But something kept me away from those sicknesses and terrors that come from that Deep South. interviewer: The House of Breath came out at the same time as other celebrated works—Styron’s, Capote’s, Mailer’s. Did you feel part of a writing generation? goyen: I felt immensely apart. And most certainly did not belong to any “writing generation.” I remember, indeed, saying, in an interview with Harvey Breit in 1950 in the New York Times, that I felt excited about joining the company of those writers, but that I had not before that time been aware of any of them! I stayed off to myself.

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I read nothing of “the literary world” when writing The House of Breath. interviewer: Subsequently, did you ever do any reviews of your contemporaries? goyen: I reviewed Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the New York Times Book Review. Actually it was a fair review . . . but it was critical . . . I called Capote a valentine maker and said I thought he was the last of the valentine makers. Well, this just seemed to shake his life for the longest time. interviewer: Do your contemporaries interest you now? goyen: They really don’t interest me very much. I still feel apart and, well, I am apart from my contemporaries. And they don’t know what to do about me, or they ignore me. I am led to believe they ignore me. interviewer: Hasn’t that perhaps something to do with your books having been out of print for a decade or more, until recently? goyen: No, I don’t think so. How could it? My books have been in libraries, on reading lists in universities. Somebody was always writing a thesis or a paper on my work and writing to me for my help. But: if I am so full of the books of all these people—Doris Lessing and John Updike and X and Y and Z—how will I have a clear head for anything of my own? I’m really not very interested in contemporary fiction, anyway. I consider my fiction absolutely separate and apart from and unrelated to “contemporary American fiction.” interviewer: You feel closer to the European literary tradition? goyen: I do. interviewer: Your books continued to remain in print in European editions long after they were unavailable here. Do you have any notion why that is? goyen: No, unless it was because my books were translated by such eminent translators—Ernst Robert Curtius and Elisabeth Schnack in Germany, Maurice Edgar Coindreau in France. interviewer: All your novels have a rather unique form: they do not follow a linear line, for one thing. Did The House of Breath ever take form as a straightforward narrative and then later get broken down into monologues? goyen: No, no, no. The form of that novel is the way it was written. It was slow, although it poured from me and a whole lot of it was simply given to me, absolutely put into my mouth. There were great stretches when nothing came. Then it poured out . . . in pieces, if that’s possible. So, I thought of it as fragments . . . that was what established its form. I

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once called it Cries Down a Well, and then I called it Six Elegies. Later it was Six American Portraits. So it came in pieces, but I knew that they were linked. interviewer: What do you have against the linear novel? goyen: I always intend to write a linear novel when I begin. It’s my greatest ambition to write a straightforward novel, and I always feel that I am, you know. I get very close. I thought Come, the Restorer was very close to being a linear novel. Then people laughed at me when I finished, and said that’s not true at all. interviewer: What people? goyen: Friends or interviewers, I suppose. What I end up writing each time, you see, is a kind of opera. It’s a series of arias and the form is musical, despite myself, and it is lyrical. The outcry is lyrical despite myself. These novels have come to me at their height, passages have come to me in exaltation. So that the gaps between have been my problem and the—I was going to say—quieter . . . spaces and moments . . . but I don’t mean that, because there are many quiet spaces in these books. But the less intense spaces seem to be hard for me to manage, somehow. What seems meant for me to do is always to begin what’s called the linear novel, and try and try and try . . . interviewer: Going back to form: Do you think of the novel as a lot of short stories, or as one big story? Or does it depend upon the novel? goyen: It might. But it seems to me that the unified novel, the organic entity that we call a novel, is a series of parts. How could it not be? I generally make the parts the way you make those individual medallions that go into quilts. All separate and as perfect as I can make them, but knowing that my quilt becomes a whole when I have finished the parts. It is the design that’s the hardest. Sometimes it takes me a long time to see, or discover, what the parts are to form or make. interviewer: Does the completion of one “medallion” lead to another? goyen: No, the completion of one medallion does not usually lead to another. They seem to generate, or materialize, out of themselves and are self-sufficient, not coupled to, or, often, even related to, any other piece. That seems to be what my writing job is: to discover this relationship of parts. Madness, of course, comes from not being able to discover any connection, any relationship at all! And the most disastrous thing that can happen is to make up, to fake, connections. In a beautiful quilt it looks like the medallions really grow out of one another,

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organic, the way petals and leaves grow. The problem, then, is to graft the living pieces to one another so that they finally become a living whole. That is the way I’ve had to work, whatever it means. interviewer: Have you made medallions that did not fit into the final quilt? goyen: There’s rarely been anything left over, that is, medallions that didn’t fit into the final quilt. If the pieces didn’t all come together, the whole failed. It’s really as though all the pieces were around, hidden, waiting to be discovered, and there were just enough for the design on hand. If, in rare cases, something was left over, one tried to use it as some sort of preamble or “postlude”—that sort of fussy thing. It never worked, even when one felt it was such “fine” writing that it should be kept in. It’s this kind of exhibitionism of bad taste that’s harmed some good work by good writers. interviewer: So you started writing under a quilt and you came out producing quilts. goyen: Producing them is right. interviewer: How else would you describe your own writing, or your style? goyen: As a kind of singing. I don’t say this because others have said it. But we’ve spoken of my work as song, earlier, the musicality of my writing and its form. It’s impossible for me not to write that way. I write in cadence—that could be very bad. Just as in the theatre, when an actor in rehearsal discovers that lines in a speech rhyme, he or the director is horrified. Someone in the back of the theatre will scream out, “Couplet! Couplet!” meaning, “It rhymes! It rhymes!” Now, when I speak of writing in cadence, I obviously don’t mean “Couplet! Couplet!” Nor am I concerned with alliteration or any kind of fancy language. But I am concerned with the flow of language (the influence of Proust). I think of my writing as having to do with singing people: people singing of their lives, generally, arias. The song is the human experience that attracts me and moves me to write. interviewer: Are you concentrating now on short stories or novels? goyen: I have less an urge to write the short story, and more of a concern with writing The Book. It has nothing to do with anything but my own lack of a need for the very short form and a deep love for the book itself, for a longer piece of writing. interviewer: Some may say you achieved both in Ghost and Flesh—a book of short stories which, on rereading, seems a total book

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rather than a collection of pieces. Was it conceived as a book, or was it a true gathering? goyen: No, it was conceived as a book, it truly was. A sort of songcycle, really, that made up a single, unified work, a thematic unity like Schubert’s Die Winterreise (which influenced The House of Breath—an early Marian Anderson recording. Frieda Lawrence first made it known to me, that is, the poem on which the songs were based). Ghost and Flesh . . . you can see in those stories . . . wow . . . quite surreal, and I loved those, and when that was finished and published, I kind of went off the beam. I think the book made me quite mad; writing it, the obsession of that book; but, on the other hand, The House of Breath did not. And that’s an obsessed book, you see. It’s hard to say these things but something always pulled me through. Of course my critics might say, he should have gone mad. interviewer: What sort of madness was it? goyen: While I wasn’t that sane, I knew that madness—that’s the word I use but I don’t know if it’s quite right—that dangerous thing . . . that terror, and I knew that. I guess I knew when to let it alone. It comes in a loss of reality. If we say madness that sounds funny. But let’s say an other-worldness. It has to do with identity. I go through phases of not knowing my own history. It’s amnesiac almost. I’ve known this all my life; as a child I’ve known that. The loss of the sense of the world around me, of the reality. It means that I just have to isolate myself and then I’m okay. Also, I found a very strong wife. So my choices must have been blessed. God knows, when I brought her home to Texas, people gathered to meet her and congratulate us and one woman came over to me who had known me all my life and said, “My God, I can’t tell you how relieved we all are. We thought you were going to bring home some poetess!” interviewer: Is writing a work of nonfiction markedly different for you from writing fiction? Did you derive equal satisfaction from reconstructing the life of Jesus (in A Book of Jesus) as you do composing a novel? goyen: Oh, yes. The excitement was tremendous in writing that book. There was no difference in feeling between that and what I felt when I had written fiction. It was as though I were creating a character in this man. A marvelous experience. Astonishing. A very real man began to live with me, of flesh and blood. He did the same work on me that He did on the people of the New Testament that He walked among: He

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won me over, enchanted and captured me, finally possessed me. I went rather crazy with the love from Him that I felt. I carried a little New Testament around with me in my pocket and would flip it open and read what He said, at cocktail parties or at dinner tables. A surprising reaction from my listeners generally followed: they were struck by the simplicity, wit and beauty of what the man said to others, particularly to the wonderful woman at the well. interviewer: How do you react to the charges of being a regional writer? goyen: For me, environment is all. Place—as I was saying about my students—is absolutely essential. I know the vogue for the non-place, the placeless place, à la Beckett, is very much an influence on writing these days. It has been said that places don’t exist anymore. That everything looks alike. There is the same Howard Johnson on your turnpike in Kansas as there is in Miami and in the state of Washington. And the same kind of architecture dominates the new office buildings and the skyscraper. What is a writer to do? Free the “reality” of his environment? To lament loss of place, to search for it in memory? Because within place is culture, style. We speak of a lost way of life. In many of my books and stories, I’ve felt the need to re-create, to restore lost ways, lost places, lost styles of living. interviewer: Isn’t this what Marietta did in In a Farther Country? And what was expected of Mr. De Persia, in Come, the Restorer? goyen: Exactly. So to this extent, then, I am a regional writer: In that my writing begins by being of a region, of a real place. It begins with real people talking like people from that place, and looking like them. Very often regional reality ends there and these people become other people, and this place becomes another place. The tiny town of Charity, in The House of Breath, is really Trinity, Texas, truly, accurately described. Once described, however, it ceases to be Charity or Trinity and becomes . . . well, London or Rome. The pasture in front of the house in Charity where a cow named Roma grazed becomes the Elysian Fields, and Orpheus and Eurydice flee across it. The house itself becomes a kind of Parthenon, with friezes of ancient kin. I think there are moments when I exceed myself as a human being, and become Ulysses, perhaps, or Zeus. It is the point of time at which the human exceeds himself, is transformed beyond himself, that I most care about writing about. This is the lyrical, the apocalyptic, the visionary, the fantastic, the symbolic, the metaphorical, the transfiguratory, transfigurational—all those terms which have been applied to my work.

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Now, by “exceeding myself as a human being” I mean in life—epiphany moments in life—not in writing. I mean those moments when human beings experience an epiphany, a transfiguration (that’s the word), are the moments that most excite me. I’ve seen it in supreme artists who sang or danced or acted, in people who’ve told me they loved me, in those whose souls have suddenly been reborn before my eyes. These are moments and people I most care about writing about, no matter how small the moment, how humble the person. “I seen the little lamp,” the transfigured child said at the end of the Katherine Mansfield story. interviewer: Are your closest friends writers? Is talking to other writers helpful or harmful to your work? goyen: My closest friends are theatre people. Painters were once closest to me. For some years I lived among painters. But that changed. Now it’s either performers or directors. I love theatre people, they give me a great deal. I don’t particularly like writers, and I am not prone to talk about writing. Since they’re solitary workers, writers tend to act out in public, I believe. They seem to carry more hostility, maybe because they are responsible to more people (their characters), to a whole world—like God—than painters or actors. Maybe it’s because writers are caught in the English language, which sometimes seems like a sticky web you can’t pull your antennae out of, like insects I’ve watched in webs, and are, in public and when they’re with other people, still thrashing about in an invisible web. It is enraging to work in words, sometimes; no wonder writers are often nervous and crazy: paint seems to be a more benevolent, a more soothing and serene-making medium. Musicians always want to play for you, which is wonderful and wordless; painters seem to want to talk only about sex or point out to you the hidden genital configurations in their canvas! Since the writer is truly a seminal person (he spits out his own web, as Yeats said, and then, as I just said, gets caught in it), the truly creative writer, I mean, he’s full of the ear and the pride that a maker of new things feels. So it’s seemed to me. interviewer: After one of your books is done, do you divorce yourself from the characters, or do you seem somehow to maintain a contact with them? goyen: Oh, the characters in my first novel haunt me to this day! Actually haunt me. And characters like Oil King (from Come, the Restorer)—who’s been in my life a long, long time. I’ve lived with him and loved him and written about him for many, many years. They stay with me, yes indeed they do. They stay. They not only enter my life but I begin to see them in life, here, there. I see Marietta McGee quite

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frequently, in several cities. I had not dreamt she was down in Ensenada, Mexico, until recently when I was there. They seem absolutely to exist in life, when I’ve seen some of them transferred to the stage: like Oil King in The Diamond Rattler—it’s as though they read for the part and got it—read for their own role. And Swimma Starnes crops up a lot. interviewer: How much of a plan do you have before you begin a novel or a play? goyen: I plan quite a bit. But I’m not too aware of it. That is, I’ve not got it all down, but I’ve got a good deal of it thought through or felt through, before I begin writing. So that the whole world of it is very much alive and urgent for me. I’m surrounded by it—almost like a saturating scent. I feel it like a heat. The world that I’m going to write has already been created, somehow, in physical sensation before I go about writing it, shaping it, organizing it. My writing begins physically, in flesh ways. The writing process, for me, is the business of taking it from the flesh state into the spiritual, the letter, the Word. interviewer: Do you see, from The House of Breath to your latest novel, a progression? Do you see any new directions forthcoming? goyen: There is a progression. I’m much freer. And I see a liberation of certain obsessive concerns in my work, a liberation towards joy! I feel that I’m much freer to talk about certain aspects of human relationships than I once was. . . . What was the other question? interviewer: Do you see any new directions in your subjects or forms? goyen: That’s very hard to say. I’d find that only as I write on. I do want very much to write a heavily plotted novel, a melodramatic novel. interviewer: Finally, a last question: Why do you write? goyen: And the easiest to answer! I can’t imagine not writing. Writing simply is a way of life for me. The older I get, the more a way of life it is. At the beginning, it was totally a way of life excluding everything else. Now it’s gathered to it marriage and children and other responsibilities. But still, it is simply a way of life before all other ways, a way to observe the world and to move through life, among human beings, and to record it all above all and to shape it, to give it sense, and to express something of myself in it. Writing is something I cannot imagine living without, nor scarcely would want to. Not to live daily as a writing person is inconceivable to me.

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II. Masques (1982)

[This interview—conducted in English, edited, translated into French, and introduced by Jean-Michel Quiblier—was published in a French magazine on the occasion of the appearance of a new edition of the French translation of Goyen’s first novel, The House of Breath; the French text of the introduction and the published translation have been retranslated from French back into English by Emma Stapely and Reginald Gibbons. The custom of literary interviews (such as the TriQuarterly and Paris Review interviews with Goyen included in this volume) allows writers to go back over the edited text to clarify and amplify their responses. In this French interview, edited down from a lengthy recorded conversation, it seems clear from internal evidence that Goyen approved the final text in French, a fact that introduces interesting problems when the interview is to be published for the first time in English, since the published French version represents a distillation, presumably corrected and edited by Goyen, of the raw interview. The original interview cannot be re-edited, entirely in English, to match the published French version. But this retranslation into English has been corrected in a few places to restore Goyen’s original recorded wording either for the sake of keeping a characteristic Goyenesque locution or to correct a mistaken emphasis in the French version of what Goyen actually said in English. Checking the retranslation was done by comparing it with the original audio tape, which was discovered by Goyen’s French translator Patrice Repusseau in 2004.]

Born in 1918 in Trinity (Texas), William Goyen, like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Truman Capote, belongs to the “southern” school. Like them, he is profoundly attached to his roots and to the “Deep South.” Like them, he draws his inspiration from there. But it would be an insulting simplification of his enterprise to see him as a regional writer, because his tales—his novels and short stories—attain, in their intimate quality, their metaphorical and symbolic power, summits to which his contemporaries barely adventured.

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All of Goyen’s characters resemble one another. They suffer from a similar affliction of having discovered in themselves, since the earliest moments of life, a failing, a wound, a difference, and as a result of this discovery they flee toward cities in order to forget and to avoid having to encounter anything other than a hallucinated world where solitude reigns supreme and the phantoms of their childhood never cease to pursue them. Unlike those of many American writers, though, Goyen’s heroes do not seek to avoid confronting their memories but rather, conscious of the richness of interiority, they try to reconstitute the past by plunging into their abysses in order to retrieve their deepest identity. Under the sign of nostalgia, Goyen’s work, marked by lyricism and poetry, bathes in the crepuscular glimmerings of memory. By a kind of alchemy peculiar to his writing, Goyen reunites the conscious and the unconscious in a place where desire, sensuality, and eroticism take the form of spirituality. The House of Breath, highly praised on its appearance by spirits as different as Bachelard, Anaïs Nin, and Albert Camus, portrays at one and the same time the long journey back to childhood, to the “home” [maison natale], the inner, purifying quest for origins, and the search for an identity. The House of Breath is a long prose-poem, melancholy and magnificent. It is also a masterpiece that one rejoices to see in print [in French] once more. —jean-michel quiblier [Retranslation into English of the French translation of the taped interview, which had been conducted in English, with restorations of some wording in English:] interviewer: You wrote The House of Breath during World War II. What was your spiritual state at that time? goyen: I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean and I thought I was going to die, that I would not escape alive. Writing was a way of saying good-bye, farewell, and thank you to those whom I had known and loved. It was a sort of commemoration. And although I survived the war, I continued to say good-bye to them. interviewer: Can one consider The House of Breath a largely autobiographical novel?

