It starts with trouble, p.34
It Starts With Trouble, page 34
The account of this episode in the Paris Review transcripts has a comic and absurdist air that belies its danger. To his old friend Ellen Garwood, a writer and the wealthy wife of a Texas Supreme Court justice, Goyen confessed that he did not “have enough medicine” to end his life and that he was “still afraid . . . searching for hope.” 5 Later, in the sketch for Six Women titled “Margo,” he built from the memory of Margo Jones’s alcohol-fueled death a fuller contemplation of his own self-destructive drinking. The piece concludes with the ominous suggestion of a kind of fated repetition:
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. (GAE 29)
If in some respect Goyen had always been afraid of becoming Folner (who “took sleeping pills at midnight in a hotel in San Antonio” [HOB 113]), he was equally unsettled by the thought of repeating Jones’s fevered burnout. It was as though the family curse—most specifically the alcoholism of some of the Goyen men—could extend to all of East Texas, bringing Margo Jones into this wider and more dangerous realm of kinship: “Of all of them Margo is my sister—demonic, rapturous insane in booze and in reverie and golden dream.”6
California evoked this nightmare. Goyen’s first impulse was therefore to flee to a reliable haven. A letter from Brett put the idea of New Mexico in his head, and that fall he was on a plane to Albuquerque, hoping to find a way to buy back his little adobe house in El Prado. He kept a notebook during this trip and recorded not only his new impressions of these old haunts but memories of his first arrival in New Mexico with Berns: “The de Vargas Hotel. Walter and I arriving in a snow storm, I believe we got a room there. It was a cheap rate hotel. Now it looks first class, thrives—as everything in Sante Fe does.”7 The practical question was whether Brett could legally give back to Goyen a piece of the land he once owned. The house he had built with Berns had been sold, probably in 1958, and now was owned by John Manchester, Brett’s art dealer and caretaker during her later years. Brett had willed her own property to Manchester as well, presumably in return for his services. Despite Brett’s pleas, Manchester refused to hand over any property to Goyen unless he paid its full value. Since Goyen had very little money (“another reason for my despondency”), he couldn’t afford what had become expensive Taos real estate, but he was reluctant to give up on what seemed for the moment like the key to his salvation.8 “A great mysterious vitality came into me,” he wrote to Ellen Garwood, “a saving, life-restoring power came, out of the great mountain near my house, out of the land, out of ‘my’ house, out of the mysterious force in . . . Brett.”9 This surge of welcome energy came to him after spending the night in his old house, and it convinced him, at least momentarily, that reconnecting to this place—regrounding himself in an ideal landscape—could restore what Los Angeles had taken away. He wrote in his notebook: “I am helpless, stranded. It is as though my books had never been written, did not exist. I feel, have felt, unknown, without identity. This is why El Prado, the place of my self-discovery, and of my early vision has touched me so deeply this time.” Ultimately, the lack of money made this desperate move impossible. It was a last attempt to recover the lost world of Taos, and it was the last time Goyen would see Brett. She died two years later, at the age of 93.
The Collected Stories
This unsettled trip to New Mexico bears a resemblance, in manner and tone, to one of Goyen’s finest stories, written a year or so earlier. The narrator of “Bridge of Music, River of Sand” doesn’t return to Taos, but he does revisit the landscape of his upbringing (and the spot that corresponds to Emma Goyen’s near drowning in the Trinity River). On a “sentimental trip through home regions,” this speaker is clearly unstable, hallucinating a naked diver who leaps from an old railroad bridge into a dry riverbed (CS 283). In the end he wanders away from this suicidal vision, shaken by his attempt to recover a past that seems to haunt rather than reassure. Goyen left New Mexico in much the same state of mind. The need to reconnect to old places was strong, but the pain and loneliness of his distance from Roberts, combined with his intensified depression at what he considered the failure of his writing, left him unmoored. He had become both the naked diver and his troubled witness, desperately seeking a lost fertility but finding nothing to nourish his recovery.
