It Starts with Trouble
William Goyen and the Life of Writing
-
- $24.99
-
- $24.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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, Ana s 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.