Remembering William Goyen (1915-1983)

On this day in 1983, when my friends and I were living in Arlington, Virginia, almost a full year after having moved there from New York, William Goyen's death became known to us. 

Years before, when we were still living in Jackson Heights, N.Y., it was Joe Savino who'd read about him in Book Forum, from an article by Erika Duncan, and he immediately got a copy of The House of Breath, and read it straight through.  He then asked everyone he knew to read it.   In 1978, Joe and I wrote him a fan letter and this was his response:

Los Angeles

September 27, 1978

Dear Joseph Savino and Mark Zipoli:

I feel bad about the long silence between your wonderful letter (4/18/1978) and mine of right now, September 27, 1978, written from my bed upon which I lie in temperature (the weather's not mine) that has ranged during the last five days between 102 and 107, recovering from unexpected surgery three weeks ago and beginning to feel my good strength again.

I am not often here, since my wife is an actress working in films and television though I do not much care for the place and prefer my own apartment (i.e., my family's and mine) and workroom in New York. And I am here, because of my illness, when I had expected to be back in New York (where I shall return, doctor willing, in early November).

By now you have weathered five months in your new life and under your beautiful new commitment you wrote to me about.* I hope you are still there; I am sure that you are; I pray that you are. Give it some more months, my friends. Writing is a lifetime's work and I have always seen it as that. It was just what I was going to do for the length of my life, no matter how cruelly it treated me, how "unsuccessful" I was, who tried to talk me out of it, counsel me about it, warn me, disparage me. I was no martyr or saint--though in memory it seems I sometimes took the stance of those (now I see, at those times when I was most afraid). I stayed away-in deserts, on mountains, in Pensions, back street bed-sitting rooms. It was the staying away that I think about now as I'm writing to you; staying away, more than hiding out or escaping. I see that I had to do this to stay with what I was writing, which took the life out of most everything else except Nature itself, took the life out of love affairs, family building, owning things, insurance, and so forth.

Did I stay away when I should have been there? And those times when I was there, my God should I have stayed away? Well, I wrote and still do, lived as a man writing, and still do. The lifetime goes on, piling up memory and feeling, which is what I go on writing about. Simplicity helped. Can one live a life of simplicity now? More than ever I fight for it. Basic daily living, a day at a time. Living in many places (while staying away). Not getting bound. Keep the senses clean, and out of the head. Whitman (I'm reading him again right now) wrote "If the body is not the soul, then what is the soul?" Feeling and trying to keep feeling true, not to fuck up feeling, trying to write from true feeling, working to get that and to find true words for it. And telling people when you care, as you do me.

I'm so glad you wrote me what you did. If you're still there--and I know you are--send me a note to let me know. Forgive my silence. God speed!

Sincerely

William Goyen

(*) In the early spring of 1978, both Joe Savino and myself had quit our jobs to pursue writing.

Who was William Goyen?  As a writer, William Goyen strove to combine spiritual inquiry about the nature of man with the elements of humble daily life. His early childhood left his writing marked by the rhythms of rural speech, the Bible, and a sense of story. His father was a lumber salesman, and nearly all of Goyen's fiction is permeated with the atmosphere of the East Texas woods and small towns. His absorption with European writers did nothing to lessen his occupation with the details of the East Texas of his youth and the nuances of its speech. This attentiveness gives a strong regional flavor to those works in which Goyen attempts to recapture the atmosphere of life in East Texas during the twenties and thirties. His work has been an example to other writers who have sought to make use of the Texas past and has encouraged those whose artistry is not always appreciated in their native places. Though he left Texas early, Goyen owes more artistically to Texas than to New York and Europe, a debt that he frequently acknowledged.
     William Goyen, the son of Charles & Mary Goyen, was born at Trinity, Texas, on April 24, 1915. He moved with his [family] to Houston when he was eight, and there he grew up and attended public schools and what is now Rice University. After teaching at the U. of Houston in 1939–40, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He was discharged 4½ years later and never returned to Texas. Between 1945 and 1952 he lived in New Mexico, California, Oregon, Europe, & New York. After a stay in Taos, N.M., 1952-1954, he lived principally in New York.
     Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath (1950), and first book of short stories, Ghost and Flesh (1952), received much acclaim and won him two Guggenheim fellowships. His work was translated into German and French by Ernst Robert Curtius and Maurice Coindreau, and was soon established in Europe, where it remains in print in several languages. In the early 1950s, in addition to publishing another novel (In a Farther Country, 1955) and more short stories (The Faces of Blood Kindred, 1960), Goyen began to write dramatic works and adaptations of his fiction for the stage. The theater brought him into contact with actress Doris Roberts, whom he married in 1963.

     Over later years Goyen taught as a visiting professor at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, the University of Southern California, [among others and worked] as an editor at McGraw-Hill, 1966-71. He published A Book of Jesus in 1973, another novel, Come, The Restorer (1974), and his Collected Stories (1975). In 1977 he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rice University. He moved to Los Angeles in 1975 and lived there (and in New York City) most of the rest of his life. He died in Los Angeles on August 30, 1983. (The work of his last years included an unfinished autobiography, short stories (collected posthumously), and a novel, Arcadio, published a few weeks after his death.)]