His distress had not gone unnoticed, of course, even in the months and years leading up to his suicide attempt. A few years before the crisis in Newport Beach, Goyen’s nephew Don Gerrard, who ran The Bookworks publishers in Berkeley, persuaded Random House to copublish a collection titled Selected Writings of William Goyen: Eight Favorites by a Master American Storyteller.10 The 1974 volume included excerpts from The House of Breath, In a Farther Country, and The Fair Sister, along with stories from Ghost and Flesh (“The White Rooster,” “Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt”) and The Faces of the Book Kindred (“Old Wildwood,” “A People of Grass”). The story “Figure over the Town” rounded out the volume, for which Goyen wrote a brief but revealing introduction. In very spare prose he set out a basic autobiographical narrative, describing his childhood psychology as “quick and scared; serving, secretly unsettled; imaginative and nervous and sensual.” His conception of his own writing, what shapes and drives it, was both resigned and determined:
It was clear to me now: I saw my life as a writing life, a life of giving shape to what happened, of searching for meanings, clarification, Entirety. It was my Way: expression in words. From then on, I managed to write, with little or no money, with growing distinction—which, I have come to see, brings little usable reward—awards, honors, little money. What I wanted was to make splendor. What I saw, felt, knew was real, was more than what I could make of it. That made it a lifetime task, I saw that.11
Another opportunity to reflect and make a statement about the goals and shape of his career came soon after, thanks to Robert Phillips. After the publication of Come, the Restorer, Goyen was still under contract with Doubleday for a novel and his projected memoir. Because of his inconsistent productivity, he was in near despair at having nothing ready to show his editors. He had originally planned to complete Six Women but had produced only a few sketches. On his own initiative, Phillips gathered all of Goyen’s stories that had been published in magazines and previous collections, made photocopies, and presented the manuscript as a surprise for his friend’s birthday. A tearful Goyen was stunned, grateful, and relieved to submit the text in February of 1975 to Doubleday, who forgave him the other contract.12 Again he wrote a brief but significant preface for the book, in which he outlined his basic conception of the short story: “I have felt the short-story form as some vitality, some force that begins (and not necessarily at the beginning), grows in force, reaches a point beyond which it cannot go without losing force, loses force and declines; stops. For me, story telling is a rhythm, a charged movement, a chain of pulses or beats. To write out of life is to catch, in pace, this pulse that beats in the material of life” (CS x). The reliance on metaphors from music stands out most clearly in this clarifying account. A story is a rhythm, and its telling embodies its pulse in a performative language that implies a listener:
But for me, as I have written, I’ve been mainly interested in the teller-listener situation. Somebody is telling something to somebody: an event! Who’s listening to this telling? Where is the listener? I’ve not been interested in simply reproducing a big section of life off the streets or from the Stock Exchange or Congress. I’ve cared most about the world in one person’s head. Most, then, I’ve cared about the buried song in somebody, sought it passionately; or the music in what happened. (CS x)
In part because his method was so intuitive, Goyen was not given to fully developed theoretical statements about his work. Consequently, this preface is a crucial record of the kind of thinking that led to some of the most arresting short fiction of the twentieth century. Again, the indirect evocation of the cardboard piano is crucial here: the story and its telling are moments of witness that emerge out of an enforced silence; the listener must be present to hear and recognize—to attest to and register—the self, the identity telling the story. In this sense, to care about “the world inside one person’s head” is not a solipsism but an absolute claim on the value—and validity—of inwardness. That such a telling remains tangled in the processes of music merely suggests that all intimate revelations remain partially concealed or, to use a different Goyen metaphor, unthawed.
