It starts with trouble, p.44
It Starts With Trouble, page 44
8. The correspondence related to this project is in HRC 37.1.
9. See Doris Roberts and Danielle Morton, Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs, and Lasagna (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 275. Another dimension of this fear was almost certainly the realization that he was following in the footsteps of his grandfather W. S. Goyen, succumbing to the darker tendencies of his father’s family about which he had written so often.
10. Ibid., 276.
11. Mark W. Rectanus, German Literature in the United States: Licensing Translations in the International Marketplace (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1990), 91.
12. Goyen to Robert Phillips, December 2, 1971 (SL 336).
13. Goyen to Dorothy Brett, August 7, 1968 (SL 325).
14. Goyen to Sam Vaughan, April 4, 1965 (SL 320). The method Goyen was employing in Six Women relied on the same preference for direct address and the re-creation of “talking to” a loved one. Another example of this kind of approach can be seen in the 1978 lecture “While You Were Away,” also addressed directly to Charlie Goyen.
15. Goyen was apparently attracted, perhaps from this point on, to small glass figurines of animals. Reginald Gibbons remembers a large collection on the shelf of Goyen’s bathroom in the house in Los Angeles (email to author, December 5, 2013), and James White recalls Goyen eagerly buying a “white glass unicorn” from a street person in Hollywood. See “On William Goyen,” Texas Review 20, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1999): 49–57, 54.
16. Draft of letter to Phyllis Jackson, undated, in HRC 10.3.
17. Sam Vaughan, “For Bill,” in Horvath, Malin, and Ruffin, A Goyen Companion, 185.
18. Goyen to Robert Phillips, December 2, 1971 (SL 336).
19. There have, of course, been numerous interpretations of Jesus—generally considered heretical—that emphasize his physical nature. Little indication exists that Goyen was aware of this long tradition, but as I have suggested in reference to the “The White Rooster,” he likely had read and absorbed Lawrence’s ideas on the subject, principally found in “The Escaped Cock” and “The Man who Died.” See Chapter Six. More remarkable than any influence, however, is the sense that through his own sensibility and personal experience, he had essentially reproduced in the twentieth century the kind of spiritual transformation of sexuality more commonly associated with the extremes of medieval mysticism.
20. Goyen must have understood that some would see his Jesus as unacceptable when Catherine Marshall painfully refused his request for a blurb. However, this kind of reaction didn’t prevent him from sending copies to anyone and everyone who might help publicize it. In addition to numerous ministers, both locally and nationally prominent, he sent the book to influential old friends like Jack Valenti and well-connected religious and political figures such as Pat Boone, Johnny Cash, and Lady Bird Johnson.
21. “A Book of Jesus,” Catholic Star Herald, April 20, 1973.
22. “A Book of Jesus,” The Christian Century, April 25, 1973, 491.
23. Joni Bodart, “Goyen, William. A Book of Jesus,” Library Journal (September 15, 1973): 2682; Michael Murray, “A Book of Jesus,” Commonweal (July 13, 1973): 391. Goyen’s old friend from San Antonio, John Igo, remembers a very negative reception for the book in Texas.
24. Robert Phillips, “A Book of Jesus,” New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1973, 30.
Chapter 13: The Restorer: 1974
1. Elliot Norton, “House of Breath Rueful, Sad, Solemn,” Record American, November 11, 1969.
2. R. E. Krieger, “William Goyen Play Tries to Say Too Much,” Evening Gazette, November 5, 1969, 30. Kevin Kelly, “House of Breath Lovely, Loving Play,” Boston Globe, November 15, 1969, 11.
3. Goyen’s note. The manuscripts and notes on Aimee! are in HRC boxes 1–3.
4. “New Show in Stock: Aimee!,” Variety, February 6, 1974, 60.
5. “Aimee!,” Boston Herald-American (December 11, 1973).
6. “Aimee!,” Worcester Telegram (December 17, 1973).
7. Goyen to Robert Phillips, May 12, 1972 (HRC).
8. Rolande Ballorain, “Interview with William Goyen,” Delta 9 (1979): 43.
9. Ibid.,” 44.
10. “An Angel, A Flower, A Bird,” The New Yorker, September 27, 1969, 130–143. Goyen never claimed the article itself as a source for his interest, but no mention of Barbette occurs in his notes prior to the 1970s. In April of 1971, during the period of his spiritual crisis, he recorded his attempts to write about a “wire-walker” at the retreat in Weston (HRC 28.2). From this point on, particularly in the drafts and notes that led to his final novel, Arcadio, he referred to Barbette repeatedly as a source for his hermaphroditic title character and sometimes as a version of Folner from The House of Breath.