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Goyen at a book signing of The House Of Breath at Brown Book Shop, Houston, September 1950

goyen: In fact, I am each of the characters, both men and women. A few of them are invented. How could I have hated or condemned any of them? There is but one voice in this book. It is a monologue, a single voice. You can imagine how happy I was when I later discovered Beckett. interviewer: How was the book received in the United States? goyen: In New York the reviews were good. In Texas, too, but some were more bitter. In the Dallas Morning News, they said that the book was decadent, that I was someone decadent, perverse, and depraved. What’s more, my parents read this review; someone in the family sent it to them. A journalist in the Saturday Review wrote that The House of Breath was a narcissistic book, just as perverse as those of Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. In his article, he spoke of us as three decadents, because, according to him, we described Southerners as being perverted, neurotic, and insane. In the Midwest and Ohio, the reviews were very bad. What was considered most shocking was the relationship between Boy, the narrator, and his Uncle Christy, and also the character of Folner (Follie),

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who wore makeup and wigs. How could anyone not see that this character is written with love, that he is a human being so misunderstood by others that he eventually kills himself ? They also said that the book was morbid. I suppose that in some places, people think the same thing today, since, over there, not much has changed. interviewer: At what age did you truly begin to write? goyen: I was very young, sixteen at the most. At eighteen, I had already written two of the short stories that can be found in my next-to-last book. Actually, at the beginning I wanted to write music, but my parents very much discouraged me, especially my poor father, who saw it as something deplorable for a boy to study music. Despite their disapproval, I applied myself to writing in order to liberate myself. It was the only way in which I could express myself. I also applied myself to reading a lot and to discovering literature—Thomas Wolfe and Saroyan, among others. I think that it’s the same for all artists and that in one way or another it is necessary for them to find a means of liberating themselves. interviewer: And you definitively abandoned music? goyen: My parents were entirely against the idea that I should study music. They did not think it was anything serious. They made me feel guilty, uncomfortable, ill at ease, of little worth. I would wait until they left home, then I’d close the curtains and play the piano, following my imagination. During this time, in the same way, I wrote a ballet and began an opera, and I have composed a number of songs for my plays that were later performed. I did not study music at the conservatory except for a few months in my first year at the university. At seventeen, I was capable of playing some Mozart, and at the end of the school year—with kids of fourteen, fifteen, twelve!—I had to give a little recital, but when it was my turn I was not able to move my fingers, and I ran away. And since then, there has always been a piano in my home, but I don’t really play. Happily, I write. It’s a pity that I didn’t continue with music. Parental authority over children can be terrible sometimes! interviewer: Since you were a child, have you felt somehow different from other people? goyen: Completely. I had a younger brother and sister. I was close enough to my family, but also very alone. I didn’t understand anything about the pursuits and interests of children my own age. What they did didn’t appeal to me. I was alone and remained alone, with one wish: to leave. I would remain sitting in a corner for hours. This would greatly annoy my friends. It was always like this. Next, I

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set myself to using anything that allowed me some form of escape (sex, pills, alcohol, etc.). And now, regardless of where I find myself (at a concert, a restaurant . . .), I always sit where it will be possible for me to leave, because in my head, it is possible that I’ll be inclined to do just that. It may be a very deep form of suicide to constantly prove one’s need to leave. If I have to stay somewhere—and in life, one is frequently constrained—I find a way to remain calm and immobile. I have since started to learn a little about being present, about living in the moment. It is a marvelous thing, and I am only beginning to discover it . . . interviewer: Does writing frighten you? goyen: It was very painful but at the same time it was a very great joy. If it had been dreadful pain I might not have continued. For some writers, writing is so painful that they prefer to smoke opium rather than to create. . . . For me, really, it has been pleasant. Moreover, writing has always been something physical, sexual—not at all erotic, but sexual. For me, writing is something “seminal.” It’s not intellectual. interviewer: When did you truly leave your family? goyen: In fact, I had already left them by the time I actually left. But leaving took some time. I was “visible” but no longer truly there. I had left a ghost [laughs] . . . That was very painful because I had to act as though I really and truly were there. I didn’t leave until the war began. I knew I needed to leave but I felt incapable of doing it. I needed to be forced to leave. So I left, and in fact never returned. Later, I returned to my family, but it was only to get some personal things . . . shoes, books . . . [laughs]. We have always been very closely tied to, and dependent upon, one another. I felt responsible for them. I thought that if I left, they would die. In this regard, Beckett, whom I like very much, said that “the artist who risks his life is from nowhere and has no brother.” interviewer: Once you left, did you begin to meet people who interested you? goyen: Going to war allowed me to discover the world, so to speak. The war freed me and I began to meet people, and those whom I met I immediately fell in love with—I immediately was captured, although there’s nothing new in that. interviewer: Reading your work, one gets the feeling that the majority of your characters are dreaming and waiting for something. . . . goyen: Yes, that’s true. They wait for a door to open, for something that will free them, calm them, comfort them. This signifies that there is a problem somewhere, some anxiety and suffering.

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interviewer: You knew Carson McCullers very well. . . . goyen: I met her in New York because after the publication of The House of Breath, that’s where I lived. It was around then that I met the small number of American writers whom I knew. Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote and I had the same editor. He was a sort of father for us. He was very interested in new talents and did everything in order to keep them together. From time to time, I met with Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. As for Carson, we were very close friends until her death . . . When she came to New York, she stayed with me . . . She was always sick and more or less paralyzed, using her strength a little more each day. She was very intelligent, delicate and frail, charming and funny, drank a lot, always taking all sorts of pills. There was also the problem of her being a dangerous woman friend because she was a gossip. Carson was very “camp” and attracted that sort of person as well . . . [laughs]. Her husband was a seductive man, strange and just as ill. He had to feed her like a baby because of her paralyzed hands. And sometimes, when he spilled some food, she would become furious . . . I was more interested in what she was than in what she wrote. Her writings are a sort of fairy-tale, a strange and marvelous world. Carson McCullers truly invented a literary genre. Truman Capote, in the beginning, wrote some similar things . . . Who knows what she would have written if she were still here . . . She had a lot of talent and I loved her very much. interviewer: You just finished a new book called Arcadio. What’s it about? goyen: It’s my first book of some length for a long while—because there have been quite a few short stories in the meantime. Initially, it was a 55-page short story and it ended up becoming a 170-page novel. Arcadio is a peculiar “voice.” He is a Mexican from Texas—his mother is Mexican, born in Mexico—I grew up with people like her—and his father is Texan—originally from a small town like mine. His [Arcadio’s] dilemma stems from the fact that he is a mixture, a combination, two halves of a whole. Already, in In a Farther Country, there was a woman, Marietta McGee-Chavez, who was one-half Irish and one-half Mexican, her dilemma that of being mestiza. This tragic mixture has always fascinated and concerned me. It’s a little like Hamlet, in that one part of him could act and not the other. Arcadio came to me as a Mexican “voice.” He “told me” his story and at one moment this “voice” became quite mad, which frightened me. I don’t know how his sexuality came to me—nonetheless, Arcadio proved to be a hermaphrodite: the sexual manifestation of an emo-

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tional and spiritual dilemma. Very early he learned that the nature of his sexuality would be the problem of his entire life. That interested me. He understood very quickly that there would be no solution for this sexual conflict. He always carries with him a photo in which he is a dazzling character who is at once more than a man and more than a woman. Arcadio can make love to a woman, a man, or himself. He is a “totality” in and of himself. He can do it with anybody. Despite this, Arcadio searches for his family—all of his book is a search. His mother disappeared and his father had sex with him when he found out what Arcadio truly was. After having seduced him, his father places him in a brothel, where he becomes a symbol of sensuality. Arcadio is thus sold to men and women, and he participates in orgies. He is a fantastically sensual person. And then one day, he discovers that because of this he is going to die. At the end he returns to his own town and to God. . . . interviewer: What do you think of bisexuality? goyen: I think that the very nature of life is bisexual. It is a question of affection and tenderness. When tenderness exists between two human beings, love is neither masculine nor feminine. It seems to me that if true tenderness exists, then everything is possible between two people, and their gender matters very little. And, when one can live following this sensuality, this is a greater gesture than to claim “bisexuality” just because one has sexual encounters with a woman one day and a man the next. It is absurd not to want to believe and understand that between two members of the same sex an intimate relationship is possible. The practice of this sentiment, of course, is altogether another thing . . . I have loved men and women and I believe that the experiences I’ve had with others are based upon a profound affection that is absolutely, profoundly, sexual but not limited by the notion of heterosexuality, fidelity, etc. I believe that the saints knew all of this. Certain ones among them—Saint Francis, for example—have a sense of sexuality. Moreover, sexuality is not what we’ve been told for a long time. Today we know that love and sexuality can take the most diverse forms. Much remains to be discovered regarding the matter. Art may be able to contribute. Some Picasso portraits, for example, are androgynous: the representation of a complete person, at once “man” and “woman.” This is what I wanted to express with Arcadio; but beyond that, finally, there is also something spiritual.

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III. TriQuarterly (1983)

[This interview was conducted by Reginald Gibbons late in 1982 and first published in TriQuarterly magazine. The original introduction is excerpted below.]

This interview was taped in Los Angeles, the first three days of November 1982. The transcript cannot show the range of tones of voice that animated, punctuated, and emphasized Goyen’s statements. Notably absent from the printed version is his laughter. Unexpectedly, at moments of seriousness or in pondering somber subjects, Goyen would heartily, delightedly, laugh, as if with wonder, with an unselfconscious and entirely becoming sense of amazement at the complexity and mysteriousness of the things he was talking about. Perhaps this is partly what Flannery O’Connor characterized as a kind of daze that compels the writer to look longer and more fixedly at things others merely glance at. “The longer you look at an object, the more of the world you see in it,” she said. But beyond that, Goyen’s wonder seemed to me of the deep sort that Plato calls the source of philosophy and of poetry—of theogony and of myth. Given Goyen’s recent work, no other attitude could be more appropriate, for both his language and his material seem now to be aimed at shaping stories in which the mysterious course of human action, and of human speech, reveals the presence of compelling outer powers—whether it is the command of the “black-winged figure” over others in “Tongues of Men and of Angels,” or the simple awareness that, as a storyteller speaks, another figure speaks through him. Stevens’ aphorism (from his “Adagia”) comes to mind in connection with Goyen’s work: “When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else.” In the interview, Goyen observes that despite his reputation as a Texas writer, it is not a given historical or regional speech that he seeks to reproduce in his work, however accurately he has wished to

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hear it when immersed in it. Instead, he says he has sought to create a language that will itself serve as the place of his fiction—a rather different and more complex impulse. Thus his preoccupation with style, and his insistence, in his own terms, on voice over speech.

What starts you writing? It starts with trouble. You don’t think it starts with peace, do you? interviewer: A passage from “Nests in a Stone Image” could serve as epigraph for all your work: He had come here out of some loss and bereavement and to sit and have back again, as it wanted to come back to him, with whatever face or feature, shape or name, what he had lost; to turn back into what had happened and let it speak to him and, out of his listening, make it all over again, this time, at least, to control it and keep it from chaos again, to give it its meaning that it waited for . . . This was what claimed him.

goyen: I found a kind of statement for myself there, didn’t I?— through real deep suffering. It’s really meditation. It’s kind of a salvation—a lot of those pieces are really my little salvation pieces: they represent my being rescued again from deep suffering. interviewer: Rescued by what? goyen: I felt that I was rescuing myself. I got a sense of myself, in a flash. It was a spiritual experience, of course. And with that clarification, I was able to move on out of what might have destroyed me. I don’t know that I have ever felt that I have been lifted by a higher power—a god or anything. By divinity. It must have been art, then—a sense of one’s self suddenly frees him, at least for that time, and one is able then to go on. interviewer: The story is quite free of what readers normally expect from a story— goyen: God bless them! interviewer:—it doesn’t give them a plot or character development. goyen: But I see that it was a form I found for myself, and used over and over again, in a whole body of work, without knowing that I was using it. I didn’t put it up on the wall and say, “This is the form I will

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A late photo

now follow.” But it was deep pain, a feeling of utter isolation and removal from the community of human beings—that kind of lostness. And then, through an acuteness of feeling and an awareness of things around me, coming back to life, through life around me—in this case— in the story you quoted from, “Nests in a Stone Image”—people in the rooms around the speaker in the story. In his misery and isolation he was surrounded by human beings, all singing and making love and talking, and life was in those rooms around him, and then rising. It was always the rising action, that I felt, over and over again.

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interviewer: That’s what you mean by the sense of form? goyen: Coming up, yes, from the bottom, rising to the top and then being freed of that pain and being identified, is surely what it was, wasn’t it? The form was new each time. But two things—it’s about love, and total giving in love till there was nothing left, total faith in life and love; and then feeling destroyed and abandoned, and then finding again . . . through life going on. Despite my misery, life was just going on! Those were such great revelations, do you know that? Suddenly you heard people next door saying, “Well, do we need eggs? Well, let’s see, we need eggs, bread . . . .” They’re making a list of groceries! And writing checks. That life was restored to me, so often not through great bursts of something, like St. Paul’s revelation, but through just the trivial, which I still hold to, the everyday trivial detail. That has always pulled me through. “Nests in a Stone Image” Katherine Anne [Porter] cared a great deal for, and I read it to her, I read her a lot of these stories, I was writing these stories when I was close to her, in the early fifties. She was not able to write at all, then; she was tremendously shut down. She wanted to hear, yet she was really—really she could have murdered me. She listened murderously. Once, when I finished reading a new story to her (it was “Children of Old Somebody,” which I’ve dedicated to her, for that reason), she stood and walked up and down the floor and cursed at me. She had all the feelings of a writer who couldn’t realize her own work. I read a lot of newly finished work to her in those days in New York in the early fifties. I had never done this before with anyone. But Katherine Anne was so close to my work then and so impoverished and cut off, I hoped I could help her to work again. She, indeed, invited me to share my work with her. interviewer: Do you remember having conversations with her about questions like this—the form that you felt was peculiar to your stories? goyen: We discussed that a great deal. I told her I felt submerged in life, given love and work and vision—and that suddenly I felt drowned. It was always almost a water image, and then it was only when I was able to rise from the depths that I could go on. So that each time these memory pieces were being written—“A People of Grass,” that whole group of stories set in Rome—it’s someone who has lost his way. The House of Breath is just the great mother-shape, isn’t it? It begins with someone who has lost his way. His own name, even. Through

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the detail of people in life around me, through their simply saying, you know, “We’ve got hemorrhoids, and the peas in the garden are all burnt up”—it was the simple detail of everyday struggle—this character was always brought back in these stories to some realization. And then there was an apostrophe to something at the end, often in italics. It embarrassed me later but now I think it’s O.K. A great utterance—he has lived to utterance; he can speak! As in The House of Breath, speech is found for what is not spoken. interviewer: Why did you feel embarrassed by that? goyen: I suppose I felt—you know, we go through periods of restraint. And now I’m very pleased that I got the pure feeling down on paper, but there was a time when I felt (probably in the sixties—those stories were written in the fifties) that I wanted to be more restrained. Burst at deeper depths. Not detonate right on the ground! interviewer: You often mention “listening” in “Nests in a Stone Image,” and I gather you listen when you work. But you told me you didn’t entirely trust what Arcadio was saying, in your new novel. goyen: I am responsible as the listener—the responsibility lies with the listener, the re-teller, not the teller, and my responsibility is to know when I’m hearing madness or to know how to give on what I’ve heard, because what I’m talking about is the continuity of listening, telling, listening. The listener needs a listener, then, when he now begins to tell the tale on. This is what everything I’ve ever written seems to be about. I see that now, yet if I sat down and thought that, when I wrote, I’d fall—like the centipede trying to count his own legs to see which moves when—over into the ditch. So I’m telling again. “Twice-told tales,” Hawthorne called them. interviewer: The telling of the story, not its substance, is the meaning, then. goyen: It has a spiritual significance. Someone wrote that about my work—that the liberating, therefore spiritual, significance of storytelling was in the very telling itself, a kind of a prayer or meditation or apotheosis of feeling, a dynamic spiritual action. So: the need to tell, on the part of a lot of characters I have written about, like Raymon Emmons [“Ghost and Flesh”]. But in some writers what one gets is diction more than voice. That is, it’s thick speech, rather than voice. There’s a great difference between speech and voice. “Correcting” the speech of my characters, as some copy editors wish to do, affects the voice. That’s the pitfall of some writers, some of the Southern writers, who get hung up on diction and

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speech. Synge was in danger of that, too. There is a quality of voice that is, I guess, undefinable. I feel I know what that is, and I have to wait for it, and that determines my work: voice. I can’t fake it, and I can’t find it if it’s not there. I have to hear it. This I know for myself. Sometimes the voice, the same voice, tells me a bunch of stories. People in my life told me stories, and I sang. They had the speech, and I got the voice. And I place the burden for that difference on angels, good and bad. Some people seem to have a good angel or a bad one (can there be bad angels?), and yet some have none at all. interviewer: Still, you have to work at the art—the angel’s not going to do the work for you, is it? goyen: But it can put a tongue in my mouth for a little while [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”]. That’s what happened to me. When I first rode a bicycle, I couldn’t ride it without my father pushing me, holding me there, and I said, “But what am I going to do? Don’t let loose! Don’t let loose!” (We had just a little hill.) He said, “Son, I wouldn’t let you aloose—don’t you worry.” And one day, he had, and I was going right along! And I looked back, and he wasn’t there, and I was doing it! From then on I rode the bicycle. Now, when I’m really working, really writing, I have the feeling it’s coming from outside of me, through me. An absolute submission, absolute surrender. It’s being had, being possessed. I’m being used. interviewer: Are you very curious to define that “it” that is using you? goyen: No. I recognize it, and know when it’s not there. It’s like being in love, or being mad—all those radical emotions. interviewer: Are you reluctant to talk about it? goyen: There’s something in me that shuts it off. interviewer: Is it like that moment when Dante describes Virgil and other ancient poets in Limbo speaking of poetry, and Dante won’t reveal what they said? goyen: I’m not able to talk about it. St. Paul speaks of the inexpressible, what you don’t repeat. There are some revelations I have, he said, that there are no words for, and why should I try? There is a reticence. interviewer: In an interview with William Peden, you said that “the storyteller is a blessed force in telling his story to a listener; a redemptive process occurs, and it’s therefore a spiritual situation, and one cannot avoid that.” What do you mean, “a spiritual situation”? goyen: It has to do first of all with distinguishing simply between spiritual and material. It’s not, “How much am I going to get for it?”

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And if it doesn’t have to do with tangible rewards, then it has to do with intangible ones, with my spirit, with my own yearning toward something higher than I, something by definition divine, some outer higher power working through me, that I have no power over or at least did not create. I remember Marian Anderson was my first experience with what truly was a spiritual moment. Suddenly when she sang she was purely an instrument for the spirit, pure spirit. Through her mouth, here was this blessed moment; the light and the fire were on her, way beyond her training or the song itself. I was sixteen; I identified thoroughly, purely, with her. “That’s where I belong, I come from that,” I said. “That’s why I feel so alone, because I belong to whatever that was.” interviewer: You wrote some poems once. What is the difference between the fictional and poetic impulses, to your mind? goyen: The poems aren’t very good—they’re not poems. I have no interest in the form of poetry, in the lines. I really care about fiction and style and speech and form, and that seems to be wholly the way I wish to work. I’m refining that more and more, and I feel great control, most of the time, when I’m really down on it. I feel the weight of all those lines I’ve written. I know a lot more about that instrument. But the impulse is to tell on, to reveal, and to be absolutely un-self-censoring. Not to hold back because I feel it might be unseemly or offensive or whatever. I never did feel censored. But I spent some time wrestling to make a decision again, not to be censored. I don’t any more. I trust the impulse now, or the vision of it. I may think I’m mad for a moment—so I wait. I do all the things an artist does; I wait. When revising I do whatever I can for the form of it, the art of it, the clarity of it. I have the sweep of the story from the beginning, and the imagery of it develops, astonishingly, almost like a bone structure. Arcadio is another kind of aria, though. interviewer: Two sorts of stories in your work seem distinguished from each other by your presence in them, as narrator. Stories like “Old Wildwood” seem almost memoir, and very unlike “The White Rooster.” goyen: But I think the stories like “Nests in a Stone Image” are delivered beyond that. I was freed, myself, as the experiencer of things (as in “Old Wildwood”) to see the revelation of stone and wood and the eternal city and a little town fading away. interviewer: You don’t seem to feel that a story needs to be cut loose from the writer, needs to be consciously taken away from autobiographical sources?