There are 26 stories in all in The Collected Stories, including the first two collections plus a few ungathered texts and sections of Half a Look of Cain. The response to the volume, though not without the occasional reservation, was warm, admiring, and respectful in a way Goyen had seldom experienced in his career. Two reviews stand out: Richard Rhodes’s deeply sympathetic reading in the Chicago Tribune and Joyce Carol Oates’s penetrating and reverential response in the New York Times Book Review. Rhodes emphasized the recurrence of the idea of “breath” throughout Goyen’s work, a body of writing he considered “extraordinarily subtle,” a successful blending of “the folk tale with the abbreviation of the modern short story.” Unlike so many reviewers in the past, he accepted Goyen’s symbolic method as essential to the nature of his writing: “Goyen’s symbolism is uncanny, ghostly, breath-like too, displaced by his quality of vision from the ordinary. . . . He is not deliberately obscure, but he is writing about qualities of memory and feeling, shifts in loyalty and love, that ordinarily function or occur outside any frame of words.” This tendency to reach beyond articulation Rhodes perceptively located in Goyen’s combination of “mature experience with childhood memory, which may stand for the juncture in the life of every child where what was wordless begins to come into words. At that juncture Goyen does his work, there and at the juncture, which parallels the childhood one, between words as music and words as sense.”13 Oates offered a similar generosity of attention based on the acceptance of Goyen’s distinctive gifts, “that curious blend of the surreal and the tender, the nightmarish and the visionary.” Perhaps even more gratifying to Goyen, she recognized his consistent mastery of “the form of the short story” and placed him at the root of midcentury writing: “One can see, for instance, how Flannery O’Connor must have learned from ‘The White Rooster,’ and it is quite likely that many other writers have learned from Goyen to seek out what he calls ‘the buried song’ in their characters.” She urged readers to be patient with these lyric evocations, to read them aloud if possible and repeatedly in order to let their meanings emerge, in order to appreciate “their musical, delicate authority, their evocation of transient, visionary moments that might otherwise be lost in that large ‘disorder’ of the world.”14
Goyen was “overwhelmed” by Oates’s “rich and full and tender” reading of his work. “I read it all in one gulp,” he wrote to Phillips, “now I’ll savor it piecemeal and slowly. I never expected such thorough, careful attention.”15 It must have been doubly a surprise since prior to this review he had tended to see Oates as part of the literary establishment that had excluded him. Along with John Updike, she symbolized a kind of success he still longed for, and in his darker, often alcoholic moments he wasn’t above lashing out at anyone who seemed to have the recognition he felt he lacked.16 But a touching reaction to his work, like that of Richard Rhodes, moved him to contact and, if possible, form a new relationship of allies: “I sent him a note,” Goyen explained to Phillips, “and today he answered with an equally loving letter. . . . He’s marvelous—a new discovery.”17
Goyen could add the good feeling generated by The Collected Stories to another honor that occurred earlier in the year. It had been twenty-five years since the publication of The House of Breath, and Random House in conjunction with Don Gerrard’s Bookworks had decided to issue a new “Silver Anniversary” edition of the novel with an event to honor its classic status. “People (critics, writers, editors) are writing from all over,” Goyen wrote to Maurice Edgar Coindreau, “and a great ad will be published. This makes me feel proud, shy and older! . . . There will be a reception at the Gotham Book Mart, and pieces in the New York Times Book Review and Publisher’s Weekly.”18 This kind of attention was obviously welcome, particularly for a book that represented Goyen’s earliest artistic impulse, and it was a pleasure to hear from old friends like James Leo Herlihy who wrote in with love and support. But as sometimes occurs with anniversaries, the marking of time showed its double edge: pride at a past accomplishment was mixed with anxiety about subsequent failures and present ambitions. One sign of his emotional unsteadiness may have been Goyen’s willingness to alter the original edition of the novel to remove a few overt sexual references. For example, in section XII of the original text, during the long monologue about his past, Christy describes wandering through Shreveport in a cold rain and coming upon a park:
[The place] seemed like the very patch of Hell where there was couples whisperin, men to men and men to women, and I went into a city toilet and saw drawn pricks hangin long on the wall and messages of lovers left for lovers written there; and crap from the toilets erupted up onto the floor and I had trod in it. Then I came out and felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and I felt robbed of everthing I never had but dreamt of and hoped I could have, I felt fouled by the filth of what men leave and had left behind them; and then I thought, “Oh I am young and have somethin to give and to be used and to write on a wall.” (HOB 166)
In the revised version, Christy walks “upon a park that seemed like the very patch of Hell where there were couples whisperin, men to men and men to women. Then I felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and I felt robbed of everthing I never had but dreamt of and hoped I could have; and then I thought, ‘O I am young and have somethin to give and to be used.’”19 As Reginald Gibbons explains in his afterword to the restored, fiftieth-anniversary edition of the novel, these “minor changes and deletions . . . seem unnecessary,” and the thinking behind them may have been compromised by Goyen’s lack of confidence in his work (HOB 189–190). It is difficult to believe that this particular cut was motivated by sexual squeamishness, particularly after the Rabelaisian frankness of Come, the Restorer released the year before, but there may have been something about the scene (the conjunction of sexual loneliness and human waste?) that Goyen found distasteful after so many years.
