It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing by Clark Davis

Author:Clark Davis [Davis, Clark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2015-05-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Blood Kindred

1957–1962

I did not describe William Goyen’s visit one evening. A man in pain—gray-haired but with a youthfulness of gestures and face, a young man upon whose body age could only imprint a few lines and would never weigh down. A softness of voice, a gentleness of manner. He had gestures of disturbance, his hands made efforts to erase the lines of anxiety. What came to the surface was the injuries received, the disappointments, the injustices, the brutalities of the press. A wounded man. The ones who expected great love and are wounded at the beginning later cannot register the love they receive in the present, only the one denied them. The groove is made to receive only the insults and betrayals.

ANAÏS NIN, DIARY, 1956

Goyen turned forty in 1955, an unhappy milestone for someone so intent on proving himself. As they did each year, his family in Houston sent him gifts: new shirts, pajamas, socks, a winter coat from his sister Kat, some Texas pralines, and money. “The check was so generous,” he wrote in thanks, “and I do worry about your spending so much when I ought to be sending it to you. I thank you with all my heart, and I know I’ll be able to do something for you one day not far off.”1 The family’s willingness to send support and their son’s guilty gratitude are persistent notes in Goyen’s correspondence during the 1950s. Perhaps if the money came only on his birthday, it wouldn’t have bothered him. But prompted by one crisis or another, he was driven to ask for help two or three times a year, sometimes in the form of brief loans that he hurried to pay back whenever his income improved. The idea that he would someday be able to send his parents something, to buy them a house or new car or help pay their medical expenses, was a consistently wishful thought, as much a palliative to his own sense of absence as the boyish fantasy of a self-exiled son.2

Despite the succès d’estime of his early books, Goyen’s lack of a sustaining income from his writing only deepened his long-nursed psychological wounds. The always perceptive Anaïs Nin saw this immediately when he visited her in New York: “A man in pain,” she guessed, “a wounded man,” unable to move beyond his original, fundamental sense of loss or betrayal. It was a problem noted early on by the more cagey literary presences in whose company Goyen sometimes found himself. Christopher Isherwood, who had frequently registered suspicion of Goyen’s emotional needs, told the young, suddenly celebrated author that he would never survive unless he put on some psychological armor (GAE 85). The writing, despite its elaborate style and effects, was essentially too raw, too open, and what it offered in intimacy Goyen would pay for in misunderstanding and rejection. The remarkable vulnerability on display in his fiction may also have suggested that he would react in the way that Nin intuited, as someone who has been rejected in love.

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