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goyen: Katherine Anne [Porter] kept feeling that, she kept feeling that it had to be cut away finally, all strings cut away from the bearer of it, as if it were a bunch of balloons. interviewer: Did she think it was terribly unsophisticated otherwise? goyen: She did, yet she saw that her salvation was in not cutting herself free. And this is why she sat down and committed a fairly unseemly act in writing a novel called Ship of Fools. She cut some strings loose, and others not. Her prejudices and her bigotries were quite cut away; she was caught—holding a lot of things aloft, maybe balloons. The hand that is holding those strings is absolutely essential to the aloft-ness of the story. She says in the end, cut them all free, and the hand is gone that held them. interviewer: Didn’t Eliot and Pound, whom you count as useful influences on you, cut those things away and conceal the hand? goyen: They held some strings more than we know. Who did cut away all of them? I was constantly told that that was naughty, to hold on that way, if my hand was visible. That was not desirable, for some reason. And I kept saying—Well, to hell with you, was about all I said, but not without worrying, “How will I get my hand free? How will I erase my own clutching hand?” Even in stories like “The White Rooster” I didn’t strive to remove myself, and the body of my work is made up of both kinds of stories. Now you see the hand, and now you don’t. interviewer: In “Had I a Hundred Mouths” you reveal the hand at the beginning, in the presence of the two nephews, one of whom will tell this story again, later. But then Ben delivers the tale, and that listening presence, that nephew, who is the hand holding the strings, disappears, until the end, when with a startling effect the nephew’s voice speaks, and there’s the hand again. goyen: That happens often in my stories—as in “The Faces of Blood Kindred.” interviewer: So if the invisible hand is the modern, or the sophisticated, then to hell with that? goyen: Well, yes! All I ask is that living voice. interviewer: What’s the connection between this sense of the visible hand and what you call listening? goyen: Finally, and foremost, we’re speaking of the person, the personal. What clears the way for me is listening, finding the listener. In terms of craft, too. Often I begin by telling what I know, what I’m feeling, in terms of myself, but soon I know that that can’t go very far, to

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Goyen’s apartment in Rome

my own satisfaction, that I’m caught in a web that is self-begetting. And that doesn’t interest me. I have to be freed to let somebody tell me what I’m telling, and I know the voices, very often. It’s often a woman’s voice talking to me. It’s someone who is trying to make it clear to me—you see, I’m not clear about what I’m telling: somebody else has to make it clear for me. I get all mixed up. And somebody keeps editing me, and saying, “That’s not right, listen to me, what I’m trying to tell you is. . . .” This helps me tell the story. I have to have help! It also removes me another step. I keep trying to step out of it, as the speaker—I don’t want it to be my memoir, my reminiscence, it’s much more than that, it’s Rome, not Charity, Texas, finally. It’s ancient ancient fossils in stone instead of a clapboard house [“Old Wildwood”]. interviewer: What’s your sense of the occasion of a story? What starts you writing? goyen: It starts with trouble. You don’t think it starts with peace, do you? It’s an occasion that brings a whole cluster of occasions together. interviewer: You don’t worry about the connections between them? goyen: No. The bridges start forming. That’s the fun sometimes, and the slavery too, in making the bridges. They are always implied, because they come of their own volition, I feel.

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Trusting the connection is the process of work. Everything I’ve written has been generated that way. I once spoke of medallions [Paris Review interview, above]: when my mother made a quilt, she made what she called medallions first, a whole bunch of separate pieces. They don’t do the whole quilt at once! When these were all together—till then, you don’t see the connections, but it makes a whole. interviewer: I think of your work as domestic in a similar sense. goyen: I understand. One of those stories I saw as a kite—and we used to make our own kites. The idea of buying a kite! Who bought a kite? We made it out of stuff at home. String, newspaper—and it flew, it flew. But it was made domestically. That’s what you call domestic invention. The cruder the better, sometimes. I think of writing as that very often. I’m most comfortable with things that happen at home.

Without art . . . would I just have been a kind of evangelist? goyen: Style is, or has been, for me, the spiritual experience of my material. interviewer: How do you mean, “spiritual”? goyen: Well, people say craft, and I’m talking on the other side of craft. Of course, I know my craft, I know what I will let go and what I won’t, and I know when it’s not the best. More and more I know about the control of words. But I’m talking about the spiritual experience of Arthur Bond [“Arthur Bond”]—to have experienced those characters and the world they have created around them through their own infirmities, or . . . [their] life in the world, has become a spiritual revelation of the human being that I would not have got by studying the work of other writers. interviewer: What’s the bridge between that experience and the words that make up a story? goyen: The bridge is the transformation. An artist transforms. He can’t just stay where life is as he finds it, not at just the level of life. Or so it is for me: the art of it becomes the transformation that must occur of that spiritual experience into the controlled craft so that the vision is tied down, is anchored everywhere, by craft. “Arthur Bond” had to be anchored in all kinds of detail, and mostly painterly detail—there was some yellow (the color came to me), the worm with the head of a doll: it all became very pictorial for me. But the man was caught in a spiritual wrestling. This was what I experienced first, his wrestling. “It is not his

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fall you see, but this man’s wrestling,” Shakespeare said about one of the kings. interviewer: The word “spiritual” then doesn’t mean “religious”? goyen: Not at all. It has to do with a certain program of action. By that I mean I don’t come into this experience to get my eyebrows longer, or my muscles stronger, or my belly flatter. So it is therefore not physical. O.K.? That’s as clear as I can make it. Something else is involved beyond the corporeal. Shall we all start there? I can’t define it any more than that. That’s what I mean by my spirit. It is not my body. So let’s go away from whatever we think of as physical and try to get into an area that is non-corporeal. Something happens to me which changes my attitude toward . . . you. What is that? It’s not that you’ve given me a lot of money, or bought me a house, or given me a reward. What changed my attitude toward you? Something, I say, came from outside me. And I see as I say this that I tend to look up, because we’ve been told that heaven is above us, though it may not be at all, it may be quite lateral, I don’t know. But it has come from beyond me somewhere, it is not anything I have learned, been taught, or even done. So that the spirit is involved in this change of feeling between me and you. Style, then, is directly related to that experience. So that style is a spiritual manifestation of the experience of the story, for me. My stories are spiritual. And yet there are an awful lot of genitalia in them. interviewer: Why is that? goyen: That’s spiritual, too, I guess. “Ghost and Flesh,” I wrote— one’s expressed right through the other, for me. interviewer: Is there some writing that, you feel, doesn’t have this spiritual element? goyen: I don’t feel it’s in most contemporary writers that I try to read. I feel that they really are too busy with repeating themselves, and repeating their own success (not necessarily material). interviewer: But despite your artistic intransigence on this point, I know that as a person you have been extremely generous and helpful to many writers who haven’t displayed much of the spiritual in this sense, at all, haven’t reached that level of art. goyen: I’ve tried to lead them toward it, I guess. That’s all I can give them. An opening out. That’s obviously why they have come to me. I’m not proselytizing and I’m not looking for disciples. I think that’s my freedom as a teacher—I don’t think people should write like

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me. I couldn’t, by my nature, stay very long in a classroom, teaching. I’ve started out thinking, this is a class about craft, and that’s what we’ll be about. But halfway through it I soared into this other thing, we’re off into another realm. I can’t talk about writing very long without talking about seeing that possible transformation. And this is what I talk about a lot. There has to be a change, some change has to pass over what happens to me, what I experience. It seems to come from a deeper reality than a knowledge of what literary device I can use to bring the change. So I like to talk about style that way, and maybe finally I will write about it a little. In the past few years I’ve had fresh experience with these things—style, image, and life-writing—in my work. Image brings a spiritual revelation of the very life-material itself. interviewer: Do you mean both the small-scale image, the occasional thing— goyen: No I mean the larger . . . I don’t say Symbol because I mean a concrete image, and it is concrete. It comes abstractly to me, but then my problem is to transform it into the concrete. The drowned (in sand) diving figure in “Bridge of Music, River of Sand” is an example. I was haunted by that image, to begin with. interviewer: “Had I a Hundred Mouths” seems to demonstrate something of what you mean by style as a spiritual transformation of the experience or the material. But the second part [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”] is very different, a flamboyant explosion and fragmentation of stories, so many different ones. How do you come to shape a piece like that? goyen: It’s odd that I chose to keep each little tombstone—is that what they are? That’s what appears to be the peculiar form of the story, that it’s in lives, in the shape of about five lives. interviewer: As if you had set a little cemetery around Leander’s empty grave, since we don’t know where he is. Is he a kind of touchstone for the others, his tale—of being begotten by lust and condemning himself with it and being made to suffer for it—the origin of their stories? goyen: You could see that the teller was preoccupied, at the beginning, with how some people just put down everything they have and go away from it. And how some do come back and how, if they do, some force has totally changed them. He’s perplexed by that. That’s what he has to tell.

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interviewer: But it’s not Ben who’s telling the tale. goyen: No, that’s the point, the voice has changed, the voice is really the nephew. He’s in a search. When I first wrote The House of Breath, and it was published in that very form, in Accent, it was called “Four American Portraits As Elegy.” I wrote four lives: “Aunty,” “Christy,” “Swimma,” and “Folner.” In a Farther Country is written the same way. And so is Come, the Restorer. This too is style. interviewer: It seems less style than shape. goyen: It is shape. The design is the last thing that comes, for me, yet it is the first thing, as well as the last. But without it I’m lost. I get it early. But then I have to lose it, and the feeling is that I’ll never get it back. But finally it’s the design that I’m able to see, specifically, the architecture of it. The two parts of this new story were pretty much of a whole, and actually the second part is contained in the first few pages of the first. It is there. All these people seem to me to be out of some book of the accursed. They’re evil figures. They’re demonic figures. They frightened me to death, those three sisters! Or they’re just spiteful figures, or just nuisance figures. But the horror of the Klan, the blackness of that, the evil of them, just pervaded that whole land. And there always seemed to be henchmen of it, and it seemed to be a nightmare of mutiny and banditry. This is the world I was in. interviewer: At the end of “Had I a Hundred Mouths,” the narrating nephew sees his cousin in white sheet and hood, with others. Then that Klan nephew is tormented and tortured by the Klan in the second part of the work, for having spoken of their doings. goyen: Because he told their secrets. And what were they? That they had had children by black women, and that they had hanged black men for fucking white women. They had scapegoats. Those are horrors, horrors! A medieval world of terror. You know it was like that, to me; as a child I really felt that. I lived around all of that. There was a man preaching the salvation of my soul in a tent across the road from my house, but up on the hill beyond there the Ku Klux were burning their crosses and I saw them run tarred and feathered Negroes through the street. I saw them running like that, twice. Aflame. We stood and watched that. interviewer: What sort of reactions were apparent in those around you? goyen: They were terrified. Just as if you were a Jew and those were Nazis. Most of them simply lived in terror and hid. It was that kind of world as I saw it. And it could only have to do later with the brutality that I wrote about and also with salvation. It was also full of the erotic

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and the sensual and all that, for me, too. It was a maelstrom; it was a cauldron. interviewer: Does that world seem another universe now, as if you were writing about something you could present only emblematically, that sort of horror? goyen: How is it another universe? It seems very contemporary. If they murdered how many hundreds in those camps in Beirut . . . The terrorism around us . . . Hollywood is a town of absolute terroristic violence. It’s a cursed place. It’s full of a violence that comes out of a whole lot of things, but out of abuse, and persecution. . . . But the town, the environment, which for me was the river and the fields, and the wonderful things that bloomed, that are so much in my stories, was still stalked by some horror all around it. And the tales I heard—a whole lot of that is stated in “The Icebound Hothouse.” That story comes to be about that. And at the end there is an apotheosis, again, to say, “Why did I ever think that that house, that door, where I’d like to go home, that promised hospitality to the one who was arriving—why did I think that there were all sunny stories of joy and laughter?” The door is a dark door. Who chose that door? Who is the dark presence in that house? This is a culmination for me of the House of Breath metaphor, all these years later—this is what I came upon in finishing this story. So it is precious door again. [“Precious Door” is not only the title of a short story but also the title of the planned book of stories that Goyen completed but did not live to publish.] And now as I grow older and I go through these experiences—of almost dying, and changes of place, as from the East to the West, here—I keep getting closer to those images of terror and horror, as well as of the sublime pastoral garden. interviewer: So there’s a way to redeem that experience? goyen: Yes, and it’s art and the Holy Spirit, which are one for me, more and more. Without art, without the process of memory, which is the process of art, and the spiritual experience of it, which for me is style, what else would I do about it? Would I be an addict? Would I be dead from alcoholism and addictions of one kind or another? Would I just have been a kind of evangelist? interviewer: Are you saying holy spirit with small h and small s? goyen: Well, you know, I tend to capitalize where other people always strike things down to l.c. That means that I’m elevating it, somewhere, that’s what it means in my head, and I insist on keeping that, because it is somehow elevating it beyond the pedestrian lowercase.

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I think there’s no such thing as meaningless suffering, and this is spoken by someone who sees the terror of life. You know, there’s a recent book called The Horror of Life? Of course, I bought that faster than I’d buy something called Days in My Garden. And it’s the lives of five people who all view life as horrible. Their life-view was one of horror and fear. Baudelaire, Maupassant, Flaubert, Jules de Goncourt, Daudet. It turned out that they were all syphilitic and had a horrible disease. I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about the horror of life. But the horrible and the terrible element in life. Why would I endure life if I thought life was horrible? What good would I gain by enduring? Enduring is a hopeful action. interviewer: Flannery O’Connor said in answer to those who criticized the apparently despairing content or material of modern novels, that people without hope don’t write novels. goyen: Of course it’s an act of hope, and faith. Art is redeeming, and art is an affirmation. There’s no other way. The creation, the result, may not be very wonderful in some cases, or even very good, but I’m given joy and faith again through watching people’s impulse to make something, and their energy in making it, their willingness to make something. interviewer: You also seem to agree with Robert Lowell, however, that poetry is not a craft. Do you think that the craft-mentality of the writing schools is all right? Does craft drive out art? goyen: I don’t think that’s possible. Art won’t have it. There’s no way possible to substitute anything for art. I believe in the absolute hegemony of art, and craft can’t hurt it. interviewer: You have said that “elegance in fiction frightens me, and exquisiteness.” Even if you were speaking there of style, I suspect that “elegance” applies also to the impulse to wrap things up a little too neatly. You certainly leave a lot of things just flapping their wings in the air. That can seem to mean something in itself. Do you worry about being too symbolic? goyen: No. I don’t have any worry about being symbolic, I don’t think I’m symbolic. Arcadio has got two genitals— interviewer: But you take a figure like Leander, and you castrate him. He is de-sexed; he is half white, half black. He was a man and is no longer a man; Arcadio is half man and half woman: these things are emblematic. Not that I can put a ready meaning to them, but you seem to be interested in more than the shape of a man, you’re interested in the significance of the shape of a man.

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goyen: And yet, you know, how emblematic is a woman with one breast? I saw a great photograph yesterday in a bookstore, a huge lifesize photograph of a very beautiful woman with a wonderful breast, and on the other side was a tattoo of roses across no breast at all. She had had one removed, and yet the photographer was saying, “This is all right. This is beautiful. Don’t be horrified. She has one breast!” But it was a creature: it seemed almost like Leander. I said, “What a defamation of a beautiful thing!” I heard myself say that. “How defaming to take a breast off her! How they slaughter women in the name of cancer.” But I was with a woman, and she said, “But look how beautiful—it’s all right.” So I caught myself. It was kind of a wreath of roses tattooed. So that is very emblematic—that’s what I’m talking about: there’s a breast, I could suck that breast! That’s very exciting. On the other hand, there’s a kind of monster. interviewer: And a kind of a symbol? Not a real rose, but the picture of a rose? goyen: No, a woman, who is saying, “I am a woman, and I am beautiful still.” interviewer: Is it the physically grotesque that interests you? goyen: I really mean more of a spiritual deformity. Of course, dwarves, and humpbacks, and harelips, and so forth. That’s only the beginning for me. I can’t linger on that very long but it delivers me from the boring reality of realistic reporting. Since I am not writing Zola-istic realism, then everyday reality, the detail of it, is obviously not going to sustain itself for me, forever. I’m not Dreiser; I’m not interested in that at all. I’m aware that there is no everyday trivia in itself, that beneath it, or going on within it, there’s always some slight deformity of thought or action. It’s the hidden life I’m talking about. I’m not writing within the vogue for the bizarre. My insights are deeper and deeper into what we’re talking about, and the revelations that are coming to me make me more and more aware of an overwhelming imagery of the crude and the violent, but I mean more than that. I suppose it’s always been with me, and I can see it back in The House of Breath, my earliest work. It really has more to do with tenderness, rather than less. It’s not hardness of heart that is happening. I see more and more brutality, and the metaphor that exists in brutality. It may be that in my earlier work I gentled that, but I see it more now. It begins in the latter half of Arcadio, for me, and continues on through Leander’s story [“Had I a Hundred Mouths”] and the last I’ve written [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”].

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interviewer: Far from the sorrow and the wonder and gratefulness that surround the erotic in “Ghost and Flesh,” you’ve moved to consider it a dark power. goyen: True. interviewer: A dark power over men, not a mystery in their lives that is constructive or renewing. goyen: Yes. It was a great power, that’s true. I’m really astonished by all that, myself, it’s still new for me, I have no hypothesis about it yet. Where I am in this work—and it’s leading me more and more—there’s a tenderness, always, at the core. “Had I a Hundred Mouths” is a tender story—the love of that man, and the love of the black man: those people have a tenderness that is almost old-fashioned. But what I really see is that within that tenderness is a brutality and a striking violence of feeling and action. It has nothing to do with disillusionment—I was never more spiritual in my life. It has nothing to do with losing faith, or any of those clichés. It’s that the light is on that now, I see that: I see lust as demonic. I have never known it to be anything else! Have you? Good Lord! The lust is the very devil working, a demon in me—my lust. I don’t know about anybody else’s. I’ve had a demon in me. interviewer: How can La Santa Biblia and that lust inhabit the same creature, as they do in Arcadio? goyen: It’s the human arrangement—it’s just our very nature, I think. It created people like St. Paul, but oddly enough it didn’t create a man like Jesus, did it? We don’t think of Jesus as a lustful man, but it’s very possible that Paul was—he’s so angry against women, against marriage, against sex. interviewer: Is that fruitful anger? goyen: Fruitful in his case—he did a lot of good work, and he did walk among real violent, lustful characters—all those Romans! I think lust is a very rare feeling, and one of the grand emotions. Arcadio is a grand figure of lust and tenderness, I think. interviewer: With a Bible in his hand? goyen: Sure. Redemption is what he was looking for. And the Bible is the handbook of redemption. It’s the song at the end of a life, he’s an old man, in his seventies. And he seems a bit deranged, too—I don’t know what he is! He’s gone a bit mad. I’m not sure how much is true and how much is false of what he’s telling me at the end. He’s now such a fabricator that he’s one of the great fabricators. interviewer: Near the end of an interview in French [from Masques, above], you mentioned St. Francis, and the sense that certain

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saints had of sexuality, of the erotic and the sensual. I think the popular image of St. Francis is of someone feeding the birds from his open hand, and not of him as a sensual creature. goyen: Have you ever fed a bird? It’s very exciting. These holy people were walking around with the same impulses that I have, or else they wouldn’t be able to reach me. They had the same equipment that I have, if they were men, the same desire, man or woman. Those desires were not submerged; they exist; the Pope perhaps wakes with a hard-on. I think there is an inevitable confrontation with the spiritual in every human life at some time or other. interviewer: Right in the most sensual experience? Eating? goyen: Coming! Absolutely. Certainly all the nailing, and the Penitente things, are sensuous. No: sensual. interviewer: You want the word that seems more animal? goyen: Yes. The French sensuelle is the word that applies to all those almost genital actions. St. Francis to my mind was a genital human being. St. Theresa was—she no doubt menstruated. This is what I mean—this helps me to find purity and holiness. It’s even there in the act of hiding away: like that woman in my story, Inez Melendrez McNamara, who went into that convent [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”]. Her hair became more and more sexual. Her body itself became more voluptuous. interviewer: At the same time, Arcadio, like Leander’s story, leads to genital horrors. goyen: I see people who have emasculated each other. I see people who have been made Leanders of, by wives and husbands, by lovers. My God, the brutality of love-relationships! A mastectomy would be more benevolent than what men do to women’s bodies sometimes, making them loathe their bodies or abusing them or hating them or whatever. That’s why that picture of that woman with one breast, and one scar, was such an affirmation: She said “I am beautiful.” So that, in a way Leander means that to me—as much as all the other abuses of whites upon blacks, and so on. People render each other sexless, finally; they can castrate each other, and the denial can close up the genitals of a woman and she can grow together. She’s been denied that, or it’s been abused. A lot of that is in Leander. interviewer: And in Arcadio, especially in characters like Arcadio’s father and Johna, the whore who is with him when he dies.

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goyen: Those people live for their genitals only. She had a máquina between her legs, that was an absolute machine, and they were purely genital, and that’s death.

