It starts with trouble, p.35
It Starts With Trouble, page 35
In retrospect, 1975 should have been one of the best years of Goyen’s life, at least in terms of recognition offered for his life’s work. But by its end, he considered it one of the worst. To Phillips, he described his sixtieth as “a just-about totally negative year. . . . What I thought was my most distinguished book and certainly one of the most distinguished books in American books in decades got not one distinction given it—Zero.”22 Neither Come, the Restorer nor the Collected Stories was issued in paperback; despite strong reviews overall for the latter, sales were apparently poor. Goyen was also despondent over how the books themselves were produced. He considered the bindings to be cheap and shabby and consistently felt that Doubleday had failed to publicize his work adequately. The year had been his bid for recognition and honors, and when the big prize or payoff failed to materialize, his mood turned darker.23 His problems, of course, went much deeper than disappointment at his career, and it’s hard to imagine a tangible reward that would have relieved his depression. His drinking, which had accelerated dangerously since the move to Los Angeles, made a clear reckoning of his pain impossible. In lucid moments, he did recognize the larger problem, though a solution seemed as far away as ever:
In L.A., April 9, 1976
My 60th year was one of my loneliest, my most displaced, my most orphaned and homeless. My fantasy was the same as that of my 16th, 17th, 18th year; my longing, my searchings, my pain, my lostness the same as in all my years. Age does not change these, in me. The same as on Merrill Street, long ago. (HRC 31.1)
“Runnin down those cold dark streets with God”
Roberts’s account of Goyen’s alcoholism in Are You Hungry, Dear?, while selectively detailed, makes clear the toll drinking had taken on him over the course of their marriage. Their relationship had begun “in a bar” and developed “over cocktails,” and after a particularly sodden evening from which they both awoke “splayed around the floor [of their apartment] like victims of a car wreck,” Roberts began to understand the situation. She gave up drinking, but Goyen did not: “Bill continued to drink, and, because I didn’t, I saw his behavior much more clearly.”24 Admitting that Goyen “could be quite cruel” when he was drunk, she describes marital arguments with a resilient humor that belies what must have been deep pain and frustration. Goyen’s work with a psychiatrist, who diagnosed depression, had little overall effect on these regular confrontations, and by the time the couple had settled in Los Angeles in the summer of 1975, Goyen’s drinking had increased alarmingly. Not only did he feel isolated from his community of New York friends, but, as Roberts notes, Los Angeles reminded him of Houston: “He lived all the failures of his life anew, this time inflamed by the dry weather and palm trees of Los Angeles. The warm climate and vegetation are similar to that of his Texas home, a place that brought too many painful memories.”25 After spending his early life trying to escape from the repressive climate, both meteorological and psychological, of East Texas, Goyen felt trapped in yet another sterile environment with nowhere to go and no way to live. He had graduated from martinis to straight vodka, and, according to Phillips, he basically “freaked out.”26
The breaking point came later the next year. Roberts had begun attending Al-Anon meetings to better understand how to deal with the challenges of living with an alcoholic. After a particularly difficult evening during which Goyen had drunkenly accosted several guests at a party given by Norman Lear, she refused to argue about his behavior but let him give vent to his feelings:
“I don’t want to live,” Bill said.
“I know that, and there’s nothing I can do to change that if that’s how you feel,” I said. “I wish I could. If there was something, I’d do it.”
