It starts with trouble, p.6
It Starts With Trouble, page 6
Enter George Kurunus. As Quella makes her way through the empty halls (classes are still in session), she encounters the “writhing and slobbering and skulking” form of a disabled student:
He was shuffling closer. She stood up and pressed against the wall and watched him, hating him. It was said that if he ever fell down he could never get up unless somebody helped him, but just lie there scrambling and waving his arms and legs, like a bug on its back, and muttering. His little withered left arm was folded like a plucked bird’s wing and its bleached and shriveled hand, looking as though it had been too long in water, was bent over and it hung limp like a dead fowl’s neck and dangling head. But he could use this piece of hand, this scrap of arm quickly and he could snap it like a little quirt and pop girls as they passed him in the hall. Here he came, this crazy George Kurunus, a piece of wreckage in the school. What did he want? She looked to see if he had a pass in his hand. No. Certainly he was not going to practice for any May Fete. Why should he be in the halls and without a pass? (CS 68–69)
Most Goyen stories contain a surrogate for his central concerns, a character around whom a specific, almost obsessive, rhetoric emerges. Generally speaking, these characters are set in opposition to the world; whether obviously so or not, they are exiles, loners, kept apart less by a conscious rebelliousness than by an innate but often inexpressible difference. Unlike the satirically observed students, George Kurunus is granted a seriousness of presence that suggests a different register of being, both more adult and, at the same time, more meaningful as a sign of tragic “breakage.”
To Quella, George is a threat to her idea of a perfect social world as exemplified by the Kings and Queens of the May Fete. In her mind, privilege is a result of beauty, and the class structure of student life has no place for the misshapen. She is offended by his inability to speak properly: “He couldn’t even hold a word still in his mouth when he said it, for it rattled or hopped away—this was why he was in Stuttering Class, but it did him no good, he still broke a word when he said it, as if it were a twig, he still said ruined words” (CS 67). George is a figure of ruin but with an air of deliberate anarchy about him: “But at the end of a straight marching line he twisted and wavered like the raveling out of a line and ruined it, even then; he was the capricious conclusion and mocking collapse of something all ordered and precise right up to the end” (CS 67–68).
But what is disorder to Quella is a kind of salvation for the narrator, who presents George as the symbol of a different attitude toward life, his brokenness the sign of his modernity: “But if you live among breakage, he may have reasoned, you finally see the wisdom in pieces; and no one can keep you from the pasting and joining together of bits to make the mind’s own whole. What can break anything set back whole upon a shelf in the mind, like a mended dish? His mind, then, was full of mended words, broken by his own speech but repaired by his silences and put back into his mind” (CS 67). As a retrospective reading of his own artistic development, this statement—and it is just that, a personal statement that rises up out of the fictional world that prompts it—may provide the clearest emotional map of Goyen’s school years in Houston. The vision is both philosophical and aesthetic; to decide, in other words, that you live “among breakage” is to enter into a dialogue between fracture and wholeness. To see this struggle taking place in the province of speaking is to believe that language, both because of and despite its silences, can be the agent of rescue, of salvation. George Kurunus may be broken, but he is also a figure of strange vitality, the energy to remake the world—his and the school’s—through a kind of mending that refuses to hide its fissures.
He is also a figure of anger and resentment, of a fantasized revenge on the social order. He appears during the rehearsal, his face “like a grasshopper’s” in the glass window of the auditorium door. And later, when the fire alarm rings and the school empties, Quella seems to see him everywhere. Asked by a teacher to run back into the building to shut the windows, Quella finds what she imagines are the traces of George in the Homemaking class: “But some hand or finger had been in it all, in all the cups and pans, who had been meddling in Homemaking?” (CS 72). Strange writing has appeared on the chalkboards, a “curious disheveled chaos of giant and dwarf runaway shapes, tumbled and humped and crazy” (CS 73), and when she looks into the auditorium again, George is sitting “on the King’s Throne like a crazy king in a burning building. On his head was the silver crown and in his ruined hand the silver wand” (CS 73). In the end, it isn’t clear whether Quella has seen these things or only imagined them, but when the fire drill is over, she seems touched by some unnamed knowledge, both a gift and a threat.
It is curious that the two stories most directly related to Goyen’s school years involve the May Day celebration. The first is based on a traumatic memory and is an attempt to exorcize it. The second proposes a more symbolic set of relationships filtered through a thin gothicism. (Quella’s vision of George on the May King’s throne with the flames around him evokes the grisly conclusion of Poe’s “Hop Frog.”) In both, the sensitivity to social shame concentrates on the ceremony and drama of the ritual pageant; there is a sense that Goyen’s youthful traumas are overtly staged, that his feelings demand an extravagant exposure even as they shrink from it. These traumas of early adolescence seem to be making way for—and perhaps retrospectively justifying—a more overt rebellion to come.
The Cardboard Piano
Daily paths, ritual journeys are common in Goyen’s fiction and recorded memories. “While You Were Away” provides a sadder, more qualified tracing of paths than the child’s walk through Charity that begins The House of Breath:
Our destination was my high school, Central High, 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 water-wrecked 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 Building on the corner of Main Street and Franklin Avenue. . . . 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. (GAE 46)
On one occasion mentioned here, father and son drove silently past Goyen’s skid-row grandfather, “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 . . .” (GAE 46).