I feel everything of mine is on the ground, now, but not gathered. There are still some things on the tree, that have to get ripe, but the great body of my work is on the ground, but not gathered. interviewer: You have prepared a new selection of your stories, and you seem to want a larger audience for this book in particular—not that any writer doesn’t want the largest audience possible. goyen: I’ve been thinking about the curious kind of recognition that I have experienced, a curious misreading or misjudging of my work, I think. Or misplacing! I suppose I don’t need an explanation for it, and the reason I may seem to be asking for one is that I don’t understand it when people say my work has been ignored in Texas or the country as a whole, and it has such an audience in Europe. I used to get sick over that, to suffer over it, and something seemed wrong. I was turning out work, and it seemed worthy of being recognized, I mean of being acknowledged, at least. Acknowledgment of my existence as an American writer: neither praise, nor dispraise, but, “Here!”—with my hand up. “Present!” interviewer: I think this has partly to do with a climate of expectation among readers who are more used to what I’ll call “writing” than to what I’ll call “art.” A literary climate formed by trivial or superficial or inconsequential or over-intellectualized or journalistic work may leave readers disabled in the presence of powerful feeling. goyen: But who disables them? Where is that perpetuated? This is probably the bafflement of my life. But I could either let it obsess me and take the place of my work, which is what many people do . . . or I can keep working. interviewer: What’s the particular forcefulness of your work? It is quite different from much contemporary fiction, which seems emotionally barren by comparison, though the other is also, by that token, not as emotionally exhausting as your work, either, especially your recent work. goyen: Well, “Had I a Hundred Mouths” is an exhausting story. I just know about my own work, not that of others. Somebody asked Tallulah Bankhead, “What makes you so sexy? Can you give us an idea?” She went around in a mink coat without anything under it, things like

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that. “You’re a naturally sexy woman, what makes you so sexy?” they’d ask. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t do a thing.” I don’t know why I’m exhausting. I don’t know what other writers do, I only know what I do. interviewer: I think the simple answer to the question, “What do you ask of your reader?” is: a lot. More than many other writers ask. goyen: But you see, those writers ask too much of me. They ask me to bog down in boring tale-telling that is not new anywhere. They’re asking me to listen to warmed-over tales of lives that have already been handled. They’re not startling me into experiencing freshly what they’re giving me. I want life made clean again. I want it brushed up clean so I can see it again. Some writers give the reader what they think he can best handle, because he has handled it before. Like your mother putting down the same goddamned meat loaf a lot of nights, and you said, “But I’m tired of it.” “But you like it,” she said, “this is what you like! You told me how you love it.” So she just settles down for what I like. Stops all enterprising; no longer surprises. I’ll do something else if I have just to repeat the old images. Everybody is slightly knocked in the head and benumbed by the beginning of a boring story. And so they read through kind of stupefied. I don’t know why I know this but it’s sure not a stand I’m taking, and I’m not a revolutionary, I don’t have a thesis, “The trouble with writing is . . .!” I don’t have answers. Writing can be benumbed by attitudes like that. interviewer: Were there some writers whose influence you felt you had to reject or throw off ? goyen: Oh sure. I had to work through them. Because a lot of them are standing in the way. We have to go through their legs or get around them or really just kind of have them, in order to be free of them, or let them have us. Thomas Wolfe. Singing people. Whitman. Early Saroyan. I had to find out whether I could do it or not, and since I didn’t have anything to replace it with yet—I tell students this: since you don’t have anything to offer yet, then take what they have to offer, and spend it. If somebody wants you to make love to them that badly, then go ahead and do it. Just go ahead and do it, get out, get through it! Never James—though he astonished me. The same as Proust: those were abundances, flowerings. They confirmed me. interviewer: Why is a minor writer like Saroyan more of a problem than a writer like James or Proust? goyen: Saroyan speaks very much to young people. That great freedom—“I’m leaving, I’m going to do what I have to do, get out of

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my way, let me fly!” But his spiritual transformation was not mine; his style, finally, was not one that I could graft onto me as my own. It was his spirit. interviewer: Did you read Sherwood Anderson? goyen: He didn’t attract me. I didn’t know what Ohio was. I hardly knew what Texas was, but I was determined to find out. I did find stories that knocked the hell out of me, and made me want to write—but write my own stories. Flaubert’s “Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”; Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger.” I suddenly found literature through classes at college. I had been cutting classes trying to learn how to compose music, and hiding out in vaudeville theaters, and trying to say something through performing. I hadn’t found the word yet. I settled for that, really, when my father told me that I couldn’t perform, that I was not allowed to, and almost at the same time in my life I came upon writing, and the whole thing burst open for me. I was reading French and Spanish, and German, too, early—languages were easy for me and I was studying them. Lazarillo de Tormes! Poetry: Goethe’s lyrics. Heine’s. Rimbaud. Blake. The Americans writing around me seemed to all just hang at that level of life that I spoke about, just at whatever tide there was—there was Hemingway, whom I couldn’t abide. Fitzgerald, totally foreign to me. I didn’t know about that world, the swell life. Or even Fitzgerald’s own transformations. Hemingway seemed to me to be like the brutes that I knew that I wanted to escape from, in Texas. That physical bravado, that leanness of style, that was anathema to me. Why would I not use three adjectives? Why not? I was a rhapsodist, why would I cut down on my adjectives? What was Hemingway trying to tell me, what was he hiding? So those people were around me, and I chose Whitman, and Saroyan, and Wolfe. interviewer: But you chose them as enemies, did you not? goyen: No, I had to go through them. Then I went into people who had a profound influence on me—like Milton, Chaucer, Dante. interviewer: It was a long time between 1937, graduating from Rice, and 1950, when you published The House of Breath. Were those figures riding with you all that time? goyen: All that time. They rode with me on a godforsaken aircraft carrier, for five years. I got into the ship in 1939 and I got out of it in nineteen fucking forty-five, at the end of the war. That’s where I was. I had to study ballistics, command a battery of antiaircraft guns. But

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I was carrying these people with me. I was shooting off in my bunk when I should have been in love affairs of all kinds, I should have been in life, breaking my heart. That’s a forced monastic living—since I’m a late bloomer, that’s something to think about. I can see the deprivation of that; but I can see too that it probably added years to my life because I was physically in good shape. I realize as I talk now the extent of a residing anger in me, resentment, bitterness, about that. I’ve never really assessed that time. It did free me from all the crippling influences in my life, the crippling circumstances—family dependence, Texas, and probably from excessive study and scholarly isolation. I have never really realized the madness of those years. I went quite mad at the end of the fourth year of it, quite crazy, I had to be under morphine on the ship. I became so enraged at the war that my rage couldn’t be contained by my body or quietened by one thousand men. We were near the coast of Japan. When would it end? It was all right for a while, but will this go on!? I was a captive. I felt punished. For what? What had I done? I recall these maniac feelings. I was a wild man on the ship, a rebel, an outlaw. My poetic and voluptuous youth, I felt, was dying and passing away a mile a minute in the China Sea in 1944.

He thought how he had always wanted to belong to a landscape, yet it seemed his destiny to be only a figure riding through many landscapes, drawn to places and faces, bodies and minds, drawing these to him, disappearing and vanishing. Sitting in public places in his own country, returned, listening, he had thought how strange and outlandish he was, as though he were a ghost that was revisiting his native place and was never seen, never spoken to. (“Nests in a Stone Image”) interviewer: One could divide your stories into those in which uprootedness is central, and those others in which for a moment that homelessness is conquered and there is a sense of getting back. goyen: I had a sense of myself—which has lessened a bit, but is still an underlying sense of myself—as a passager, as someone passing through. So many of my stories were almost ballads—saying that I’m on my way, I’m just passing through, I’ve sung my song, now I’m going on, I just stopped by here. That came out of my feeling that I couldn’t live in Texas, that I couldn’t live among my own, that something alienated me, that I was drawn apart. And that was a heartbreak for me. I accepted it as a kind of destiny and often as a curse. I couldn’t be there,

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At Port Townsend, Washington, 1948

whatever those reasons were, and that led me to an immense homesickness, a longing for where I couldn’t be. It’s an exile. I don’t know what the exiling factors or forces were, may never know. interviewer: Were they personal more than artistic?

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goyen: An artist moves, goes out, comes back and then leaves again. interviewer: You’re not speaking about a cultural question, about the writer who goes to New York because there is no one to read him in Texas? goyen: No, of course not. When I went back, it was almost—just a death, one of my deaths. I couldn’t get over waking and hearing Texans. I couldn’t believe their speech! At once I thought, “This is where I belong! I’m here! I’m home here!” And then my second feeling, on the heels of that, was that they would never let me become a part of them. I talk like that, that’s my speech, and those are all my people, but why is it I can’t be a part of them? Why am I here in this room alone, isolated and exiled from them, just outside my door? I still feel that when I go home. interviewer: Is that relationship something you expect to find, or aren’t surprised to find, in other people’s work, or do you feel it’s peculiar to you? goyen: It seemed to be so deep in me that I thought, if I read it somewhere else, I felt confirmed, or affirmed. I didn’t associate it with Joyce and with the classic exile of Joyce, because I felt that Joyce’s was much more planned, reasonable, he was much less bewildered by the forces upon him, at him, and he was dealing with a whole huge culture, a literary and an ethnic culture, the whole Celtic renaissance. My case seemed a very personal thing, almost demonic—a curse: dark. Therefore the meditational quality, a prayer-like quality, almost “Help me, Save me, Deliver me.” interviewer: Given the italicized passages we spoke of, rising at the ends of some of your stories, it seems to me that that prayer was addressed to the language itself. goyen: True. interviewer: And you have called them songs, those stories, as well. goyen: They always came like anthems, or serenades. And they were sung, finally; it was an anthem, a joyous hymnal-feeling I had, even in “Arthur Bond,” that late. The language is always a principal character in the story for me; I suppose that’s why I can’t read so many other writers. They feel they’re giving me whole characters and they probably are but the characters don’t interest me if I can’t hear them speak or identify them with words, by which they are delivered to me. interviewer: Your literary mode, your literary consciousness, your artistic devices, and your gypsy experience, have all been extremely

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cosmopolitan, but even when you start on West Twenty-third Street with Marietta McGee-Chavez [In a Farther Country], you always go back to that rural reality, in your work, more a different place in the mind than a geographical place, a world of fewer emblems and more powerful ones, which we seem to say is rural, mostly. A good example is “Old Wildwood,” which begins in Rome, but goes back to the funny little motel cabin on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. goyen: That saves me each time, though, because it’s the detail of the small scope that keeps me from being lost in the Rome of it, or in the New York City of it, because I am not really writing about Rome, or I would have to find the detail of Rome. interviewer: That sort of fictional texture doesn’t interest you, does it? goyen: No. The house, therefore. I look for containment. I see this now, and I guess I do at a certain point know when I’m engulfed by too much, and then I really try to get into some little manageable harbor, get anchored somewhere, and it’s in simple and homely detail, and often in bizarre detail. An absolutely recognizable detail, that seems trivial. I have to be contained by a house, or a place. I’m then free to do what I want. interviewer: And yet, if sometimes you suggest containment, at other times you suggest freedom of a roaming, wandering sort. goyen: Sometimes people just go, and you never hear from them again. Or they come back very different from what they were when they left. What makes them come back? Or changes them—if some force took that demon out of them and put it into swine? Later I’d like to talk about the swine! Somebody was exorcised through me, I took over people’s demons and I went on off with those demons, a lot of the time. They went off pure and fine. They flew on off, like angels, and I was cursed! I was the pig. The cliff by the sea beckoned me. The bizarre, and the supernatural, that we were talking about—I thought sometimes I was the receiver of a cursedness. I felt often that I was a carrier: that image. I’ve written about the carrier, in The House of Breath. That image of myself, carrying, benignly walking through and infecting others, or receiving what others put onto me. . . . interviewer: You describe Lois Fuchs [In a Farther Country] falling in love at thirty-five with a seventeen-year-old boy, who then dies, as if she has cursed or infected him. goyen: That’s what I’m talking about. But I can’t account for these people—not Leander either. I’m not responsible for accounting for Uncle

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Ben [“Had I a Hundred Mouths”], although it seems I’m his creator. I’m therefore held, it seems, accountable. But I don’t believe the artist is held accountable. Is he, maybe? Morally, we feel that he is. Do we just abandon characters to the destiny that life has for them? Do we let them go into life out of the art we have made? Or do we hold them within our art and try to account for them totally through art? I don’t think so. Leander was restored to life, I guess—he had to take his chances out there, maybe. I was done with him, in a way. I came upon my own redemption in the streets somewhere, as creator-narrator, and looked upon my own flesh and felt my own reality in Leander now at large from my own creation. interviewer: In the French interview you were asked if all your characters weren’t either waiting for something or wounded. Is that waiting a kind of disablement like the physical disablement that afflicts some of them? goyen: I think they’re waiting for miracles, for wonderful visitations—they’re waiting for the marvelous. interviewer: Is the marvelous that important? goyen: I’m not didactic—it’s just surprise, waiting for the wonderful surprise. It’s probably waiting for the Second Coming, underneath. I’m sure that’s all I’ve ever been writing about. Salvation, redemption, freedom from bondage, complete release. All those people from those little towns, that’s what they were brought up to wait for: the end of the world, when the trumpets would sound, and they’d be free of all this daily labor. That’s the whole black southern thing. Rebirth, a new life, heaven—freedom from pain, bondage, travail. Those characters in my stories all are waiting. They’re really kind of hopeful people, expecting more. They’re open to something. They are forerunners. They’ve lost place—a lot of them are displaced; that’s their sorrow. “But there’s a better place I know,” don’t you know that’s what they say? “I accept that I’ve lost my place, my home, my town, my river— a whole river is gone!” When Jessy comes back to her mother, in The House of Breath, she says to her, “Life is loss, Mama.” Her mother is just waiting, sitting in a chair. She had closed the blinds, and the wind played memory through them. Jessy says, “Life is loss, don’t you know that? I know that, and I’m only ten years old.” interviewer: How do you feel now that you have adjusted to living in southern California, after several years? goyen: I feel exhilarated, it’s encouraging and hospitable to me, for my work, because I am in a foreign country. This is the way I’ve been

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able to accept it. The people are foreigners to me and I am in a strange land. I’m at home in a strange land—always my image of home was of someplace where I would put down the deepest roots and build a permanent place and I would never stray from that. But of course that was pure fallacy, pure idiocy, a fake way of thinking about my life, that was never possible, I would never allow that, anyway. It’s not anything I really would care about! Beckett said this for me at a time when I was looking for the statement, that the artist lives nowhere. “L’artiste qui joue son être est de nulle part. Et il n’a pas des frères.” interviewer: Who would have guessed this of a writer as concerned with such specific speech and with the exile’s return? goyen: But that place has become a language, now, for me. That’s a language of its own; I’ve created a language, as I did for Arcadio, that was never spoken there. That’s become my style, for me. interviewer: You’re not reproducing a speech? goyen: Not at all, not the way those Southerners do. I’m not a “Texas writer” or a “regional” one. I’m not interested in that; I never really was. I was making a language out of speech. If you harm that language, you’re harming the life of that work, and you’re harming the character himself. You’re re-dressing him. You’re saying, “No, he wouldn’t have this kind of a hat on, he wouldn’t have that color eyes.” It’s a violation. The language has become paint, as for a painter—the quality of the paint, the texture. A Cézanne local mountain is paint. interviewer: What’s special to you about Arcadio speaking Spanish? Why does he speak it? Why isn’t he just a redneck . . . hermaphrodite? goyen: He is a Mexican. That is his speech. That’s his mother—she has a real hard time with English. His father is an East Texan, but his mother is a strange, foreign thing, jumping around, and she don’t belong nowhere, she can’t stay still! That’s his language too and what you get out of him finally is his struggle to speak, any way he can. He can’t use his father’s language, or the speech he hears around him, and he knows his own. Again, he’s trying to tell. interviewer: Bilingual, and split sensual/spiritual, male/female—schizoid? goyen: He becomes quite crazy at times . . . And what son can tell you about his father?! I think the son-father relationship is as enigmatic as can be . . . That’s a wild nightmare there, though, that was given to

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me. And I feel I just have to let it alone. There’s no such thing as clarification of it. I’m interested in what other people say about it, but it’s almost like “Tongues of Men and of Angels”—that’s the way that tree grows. And either further work will clarify it, will straighten that tree up, or. . . . interviewer: You revise and revise, though, so it’s not your spontaneous early drafts that you seem to be protecting in this way. goyen: But something is never changed. And that’s what I know not to change. I can’t say that it’s words: it’s the vision, and it is never changed. There are no “revisions” for me, in that sense. I’m really in trouble if I try to change that. But it’s not as if my first draft were holier than any other. interviewer: Your attitude is nothing like that of the Beats, then, for whom the spontaneous composition was sacred? goyen: Those states were induced, those visionary states. Now, in the last five years, I’ve read the Beats, and I’ve found there’s something there. But at that time, the fifties, they were crazy, and I was trying to be sane. My God, I started by being crazy, why would I want to induce insanity? And writing kept making me sane, at least tying me down somewhere. So I couldn’t hear any of that, then. They scared me, too. Wild people . . . I find that when I get a little depressed or morbid I want to stop talking. It’s probably that I’ve just used it up. That’s a good sign, to me. interviewer: A clear signal, you mean? goyen: Yes, I think it is, to let it alone. So that I don’t get into other feelings—fear. And the kind of memory that is not creative. There is a destructive memory, too, that has nothing to do with recreating life, and I know when it is, more and more. I used to brood on it, and use it, and think it was a part of my creativity—it really was demonic. It came when it came. I was a prey to it. I drank to stop that, obsessed and on the verge of insanity. I’m through that. I was afraid of those things of mind, and I just joined the ranks of many others. The destructive memory was all that would come to me then, and you have to learn through the destruction—if you survive—when it is creative, when it is a building thing. I think some poets never knew that. I thought at that time that the idea of insanity in poets was somewhat hallowed. And there was such a false feeling about that. There still is. I have not much patience with it now; I just consider them ill, people who need help. And once they are restored, then their process goes on again. But the madness of the poet, and the poetry that came out of madness and suicide and

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all that—it impresses me less and less. Too much destructive memory. And I feel that a lot of poets begin to use that as a way of life, a pattern of behavior, even as a creative pattern. interviewer: How do you distinguish between the creative and destructive memory? goyen: Through surviving it. And through knowing when to let it alone. This is why I am physical, thank God. I am physical. I would use sex. I would go digging—I dug whole arroyos, irrigation ditches where there was no water, in New Mexico. I made adobes, and lifted, and built. This was healing, I thought—to go into the detail of everyday life again. That was my survival, that’s why I’m here, I knew that. Because basically I wanted health; I wanted an art that was healthy and healing, that had life-force in it, life-strength. When it got into this darkness, I knew more and more to let it alone. If I was in a relationship, a love relationship, that was dark, and was caught in it, with no way to escape from that, then it was very very dangerous for me. Or if I went home— often I would go home thinking that that would restore me, but I found that black angel there, though home was a great source of restoration and healing for me, I thought. This was when I was not writing. But if there were traps that I couldn’t escape—I won’t stay where that black angel is—then that’s a dangerous time for me. And it looked to me that California might be the final trap for me. And it seemed that that dark angel, that bad angel, that I wrote about, was here. I came here thinking: sunshine, the flowers, and a new way of life, from New York apartment living—and I never have been able to live in New York, really. Ever! I’ve done it, but only happily in my own place, my own rooms, a nest—a life-giving place. interviewer: Not in the city, only in your nest there? goyen: That’s right. As my present self, I’m not able to handle the place now. interviewer: But when you go home, aren’t you wiser and stronger than before? goyen: But what I’m shown is that I’m not, and that’s the last straw! I come there vulnerable. I have come there out of seeking, and to seek is to be vulnerable, I guess. I have come there seeking, saying, “Well, that will save me,” and already now I’m open to any kind of force that can get me down, destroy me. Also I suppose that wisdom reveals that often there was a dark angel where we thought there was a bright one. I said, “Those people sitting on the porch, and singing together at night,

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and those stories they told, in the twilight . . . Who was the dark figure in that house? Who among them chose that front door pane with that forbidding figure that says ‘Don’t come in this house—who are you?— don’t enter here—you’re not welcome here.’” When I’d come with my suitcase, saying, “I’m here!”, I’d see that figure on that horse saying “Come in!” and yet “Don’t! It’s just pain and darkness.” That house is still there, and so far as I know, that door is still there. A very precious, suspicious, dangerous door.

