It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing
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William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an "orphan," Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.
It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen's life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen's relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen's life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.
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Clark Davis. (2015). It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing. University of Texas Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Clark Davis. 2015. It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing. University of Texas Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Clark Davis, It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing. University of Texas Press, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Clark Davis. It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing. University of Texas Press, 2015.
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Clark Davis is Professor of English at the University of Denver. He is the author of Hawthorne's Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement and After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick.
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William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an "orphan," Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.
It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen's life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen's relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen's life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.
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Starred review from March 16, 2015
In this stellar biography, Davis (After the Whale) deftly examines the life of a complex and overlooked figure in the
history of American literature. William Goyen emerged from smalltown East Texas and the WWII-era Navy to write the sort of lush, dreamlike prose more commonly associated with European writers than the Americans of the postwar period. Harnessing extensive archival research and new interviews, Davis stakes out the boundaries of Goyen’s involvement with the literary community and his evolution as an artist. Throughout, Davis expertly weaves in literary criticism of Goyen’s masterpiece, the novel The House of Breath, and his other fiction, which in combination reveal the urgency of his search for place and identity. Goyen found refuge from
his outsider status in friendships with luminaries like Frieda Lawrence, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Katherine Anne Porter. After moving around the country and living with several men, Goyen married actress Doris Roberts in 1963, taking a job at McGraw-Hill to pay for the domestic life he had avoided for so long. Nonetheless, Goyen kept writing, continuing to produce stories, poems, novels, and plays until shortly before his death
in 1983. This lively and enlightening biography will resurrect Goyen’s brilliant writing for a new generation of readers.
19 b&w photos.
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February 15, 2015
The first biography of a tormented writer.Joyce Carol Oates called William Goyen (1915-1983) "the most mysterious of writers...a seer; a troubled visionary; a spiritual presence in a national literature largely deprived of the spiritual." Admired but hardly popular, Goyen never achieved the readership he coveted, as his difficult, emotionally effuse fiction read like "anguished confessions or emblem-rich sermons." In this sympathetic study, Davis (English/Univ. of Denver; Hawthorne's Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement, 2005, etc.) draws extensively on that fiction, in addition to letters, interviews, and a memoir by Goyen's wife, actress Doris Roberts. Goyen grew up in East Texas and Houston, alienated and lonely. An emotionally fragile child, he was intimidated by his strict father, who quashed his desire to study music and dance. All of Goyen's work, Davis writes, "can be understood as experimental spiritual autobiography," centered on characters "set in opposition to the world": "exiles, loners, kept apart less by a conscious rebelliousness than by an innate but often inexpressible difference." Goyen felt different, in part, because he was bisexual. Intense affairs with men and the homophobic writer Katherine Anne Porter preceded his marriage to Roberts, at the age of 48. An artist, Goyen said, "is a disturbed, distressed, obsessed human being." Fellow writer Anais Nin described him as "a man in pain...a wounded man." His efforts to assuage his pain led to alcoholism; his search for spiritual comfort led to a religious conversion that resulted in his writing A Book of Jesus and taking on the role of "an eccentric evangelist," treating dinner companions to readings from the New Testament. Goyen's "intensely poetic style" may dissuade contemporary readers, but for those who return to his work, this biography offers a thorough and illuminating grounding.
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William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an "orphan," Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.
It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen's life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college...
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List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Prologue: The Drowning
Part I: The House in the Bitterweeds
1. Trinity: 1915–1922
2. Merrill Street: 1923–1931
3. Rice Institute: 1932–1941
Part II: Song of Leaving
4. Ulysses: 1942–1945
5. El Prado: 1945–1948
6. Christopher Icarus: 1948–1950
7. The House of Breath: 1950
8. Marvello: 1950–1953
9. A Farther Country: 1954–1956
10. Blood Kindred: 1957–1962
Part III: The Rider at the Door
11. "A New Life": 1962–1964
12. A Living Jesus: 1966–1973
13. The Restorer: 1974
14. Precious Door: 1975–1981
15. The Nurseryman: 1976–1982
16. Arcadio: 1983
17. The Wound and the Bow: 1982–1983
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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