Biographical and critical text: Reginald Gibbons, "GOYEN, CHARLES WILLIAM," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgo32). Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You Sleep? (Orhan Pamuk says #3)

      "Some nights when I get out of bed, I cannot understand why the linoleum is like this.  Every square has all these lines on it. Why? And every square is different from the others  ...The lamp's looking just as strange.  If you can't see the lightbulb, you can imagine that the light is emanating from its zinc stem and its satin shade.  You know, the way light might radiate from a person's face--something like that.
     "I know this happens to you sometimes too: So, for example, if there were a lightbulb burning inside my skull, somewhere deep inside, between my eyes and my mouth, how beautifully that light would ooze from my pores--you too are capable of such a thought.  The light pouring especially from our cheeks and our foreheads: in the evenings, where there is a power cut.
     "...But you never admit to thinking such things.  Neither do I.  I don't tell anyone.
     "...I don't talk about these things to anyone.  No one talks about such things, and so maybe I'm the only one who sees  them.  The  attendant sense of responsibility is more than just a burden.  It prompts one to ask why it is that this great secret of life is revealed only to oneself.
     "Why does that ashtray tell only me of its sadness and defeat?  Why am I the confessor of the door latch in its misery?  Why am I the only one who thinks that by opening the refrigerator I shall come to a world exactly like the one I knew twenty years ago?
     "I try to calm myself by telling myself that people cannot have so little interest in these signs.
     "In a while, when I'm asleep, I too shall become part of a story."

(Orhan Pamuk, from Other Colors: Essays and a Story)

John Cowper Powys Championship Page - Post #2 - "Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life."

Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.

(John Cowper Powys)

To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy. The raw spikes and jagged edges, the sour-tasting dust and wind-blown debris of superficial real life have to be deliberately comprehended, or at least evaded, before the more secret rhythms, the more recondite patterns of Nature, her humours, her tragedies, her poetry take shape in the mind.

(John Cowper Powys)

Photo Credits:
Photos #1 and #2--Images suggested by the novel Rodmoor, by John Cowper Powys, thanks to Bruno Gaultier, Systar du Systeme a L'Etoile
Photo #3--"A Welsh Village" thanks to Pr Mark Henderson



Orhan Pamuk says...#2

Orhan Pamuk says...

"While one corner of my mind is busy creating fictional people, speaking and acting like my heroes, and generally trying to inhabit another person's skin, a different corner of my mind is carefully assessing the novel as a whole--surveying the overall composition, gauging how the reader will read, interpreting the narrative and the actors, and trying to predict the effect of my sentences. The more the novelist succeeds in simultaneously being both naive and sentimental, the better he writes."

John Cowper Powys Championship Page on The Long Habit of Living

John Cowper Powys Championship Page on

The Long Habit of Living

I have started a new page on the blog, and it will be fed by posts about his work and his life.

Powys is a great influence on my work, and he is mentioned several times in The Long Habit of Living.

Wolf Solent was the first Powys novel that I ever read...

Wolf Solent was the first Powys novel that I ever read, and I knew I was hooked on the whole philosophy and the thick oceanic love of literature and language, his literature and his language. It propelled an already steaming and obliterating love of books, more intravenous than genetics and more self-consuming than the sun.

WOLF SOLENT is a protean, inexhaustible, exhilarating book."

— George Gurley, The Kansas City Star

Wolf Solent is the first of the great novels of John Cowper Powys and caused quite a stir when it debuted in 1929, garnering praise from many of the top writers of the day including Conrad Aiken and Theodore Dreiser; Angus Wilson, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch and Simon Heffer are among the faithful. 

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973)
American novelist and poet,
his work includes poetry, short stories,
novels, & an autobiography

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
American novelist and journalist

"The only book in the English language to rival Tolstoy."

— George Steiner

"I particularly admire John Cowper Powys.

I particularly like Wolf Solent,

A Glastonbury Romance, and Weymouth Sands."

--Iris Murdoch

This novel, says writer Lawrence Millman, "...concerns an extremely introverted man, Wolf Solent, and his courtship of two very different women. The supporting cast includes a lecherous sausage-maker, a peddler of antiquarian pornography, a homosexual clergyman, a voyeuristic country squire, a teenage boy who kisses trees, and a mad poet. Here, I thought, is God's weird plenty. "*

(*) Lawrence Millman is an Arctic explorer as well as a writer.



Here is the paragraph that caught me 30 years ago--

"He recalled the figure of a man he had seen on the steps outside Waterloo Station. The inert despair upon the face that this figure had turned towards him came between him now and a hillside covered with budding beeches. The face was repeated many times among those great curving massess of emerald-clear foliage. It was an English face; and it was also a Chinese face, a Russian face, and Indian face. It had the variableness of that Protean wine of the priestess Bacbuc. It was just the face of a man, of a mortal man against whom Providence had grown as malignant as a mad dog. And the woe upon the face was of such a character that Wolf knew at once that no conceivable social readjustments or ameliorative revolutions could ever atone for it--could ever make up for the simple irrmediable fact that it had been as it had been!" (From Wolf Solent, Chapter One "The Face on the Waterloo Steps")

"A stupendous and rather glorious book...as beautiful and strange as an electric storm."