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Part III

Evocations

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Early Evocations

Notebook Entries [Although Goyen never wrote informally at the steady pace of a diarist, he nevertheless accumulated a great many notes. The following notebook entries are only a very small portion of such materials in his papers. This selection is intended to bring into view a little of his creative process, his sense of himself as an artist, and a hint of the friends and acquaintances with whom he spent time.]

At Humble Oil Co.

August 22, 1935 [small typed notebook sheet]

Why is it that I go through so much agony here? I like to think that it is because working in such a place cramps my creative powers—and I think that I am right. I feel that I shall never be satisfied working in an office; my experience this summer has shown me this. I seem to feel sick and crammed full inside; but once I get out of this place, I feel better. I don’t hate this particular place; the people are nice to me, and I have nice work, but still I feel that it isn’t the place for me. I dream of the things I’ve always wanted to do while I work—every minute, and that isn’t right. Even though I know that I have only a week more to work, I feel, every day, that I can’t even stand it that much longer. At my desk, while I work, I am constantly writing or calling up ideas. That is all I want to do. I feel that I am out of place, and that if I had to work in a place like this, or any office, I should rather die first. The psychiatrist told me that I shall travel a great deal—and that’s what I want to do; she told me that I would have very good success with music and writing—and that’s what I want to do. Maybe it’s because I want to believe these that I do believe them, but she gave me encouragement and a little more confidence.

~

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[The following entries, along with others not here transcribed, were written in a commercial 1939 diary book. A few words difficult to decipher are followed by “[?]”.] Ballet Russe— When I went backstage I felt a sense of disillusionment to find that the beauty of the dance, or of what it represented to me, was not a consistent, eternal thing, but created only on the lighted stage, at the proper moment in the program. Before that time, or after, the inhabitants of that lovely world were different people, laughing, pirouetting. Walking, looking up to the sky, the stars were brilliants strung on the telephone wires. Looking upon life as continuous action, as Goethe put it, forever at work, with nature and creation, growing, feeling, thinking—close to nature, never allowing it to get away from one—looking upon events as symbols, the illusion of a higher reality, and not as all of themselves— this is the life one must live in order to justify himself, and for me the only way. All I have and must be and do makes this inevitable. What am I? What am I? Last night at the tennis matches I was one who speaks of dances and dance-bands, one who spoke to members of the audience like a hail-fellow-well-met. Today with A I was a little of myself and then a great deal of some other who laughs and rids himself of empty comments. With C, a typical Sophomore co-ed, I was her idiot partner at a dance: I spoke of examinations, of “playing,” of “gay” times in class. At least I have not disturbed these people. But—must I continue to fear frightening—no—disturbing them. My Self, if freed before them, would rear up like a strange beast and would either repulse or become distasteful to them. I and my self are not yet one. When will the two melt into One and remain indivisibly one, indestructibly One? It is because I am still seeking places for stray parts of my jigsaw puzzle. I must know where these things belong; I must justify myself and everything that touches [?] me as I move about during my waking hours— I must justify even a train whistle, a feathery white sky with a moon, the soft, wet plants at midnight. I cannot leave the sky, the plants as I see

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them. They must become a part of me—they are a part of me—and I must take them and give them back—the moon to the sky and the plants to the earth. I must see things as symbols (I do); and I must complete and develop and interpret these symbols, for myself and therefore inevitably for all men. Meeting and discoursing with people destroys my thinking for the moment. These people come in, usually uninvited, and shatter my images, they walk over my jigsaw puzzle and scatter the parts, then leave me to reassemble them, struggling to find a place for them, the iconoclasts and awkward, bungling ones. But they are there, all there. Perhaps sometimes one comes late and says, “Look, you have forgotten me; you have left me out.” And then I see and recognize the awful, empty place and remember him. My puzzle is vast and I must know human nature better; better enough to make me less distrustful and impatient with it. Where does C belong? And T? And A?

~ Everywhere I see the principle of love working itself out. The little girl who used to run and play about our house has now grown strangely wary and secretive in her movements as if she were concealing some dark revelation from humanity—and when I return late some nights I see an automobile before her house and two sitting like statues in the front seat. Tonight as I walked I passed a little cottage on whose tiny porch two were in a very close embrace. The house was completely dark—as if it were there only to provide a front porch for the girl to stand upon and receive her lover. The darkened house gave the suggestion that no one within objected to her lover’s coming. It seemed to say—the people, mother and father, lying asleep within seemed to be saying, “Let her love; it is her time; this is her season. Let her run through it, let it run itself out in her. It is hers; she has found it. Let us sleep while she allows it to flow through her out there on the porch. This is her season.”

~ In the mornings he would be awakened early by the delicate swishing of her broom in the hall outside his closed door. He would lie in bed and listen to her dainty brushing and her uneven, broken steps as she

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pushed the broom, like the blowing of leaves in the autumn. It made him feel warm and secure lying there in bed.

~ Suddenly the thought came to him, oracularly: I am a man—and within him, then, the child fought with the man.

~ The artist has a double difficulty to perform. He has in the first place to be a person who is emancipated from the very strong habits of the mind which make us see not individual things but stock types. (My constant fight.) His second difficulty comes when he tries to express the individual thing which he has seen. He finds then that not only has his mind habits, but that language, or whatever medium of expression he employs, also has its fi xed ways. It is only by a certain tension of mind that he is able to force the mechanism of expression out of the way in which it tends to go and into the way he wants. (cf. Stein, Joyce)

~ April 24, ’39 Loneliness— remembrance— words, unknown— Resolution—Keats “We artists are the servants of not any cause but of mere naked life.” To be ever percipient, sentient, sensitive to the undulations, the nuances, the sinuous rises and falls of life and its creature man. To feel and more important, to think, to see. To correlate, analyze, interpret faithfully and movingly. To remember ever “thy art.” Relief must come. To this I dedicate myself. To defeat adolescence now that it has grown effete and defunct, to be, now, man—mature, developed, synchronized.

~

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May 7, 1939 I am still trying to find my way; it is still dark, penumbrant, full of shadows—enticing, tempting, portentous, specious [?] shadows. I am yet saying over & over to myself—“I must do this—this is my way” and yet I cannot conclude the definite and unquestionable path I must take. I believe that teaching will allow me to progress in the desired path. It concurs with and admits of my current ideals and convictions. I must create, interpret, and record—enlighten and beautify. I must give my mind, nay all my faculties, to this one task. How may I guide myself into a final full fruition of what I felt to be my potential power and ability? One must finally leap into the full storm and fight to gain his way with as much belief in himself as he can muster and encourage—and the rest depends on faith and determination in the final vindication of an ideal and a hope. God keep me from even momentary blindness—even temporary insensitiveness to my task and duty.

~ The morning was as fresh and crisp and clean as something just come out of a shell.

~ July—3 I am living in almost complete darkness—this past year. I have been writing, fighting to create, out of utter darkness and confusion. Only vaguely and uncertainly do I know my way. The torment and anguish and sometimes utter hopelessness have sometimes been almost too much to bear, and at times I have been almost willing to compromise for the sake of ease, but I have not.

~ [Almost certainly in preparation for his trip to Iowa to enter graduate school:]

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Via Kansas City Coach—$20.65} one pullman—$30.90} way ———— Tuition $100.00 (50.00) Dorm 47.50 Fare 21.00 168.50 (118.50) $200.00—R. 37.00—Check. $237.00 Total cash on hand $237.00 168.50 $68.50 [sic] Balance ($118.50) [Not transcribed here: copied-out schedules for Southern Pacific train— Dallas, Katy, Kansas City] Sept. 15—$75.00 Rotary Club Sak. Dr. Ticket

25.00 10.00 6.00 20.00 61.00

luggage, clothes [and another word, struck out between those two] $200.00 Tuition Room

50.00 50.00

Books, fees, incidentals, etc. meals “Better a dinner of herbs where love is Than a stalked ox where it is not . . .”

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The steadfast stars— Steadfast stars foxglove turtlehead figwort Sehnsucht* [*Sehnsucht⫽German for “longing.”]

~ [More accounts, and, slipped between the pages, a vocabulary list with definitions, and a receipt from the Rotary Club of Houston, Students’ Educational Fund ($10.00), another for $23.60, a public library card from Houston, good till 4-10-42, list of books with call numbers (T. E. Lawrence, Greek drama—Sophocles, Greek poetry, Latin, Blake), another scrap of paper with his signature, a handbill: “For a Progressive Administration/Support/‘Cactus Jack’ Valenti/for/Councilman-at-Large, Position No. 1/For Reforms a-Plenty—Back Jack Valenti.” Also tucked into the 1939 diary is a sheet typed double-spaced through no. 13, and handwritten in ink after that point, with items either checked off or struck out:] 1. Trunk, suitcase 2. dressing robe, slippers 3. pajamas 4. Insurance (Hosp.) [in Goyen’s hand:] Tues. or Wed. 5. trench-coat 6. trousers altered [in Goyen’s hand:] Tues. 7. typewriter [struck out] 8. books, notes, thesis 9. towels 10. transcript from Rice. [both checked and struck out] 11. have fountain pen repaired. [in Goyen’s hand:] Get Mon—.50 12. refi ll prescription. [in Goyen’s hand:] Sat.—Mon. 13. Shaving supplies ; new razor [in Goyen’s hand:] Sat. or Mon. 14. radio 15. [indecipherable word] light co. [?] [struck out] 16. [indecipherable short word] 17. ‘Y.’ Sat. or Mon.

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18. Call Hogue [?] & Grasty [?] 19. Get Flora’s pres. 20. clock 21. Lloyd’s records 22. Book from Jane [?] 23. Stationery

socks— underwear— shirts— trousers— sweaters— PAJAMAS

ON HAND |

TO BUY

| | | | | |

3 prs. — — 1 pr. — 1 pr.

— — — 3 prs.

| | | | | |

[In the chart above, words in lowercase were typed, in caps were written by hand.]

~ Another idea—how the lit-up world relates not to clarity but to illusion, false impressions, deliberately created false impressions, consumerism, pr, politics . . .

~ [From a notebook, 1947–1948] [Title:]

El Prado, New Mexico Journal (Kiowa Ranch with Frieda) Early Folner, etc. from “The House of Breath”

If we can achieve an honest memory, then we can see where we have gone and where we are going, how far we have come. We can see a Total, a Summary and thus know ourselves.

~ To B. Hart June 3—on Mother’s letter [see Goyen, Letters, 107–108]:

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On Navy leave with William Hart and Nione Carlson

“Can you, my beloved and staunch friend Billy, ever really go back to the Merrill Street of your deep cisterned memoried self ? Only this way, I know . . . Only in stern meditation of it, in the hard and agonizing resurrection of it into clear and merciless light . . .”

~ Frieda says “and now I joyously wash” and spreads out her washing on the grass and over the gooseberry bushes under the brilliant sun. Then to the piano where she plays her old German lieder and French and Italian folk songs, sometimes sings, in her profound husky voice. She speaks to the moon—“how he marched through my room”—to rainbows, to cicadas (“Ja! Who are you?”) and her beloved chipmunks,

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Goyen’s caption on back of photo: “Walter [Berns] & sunflowers”

to the trees that “stand like a regiment, protecting us from the world,” or how they “march up the hill like a battalion.” (“When Lawrence was here, there used to be big eagles sitting round in the treetops, and wild turkeys [. . . ].”)

~ Kiowa—July 21, ’48 [but perhaps 1947] Is it clear now?—that I do him harm—that he is écarté by me? That I have flung him into a world whose environment may be in too many ways foreign to him and that he copies so courageously but awkwardly? And that I leave him floating, sort of unmoored, except to me, for whom his love is so great that he doesn’t really know its scope and intensity— and that if he loses me—by a parting or etc.—he will, indeed, be left dangling or floating—It is in this light that he seems pitiful and we both seem doomed. Is all this knowledge—not always clearly defined—the cause of my unrest—the wrongness in it all, here? Frieda said, “But I didn’t want to tell anyone of Lorenzo’s and my

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dreadful, terrifying intimacy—I didn’t even want to tell myself. I didn’t think about it—I just lived in it and let it be and let it flow.” “But often we are led into tragedy by just following the flow of life.” “Then let us go into tragedy. If that is where the flow leads. We must endure the whole of experience, right to its end. Otherwise we are fragments and life is fragment.” “Yet can’t we shape human experience by will and by choice, with Ends in mind, with greatest good in mind?”

~ Berkeley—Aug. 1947 How it was always necessary to put a thing down about what happened, so as to fi x it, record it, and hold it for all time as a thing of his time and vision, as a thing that happened.

~ The thrill of S.F.— High swank, insidious glamour, misery, grandeur, evil and fear— linger over hills and hotels and bridges. Is a sensualist’s retrogression. Crown of sorrow or the tragic head of all of it is that, alas, a thing is gone, inevitable. To not always be wanting to call things back, not to grieve, in really a resigned way, the loss of what one later knows had to be only an ephemeral, fleeting, parcel of a greater, steadier and really unchangeable whole—this must be something like serenity that lies in something like renunciation.

~ When I was in my youth and good-looking, my hair combed clean and just right, a fresh white shirt and a pressed uniform, smelling good under the arms with a man’s perfume my mother had sent me. [The following notes and sketches were evidently the origins of Goyen’s story “Nests in a Stone Image.”]

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In Tacoma, Washington, after the war

(use in hotel episode) To be ordained to words— Smitten to expression, so that memory must be fitted to words [indecipherable word] (Oh all the things one has to tell!); as though one perceived through words. To be grieved by the world, the way it goes; to be excited by it, as by a lover; to be overjoyed with it, as by a gift or news of a bright thing. But most of all to be grieved, saddened. To feel sorrow, to feel alien; to want to stop it, the world, from running into madness and despair. To want to give it, and life, meaning. Why, why? You want to say to words let me alone. Why do you always urge me to find you a symbol, to give men to you, to dress experience in you like mannikins. It is my task, I say. All night I was writing, putting it down, writing across the desk in my room, across the sheets of my bed, putting it down, right, because it had (all) happened.

~ To be away from the world, out of the world for a time and then come back to it: the people one sees, as though he had never seen or known

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them before. The conversations one overhears, listens to; the dialogues of men and women. Most of all, they seem unclear, aimless and all fraught with the same related troubles. One imagines their worlds—there is always gain in them; there seems to be little cause in them. The city grinds on its greased haunch towards a mechanic ecstasy . . . etc. How they are like animals—birds or dogs or foxes or cats. How they labor and stagger through the enormous trash and offal of humanity. They know the rubbish of swarms of humans as a rat knows it—as the floor of the world, over which they must scramble to get at their needs—food or money to live on. How they seem to be creatures of a universe created by millions of them, with all its objects of purchase, its needless empty requirements for a fabricated life in a fabricated world—cosmetics and cigars and ribbons, bracelets, cravats and chewing gum. They fill the streetcars and the trains, sitting in cigarette butts and candy wrappers in the dirt and filth of the streets. They cope with it all in a resigned way and do not even know, finally, that they cope with it, and loathe it. One’s hands are filthy with the touch of the humanity-soiled brass door knobs, rails and newspapers, leather and iron, coins and tickets. How clean is the sweet undegenerate earth of the fields and meadows and mountains! Where the clean flowers open and close and the wind bloweth sweet and the air is pure. The great festering cities, the pus and scum and excrement of the human swarm. Sunday in a hotel room. Three women in conversation. (Somewhere the clear delicate singing language of two orientals blows in, floats almost like petals of a flower, just for a moment—they have said something to each other, probably something insignificant and unnecessary, exchanged words, then say no more.) Where were they? Where, in the world? 1. I tell you Finney is a liar. 2. But he said this (that). I heard him say this. He said this to me. 3. So you’ve talked it over.

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1. I tell you Finny is a sweet liar. 3. And you have talked it over. 2. I like Finney a lot. But I don’t love him. I have my husband. 1. He’s a liar. 2. My nephew said to me that Finney is so nice. 3. Oh every body likes Finney Robinson. 1. He’s a damned liar. 2. And me standing there with my husband Jack sick in the back room for three solid months and Finney saying this to me. 3. I knew you’d talked it over. 2. Oh I like Finny a lot, I mean a lot. But that’s not like loving a man, which is my husband the sick Jack. 3. There’s very little difference I can tell you between loving a man and liking one a lot. (She laughs hysterically.) 1. I tell you Finney’s a goddamned liar. 2. [blank] The foxy old man night clerk (I peek through the door) is doing a wooden little dance before the three women. He wants to have some kind of swank about him. He wants to be devilish, dapper, but it is too late, you feel. He pulls the face of the wife of Jack to him and kisses it demonstratively. “Look Mrs. Fisher,” he says, dancing, and he does it again. The kissed woman laughs hysterically and throws her head back. “For a man as old as you, Mr. Johnson,” Mrs. Fisher says. She is Jewish and speaks heavily. “Well nigh sixty.” “The older the better,” Mr. Johnson says and laughs. The hysterical kissed woman howls in laughter. Then there is quiet among them. Only the whistle of the old man’s whispered voice is heard. He is telling them something that should be whispered. But the hysterical laughter of the woman rises again in the night. In the room above them is the noise of love in a bed. You listen. The noise is like a bed breathing. It is so quiet except for the hastened panting of the bed above your head. You grow tense and fi xed (immobile) and ashamed, not wanting to hear, not wanting to be forced to (share) participate in this. Then suddenly the shrieking voice of one of the women below in the lobby, “I tell you Finney is a lousy liar!” You look at your watch. It is two a.m. You are getting a headache. You don’t want to listen but you are listening hard. You decide you will

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have to call down to the desk and tell the old man night clerk that this voice will have to stop, you cannot sleep. But the two up above you. You don’t want to disturb them—yet. You wait. It is over. It has happened. All is quiet. Then you hear the sound of water running above you and the gurgle and trickle of it, down the drain, and the sound of bare feet on the floor [ four indecipherable words]. You get up, turn on the light, and go to the phone on your wall, take the trousers [?] off (which you have hung on its mouth (as if it were forever saying oh!)). You hear the buzz down in the lobby switchboard. The old man night clerk answers. You tell him. You are trembling a little. You want to be angry. After you hang up the receiver, you hear the dead silence of the lobby below—the women are waiting to see what this is— then the sibilant whispers of the old man who is telling the women what happened. Now all three are whispering. In a few minutes you hear the women going out of the hotel through the swinging door. Lying in bed you know that you cannot go back to sleep. Suddenly in a little dark space of early morning time in the world, this has happened. You think and think about it. It has the quality and feeling of dream. My God you tell yourself, so much happens in the world at all hours. You’ve got to put it down, fi x it, hold it, as something. So much of everything everyday is nothing. But even the nothingness is something and you must put it down. You lie and turn and sprawl in the bed and think that human beings in the world are and will forever be for you the strangest, most terrible, most wonderful thing you could ever know about.