In this brief memoir, Goyen emphasizes the early stages of Houston’s astonishing growth—and his deeper incompatibility with its transformation. His father is given the voice of urban optimism, while the son dreams “of escape, release, brightness, dazzle—some unknown, unnameable beautiful thing” (GAE 46). The contrast is clarified by Goyen’s description of the streetcar that he rode home from high school each day:
The afterschool 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. (GAE 47)
But the simplicity and smallness of the streetcar suggests a time quickly fading, giving way to “street jams of trucks and cars, of beginning traffic lights in places, and accidents.” And as is frequently the case with Goyen, the perception of loss created a desire to escape and at the same time to save what he was leaving behind. The city was growing and his father was urging him to take advantage of new opportunities, so he sought refuge in “a wilderness of thick woods and cliffs” near his neighborhood: “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.”
Despite the measured but determined warmth with which he evokes his father in “While You Were Away,” Goyen consistently presented his adolescent turn to art as a defiance of his father’s demands and wishes. By the end of his high school years, this meant not only secretly writing in the “wild place” at the end of Eleventh Street, but, with the help of his mother, taking music lessons at the Houston Conservatory of Music. It was an important period for the often sullen teenager, full of small but decided rebellions, and Goyen told and retold these formative moments in interviews throughout his life. In the Paris Review, he explained to Robert Phillips the secrecy required to evade his father’s control:
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.)2 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 beginner’s 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. (GAE 74)
As in “The Thief Coyote,” the father opposes the son based on an idea of what men should do or be. As in The House of Breath, the mother abets the son’s ambitions, joining him in a secret bond against the father. The image of the cardboard piano gathers all these tensions and more: here is the desire for expression silenced but surreptitiously fed; the need for performance, for display, driven inward. In many respects, the paper keyboard becomes the emblem for Goyen’s reading of his own adolescence and artistic development. It helps explain why he later spoke of himself as a singer: “I’ve cared most about the buried song in somebody, and sought it passionately; or the music in what happened” (CS x). The silent piano is the sign of the buried song, expression that emerges through and out of a perceived repression. No wonder then that Goyen became a writer of arias, at first literally—one of his teenage musical compositions was an opera entitled The House of Malvenu—and later indirectly, inspired by William Saroyan and Thomas Wolfe.
And yet, for as much as Goyen portrayed himself as a revealer of secrets, he was also adept at repressions of his own, and the cardboard piano serves equally as the figure for what remains buried in him and his work. Implicit in his father’s prohibitions is the fear that the son might be homosexual. Secreted in the image of the piano—and the various recountings, fictional and autobiographical, of this period of early self-assertion—is the same thought, indirectly revealed but never directly confronted. The buried song, then, is in part the secret of his identity, and this powerful combination of revelation and secrecy—of performing that identity and hiding it at the same time—consistently feeds Goyen’s writing for most of his life. We can see it in his obvious attraction to imagining and writing about houses or enclosed spaces, in his need for containment, and in his idiosyncratic fictional method, which he once described as “a thawing process . . . as though the whole were a block (or circle or triangle) of something frozen—and I had to put back together the thawed parts of it” (HRC 7.8). A glance at his manuscripts makes clear just how much remained unthawed as he pursued the unspoken story within and beneath these images.
Goyen did have moments of open defiance, however. An astonishing example of the angry, exultant possibility of resistance appears in his most direct piece of autobiographical prose, the fragments that make up the unpublished Six Women. In one section, addressed to the stage director Margo Jones, Goyen provides a highly stylized account of his teenage infatuation with the local vaudeville theater:
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 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 was 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 the doomed generations, wondering how on earth he can even 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. (GAE 27–28)
This moment of hurt self-assertion was just one of a series of usually hidden attempts to find a form of expression that would relieve the restraints imposed by his father. From his high school years through a part of his undergraduate career at Rice, Goyen repeatedly sought creative outlet in formal music, singing, and dance training—most of which he concealed from his family. The music lessons took place during his second year at college on Saturday mornings at “a funny, old dank house” on Caroline Avenue, otherwise known as the Houston Conservatory of Music. For a few dollars a week, money he got on the sly from his mother, Goyen studied composition and harmony and began piano lessons. Since he wasn’t allowed to use the piano at home, he made do with the paper keyboard or snuck away to the piano in the basement of Woodland Heights Methodist Church. A year or so before, at the Lamar Hotel Ballroom, he had secretly begun voice training with Mrs. John Wesley Graham, an event described in “While You Were Away”: “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” (GAE 48). The “hoarse but tender voice of Mrs. Graham” told him that he had “a singing talent” but that a bad operation on his tonsils had left a small obstruction “like the tip of an asparagus” in his throat. In a similar fashion, he had pursued dance lessons, possibly at the same time as the flirtation with the vaudevillians described in “Margo,” and studied tap in a class that included the young Ann Miller.
Typically, these secretive attempts at self-display brought a corresponding discovery by the father who fiercely disapproved. In “While You Were Away,” Goyen explains the pattern:
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 . . . 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. . . . 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. Hoffman, 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. (GAE 48)