11. Jean Cocteau and Man Ray, Barbette (Berlin: borderline, 1988), 5.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. See note 6, Chapter Six.
14. Addis’s death in the fork of the tree is another version of Goyen’s boyhood fall in the cedar tree in Trinity, recorded in The House of Breath: “Then I would turn off at the twisted cedar, in whose branches I had been as often as any bird, that had a forked limb like a chicken’s wishbone, where once I slipped and hung like Absalom until Mrs. Tanner came running to save me” (HOB 11).
15. Goyen described the process of composition to Robert Phillips: “The book is not being written by me, it is revealing itself—the way all my books have done. I have to wait until the story shows itself. Pieces come—here, there; hang there, manifestly, without any apparent connections. What I write for is the connections.” Goyen to Phillips, October 25, 1972 (SL 344).
16. “Come, the Restorer,” Publishers’ Weekly, August 26, 1974, 298; Peter G. Kramer, “Come, the Restorer,” Newsweek, November 11, 1974, 111; Lon Tinkle, “Virtuosic Feast from Bill Goyen,” Dallas Morning News, November 24, 1974, 54; Patrice Repusseau, “In the Name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Oily Spirit,” Southwest Review (Winter 1975): 87–89; Shirley Ann Grau, “Selected Writings of William Goyen: Come, the Restorer,” New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1974, 73.
17. Perhaps at least in part because of Grau’s review, the book did not sell well. Goyen was particularly incensed by Doubleday’s failure to solicit blurbs for the cover, an (intentional?) oversight that simply added to his long list of grievances against publishers. See Doris Roberts and Danielle Morton, Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs, and Lasagna (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 267.
Chapter 14: Precious Door: 1975–1981
1. This tally does not include The Selected Writings of William Goyen: Eight Favorites by a Master American Storyteller (New York: Random House; Berkeley, Calif.: The Bookworks, 1974).
2. See Doris Roberts and Danielle Morton, Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs, and Lasagna (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 153–159.
3. Goyen to Robert Phillips, August 13, 1975. Robert S. Phillips Papers, Syracuse University Library.
4. The following account is taken from the unedited transcripts of Goyen’s Paris Review interview conducted by Robert Phillips in June of 1975, found in HRC 35.14.
5. Goyen to Ellen Garwood, September 13, 1975 (SL 351). This letter may have been connected to Garwood’s funding of the acquisition of Goyen’s papers by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in 1975. Later, Garwood also offered to endow a chair in creative writing at UT, provided that Goyen was selected to fill it. Though he did give a reading in Austin in pursuit of this possibility, he was apparently opposed by members of the English department. See James White, “On William Goyen,” Texas Review 20, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1999): 49–57. Author interview with James White.
6. From notes to “Margo” in Six Women material in HRC 29.6.
7. The notebook containing these entries is in HRC 31.1.
8. Goyen to Ellen Garwood, September 13, 1975 (SL 351). In his notes to SL, Phillips suggests that this letter may not have been sent.
9. Goyen to Ellen Garwood, September 13, 1975 (SL 351).
10. According to Gerrard, the impetus behind the volume was primarily the wish to help Goyen during this troubled period of his life. Author interview with Don Gerrard.
11. William Goyen, “Introduction,” Selected Writings, i–ii.
12. Author interview with Robert Phillips.
13. Richard Rhodes, “William Goyen’s world is enormous and enormously minute,” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1975, F3.
14. Joyce Carol Oates, “William Goyen’s Life Rhythms,” New York Times Book Review, November 16, 1975, 4, 14.
15. Goyen to Robert Phillips, November 29, 1975 (SL 352).
16. In 1978, when Goyen was teaching at Princeton, he developed a warm relationship with Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith. According to Oates, Goyen was “a gracious, soft-spoken, warmly welcoming and sweet-mannered person”: “I wish that I could convey Bill’s particular sort of southern-masculine gentleness. He had a way of inspiring others, simply by his example. He was the most ‘poetic’ of persons in both his writing and in his personality.” Email to author, September 24, 2012.