~ Napa, Sun. Jan 25. [1948—where Goyen and Walter Berns had been living since the fall of 1947.] To live among folk of tradition and folk-ways—of some legend and myth—their language and customs—unsophisticated and un-complex, going about in their way, following their way and work of their humanity. But where? Taos?—The Indians lack appeal, for me. Texas? perhaps—Some little province or some region that goes on unchanged and uncorrupted by the modern perversion.

~

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Perhaps in California

Feb. 3—’48—Napa— Brett in Berkeley. We saw her for the first time Sunday (Feb. 1) at the Morses’ [?] cocktail party for her—looking very strange in a drab Mabel dress and silk stockings. “My legs are cold!” she whispered.

~ Feb. 21, 1948 Arrived Port Isabel [Texas]—Spud [ Johnson], Walter [Berns] and I. A huge wind and heavy rain, gulf storm—a norther. Found Frieda big and grey and needing a hair cut. To Mrs. Griffin’s cozy little cottage right on the Gulf—cold & wet. We set up our management from our packed goods in both cars—now we are comfortable. “We’ve come 2300 miles,” we said to Frieda. “Today?” she asked with wide eyes.

~ Feb. 23, 1948 To Brownsville this afternoon—very Mexican little town, narrow streets, grillwork, old old houses.

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Tonight, Walter cut Frieda’s hair—such beautiful hair, while Angie [Ravagli—Frieda’s husband] looked on and made suggestions—Frieda holding very still—shy, a bit afraid—and I reading Rexroth’s edition of Lawrence’s poems, really shy, too, watching over the book and feeling at times like weeping. I thought, “What in his destiny turned Walter in the direction that would lead him to Frieda and in the room of a little house on the Gulf of Mexico, one night in February, kneel to cut her beautiful hair?”

~ El Prado—June 1, 1948. What beautiful beautiful wild flowers blooming in the desert here! Lupine and wild sweet pea and Indian Paint Brush, flowing alfalfa, little yellow and white daisies, the lovely little pink flowers whose name I don’t know. All have come, in their silent secret cycle, at their own pace in their own time—untended, unknown. And now come the first little mallows, orange. I cannot keep my hands off them, bring them all into the house.

A Crossing [In the margin of the first page of “A Crossing,” Goyen wrote “f[or] [?] the old nurse narrator.” This would suggest that the piece was written while Goyen was working on Half a Look of Cain in the 1950s. (This was the second novel he completed, but he did not find a publisher for it during his lifetime.) This typescript is on now yellowed paper, with one of Goyen’s frequent pencil doodles—maelstrom-like, blacked-in—in the lefthand margin of the first page, and a smaller doodle above it like a dollar sign, and one below shaped like an almond. The movement of the piece is from the abstract idea to—abruptly, narratively (except there is no narrative, only the groundwork for one)—Little Miss Hazel, and then to the boat (again “darkening” plays a role) and then to the dreamer, as if to say that the image of Charon had first been dreamed, having been drawn from the image on the real wall, and then was connected back through Hazel to the opening idea of darkness and shadow. Thus the workings of Goyen’s associative creative process.]

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How darkeningness may have a quality of light, and the light in the darkeningness—how so many of us do not see that, or how we forget that when light is seen from darkness we define the darkness [by, or as?] the light. I think how we live in an age of false light, the streets and facades aglow, the supermarkets brilliant with light, speedways and parkways, rooms. And I think of the ancient light,* the half-light of rooms, candlelight and lamplight and firelight and lanternlight, where faces were in shadow and bodies moved in flickering light and shadow: in a world where everything is seen, every detail, there is nothing left, everything is described, every detail of face and movement. The artist takes life back into shadow, he adumbrates life (which means casting forth the shadow and the shape). In a picture the shadow takes on a form, an integral form all its own, though it is related, of course, to the object which cast it; but the shadow-form seems to have taken upon itself a moral reality all its own and speaks too, is something added to the statement of the object whose shadow it is; and the shadow seems to mean more, be more than the object itself, is the reality of the object. Little Miss Hazel was a light, shrugged little creature whose shoulders were shrugged up as though once, in a gesture of wonder at something she had thought about** she had drawn up the bones of her shoulderblades around her frail neck and tilted her head and shrunk her narrow little face, and her body stayed this way. So that forever after, her body was the shape of one time or moment of wonder when her whole self and shape entered into an attitude— Her two sisters and brother were people of means, and though they provided comfort for her in their homes, she preferred to live in a small apartment hotel in the city; and there she was, this fragile little shape of a woman, this delicately turned little shape, slightly to one side, so that she cut through space at an angle, breathing her small breath, a fragile, floating kind of little birdbone structure—no larger than a bird’s on a perch, slanting about in her two small rooms, shunting about in her frail life. Now that she was dead, I thought of her life as a very delicate time in the world, like the ticking of a tiny watch, or the cry of one small insect, and of the speck of life she created, her world, with these little rooms, as a little crooked line or mark made with one finger in the sand. Over my desk is tacked the reproduction of a painting called “Charon’s Boat,” and it shows the fierce Boatman delivering a little huddled soul naked in a brute boat across a river. They are in midstream and an angel has lighted on a rock on the side that has been left behind. Across the

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wide river on the other side is the mouth of a cave, and fires are burning on that farther darkening side. The waked dreamer sitting on the side of his bed, head in his hands, staring at the floor, remembering his dream and thinking how we see so much, know so much, being able to tell so little of it and that so slowly and with such great pain. [*Goyen added an s in parentheses above the word, as if considering writing “lights.”] [**Originally this said “thought about” in typescript, then “about” was crossed out—which gives a different meaning—then “about” was restored in pencil above the line.]

Where Are We Traveling? [Goyen and Walter Berns moved to Chicago, perhaps in the summer or fall of 1948, and Berns enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he would take an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science and begin a career as a scholar. Berns received his degree in 1953, but it seems that Goyen must have been in Chicago only briefly before moving on to New York. The following piece, typed on four sheets of paper, and mentioning the elevated train, is not likely to have been written before Goyen went to Chicago and then on to New York, nor, I think, very long after. (In 1949, at the invitation of Stephen Spender, Goyen would go to London with Dorothy Robinson, where his relationship with her quickly foundered; he also traveled on the continent; in 1950 he was back in the United States, in 1954 he went to Rome for a year.) Goyen’s 1946 story “Nests in a Stone Image” is written partly out of the earlier notes, above, on the liar Finney, and partly out of materials similar to the first paragraphs of this draft of a meditative sketch—overheard conversations in a San Francisco apartment house or hotel. Also perhaps germinating here, and stimulated further by Goyen’s stay in Rome, was his story “Old Wildwood.” And many of Goyen’s lifelong preoccupations and themes are present in this compact trying out of his observations and meditation, including the phrase he would use to title his second book of stories (1960), “the faces of blood kindred.”] Where are we traveling? he asked himself. The noise of the El, was it the noise of the railroad flat, rumbling on and on. Humanity is outraged in

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me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation which is one of the most passionate forms of love. . . . Over it all, the Armenian girl, on the first floor (she had sat her beautiful old mother down in the chair to listen to her) sang “Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies”. . . . “More and more there are things I cannot forget as long as I live . . .” the man’s voice cried. “I’ll tell you another thing . . . remember the time you. . . .” “Yes.” “And you wouldn’t. . . .” “Of course I wouldn’t; who in the name of Adam would have. . . .” “And I tried to . . . .” “That’s not the way it was, and you know it. . . .” “And you said. . . .” “. . . . well; that’s another thing I’ll never forget as long as I live.” “Aw die early and save yourself a long memory.” The traveler in the railroad flat. He sat and cried out to himself, where is the fullness of my work, where is the fullness of my life? They are homesick, being foreigners. But, he thought how he knew what [he] had not known in his youth, that the nature of life is homesickness: in every breast is a yearning for home, could it, that home, finally, be paradise that all beings yearned for. Was that yearning what gave an air of sadness, gentle and beautiful, even to creatures—the deer, the beaver, the horses standing together in the fields? Where are we traveling? The railroad flat rumbled by an eternal chasm full of damning voices, on and on. Over it all, suddenly, floated the little sad song he used to hear his grandfather sing, “When I was a young man before my beard was gray . . .” He thought. I will make something out of it all, some shape, some piece of work, and it will be like a dwelling place of neither stone nor wood; and in it all may live, all races and strangers, nations and creeds, the faces of my own blood kindred and the naked heavy foot of the peasant, and even the rosecolored snail, even the “Friedlos.” * There, there would be a home, a living place for all—in this long train on this long long railroad, carrying its cargo of all he remembered brought into it, past the forever unchanging chasm resounding with querulous voices, eternally passing

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through a strange unchanging landscape of a city where people leaned eternally out their windows in the hot summer evenings and the Trees of Heaven drooped in the humid heat, and the old gaunt-boned whiteheaded man, the face of all humanity sitting at its stark bare table; but below the dark-skinned young mother holding her brown baby at the open window, all looking out upon the trees of Heaven; and on the railroad traveled. Where are we traveling? he asked the Trees of Heaven. Thinking, remembering, planning—for some day that would come, an event of tidings, of news, some fulfillment of wish, reward, a day or night of beautiful sensation, some abstract gladness, some sight of loveliness: what, what was it everyone waited for as they traveled on, passengers in their inner compartments, quarreling and hanging out windows, waiting at a table, walking up and down? That we might touch earth, that we might set foot on ground! he cried, and he thought of the sound of the peasant’s bare feet on the ancient stone paths of Europe. The shape of the peasant—a foot flat and broad and fitting earth as a stone rests and conforms to it; the treading bare foot of the peasant upon stony earth, this seemed to him the history of Europe and in Europe, in a little peasant village, he had lain in his bed and heard the sound of peasant feet passing on the stony path below his windows in the dawn. The great grasslands and the talltree country, the meadow and vale and marsh, the small sweet rivers, the ponds and the creeks—where were they? If we could all disembark and touch foot to these, he thought. This human force of nature, this ability to make clear and traversible what is occluded and blocked, is lent us like a good plain axe to cut clearing with spit on handle out of the bramble we journey into, being traveling mortality through immortal wilderness. Our human spirit that craves to clarify and to make navigable, negotiable our human instrument is the indestructible and unrusting blade of the axe . . . He envisioned under the trees and in the grasses the faces of old blood kindred, a wilderness folk. They were good lasting faces with features of rock and earth, with the mark of wild vigor and gamey beauty upon their countenances. They had not been only clearing a place to live in but a place for hope to abide in, and love, and reconciliation of the human affections that, like the eternal wilderness, bramble over; and where the race they belonged to might struggle to perform its daring, lovely, splendid and disastrous achievements. It was the clearing we all look for, he thought, traveling through this pile and stack of stone and brick, viewless and compartmented and the echoes of cursing voices howling in the crypts and hollow shafts between the buildings.

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If he leaned out dangerously far through his front window he could see, holding precariously to the sill, a little piece of river, river, that led on to freedom and wide space. Turn our convoys of long trains in that direction, he prayed, and drew back into the long narrow compartment. [*Friedlos = German for “quarrelsome.”]

Some Children and Teachers [This compilation of memory-portraits from grade school is the clear and substantial antecedent of Goyen’s story “The Grasshopper’s Burden,” in which he creates a shape for fiction by selecting a protagonist, Quella (absent from this apparently autobiographical, although not first- person, piece) and sending her through the school to register the presence and character of teachers and of other students, especially of a figure Goyen constructs as her opposite, the poor deformed and stuttering George Kurunus. That Goyen typed out a clear copy of this piece suggests that at first he thought that this was his finished work; but to compare this piece with Goyen’s polished and delicate final text is to see how he worked his autobiographical materials—in a few instances using the same passage or visual image—into a short story that invests feeling primarily in one child, whose responsiveness to her school surroundings is perhaps an evocation of Goyen’s own emotional connection to a place very like this, presumably in Houston. The typescript is corrected in a few places by hand. At the top left corner of the first page is Goyen’s typed address in Portland, Oregon, scored out and replaced by the handwritten words “Taos, New Mexico.”] 1. George Kurunus He breaks a word when he says it, like a twig or a little bone; or bends it or flutes it or umlauts it. He says ruined words. He cannot speak a word right and whole, no matter how hard he tries, or carefully. He cannot hold a word still in his mouth when he says it. A small word rattles or quivers—and shatters. This is stammering, a word that is used to describe to him what happens to his words. Yet who knows what perfect words fill the crock of his mind like agates in a crock? But if you live among breakage, he may reason, you finally see the wisdom in pieces; that we live among breakage; that the only whole is the pieced whole; and no one can keep you from that construction

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which is a pasting together of bits to make the mind’s own whole. What can break anything pieced whole in the mind, set mended back on a shelf of the mind? The wisdom in all things, in time, tells a meaning to those things, even to fragments of things that seem to mean disuse and no use, like scraps in a mending basket that are tokens of many splendid robes. He could scare the world with his face, even in sleep. He might appear, sleeping, to have died in an agony. Even sleep, except for some dream in it, smoothes a face; but never his. His little left withered arm is folded like a plucked bird’s wing and its bleached and shriveled hand, looking as though it had been too long in water, is bent over, and it hangs like a dead fowl’s neck and dangling head. But he can use this piece of a hand, this scrap of an arm, quickly and he can snap it like a quirt. When he staggers along, with his crooked face, his knees scrape and sound like a little puffing train in the corridor. It is always known when he is coming, and he has never in his life been able to creep up on anything and surprise it. The boys of the school play around with him as though he is some crazy toy or a crooked jack-in-the-box or something on a string. Often a class will hear a scratching at the door, see a hoodlum face at the door pane like Hallowe’en and be frightened until they see it is just George Kurunus. Then the class will laugh and make faces back at him and the teacher will go to the door and say “Now George . . .” and turn him away. In a marching line of some class to somewhere, the library or a program in the auditorium, he is always put last to keep a line going smoothly. He is the aberration of a straight and even marching, the raveled out, idiotic end of order, the mocking question mark of Conclusion. 2. Edward Johnson He has glittering beaded eyes, rhinestone-like; and a torn mouth. When he speaks it is as if each word tears open his mouth to come through, like a clown or a kewpie through a paper hoop. And then his mouth mends itself again. He sits looking with his beaded eyes through the window and does not talk, as if he were watching for a bright thing to come wave at him and call him away. Who would keep him if it came? 3. The Boy from Cuttings Wharf His eyes are hot brown with a red spark in the center. His face is lean and shaped like a pear, and as he talks he throws his head back like a

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stamping pony, as though he were casting back long hair. “At Cuttings Wharf,” he says, “there are many wonderful things.” You can see him running along the wharf at dusk in wind and fog, tossing back his head like a trotting pony and looking for marvelous and magic things. 4. Mabel Standard Her name is Mabel Standard and she comes into the schoolroom with loose hair and a blue woman’s comb to run through it. She is getting ready for something, she is busy in some important preparation. You can see it in her face, under the eyes, and in her half-finished body, which is suffering a kind of shaping. That she is aware of this shapening you know, because you can see that she is helping it along with bracelets and ribbons and a flaming spot of rouge. She has a red ribbon pinned like an award on the back of her head, and it flows down in two streamers so that boys may pull at it and make her angry and [make her] have to slap them. Because she is bigger than the others in the seventh-grade class, she persecutes them and judges them whenever and wherever she can, to make it plain that she has some way, somewhere, in the confused rush and tumble and scramble of children together passed them on her way to something and will get there first. 5. Harriet Hanes Harriet Hanes knows that Mabel Standard will get there first, so she holds to her hand tight as they go anywhere, down the halls or home after school, so that she may get there too, pulled there by Mabel Standard. She is being prepared by Mabel Standard: in the classroom her hair is constantly and with great patience braided and unbraided, then braided again. She sits very quietly, being made ready by Mabel Standard. What they wait for may be just outside the classroom door in the hall when the bell rings, who knows? She has little chinky-pin eyes close to the bridge of her nose, like a cheap doll’s, dull and fi xed, and scant white eyebrows; and her almost white hair is infested with lures, like red plastic butterflies, a green Spanish comb staked there, and some knitting twine, red or blue, wound through a spliced hawser of hair which arches [over] the top of her head from ear to ear. A pencil, she has discovered, stuck there and stolen often by Billy White, who sits behind her, will have to be fought for.

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6. Billy White He is fat and white and will whine easily, and has a false tooth in front which makes him special wherever he goes. And when someone says, “Billy, wiggle your false tooth in front,” he will, with his tongue, cause a tooth right in the middle of his mouth to wiggle like a loose picket in a fence. 7. Judy Sampson Whether in Arithmetic or Social Studies, she will sit arranging her plumage, preening and arranging and fi xing. Or she will sit and frame her kissing lips in a mirror. She will drop her instruments to the floor while a boy is standing reading the story of Roger Williams and he will have to stop and gather a lipstick tube, a mirror, a folding red comb before he can go on. Miss Blake is a yearner. She sometimes cries in class over a poem she will read, which is about no more than a waterfall or a waterfowl. To prove that she is good at something she will say “I’ve had a course in it.” Or “I’ve a minor in it”; or triumphantly, as if she were qualified for all time for something, “It’s my major.” Miss Krauss, the typing teacher, has a hard and painted face like a circus trainer; and when she stands with a stick pointing to each letter of the alphabet, the class clicks it away, click click click, like the galloping hooves of her ponies in a ring. Miss Morris, the Social Studies teacher, has a puckered mouth just like a purse drawn up. She knows everything about children, whether they have told a story about undone homework; and especially about boys, if they have been smoking, by their smell, or have a jawbreaker hidden over their last tooth, or a beanshooter in their blouse. She surmises a beanshooter so dreadful that it might be a revolver concealed there. And when she fusses at a boy who is mean by stealing a girl’s purse and going through it, showing all a girl’s things to other boys in the class, Miss Morris will draw her pursey mouth so tight that she seems to have no lips at all and stitches will crack the powder round it. Then she will shake this boy hard, often causing jawbreakers or bubblegum to fall from him everywhere and roll hard on the floor under all the seats.

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The Homemaking Teacher, Miss Starnes, is always smiling and standing straight. Each day she has a fresh rose or some flower from her own garden stuck to her strict dress (which she has made herself ) and the way she maneuvers her mouth and bows and leans her head towards the girls sitting before her while she reads from some book makes them know that she is saying something good and important, as though she were smacking her lips and eating something like a dessert, which she herself had cooked. Yet Miss Starnes is very serious and means what she will say or read, and pauses often, sticking out her chin (which has hairs on it) for emphasis. The girls in Homemaking who sit before her are not sure at all what these words mean, but they sit there, among the linen dresses and the fancy aprons (and one fine blue woolen suit hanging on a hanger, which last year’s class had made with its own hands and left the price pinned on it to show that it was good enough to be bought in any store in town). “Responsibility” is a word Miss Starnes will smack off her lips; and “Domestic i-n-t-e-g-r-i-t-y.” These are things they in the class should be or do in the good home they will have or make—and which lies off somewhere in the vague unknown and which they cannot quite see as something of theirs but just imagine. But whatever or however this place, “The Home,” they will be there, all these girls, going industriously around in aprons, which they will have made, there will be a lot of busy sewing, and a difficult cooking, and “do-mest-tic in-teg-ri-ty”. . . .

