The House of Breath

William Goyen was thirty-five years old when he published The House of Breath, his first book, in 1950. World War II, during which he had served in the U.S. Navy, had taken more than four years from him with its consuming dangers, obligations, and psychological imperatives; Goyen also suffered from chronic migraines and seasickness. His chances to make the most of his ardent desire to write, and of his gifts as a writer, even though he continued to write and to think about writing during the war, were necessarily postponed not only by his duties but also by the emotional and mental demands of being in the midst of mortal uncertainty and destruction. Thus his apprenticeship as a writer was prolonged. So The House of Breath—at which he worked for many years, repeatedly recasting and revising it, till he completed it only a few months before its publication—is in some ways a very young book for a writer of thirty-five, in the way it looks back so intently to childhood and youth (not only Goyen’s own particular childhood and youth, which provided the materials for the book, although greatly altered by artistic choice, but also the aura and feelings and mysteries of childhood and youth in all lives). In fact, when Goyen wrote a brief “Note on the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of This Book” for the 1975 paperback edition of The House of Breath, youth and the preoccupations and possibilities particular to it were uppermost on his mind:

It is twenty-five years since this, the exultant song of my earlier days, elegy to my homesickness, memorial to my going-out, was first published.

I am pleased that this Second Edition will probably reach many new people; but most of all I could hope it would encourage young people to sing out of themselves their own music, to reveal long-kept secrets, to disclose hidden hurt, to make connections with their beginnings, to realize the extent of their relationships to their own at home and to the great mysterious world.

And to those I loved, living and dead, who surrounded the writing of this book, in Houston, Texas, in Dallas, Texas, in Portland, Oregon, in Napa, California, aboard an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, in London, in El Prado, New Mexico, those who live in this book today as vividly as then: I salute you again and embrace you again, now as long ago:

Walter and Frieda and Stephen and Dorothy and Bob Linscott and Margo and Liz Ann and Lon and Allen and Margaret….

Yet The House of Breath is also a remarkably sophisticated, mature first book for a writer of thirty-five, when one thinks of how wise it is, and also of how successfully and how genuinely in response to expressive necessity Goyen invented a new form of the novel. Unfolding in time with remarkable stylistic grace and great intensity of feeling, The House of Breath is like a series of related “arias,” as Goyen himself said afterward; yet it also creates the illusion of having the spatial shape of an arrangement of what Goyen later called the “medallions” of a quilt. (Thus, unstably and fascinatingly, as the reader goes both backward and forward through the novel, it is two different things at once.) It is not a narrative in the usual sense, although it is filled with incident, from the humorous to the tragic; and it does not develop its characters, even though it consists mostly of portraits. With evident deliberateness and care—for which there is ample textual evidence—the reader is led by stages through the lives and places of a small, half-remembered, half-imagined local world in which the central quest is to find the very purpose of the human life that has been gradually destroyed by time during the narrator’s absence. (The narrator is like Ben Berryben, who has gone away and will not return, but is trying to make some meaning out of the lives he has left behind.)

Approaching closer and closer toward some unknown key to the drama and energy and difficulty of human life, the reader finally reaches both the transforming power of imagination and memory, and also—related to this power, somehow—Goyen’s treatment of sexual awakening, which for him was the touchstone of human experience. Thus it is near the end of the novel that even the aged Granny Ganchion has her say about erotic experience, so that her recollection of the adventure of her night with a traveling circus performer may complement the pages devoted to the child of that coupling, her son Christy, who serves as the ultimate guardian of the mysteries of male sexuality—and is unable to understand or master or satisfy his own erotic needs. Not that this role is the only one Granny Ganchion plays in the novel, for the book is gracefully complex, speaking of many things to which it returns again and again. (This is the musical structure of the sequence of “arias.”) Especially important in the novel is a fascinated horror at the irrevocable progress of time, which Granny, like most of the characters in the novel, mulls over thoroughly—time that inevitably ruins so much of this world and brings human lives through their spans from hope and experience to memory and reflection. Goyen’s “memorial” to what time ruins is not only valedictory but also ecstatic and consoling in its re-creation of the vividness and vitality of the life that is gone. Like Czeslaw Milosz in his poem “Encounter,” Goyen addresses the past not only in sorrow but also in wonder.

The House of Breath is a courageous book. It departed from all but a few somewhat analogous explorations, among the modernists, of the form of the novel, as Goyen found both a structure and a stylistic originality that had not been seen before and have only rarely been equaled since. This achievement is what so quickly drew the admiration and labor of his German and French translators, Ernst Robert Curtius and Maurice Coindreau, who were among the most distinguished literary figures of their time, and who considered The House of Breath an American masterpiece. (Perhaps the wartime interruptions and postponements of Goyen’s writing prevented him from settling for a more conventional book, and gave him the time to invent a form and a use of language that he would not have found had he completed the novel when younger; thus the delay may have allowed him to accomplish more than he could even have aimed at accomplishing earlier. May some future biographer delve into this possibility.) The House of Breath fashioned a way of “speaking” that, somewhat paradoxically, and also uncompromisingly, aimed at emulating the formal compression and complexity of the great modernist writers. Like some modernist works, The House of Breath also explores the play and uncertainty of narrative identity and offers the reader no central plot. Yet at the same time, unlike the modernist novels, which often exemplified mandarin themes and lives, The House of Breath gives us an intensifying of the expressive power of language by orchestrating its sentences for voices whose eloquence and vividness could come as readily out of the demotic speech of the humble and poor as out of more polished eloquence. In fact, Goyen was often able to put these two kinds of language side by side, in moving from the voice of one of the inhabitants of the house of breath to that of the narrator. As Goyen said of the people from whom he came, and to whom he had listened so intently, “People in my life told me stories, and I sang They had The speech, and I got voice.”