If the Collected Stories and the reissue of The House of Breath prompted greater retrospection in Goyen’s sixtieth year, the interview by Phillips for the Paris Review could only have intensified it. Conducted that June at Phillips’s house in Katonah, New York, the discussion ranged widely over Goyen’s biography and ideas about writing. For the first time, under extensive questioning, he offered penetrating descriptions of his early experiences in Houston and Taos and crystallized some of his intuitions about form. In an inspired moment, while discussing his approach to the novel, he conjured up the image of a quilt: “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” (GAE 97). The textile metaphors from Half a Look of Cain and In a Farther Country emerge more clearly here to ground Goyen’s sense of the spatial arrangement of narrative fragments. (The image also recalls his encounter with the Elgin Marbles and his notion of writing as a “frieze of words.”) Combined with his cherished conception of writing as song—and his books as song cycles—this homespun analogue reveals a great deal about the lyric and narrative impulses he often sought to reconcile. Time (in the form of story) seems here contained in a pattern that is both fragmentary and meaningful—but that ultimately allows for a kind of keeping or saving, a blanket of memory to be stored in a chest, held onto, or passed on.
The interview also reveals Goyen’s talent as a raconteur and sharp-edged gossip. The sequence recounting his friendship with Carson McCullers is both funny and malicious, a condescending portrait of a writer he often grouped with Capote as both a competitor and subject of envy. He was fond of stating the difference between his Texan or southwestern roots and “Southernness,” what he here calls “those sicknesses and terrors that come from the Deep South” (GAE 95). As is clear from his review of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he worked consistently to separate himself from what he considered the glittering but insubstantial delicacy of Dixie kitsch.20 In his more despairing moments, it never ceased to gall him that writing he thought inferior—less serious, with less at stake—could be seen as more important than his own.
Of course, good interviews can sometimes produce inadvertent self-description, and in his attempt to capture McCullers’s weaknesses Goyen may have clarified one of his own. Asked by Phillips whether she could have written an autobiography, he replied: “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 an autobiography; it would be impossible for her . . . she had disguised herself so much . . . And what a past, you know? Her mother . . . the Mother of all these people . . . Thank God mine seems to be quite okay—I’d be raving mad at this point” (GAE 88–89). Though he did attempt an autobiography and would ultimately produce potent sketches such as “Margo,” the echo of Goyen’s own complications shadows this analysis. His very real difficulties with his mother are too easily discounted here, and he allows his own disguises—subtle and various as they were—to slip behind the vivid account of McCullers’s eccentricities. Though everyone quietly edits his past, it is worth noting that Goyen makes no mention of Berns, even in the context of Taos, avoids his affair with Spender, and similarly elides Joe Glasco. Given his marriage and potential privacy concerns, these omissions are understandable, but they also underline a sometimes fierce desire to control his public reputation.21 In this respect, his account of a weakened McCullers may have allowed him to strengthen his own self-esteem at a time when his confidence, despite mounting honors, remained low.