17. Goyen to Robert Phillips, November 29, 1975 (SL 352).
18. Goyen to Maurice Edgar Coindreau, February 24, 1975.
19. The House of Breath, 2nd ed. (New York: Persea Books, 1986), 178.
20. In the unedited transcript of the interview, Goyen expands upon his critique of Capote: “It’s just fake Southern. It’s fake sweet and fake naive and fake primitive. To read it is, I mean, it’s obvious if one reads it carefully but if one saw it on television you knew then that it was absurd . . .” (HRC 35.14).
21. According to Phillips, because of his role as husband and stepfather, Goyen “would sometimes be very outraged by something that was said in print that he thought was damaging to his image.” Author interview with Robert Phillips.
22. Goyen to Robert Phillips, May 16, 1976 (SL 353).
23. One potential award was the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for which Goyen apparently believed he had been nominated. Records for the 1976 award, for which The Collected Stories would have been eligible, indicate that the jury (Walter Clemons, Guy Davenport, and Eudora Welty) had a short list that included works by Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Reynolds Price, Diane Vreuls, and E. L. Doctorow. The award went to Bellow for Humboldt’s Gift. It is possible that Doubleday nominated Goyen’s book to be considered on the long list, which may have given him the impression that he was a finalist. According to James White, the failure to receive the Pulitzer haunted Goyen in the years after. In fact, White reports Goyen telling him that he sent the winner of the prize a telegraph that said, “You didn’t deserve it.” If this is true and Goyen did send such a telegraph to Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize that same year, it indicates how far his bitterness and disappointment could push him from both rationality and civility. See White, “On William Goyen,” 53; and Heinz-Dietrich Fischer and Erika J. Fischer, The Pulitzer Prize Archive: Novel/Fiction Awards, 1917–1994 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1997), lxiv–lxv.
24. Roberts, Are You Hungry, 276, 277.
25. Ibid., 278.
26. Letter to author from Robert Phillips, September 14, 1999. See also Phillips’s “Memories of William Goyen,” Texas Review 30, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2009): 103–106, 105.
27. Roberts, Are You Hungry, 280.
28. Ernest Kurtz, Not-God, A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, Minn.: Hazelden Educational Services, 1979), 186.
29. Author interview with Eve Caram.
30. Responding to what he called a “self-pitying” phone message from Robert Phillips, Goyen explained how careful he needed to be about indulging destructive emotions: “I am living a different life now, Robert, trying to maintain the Program that keeps me alive, a day at a time. Surely you know this, by now. This requires that I turn away from what is uncomfortable—to save myself. It also requires that I be honest and open in my feelings, not sullen and resentful and hidden, as is my nature when rejected.” Goyen to Phillips, November 24, 1977. Robert S. Phillips Papers, Syracuse University Library.
31. The image also enters into Goyen’s notes on AA: “Runnin down those cold dark streets with God, looking for a door—and finding, suddenly, those two little A’s” (HRC 29.6).
32. Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Scribners, 1955), 20.
33. Tillich, New Being, 20, 21.
34. As is clear from Half a Look of Cain, Goyen was also accustomed to using the Cain and Abel story, important in “Precious Door,” as a way to frame his relationship to Berns. As the older of the two, Goyen tended to see himself as the discontented, “darker” half who, like the older brother here, had symbolically sacrificed and lost his companion: “Oh he was bright and I was dark and I gave him all my darkness on that ship; but we joined, for all good things in the world, and to find somethin together . . .” (HOB 36).
35. Goyen’s Sunday school books of Bible study exercises are in HRC 54.2.
36. Patrice Repusseau, “Of Two Stranger Hands: A Reading of William Goyen’s ‘Precious Door,’” Triquarterly 139 (Winter/Spring 2011). Online at www.triquarterly.org. Repusseau’s reading is the most clarifying and penetrating in the limited critical history of this story.
37. Ibid.
Chapter 15: The Nurseryman: 1976–1982
1. Goyen had been asked to substitute for George Garrett, who later described him as “a great and good influence on some of my best and favorite students.” George Garrett, Southern Excursions: Views on Southern Letters in My Time, ed. James Conrad McKinley (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
2. Madison Smartt Bell, “A Memory of William Goyen,” in A Goyen Companion: Appreciations of a Writer’s Writer, ed. Brooke Horvath, Irving Malin, and Paul Ruffin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 156.