And finally, The House of Breath is courageous in how honestly—whether in reverie or desperation—it explored a kind of cosmic eroticism, a generous love of and for the body, that went above or beyond what we now call sexual preference. The human body is everywhere in the novel, not only in its memorable moments of desire, and despair over desire, but also in the sense of every character’s physical presence in the world, whether that presence is marked by appetite, as in Swimma’s and Folner’s restless, reckless flinging of themselves into the world, or affliction, as in Hattie Clegg’s palsy or Granny Ganchion’s goiter. In fact, a favorite but unrealized hope of Goyen’s later life was to write his version of a Greek myth that presents a fundamental human tension—that of Philoctetes, the Greek archer of the Trojan War who embodied at once both a unique gift that was essential to his people (his skill with the bow) and a repugnant liability (his festering, stinking sore from a snakebite). From these simultaneous and somehow mutually complementary conditions comes our phrase “the wound and the bow.” That is, Goyen was fascinated by how the power and pleasure of an ability—the gift—sometimes seems to require that its owner suffer, or vice versa: how a wound, physical or psychic or both, may make possible a gift. In The House of Breath we see this antithesis in the way that the glory of the pleasures of the body is attacked by illness and accident and infirmity and age (Malley and Hattie and Granny); in how a bright spark of intelligence or talent or feeling or sheer life may sometimes be found in a person who is psychically wounded (Swimma and Folner); in the way the deep focus and accomplishment and restlessness of making art may exact payment in painful struggle, emotional exhaustion, and the personal frailties and susceptibilities of he who makes it (Christy and his ship in the bottle). “I’ve limped out of every piece of work I’ve done,” as Goyen put it in his late, extraordinary essay “Recovering.” He believed in, and seems to have lived, a particularly intense mutual dependence and animating of body and spirit in the achieving of a human life.

This paperback edition of The House of Breath, published nearly fifty years after it first appeared, returns to print the original edition. In the 1975 edition, which was completely reset in type, Goyen made a number of small changes, perhaps out of a caution of late middle age that withdrew slightly from the daring of younger years. Not only do these minor changes and deletions now seem unnecessary, but also the new edition introduced numerous typographical errors, some of them very misleading or confusing. Furthermore, Goyen’s judgment in that year may well have been in this matter unreliable. He was not confident of his gift or his accomplishment. Perhaps 1975 was the worst year in his life: he felt personally shattered, he had scarcely written for eleven years, and his Collected Stories and new novel of that year, Come the Restorer—his bid to regain a readership—were scarcely noticed and were not even reprinted in paperback editions. And yet only a year later, he began both a physical and emotional recovery, and a last creative phase of his life, which happily would prove to be the most daring of all. Along with completely new work, from new conceptions, he also restored himself to some of the ideas and formal possibilities that had accompanied him all through his artistic life, since they had first appeared in The House of Breath, and developed these in new work. In his writings of this late period, lasting until his death in 1983, we find Arcadio and “the show,” a late fruition of the figure of Folner and of the circus he runs away with; the startling and strikingly moving exploration of race in the late story “Had I a Hundred Mouths,” which was prefigured in the way Goyen frequently touches on racial conflict, as if merely to note its extent, in The House of Breath, but does not pause to open that subject up; a preoccupation with human destruction of the natural environment, which lies in the background of The House of Breath, and reappears more pointedly in Arcadio and some of Goyen’s late stories; Goyen’s return in the story “The Icebound Hothouse” to the image of contradictory desire (the very word “ice bound” appears repeatedly in The House of Breath); the fluidity of identity of the one in whom another person’s story takes hold—which runs from the sometimes merged figures of Boy Ganchion and Ben Berryben in The House of Breath throughout Goyen’s work to the narrator and his cousin in “Had I a Hundred Mouths”; and other late full flowerings. Also in this last creative period, Goyen achieved the formal and linguistic adventurousness of Arcadio, “Tongues of Men and of Angels,” “Arthur Bond,” and other stories. So if in fact Goyen had prepared a new edition of The House of Breath in, say, 1980, he might not have made the few slight changes he did in 1975—which is the rationale for reissuing this text in its original form.

Given all the travails and travesties of publishing in America, The House of Breath still remains a kind of fugitive, priceless, spangled fish, darting all alone amid the myriad, dull schools of books swimming in our sea, each with a price tag for a tail. Perhaps this new edition will carry Goyen’s novel to new readers and evoke a new appreciation of its uniqueness and beauty. How valuable it is to our sense of what a novel can do, so unpredictably and movingly; in it, we hear how memorably expressive language can be. It comes to us as Goyen’s gift of vision, reverie, imagination, and fellow feeling.