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I Spent All My Time in Texas . . . [Apparently copied from one of his own letters, or a draft of a letter to be sent, this is an undated two-page typescript; the recipient is evidently in Europe, and the letter could date from the 1970s.] I spent all my time in Texas until I had to go to war in 1939, then I spent the best five years of my life on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific: nothing much has been the same since then: I believe I made all the wrong turnings during those five years for which I have paid heavily ever since. At the end of the war, 1945, I went to investigate New Mexico, which I had never seen, and stayed on there for three years, living on the desert under the mountain in the house you saw. Thence to the Northwest which I love dearly, living near San Francisco, then all my wanderings, trying to understand myself, my own work, what it was to be, how it was to be made; everything I have done in my work has been only an attempt to find out how to say what I have to say: I cannot yet find the way, yet each book has seemed to me to be the only way to say it, the only possible form I could discover for what had to be said. When I do not know anything, which is often, I cannot and do not write. Then I do not seem to know why I exist. My country haunts me, and I feel like an exile from it: I cannot find it again, it has disappeared. For me, all art is a struggle to return to one’s country which, finally, lived in one’s own breast; when it is vanished, one is exiled. The loveliness of the world in a meadow, near woods and a river, where simple people spoke a kind of poetry and lived a kind of myth, that I once knew—delusion or reality?—has vanished. I must recreate it if I can find it in my memory; then, I hope, I will bring to it, that recreated world, what is in this half-world I now live in and might have been in every other world, everywhere. I do not wish to be isolated in my own time, to be “contemporary”—the Bible says: “For the fashion of this world passeth away.” I am not a contemporary

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writer, am not interested in topical story or plots about men and women working in offices, drinking in bars, quarreling in cities or suburban villages. Something that began a long time ago goes on—it is that I want to find and join and speak about. My wanderings have led me to half a dozen American cities, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Portland (Oregon), New York City, and London, Rome. I am not at home. An artist tries to find some home, somewhere to live—that is what his work is about; I guess that is my theme, people trying to find some home, somewhere. I live in New York City because I cannot bear the sterility of new towns and cities, the pattern of modern country life. I live and work in a time of abject realism in literature; I wait it out, hardly read or notice it except to hear of it from my publishers, who do not care much about my work, cannot sell it. The point is to work and be true. I am collecting new stories for a collection to be published in America (first published in Germany). I am also at work on a novel. I want to write many stories, but the short novel, the roman, the novella, interests me most. America is my home and I am an American writer; I cannot live anywhere else, for I must live within the problems and struggles rising out of my own authentic situation which is American.

Dear George: The Salt? The Wrath? The Salvation? [The following three-page typescript is dated “New York City, October 10, 1976.” The title is written by hand across the top of the first page. George Williams was a professor of inglish and creative writing at Rice.] “The world’s going to have to shake a little salt on your wounds, Billy. You need anger, venom, some meanness. Your writing is too gentle and melancholy. You need more experience in the world.” Well, my beloved George, when it finally rained (and not long thereafter) it poured; oh the salt shook. I couldn’t see what George Williams meant then. Of course my anger was profound. It lay in me thick and unstirred, like a fresh can of paint. I needed roiling. George saw this, then. That was when I was about eighteen and very lost, very starry, very imprisoned in my father’s house, on my neighborhood street, imprisoned in my city, imprisoned in my state of Texas, imprisoned in myself. To write was to make a window through which I could escape from the frigid subjects of study, the dreary Math and canned lectures on mimeographed sheets in History

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Goyen’s caption on back of photo: “First days in New York City, 1950”

and Biology, the dear and dry professors in cold amphitheaters. And here was a gentle, quick-minded and radiantly imaginative man who might read my stories that I’d been writing in my Woodland Heights captivity since I was sixteen, at night, hearing the call of the Southern Pacific train whistle, faraway, around Sealy, and then very near, just over by the Bayou. This man embodied my salvation and my escape to a world I could create out of myself, make fair and joyous. Through the years, people were to reiterate George Williams’ advice about my writing. “Get mad,” “fight a little,” “stop singing and curse a little.” Salt on your wounds. In the world, far from George Williams and the hedges and sweet vines of my sad university, I became, very long ago, accustomed to the familiar rustle of the saltbox. Out in the world, life stabbed at me and scraped my knees and elbows; and certain people I met or loved were carriers of salt. Though I was not enrolled in his Sophomore course in Writing— George disallowed me as an official member in my Sophomore year because of my immaturity—he did not reject me but gave me even more of the gift of his spirit, of his good sense, of his insight and his solid loving care. I had an open invitation to attend and participate in the regular evening meetings of the Writing Club. There I read before this man of simplicity and wisdom, quaking and gasping for breath, my saltless

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stories—which were more like long elegies and sad songs. I lived for these meetings where I sat in a dark place and when asked to offer what I had written, found, terrified though I was, the very first open release, the window I searched for. In the living room of somebody’s house, somewhere in Houston, among fellow students who’ve long ago gone their way and left me few names to remember, I gasped out my dreams and songs from Woodland Heights. There, George Williams gave me the very first invitation to creative freedom, the very first twinkling sense of the artist and his tribulation: revelations came to me, there, in Texas my prison. He knew that I longed to get away. He sensed that I might never get away because I could not use my anger enough or could not fight my way. He knew from listening to what I was writing that I hungered to get away, to flee, so that I could have experience and write about it, make art of it, something true and lasting. Later, when I began, at last away from there, to write, what I wrote about, obsessively and tenderly, with no anger, was Merrill Street in Woodland Heights—what I had fled—one long block of little wooden houses that became for me, away from it, a whole rich and human world. Now, these years and books later, I find George Williams when and how I can, when our paths cross and life brings us together—not often. But we share. It is absolutely the same between us as it was those years ago when I first saw him, sitting at a desk waiting for me, in line, to come to him and ask if I could come into his Writing class, first talked with him, stammering and shivering, first sat in a room in somebody’s house in early Houston in the mid-thirties, a steaming Houston night outside, the treefrogs calling, and the locusts, and read out to him from my Woodland Heights captivity and my Merrill Street reverie, of my hunger and of how I was going to make my work the salvation of my life. The salt? The wrath? The salvation? Well, beloved George, benevolent figure of my secret life, first encourager, and found in the most unlikely of places—well, well.

Notebook Entries [The notes that Goyen kept sporadically in a black-bound artist’s sketchbook, 8.5 by 11 inches, in 1978 and 1979, show us the flares that lit his pained passage from New York to Los Angeles. His wife, Doris Roberts, a stage actress in New York, had moved several years before to Los Angeles

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to work (very successfully) in television; the Goyens kept their apartment in New York because Bill could not bear to leave it. After Doris Roberts bought a house, she reasoned that she could not maintain both dwellings, and of course Bill Goyen was not earning enough from his writing and teaching to meet these expenses. Living, it would seem from what he wrote in this journal, from spiritual crisis to spiritual crisis over abandoning New York for L.A., over the invisibility of his work in American literary culture, and over the fits and starts of his own creativity, he put into this journal, some of which is excerpted below, not only his own words but also quotations from his reading and items tucked into the pages, such as clippings, postcards, and other odds and ends. Some of these are very obviously relevant to his sense of his work and himself, such as clippings from the New York Times about the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi (for in this period he would end up working on the stories “Had I a Hundred Mouths,” “Tongues of Men and of Angels,” and the unfinished “Leander”). Other items are figures or reiterations of the touchstones of what might be called the themes of his Self—such as a terrible brief newspaper account of a child murder, which would have struck both his sense of tragic story, looked at from the murdering mother’s point of view, and his sense of his own childhood experience of soul-murder by all those who could not understand him; a small reproduction of an erotic drawing by Picasso; a photograph of three dancers in a pose in which two young men have locked their half-raised hands in struggle while a young woman seems to be trying to interpose herself between them; and a clipping of a self-righteous poem by Edgar A. Guest—which Goyen noted had been sent to him by his Aunt Gay—that had been reprinted in 1978 in a newspaper and which versified anxiety about being careful of one’s father’s name. So the embarrassment of his relatives over the artist in their midst, and their attempts to shame him, had not abated, even thirty years after the first blow he had received from his family, a terrible letter of condemnation from his mother. (See Letters, 107–108.) He continually chose, in other words, those items that spoke readily to his existing preoccupations, conscious and unconscious. The most important and indeed spectacular entry is the one on the palm tree, in which the opposition between New York and Los Angeles is figured as a series of oppositions inherent in the tree itself, which he now saw as a revelation to him regarding his own long-standing “war with himself,” as he calls it elsewhere—notably between sexuality and spirituality. As is apparent so often in his work, Goyen was drawn to contradic-

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tion, to that which struggles against itself and must be not one or another alternative but both alternatives, however opposed to each other, at the same time. Feb. 12, 1978. N.Y. Reading: Lawrence stories (“The Prussian Officer”), Thomas Wolfe stories again (“No Door”), Jean Rhys (“Good Morning, Midnight”), marvelous Beckett (“Malloy”) discovered only last fall. I’ve been in a mania of reading, want to read, to re-read just about everything I see, find—a renewed hunger for discovering, re-discovering. Writing: Writing parts of the large piece (“Visitors”?) [ first section of what became the novel Arcadio]—The Texas Principessa, the insect in the peach, the icebound greenhouse and the drunken nurseryman, Arcadio the beautiful Hermaphrodite, “Precious Door”; also Houston piece on Houston as I saw it growing up; sometimes the autobiography; dramatization of The Fair Sister. Doris’s play closed. Three days a week teaching at Princeton begun last week for this semester are very hard physically for me. But I’m grateful for the job and the work. American Academy again ignored me choosing Joyce Carol Oates and Donald Barthelme. Lenten season has begun—my favorite time—late winter, very early cold, raw spring, the bulbs (already blooming in my room—hyacinth, narcissus, and forced forsythia from Princeton bushes by the railway station) and shoots and first touches and signs of spring, cold but warm, the first birds (mine who comes to sing at my windows every year before Easter). My beautiful room, full of morning light: the sun now reaches it at 9:00. February 19, 1978 N.Y. Return from San Antonio, April 16, 1978: a feeling—new—a sense of Mexican Texas, Spanish Texas. I have read from “In a Farther Country” at the San Antonio Writers’ Guild—“The Roadrunner in Woolworth’s”—and that whole world—“mestizo”—Chemisa [?] desert and mesquite. Huisache, live-oak. Hot sun, yuccas. And I had visited the home of John and Lucille Santos who cooked a Mexican dinner. Some wonderful carne, beans, rice, hot tortillas, salsa con coriander. After dinner Juan sang Mexican songs and played his guitar. There were

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twin sons, teen-age; their brother, John Phillip, is at Notre Dame where I visited last year and participated in a Writers’ Festival. We spoke of Spain and of Lucille’s family who had left her the land grants given her ancestors. John spoke of his ancestry—all Mexicans in San Antonio for some generations. All this has somehow touched my own ancestry and has brought vividly back to me the feeling for Marietta McGee-Chavez and her “Spain” and for the book itself. Which I have generally reread during this trip driving to San Antonio and have found many beautiful passages in it; and I am proud to have written it—so long ago, it seems—and hope, now, to begin to take action to see that it might be brought back into print again. And the kindness to me, the respect given, have brought me a new sense of acceptance, of affirmation. A new kind of serenity, or of harmony is in me tonight as I fly back to New York. For once, I have not felt the deadly feelings of resentment, disappointment, loss, lack of recognition, bitterness, and despair, because of my work being ignored, unrecognized. My gratitude is deep and warm. April 23, 1978. N. Y. En route to Houston for speech at Public Library. Remembering the beautiful trip yesterday by taxi to deliver the revision of “Fair Sister” to Woody King’s house in Harlem. It was a clear sunset and we drove along the Hudson River. George Washington bridge was ahead of us. The Hawthorne trees, white and pink, were just flowering in Riverside Park. It was a time of purity and freshness—early (late for me) Spring. We crossed on 125th Street to Amsterdam Ave. and thence to 147th Street, across to Convent Ave. between 147th and 148th St. Ahead was a golden-silver moon, setting. “There’s a million-dollar camera on that moon,” the taxi driver said. “Made of pure gold. And taking pictures of us right now. There are also life-size cardboard figures of human beings up there, music playing, and a record of John Kennedy’s voice.” My gift. I left the manuscript and felt elated and free and serene. We headed back downtown on St. Nicholas Ave. through sad and often ruined areas of Harlem where tenants had burnt their own buildings in rage. Yet some were still living in them. We cut to Second Avenue and came on down to 72nd where I got out and went to a meeting in the Church of the Martyrs.

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L.A. June 17, 18, 19 [1978] Whirling in the sweep and whirl of cars whirling and turning and rushing in the swift current of streets and freeways in noon blank white heat and afternoon heat and emptiness. The laying out of space with no center, no draining center, no tension; no sphincter, no muscle. But a chance in me, a chance is working in me. L.A. June [1978] What was that feeling I felt? What was that feeling I felt, alone in the dark, caught in silk. Of tenderness, stoppered cry in my throat, pain exquisite, pain bitter. What was that cry choked out of me. For a moment, in giving myself up I got myself back. [On otherwise blank left-hand page, near top and at right, as an added epigraph to the pages following:] “The old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” [The following long entry on the palm tree, written in pencil, is somewhat worked over throughout and in some places heavily, with added brackets, added words and others struck out, erasures, and new passages. So presenting it as a continuous text is misleading, in that the simultaneity of some of Goyen’s thoughts, the competing impulses, which he had to follow sequentially even though they may have burst on him simultaneously, are at least somewhat represented by the spatial arrangement of his writing on the original page and cannot be conveyed in printed paragraphs. All the {curly brackets} in this entry contain Goyen’s changes.] L.A. July 9, 1978 [Christ in the Palm] Palm ask, seek, knock I have the right to come and the right to work at my craft and vision and no one can deny me this right. The pain, the sickness are lifting. The deepest despair and fear are leaving me. Hatred and vile anger and violence of feeling in my week-long insanity. God is removing this death from me. I’m healing. I’m coming back.

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O little red spider that has made such a fragile web. Like a silver mist hanging over a corner of the window. Like your pale breath. I see your frail red at the corner of your artifice. And now the palms. This morning I have suddenly seen the palm. I touched the coarse animal hair, the leathery strips that wrap around and crisscross and bind like bindings {on} the loins of the gross, beastlike trunk of the palm. And looked up through the fierce toothed blades that are green and the brittle brown dried ones that the {curious and} mysterious force in the palm has folded down {like wings} against its sides, like old wings. I saw suddenly the power of the palm {and its mystery} and I suddenly remembered that the palm is Jesus’ tree and branch and that its fronds were strewn on his path and that he carried it in his hand into the city on that Sunday before his death and new life five days later. And I had cursed and hated the tree. A little later while squatting to turn off a water spigot (7:30 a.m.) I looked down into the Los Angeles basin gray with fog and saw a line of palms in the haze lighted a little bit by the rising sun, and the palms, in a vision {of revelation} for me, seemed blessed and of dignity and humility, and seemed to be festive of triumph and victory; yet mystical and mysterious and apocalyptic. Jesus’ palm, strange tree of humility and triumph, of pain and death, of surrender and victory. Bitter tree. Blessed leaf ! Beast of the Apocalypse. Hairy and rough-sided, its coarse hair, sexual and bestial, its rough sides, its daggerlike leaves, toothed blades and sawlike branches edged with teeth of thorns, its ugly stumpish trunk, its ragged hangings rattling from its sides. Something of John the Baptist about it, fierce and soft, shaggy and wild. Something of St. Francis about it, ragged and beggary and {fierce and} meek. The palm—truly a being of the spirit, coarse and rough, forbidding, mystical, terrifying, even; a presence of humility, awe, holiness, of sexual lust and sexual beauty. If I embraced it naked in humility and as an act of forgiveness, for I had cursed it, it would tear me and cut me, it would be like claws on my face and like knives on my breast, its dry beast hair, gross pelt, would scrape my belly and my cock would be torn again where the {circumcised} scars had once healed. Oh terrible embrace—of the scaly leper, of the scabbed beggar! Ragged presence at my very window, so close I reach through my window and touch you! It’s as though you had just arrived there. Palm! Had you moved there in the night, breaking away, for me from the procession in the valley, walking all night on the Hollywood hill to come to me? But you had been there all the time!

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The harsh body of Christ is in the palm, of thorns and spikes. Had I embraced Christ’s body on the cross, the spiked and thorned body of Christ would have torn me. It was a harsh body then in its suffering, in its dying. But it was soft and tender when it was lifted from the cross and living. Soft. The utmost tenderness, the softest flesh of new life and love and ultimate forgiveness were there, on that tree. All the time you, palm, had been there, just outside my room where I lay on my own couch of death in my old pain. And you were there! Ancient palm, rooted there for generations, shaggy and ragged and fierce and mysterious, suddenly there at my window, for me. In my sickness of spirit, in my absolute loneliness, in my, once again, lastness, you, palm, that I had mocked and cursed, loomed there in your power and beauty, healing and fierce and redemptive. I had lain in your very shadow, under the rattling of your dry leaves and in the radiance of your mystic power, of your healing powers, within close touch of your wild secret hair, your grass cunt hair and thick dick hair and grisly belly hair, beckoning half-hidden from your loin strap, your garment of bark to the harsh body of Christ. Wild, gangly, gypsy palms; stately, waving, princely palms; voluptuous, flowering, plumed, grand, fountainous palms. [On a page by itself:] I will never be able to thank God enough for all the mornings in my life, in all the places. No matter where I have been and no matter how unhappy I have been, the mornings have been all right. [New page:] L.A. Jan. 9, 1979 Reading—lives of Piranesi, Lizst, Delacroix, Rembrandt, Kierkegaard. Writing—“Arcadio”—attempts, again, at Autobiography (“Six Women”). But every day “Arcadio,” easily, simply, trustingly. [New page:] New York Feb. 10, 1979 Here since Jan. 29. A marked difference. I find New York quite grim. Yet I love my beautiful blessed rooms. They are spiritual rooms, full of spirit and grace. I stay whole days in them; the City outside beckons me not.

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Up at five a.m., the wonderful early early morning; the spacious light of the early morning, the dawn. He whom the dawn touches. Wrote the three (rewrote, but really found them) pieces in that obsessed week before reading them on night of Feb. 6 (still resting from it, I felt burned down) at Books & Co. Those who loved me then—“Frieda,” “While You Were Away,” “Margo.” Reading—Piranesi—Life of Liszt, Tillich, “The Shaking of the Foundations,” “The Eternal Now,” Lawrence’s essay on Thomas Hardy, Lawrence’s “Aaron’s Rod,” life & pictures of Delacroix. [New page:] In the long and close association with myself, closest to my own feelings than to those of any other, on that journey with myself, more remarkable than any other journey I have ever experienced. [New page:] New York May 27, 1979 On the return from Europe This sickness is in my head again. For the first time in a long time, since the early summer, June, July, 1978, before the revelation and the charge came to me, taking hate from me and replacing it with love and showing me where I was meant to be. Now I have lost the joy in living that was given to me then. May 1979 [Loose steno pad page tucked in:] For some days in early December when the air was cleared by a cold wind we saw the snowy peak of a rosy pearl-like mountain far in the distance. It had not been seen for years. And then it faded away. A curtain of smoke and dust fell and it was gone. [New page:] Hollywood June 22, 1979 (In my office) I have not left myself without witness. That is all I can say about my work today, books which have been turned back to and upon me. Today, as I write, not a single book of mine that is not returned to me, to my door literally—there was the man holding the familiar box—remaindered. Turned away

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At the building on Hollywood and Vine, in Los Angeles, where Goyen rented an office for use as a writing studio

[New page:] L.A. June 28, 1979 The attitude I find so hard to change—about writing again: What’s the use? Fighting—gently, not desperately bitterly—the feeling of failure in my work, that, again, it has come to nothing—everywhere, Europe, New York, Texas—old, I thought, strongholds of my identity as an artist—nothing, all, it seems to me, faded out, turned back. And here, in my little room on Hollywood and Vine again, I do not want to have the old feelings of failure and lostness; I have come through that; it is all new, I am new. My work will be new. Yet the spirit for work is pretty well kicked out of me. I show up, let go, turn over these feelings as best I can. The old habits are gone—or going. Something new is here. [New notebook: spiral-bound school notebook:] Feelings L.A. 10/20/79 Getting freer —to full feelings. Have been so protective. Sometimes want the old wild feelings—of wildly feeling, desperate and I don’t dare

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Late Evocations

181

feelings, feelings of going down the current of the rapids, of giving in (as opposed to “surrendering” which is spiritual). So what will pull me down and away. For sometimes get so tired of protecting, of guarding, of monitoring my feelings—turning away from situations that would produce feelings I can’t yet manage. Feeling of staying “good,” of being honest and fair and willing and open and patient and tolerant. The old person in me wants to be closed and hidden and mean and wild and vindictive and raging and crazed. These are drink signals, drink invitations, drink promises. November 11, 1979 New York That living in this apartment is an old idea. That the old life is gone. That the new life for me, beginning with my rebirth, is in California. There I have, after pain, found new life and new work. To try to fall back, recapture, relive the old pattern of life here, feel the old feelings, brings pain that is old, that I do not have to feel again, brings old disturbances, old attitudes that I do not have to have again. Yet I am new. Can I not bring my new self here, my new attitudes, new actions. I am powerless over places. I must turn it over and let it go. [Undated page tucked in:] My own struggle with my gifts and the consequences of accepting and developing and using them—complications and confusions of ego and the power in them, the control of them, the interference in them by others (publishers, agents, editors, critics, even readers) became unbearable. Would, it seemed, drive me to madness and self-destruction. Instruments of oblivion (of “getting out”) delivered me from these tormented feelings. Now, without these instruments, the same situation existing, I must use a different way.