“I write a book and what happens to it?” he said. “It gets taken off the press. I write another book and they don’t even send it out for blurbs. It’s like giving birth to these babies and they die. They’re stillborn. You get up to the top of the mountain and you go sliding back down. And it takes everything in the world to come back up. You write the next one and nothing happens. Who knows when I will write another one? Who knows?”27
After a long night of frank discussion, Goyen called Alcoholics Anonymous the next day. Like all new attendees, he began going to meetings every day at first and kept track of his self-analysis in a notebook. In September he started a semester’s teaching job at Princeton and began attending meetings in New York:
Sept. 8. 6:15 Mustard Seed meeting, 122 E 3rd [St.]. Disappointing and cold; the leader, a woman bedecked with bracelets and chains of gold, presumed authority and gave an authoritative comment or dictum on following each person’s story. She said our Higher Power could be anything—“an ashtray.” The meeting seemed dark and lusterless, even spiritless, after, except for the face of Doris, a young black woman and the spirit of a beach man. Still, it was my fellowship, my family. (HRC 29.6)
“Fellowship” and “family” were clearly resonant and essential terms for Goyen, who had been writing about this kind of community of storytelling and self-repair for most of his career. The small groups of pained and displaced characters that fill In a Farther Country and “Tenant in the Garden,” for instance, illustrate the idea that telling one’s own story is fundamental to finding a place and creating a full and functioning identity. As Ernest Kurtz explains in his history of AA, this concept of personal narrative was central to the program’s therapeutic strategy from the beginning: “The fellowship’s faith in the efficacy of the telling by stories about personal experience was rooted in its memory of Bill Wilson’s first call on Dr. Bob Smith. This faith in Word and Witness was also itself witnessed to by the ‘story section’ of its hallowed book, Alcoholics Anonymous.” Storytelling, which was allied but not equated to confession, was a way of demonstrating acceptance (the acknowledgement of reality) and “limited control.”28 Combined with the somewhat secularized, structural elements of religious faith—the need for a “higher power,” no matter how symbolic—this rigorous practice of telling and listening must have fit familiarly into Goyen’s deep and recent memories of spiritual practice. There is no doubt that the experience at Weston and Goyen’s subsequent engagement with the idea of Jesus had constituted an idiosyncratic return to his Methodist upbringing. However, these experiences, and the writing that followed, also reinforced his long-standing literary interest in the structures of salvation and rebirth. His approach to storytelling had always leaned on the concept of repair and restoration, the knitting together of broken fragments. Now this same impulse, to heal and save (in both senses), was realized in a much more mundane yet vital way.
The process of self-reflection encouraged by AA came naturally as well. In a large black notebook, Goyen recorded his attempts at a painful retrospection focused on his history of drinking. Those themes that had been obsessive in his work from the beginning—early exile, isolation, secrecy—now came to signify deeper causes of addiction: “Even then (back in Houston in the 1930s, fearful, terrified even, nervous, anxiety-ridden, yearning) I knew it was going to be too much to bear sooner or later and that I would seek oblivion somewhere, in some way. It was certain, to me, that I would not endure this pain always. I thought it would be early death. I, as I thought, finally reached for this oblivion, this self-effacement, in alcohol” (HRC 29.6). Certain elements recur in these accounts that echo significantly in Goyen’s writing. His early work, particularly Christopher Icarus, had registered the burden of his perceived role as caretaker; the demands of relationships and family stood in opposition to independence and expression. Now he circled back to this central insight: “1. In childhood taught that my place was to take care of them. 2. Since childhood worry over others, anticipation, anxiety, fear, projection.” He is drawn back to the phrase “nurse, saint & savior” several times in these accounts, and on an index card tucked into the notebook at some point sketched this pattern: “obcessive [sic] servitude and total surrender for years—to Joe, to marriage (family pattern). Led to alcohol to kill feelings (resentment, fear)—alcohol led me here” (HRC 29.6, original emphases). This demand for self-sacrifice, as Goyen felt it, then fed a penchant for secrecy and imaginative concealment: “1. Blanket over chairs—hidden world, exquisite aloneness. Self-pity, abasement, secretiveness. 2. What is ‘reality’? I said. ‘And whose reality? Who wants that reality. Let those others have that. I’ll make my own reality” (HRC 29.6, original emphases). The image of the boy hiding under the blanket—whether to listen to music secretly because his father disapproved or later to write against that disapproval—remains powerful and important to these strained meditations. Goyen recognized the problematic connection between what he here calls his “alcoholic being” and his creative life. The secrecy had been a response that later developed into drinking, but it also created what was unique and sustaining about his art. The drive to make his own reality, to build another world that hides from and confronts his life, was both creative and destructive, a way to live and a way to die.
