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.