3. Ibid., 156.
4. Goyen to Samuel Vaughan and Stewart Richardson, July 19, 1977 (SL 357).
5. Goyen to Roberta Pryor, March 26, 1978 (SL 359–360). John Igo also remembers Goyen’s distress at this experience: “I had to console him.” The site of the remaindered books “wounded him.” Author interview with John Igo.
6. The insertions in curly brackets {} are Goyen’s revisions.
7. This was apparently more than just an imagined gesture. In describing how Goyen “made his peace with Los Angeles,” Roberts says that one afternoon she “caught him hugging a palm tree outside our house.” Doris Roberts and Danielle Morton, Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs, and Lasagna (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 281.
8. Ibid., 272.
9. James White, “On William Goyen,” Texas Review 20, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1999): 53. Goyen to Eve Caram, March 10, 1980 (SL 370).
10. Patrick Bennett, “William Goyen: A Poet Telling Stories,” Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), 233.
11. Roberts, Are You Hungry, 272.
12. Erika Duncan, “William Goyen,” in Unless Soul Clap Its Hands: Portraits and Passages (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 20, 21.
13. The story was also included in the posthumous HHM.
14. In his superb essay on the story, Patrice Repusseau makes this same point: “In many ways it is as if ‘In the Icebound Hothouse’ were a kind of compression of Goyen’s most intimate life and work, which accounts for the amazing intensity of this dozen or so pages. See “Lunar Plexus: On William Goyen’s ‘In the Icebound Hothouse,’” Mid-American Review 13, no. 1 (1992): 9–38.
15. Goyen to Spud Johnson, June 1, 1951 (HRC 49.3).
16. Goyen to Patrice Repusseau, March 18, 1981 (SL 377).
17. In his 1983 interview with Reginald Gibbons, Goyen glossed the conclusion of this story in response to a question about returning home to Texas: “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” (GAE 139).
18. Vance Bourjaily, “Words for a World,” New York Times Book, Review, June 9, 1985.
19. Goyen to Patrice Repusseau, June 24, 1978. Courtesy of Patrice Repusseau.
Chapter 16: Arcadio: 1983
1. Goyen insisted on pronouncing the name with a long “a,” perhaps to echo Arcadia or “arcade.” John Igo, who read several versions of the manuscript and helped edit the Spanish in the text, objected to the Anglicized (or perhaps Texanized) pronunciation but couldn’t get Goyen to change his mind. “Nobody corrects Bill Goyen,” Igo explained, “but you can suggest.” Author interview with John Igo.
2. Despite Arcadio’s male and female attributes, the narrator uses the masculine singular pronoun in those instances when such a reference is called for. Indeed, with the exception of defined moments when Arcadio dresses as a woman, he appears, externally, more masculine than feminine.
3. Goyen to Thomas Hart, August 10, 1981 (SL 382).
4. Repusseau convincingly links the figura to the high-wire “act” described in Half a Look of Cain. See “Lunar Plexus: On William Goyen’s ‘In the Icebound Hothouse,’” Mid-American Review 13, no. 1 (1992): 9–38, 27.
5. John J. McNeill, The Church and the Homosexual (Boston: Beacon, 1993), originally published in 1976. Goyen also drew on a number of works about hermaphroditism and gay experience. A list of books in his notes includes Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex and Days with Walt Whitman; Howard Jones and William Wallace Street’s Hermaphroditisms: Genital Anomalia and Related Endocrine Disorders; John Money’s Sex Errors of the Body; Bruce Jackson’s In the Life; Ambroise Paré’s De monstres et prodiges; Marie Delacourt’s Hermphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in Classical Antiquity; Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody; and Jane Kramer’s Allen Ginsburg in America.
6. Goyen to Robert Phillips, May 16, 1976 (SL 353).
7. There is some indication that sexual need—perhaps specifically gay desire—functioned like an addiction to Goyen, offering comfort when he felt “pushed down.” When he was in France in the mid-1970s looking for a publisher for Come, the Restorer, he was deeply insulted by his treatment at the hands of the publisher Gallimard, who had rudely ignored him despite his past successes. According to Repusseau, Goyen’s “rage plunged him into a dark pit of anguish and despair clearly tinged with sexual overtones,” and he spent the afternoon browsing homoerotica in several sex shops. Patrice Repusseau, email to author, October 8, 2013.