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Epilogue On Francis Mockel’s Etching “Suite funèbre I” (1978)

[Goyen wrote this brief text for the brochure of an exhibition in France of etchings by this French artist. He himself purchased one etching.] The depth of feeling in the two figures, the emotional power embodied in them, reaches out and startles me when I come into the room. The figure at the window looks down uncaring and at the same time with a feeling of responsibility for the agony figure on the floor (is it the floor, the earth?); responsibility, not pity, not mercy, not compassion; and there is cruelty in this fugitive, glancing figure. Where was he going when he passed by this window and looked down? Wherever he had come from, wherever he is going has to do with the figure on the ground. The passerby, the glancer, has not just this moment discovered the tragic figure on the earth. There is an ancient connection between the two, an ancient relationship of blood and guilt and love. The agony figure seems to be trying to lift itself up by its elbows. Weak beyond lifting, it has frailty, power, surrender, holiness in it. A large noble figure, fainting away in dignity, in grief, in austere grief, solemnity in agony. Somehow he is not dead, to me. He will die when I take my eyes away and leave the room. But it is the passing figure, the sinister and passionate and responsible transient who haunts me. Lingering for a moment at the window (which seems to be hung in smoke), he has the face of a cunning beast—is it a coyote? is his head that of a wise ass? Is it a demon head? What is there of evil in it? Yet there is a hint of tenderness playing over it, the beginning—or end—of affection.

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184 Goyen

Yet I am both figures. I am at the window, I am on the ground. I am bound immobile by frailty; I am virile, smart, fleet, iron-hard; I am on my way, past all windows, and cannot stop or stay. August 31, 1978 Los Angeles

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Chronology

1915: On April 24, Charles William Goyen, first of three children, is born in Trinity, Texas, to Mary Inez Trow and Charles Provine Goyen. 1923: After Charles Provine Goyen moves the family to Shreveport, Louisiana, for a few months, he takes them on to Houston. They live at 614 Merrill Street for the rest of Goyen’s childhood and his youth. From the third grade on, Goyen goes to public schools in Houston. Goyen becomes interested in music and drama, as well as writing. “I thought surely I would be a composer, actor, dancer, singer, fantastico.” 1932–1937: Goyen attends Rice Institute and receives a B.A. in Literature and Languages, reading works in French and German as well as English literature. 1939: Goyen receives an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Rice. He enrolls as a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa but quits after three months and returns to Houston, where he teaches for one year at the University of Houston. 1940: Goyen’s later account is that he received government notification that he was to be drafted, so he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He first serves in a Navy recruitment office in Houston, then is sent to Midshipmen School at Columbia University in New York. He serves for several years at sea in the Pacific but suffers from migraines and seasickness that finally lead to his hospitalization. He works on early drafts of material that will become The House of Breath. 1945: After the war and hospitalization, Goyen returns briefly to Houston; he then leaves with his Navy friend Walter Berns for California by car but stops in Taos, New Mexico, where he meets Frieda Lawrence. She gives him three acres of her land at El Prado, and with Berns and Indians from the pueblos he builds a small adobe house. (For the next ten years he returns to this house off and on.) He works on short fiction and a novel. Frieda Lawrence introduces him to Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge, Stephen Spender, and others who will influence Goyen in one way or another in later years. 1947: The first acceptance for publication of Goyen’s work comes from James Laughlin, who takes “A Parable of Perez” for a future issue of New Directions in Prose and Poetry but does not publish it until 1949; in the meantime

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186 Goyen Goyen’s first published story, “The White Rooster,” appears in Mademoiselle magazine (although in a version drastically edited by the magazine). A few months later, the first of his several works to be published in The Southwest Review, “River’s Procession,” appears. With Walter Berns, Goyen travels to California to take up a teaching job at Reed College. Goyen seeks out and meets Katherine Anne Porter. 1948: Goyen’s stint at Reed is very brief, but he receives a Literary Fellowship from The Southwest Review (whose editors Allen Maxwell and Margaret Hartley will over the years publish many of his stories). He works not only on his novel but also on a translation from French of Les Fainéants (The Lazy Ones) by Albert Cossery (which New Directions will publish in 1952). 1949: Goyen travels to London, where he lives off and on for a year in a room in the house of Stephen Spender; he visits Paris; he completes The House of Breath. 1950: After publication of The House of Breath, Goyen wins the MacMurray Award for the best first novel by a Texan. The book is reviewed prominently in the New York Times Book Review by Katherine Anne Porter. Goyen lives briefly in New York, then Chicago, Houston, and various points in Texas and New Mexico while completing his first collection of short stories, Ghost and Flesh, in 1950–1951. 1952: Goyen publishes Ghost and Flesh and afterward wins a Guggenheim Fellowship. He returns to El Prado and works on a stage adaptation of The House of Breath. When the French translation of the novel, by Maurice Coindreau (Faulkner’s translator), is published, it wins the French Halperin-Kaminsky Prize. (The novel is also translated into German by Ernst Robert Curtius, eminent scholar and translator of other American masterpieces, most notably T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.) “Her Breath on the Windowpane,” a part of The House of Breath, is selected for publication in Best American Short Stories 1950. 1954: Goyen’s stage version of his first novel is produced off Broadway. With a second Guggenheim Fellowship, he now goes to Rome for a year. 1955: Goyen’s novel In a Farther Country is published, and he lives in New York. Over the next several years, Goyen travels back and forth from New York to New Mexico while continuing his involvement in the theater world. Between 1955 and 1960 Goyen teaches creative writing at the New School for Social Research in New York. 1956: Frieda Lawrence dies. Goyen sells his house in El Prado and definitively leaves New Mexico. Some of his stories are published in German translation. 1957: A fi lm version of his short story “The White Rooster” is produced. 1958: He revises the screenplay and writes song lyrics for the fi lm The LeftHanded Gun.

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Chronology 187 1960: Goyen’s second book of short stories, The Faces of Blood Kindred, is published. A new play, The Diamond Rattler, is produced at the Charles Playhouse in Boston. 1961: “A Tale of Inheritance” is selected for publication in Best American Short Stories 1961. Goyen goes to Germany. His play A Possibility of Oil is produced for television. 1962: Goyen returns to New York; he receives a Ford Foundation grant for playwriting to work with the Lincoln Center Repertory Company; his fourth play, Christy, is produced. He meets actress Doris Roberts, who is in the cast, and they are married. His novel The Fair Sister is published and is translated into German. 1964: In Germany, a translation of a collection of Goyen’s short stories is published. “Figure Over the Town” is selected for publication in Best American Short Stories 1964. During the 1964–1965 school year, Goyen teaches at Columbia University. 1966: Goyen takes a job as editor at McGraw-Hill in New York and remains in this position until 1971. During this period he writes very little but continues to involve himself in the theater: he is Playwright-in-Residence at the Trinity Square Repertory Company in New York, and a new stage version of The House of Breath called The House of Breath, Black/White is produced in Providence, Rhode Island. 1970: Goyen teaches creative writing at Brown University. 1973: Goyen publishes his nonfiction book, A Book of Jesus, the first work he has completed after his resignation from McGraw-Hill in 1971. 1974: Goyen publishes his novel Come, the Restorer. His musical, Aimee!, based on the life of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, is produced in Providence. Goyen publishes Selected Writings of William Goyen. Martha Graham’s dance company presents a new work, “Holy Jungle,” based on The House of Breath. During the 1974–1975 school year Goyen teaches again at Brown University. 1975: Goyen publishes a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The House of Breath and also The Collected Stories, including a number of new stories. He begins to divide his residency between New York and Los Angeles, where Doris Roberts has moved to work in television and fi lms. Robert Phillips conducts a detailed interview on Goyen’s life and work for The Paris Review (published in 1976). 1976: A limited edition of Nine Poems by William Goyen is published; “Bridge of Music, River of Sand,” is selected for the annual O. Henry Prize stories anthology. In the fall, Goyen begins teaching creative writing at Princeton University, a position he will continue through 1978. Goyen writes his first new story in several years, “Precious Door,” beginning the burst of creative energy of the last phase of his work (and fittingly, the story is published in The Southwest Review, in 1981).

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188 Goyen 1977: Goyen receives the Distinguished Alumni Award from Rice University. Over time, Goyen is spending more and more of the year in Los Angeles and by 1980 has effectively moved there. In Los Angeles, he rents an office to use as a writing studio in a building on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and he works on a new collection of stories. 1979: The French magazine Delta publishes a special issue on Goyen’s work. 1982: Having suffered increasing medical problems, Goyen is diagnosed as having lymphoma. He works to complete a collection of stories, tentatively entitled Precious Door, and a new novel, Arcadio. He is hospitalized and released and enjoys a significant recovery. He gives another substantial interview on his writings and his aesthetic ideas that is published in TriQuarterly magazine in 1983 along with a large sampling of Goyen’s work in progress, including short stories and excerpts from Arcadio and from Goyen’s projected but unfinished autobiographical volume, Six Women. He completes Arcadio. 1983: In April, at New York University, Goyen delivers the lecture “Recovering” on the process of writing and his experience of physical health and illness. In the summer Goyen is hospitalized in Los Angeles again, interrupting his final work on his new collection of short stories and on a new short novel that was to be based on two of the recent stories and that he had tentatively entitled Leander. Goyen dies in the hospital on August 30. Shortly after his death, Arcadio is published and receives much praise in reviews, and his lecture, “Recovering,” is published in the fall 1983 issue of TriQuarterly. 1985: Had I a Hundred Mouths: New and Selected Stories 1947–1983 is published, incorporating most of the new stories Goyen had prepared for book publication as well as some stories from his earlier collections. Since 1985: Goyen’s work continues to be reprinted and translated, with an English edition of Arcadio appearing in 1989, as well as a French translation by Patrice Repusseau, an early scholar of Goyen’s work, of that book and more of Goyen’s stories. In subsequent years, American editions of his outof-print work, his letters, and his previously unpublished second novel, Half a Look of Cain, are published.

Sources Goyen, “Introduction” to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The House of Breath (Random House, 1975); “Chronology,” in Robert Phillips, William Goyen (Twayne, 1979); Patrice Repusseau, The House of Breath Dans L’Oeuvre de William Goyen (Lille, France, 1980); “Chronology,” in Reginald Gibbons, William Goyen: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne, 1991); published interviews with Goyen; personal conversations with Goyen; and the revised chronology in Robert Phillips’ edition of William Goyen: Selected Letters from a Writer’s Life (University of Texas Press, 1995).

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Index

Aleixandre, Vicente, xxi Alexander, 4 Ames, Elizabeth, xx Anderson, Marian, 99, 116 Anderson, Sherwood, 130 Atlas, 61–63 Auden, W. H., 85 Bachelard, Gaston, 104 Balzac, Honoré de, 95 Bankhead, Tallulah, 128–129 Barthelme, Donald, 174 Baudelaire, Charles, 124 Beckett, Samuel, xiv, xxi, xxii, 63, 100, 105, 107, 136, 174 Bellow, Saul, 88 Berns, Walter, xvii, 78, 152, 157–159, 161, 185, 186 Bible, 55, 94, 126, 169 Bishop, Elizabeth, xx Blake, William, 130, 149 Bowen, Elizabeth, 84, 87 Brett, Dorothy, xvii, xx, 8–17 passim, 18–21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 81, 82, 158, 185 Caesar, Julius, 4 Camus, Albert, 62, 104, 107 Capote, Truman, xx, 87, 96, 103, 108 Cézanne, Paul, 136 Chaucer, Geoff rey, 130 Clark, Eleanor, xx Coindreau, Maurice Edgar, 96, 186

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Connolly, Cyril, 84 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 55 Cossery, Albert, 185 Curtius, Ernst Robert, xvii, 57, 95, 186 Dante, 95, 115, 130 Daudet, Alphonse, 124 DeKooning, Willem, 25 Delacroix, 56, 178, 179 Democritus, 4 Dodge, Mabel. See Luhan, Mabel Dodge Dreiser, Theodore, 125 Dubuffet, Jean, 25 Duncan, Isadora, 22 Eliot, T. S., 59, 93–95, 117, 186 El Prado (N.M.), 11, 12, 13, 19, 76, 138, 150, 185 Faulkner, William, 95 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 130 Flaubert, Gustave, 95, 124, 130 Gibbons, Reginald, 110 Gide, André, 62 Glasco, Joseph, xvii Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 95, 130 Goncourt, Jules de, 124 Goyen, Charles Provine (father), xx, 2, 3–7, 27–28, 39–52, 74–75, 86, 95, 106, 115, 185

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190

Goyen

Goyen, Charles William: as editor at McGraw-Hill, xxi, 90–91, 187; playwriting, 93, 101, 102; service in World War II, 75, 76, 77, 79–81, 104, 107, 130–131, 169, 185; and the short story, 111–113, 114–115, 116–119; teaching, 91–92, 120–121; writing “medallions,” 97–98, 119 Goyen, Charles William (works of): Arcadio, xii, xv, xvi, 108–109, 114, 116, 124–128, 136–137, 174, 178, 188; A Book of Jesus, 73, 99–100; Collected Stories, 73; Come, the Restorer, 73, 97, 100, 101, 122, 187; The Diamond Rattler, 102; The Faces of Blood Kindred, 73, 187; The Fair Sister, 73, 187; Ghost and Flesh, 73, 98–99, 186; Half a Look of Cain, 159; The House of Breath, xii, xiii, 73, 74, 75, 77, 83, 85–86, 95–97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104–106, 113, 114, 122, 123, 125, 130, 134, 135, 185, 186; In a Farther Country, 73, 100, 101, 108, 122, 134, 175, 186; Nine Poems, 73, 92–93, 187; Selected Writings, 73, 75 Goyen, Mary Inez (Trow) (mother), xiv, xvii–xix, 5, 41, 42, 44, 48, 51, 89, 95, 119, 150, 185 Graham, Martha, 187 Green, Ann, xvii

Jacob and Esau, 63–67 James, Henry, 93, 129 Jesus Christ, 28, 99, 126, 176, 178 Johnson, Spud, 10, 81, 158 John the Baptist, 177 Jones, Margo, xvii, xx, 8, 9, 24–29, 179 Joyce, James, 133, 146 Jung, C. G., xxii

Hart, William, 93–94, 150–151 Hawk, Rachel and Bill, 17 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 54–55, 56, 93, 114 Heine, Heinrich, 59, 95, 130 Hemingway, Ernest, 130 Hippocrates, 4 Hora, Thomas, 68 Huxley, Aldous, 19

Macaulay, Rose, 83 Mackey, Ted, 17 MacLeish, Archibald, 94 Mann, Thomas, 58, 95, 130 Mansfield, Katherine, 19, 89, 101, 117 Maupassant, Guy de, 124 McCullers, Carson, xx, 87–89, 103, 108 Melville, Herman, 93 Merlo, Frank, 83

Keats, John, 146 Kierkegaard, Søren, 178 King, Woody, 175 Kiowa Ranch, 11, 13, 16, 17, 76, 150, 152 Ku Klux Klan, 122, 173 Kundera, Milan, 54, 56 Laughlin, James, 85, 185 Lawrence, D. H., xx, 8–18 passim, 19, 21, 22, 23, 57, 76, 81, 83, 159, 174, 179 Lawrence, Frieda, xvii, xx, 8, 9, 10–18, 19, 22–23, 24, 29, 31, 76, 77, 81–83, 150, 151–153, 158–159, 179, 185, 186 Linscott, Robert N., xvii, xx, 55, 86–87, 88, 107 Liszt, Franz, 178, 179 Lowell, Robert, 124 Luhan, Antonio, 8, 10, 22, 23, 30–31 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, xvii, xx, 8–12 passim, 19, 22–24, 30, 31, 81, 83, 158, 185

Isherwood, Christopher, 85–86

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Index Middleton Murry, John, 19 Milton, John, 95, 130 Mockel, Francis, 183–184 Mozart, W. A., 74, 106 Nin, Anaïs, xvii, 104 Oates, Joyce Carol, 174 O’Connor, Flannery, 88, 103, 110, 124 Peden, William, 115 Phillips, Robert, xxiii, 73, 187 Philoctetes, 60–61, 62, 63, 68–70 Picasso, 109, 173 Piranesi, 178 Porter, Katherine Anne, xvii, xx, 8, 9, 11, 32–37, 113, 117, 186 Pound, Ezra, xiv, 59, 93–95, 117 Proust, Marcel, 95, 98, 129 Quiblier, Jean-Michel, 103

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191

Schnack, Elisabeth, 96 Schubert, Franz, 99 Shakespeare, 120 Sitwell, Dame Edith, 84–85 Socrates, 4 Sophocles, 149. See also Philoctetes Spender, Natasha (Litvin), 84 Spender, Stephen, xvii, 83–85, 86, 161, 185, 186 Stein, Gertrude, 22, 146 Stevens, Wallace, 110 Stokowski, Leopold, 19, 20 Stravinski, Igor, 25 Swayne, Ruth, 10 Synge, John Millington, 58, 59 Taos Pueblo, 18, 19 Tillich, Paul, 179 Tintoretto, 56 Tiny Mother, 20 Turner, J. M. W., 56

Ravagli, Angelino, 11–17, 23, 159 Ravel, Maurice, 25 Rembrandt, 55, 159 Repusseau, Patrice, 188 Rhys, Jean, 174 Rice Institute (later Rice University), 48–50, 130, 149, 170–172, 185, 188 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 59 Rimbaud, Arthur, xxii, 130 Roberts, Doris, xix, 73, 86, 99, 172–173, 174 Robinson, Dorothy, 84, 86, 161 Rogers, Millicent, xvii, xx, 8, 9, 16, 29–32

Vidal, Gore, 105, 108

Saint Francis, 109, 126–127, 177 Saint Paul, 115, 126 Santos, John and Lucille, 174 Saroyan, William, 58, 106, 129–130

Zola, Émile, 125

Whitman, Walt, 58, 129, 130 Williams, George, 170–172 Williams, Tennessee, 8, 81, 83, 105 Williams, William Carlos, 23–24 Wilson, Edmund, 60 Wolfe, Thomas, 57, 58, 106, 129, 130, 174 Woolf, Virginia, 19 Wordsworth, William, 95 Wurlitzer, Helene, 83–84 Yeats, William Butler, 58, 101

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