Precious Door: New Stories
Goyen attended AA faithfully for the rest of his life. On visits to far-flung campuses to give readings, he often asked those looking after him to drive him to local meetings, though he sometimes worried about what people would think when they found out he was an alcoholic.29 Given his emotional fragility, maintaining sobriety was in no way easy; however, the benefits were soon evident in newly intense and inventive writing.30 The first product of this rediscovered clarity was a story based on an image that had haunted him since The Book of Jesus. In the final section, “Words of Jesus,” the first quotation he lists is from John 10:9: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.” In his working notes on the experience at Weston, Goyen seems possessed by this familiar metaphor, as though seizing on it—truly seeing into it—for the first time:
Here I am, standing before you, Like you said for me, I am a door for you. Open me! And walk through me! Free, unlocked, unbound. I, the door, need to be opened, too. Who understands a door? And if you walk through me, to your own, standing only one minute in me to see the openness before you, then I shall have come to my own too: open and unlocked and unbound, feeling you pass through me. Something of me will pass through, with you, and in you. We will both be open, and free. I am a door, I am a door, I am a door. (HRC 10.7)
The sense of discovered space—of liberation—is palpable here, as though the boy under the blanket had come to see a way out that no longer involved keeping secrets. Jesus-as-door is a near double to the constrained seeker, needing passage in order to share a new reality. The door is thus more than a figure for Jesus’s instrumental function as sacrifice or “way” to salvation. The “I” and “the door” are companions, necessary to one another, bound in a relationship that allows one to transport the other.31
“Precious Door,” the story that emerged from these meditations, is one of Goyen’s deepest and most brooding. Grounded in his East Texas boyhood, the simple account records the memory of a hurricane that hit the narrator’s hometown when he was twelve years old. In the yellow stillness preceding the storm, the narrator’s younger brother finds a young man lying in a nearby field. The father realizes that this unconscious stranger is wounded, and with his son’s help he takes in the body and begins to wash and treat the stranger’s injuries. Soon the wind begins to blow, and for their protection all of the family except the father and son leave for the shelter at the local high school. The stranger’s injury is grave, and despite attentive nursing, he soon dies:
My father prayed over the young man, laying his carpenter’s hand on the brow of the suffering man and clasping his hand in love and hope. And then I heard my father’s words, “He’s dead.”
We said the Lord’s prayer together on our knees by the dead stranger’s pallet. The rhythmic clanging of the wind against something of metal, our washtub maybe, tolled over our prayer. (HHM 43)
As the storm hits and the roads and fields begin to flood, a second wanderer appears at the window, “a figure of flying hair and tearing clothes with wild eyes and a face of terror” (HHM 44). This is the dead man’s older brother. The two had been riding boxcars from Memphis to Houston, perhaps to find work on a ship and travel the world. But they had argued, and the older had stabbed the younger in a rage. Distraught with grief, the guilty brother insists on taking the body back out into the storm, and in the flooding aftermath days later the narrator hears strange tales of “a floating door bearing the bodies of two men . . . moving on the wide river through several towns.” This odd vessel is last seen riding perilously into the Gulf of Mexico, topping “the crests of dangerous rapids so serenely that it was easy to see the two men, one, alive and fierce, holding the other, dead” (HHM 47).