— V. S. Pritchett

"The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys: Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, and Maiden Castle, must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language."

-- A.N. Wilson

"It brings to mind the...romantic ferment of the film 'Les Enfants du Paradis'

or...one of the works of J.M.W. Turner."

— Anthony Bailey, The Observer

The next book was Weymouth Sands. Some of my favorite and unforgettable literary characters can be found in this book. This was and still is an extraordinary experience. Characters such as Adam "Jobber" Skald, Magnus Muir, Perdita Wane, Mr. Trot, Miss Guppy, Larry Zed, and let's not forget Dog Cattistock and Sylvanus Cobbold. I love this book and can't recommend it more strongly than flying over the most populated sites of the world and dropping pamphlets encouraging the readership. 

Weymouth Sands is described thus: "...the story of Jobber Skald--a large, somewhat brutish man, obsessed with the urge to kill the local magnate of the town because of the man's contempt for the workers of the local quarry--and his redeeming love for Perdita Wane, a young girl from the Channel Islands.  ...an epic tale which depicts the power of Eros, the inscrutability of the universe, and the nature of madness, while highlighting Powys's deep sympathy for the variety, eccentricity, and essential loneliness of human beings."**

(**) The editors at Overlook Press.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the book:



"The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave.  Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth's ancient antagonist.
     Such at any rate was the impression that Magnus Muir--tutor in Latin to backward boys--received from the waves on Weymouth Beach as in the early twighlight of a dark January afternoon, having dismissed his last pupil for the day and hurriedly crossed the road and the esplanade, he stood on the wet pebbles and surveyed the turbulent expanse of water."

(From Weymouth Sands, Chapter One "Magnus Muir")

There is an outstanding website with beautiful and romantic photographs of the Weymouth Sands that Powys wrote about. I draw your attention to
A Visit to the Weymouth Sands of John Cowper Powys. It is so well-done, that those out there who have read the book will appreciate it significantly.


The following is from the chapter entitled "Hell's Museum":

"And all this while, like an evil blood-clot upon his brain, the thought kept coming back to him of the vivisection he felt sure went on in one of those buildings of iron and glass and pale brick, where Dr. Brush studied pathology among the inmates of Hell's Museum, and he suddenly began telling himself a story about the spirits of the old tribes who had raised this huge earth-fortress, and how the captive souls from the Brush Home might at least in the liberation of sleep come flocking out through the night to Maiden Castle and be there protected and safe, along with a great ghostly pack of couching, whimpering, fawning, cringing, torture-released dogs, all crowding close behind theses phantom-warriors, as wave after wave of their enemies poured up the slope, trying in vain to repossess themselves of them."

"An intricate, provocative, and living example of the novel which takes people as it finds them.... The cool, calm impersonality of Weymouth Sands, and the author's all but diabolical power to peer beneath the surface, combine to make it a book of moment."

— The New York Times

To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation.--Henry Miller

"To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation."

(Henry Miller)

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

 

“...a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.”

(Margaret Drabble)

"A genius – a fearless writer, who writes with reckless passion."

(Margaret Drabble)

John Cowper Powys was a prolific novelist, essayist, letter writer, poet and philosopher, and a writer of enormous scope, complexity, profundity and humour.

A powerful orator, he spent over 30 years as an itinerant lecturer in the U.S., during which time he wrote his first four novels. In 1930, he retired to upstate New York and turned to full-time writing: it was here that he produced such masterpieces as his Autobiography, A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands.

He returned to Great Britain in 1934, settling in North Wales in 1935, where he wrote the historical novels Owen Glendower and Porius, the critical studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, and The Brazen Head.

Other notable novels are Wolf Solent and Maiden Castle: ...rich in characterization, psychological analysis, and evocation of place.

George Steiner once claimed that Powys was the only twentieth-century English writer on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Margaret Drabble, the distinguished English novelist, believes, “we need to pay attention to this man.” The world of his novels, she says, is “densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.”

(All above text courtesy of the Official Website of The Powys Society)

(From noted writer Lawrence Millman): "What struck me when I reread Wolf Solent recently was not its weirdness but its compassion for the down-and-out, the aberrant, and the misbegotten. What also struck me was its casual attitude toward polymorphous sex. 'Natural or unnatural,' one of the characters says, 'it's nature. It's mortal man's one great solace before he's annihilated.' I can't imagine anyone else of Powys's generation writing those words. Certainly not D. H. Lawrence, who compared with Powys was a reactionary about matters of the flesh."

Orhan Pamuk says...

"A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words." (Orhan Pamuk)



"He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy." (Orhan Pamuk) 



One of my new "pages" on this blog is devoted to the deep admiration and respect I have for the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.  His work enlightens, empowers, and entertains; and as a great man once said to me, "you can't get much better than that."  The page is titled simply, "Orhan Pamuk says..."