On a basic level, “Precious Door” captures a heightened and intimate moment between a father and son. The storm and the wounded stranger bring the two together, creating a tight, dramatic space that allows the narrator to see his father’s tenderness in a moment of true charity. Father and son “nurse” the wounded man, and the son notices his “father’s face” filling “with softness” in the firelight (HHM 42–43). In effect, the narrator is able to observe—and later remember—a demonstrated warmth and love often absent from Goyen’s fictional fathers. And yet despite this loving retrospect, an undercurrent of loneliness and desire pulls at the boy’s feelings: he can see his father’s gentleness toward the stranger, but he also intuits that the stranger foreshadows his own future, away from family, possibly estranged, searching for someone to love: “I felt for the first time the love that one person might have for another he did not know, for a stranger come suddenly close. . . . And I hoped then, with a longing that first touched me there on that wild and tender night in our faraway parlor in that hidden little town, that one day I would know the love of another, no matter how bitter the loss of them would be” (HHM 43). The two brothers are thus another kind of example, of how intimacy might be offered and shared, even if it ends in sorrow and violence. As Ben—the older, Cain-like murderer—gently rocks the body in his arms, the boy feels his father’s arm around him and understands the contrast between his fragile but sheltered childhood and his uncertain and painful future: “I felt my everlasting love for him, my father, but in my head rang Ben’s words, we had a plan. My blood rushed in exciting hope. And that hope was that one day I would have enough courage to be this tender as this man was now at this moment, if ever I was lucky enough to find someone who would take my tenderness. And to have, together with someone, a plan” (HHM 45–46).
The image of the two brothers leaving in the storm—and later caught together on the door floating toward the sea—registers the tragic loss in love as well as its power to recover or reconcile. The term “reconciliation” had become important for Goyen, and his reliance on it here indicates the shift in attitude that his AA experience had begun to produce. Though the general concept may have arisen out of program material, it is more likely that he found it in Paul Tillich’s The New Being, which he began reading shortly after his first meetings. In the second chapter of this collection of sermons, Tillich describes the “New Being” as the product of a kind of “re-newal: The threefold ‘re,’ namely, re-conciliation, re-union, re-surrection.”32 A reconciliation with God is necessary because we feel fundamentally inadequate to His demands and therefore “hostile” to our existence. In language that must have resonated with Goyen, Tillich describes a familiar pattern of modern alienation: “Everybody carries a hostility towards the existence into which he has been thrown, toward the hidden powers which determine his life and that of the universe, toward that which makes him guilty and that threatens him with destruction because he has become guilty.” This hostility is directed both inward and outward, toward the self and others: “Be reconciled to God; that means at the same time, be reconciled to ourselves. But we are not; we try to appease ourselves. . . . And he who feels rejected by God and who rejects himself feels also rejected by others. . . . We tried hard to make ourselves acceptable to them, and we failed. And their and our hostility grew. Be reconciled to God—that means, at the same time, be reconciled with the others!”33
In the story the father becomes the voice for this kind of healing. After the brothers disappear into the storm, he tells his son that “the love of God works through reconciliation,” which he describes as “coming back together in peace” (HHM 46, 47). The door on which the brothers move becomes the image for this tragic recovery of kinship, a togetherness possible, the image implies, only because of, or through, death itself. The implication for Goyen was powerful. On the one hand, the story implies a kind of recovery and rejoining with Charlie Goyen similar to the one he imaginatively constructed in “The Beleek Swan.” Here as there, the father often seen as callous or cold is instead warm, thoughtful, and caring. Father and son find a togetherness rarely possible in life, bound through the needs of a stranger. In this sense, “Precious Door” is part of the long mourning for his father that continued in the 1978 lecture “While You Were Away” and suggests a still-fresh need to revisit this relationship in the hope of belated repair. At the same time, the story of the two brothers closely reflects Goyen’s separation from Walter Berns, a deep wound that began to resurface more clearly during his later years. The two young men with a plan to travel enact the close bond and eventual falling out between the veterans who built the house in El Prado, a story repeated by Goyen’s relationship with Glasco.34 Reconciliation thus implied finding an image that could hold, in charged tension, the continued grief of Goyen’s deepest losses. In this way, the door serves as both an opening and closing, a chance to signal release from burdens, freedom from pain, while opening the self to a new life.
