I ran and ran and felt myself melting down as I ran, but I would not cry. It was towards twilight and soon it would be dark. O which way was home? The sun was setting. I ran and ran.
All the woods were now saying the same things to me that I had heard during the long and timeless hunt with Christy. Something like stars was twinkling in my loins. I prayed. Moss hung from trees like long hair and I saw the little green fuzz on rocks. What would I ever do with all this that had been said to me, now that Christy knew I knew all this? I would pray against it. I walked praying through the woods. O which way was home? The sad dusk was falling, and I was lost, lost. There was a kind of purring of the woods before dark. Which way was home? I had left Christy alone in the woods and night was coming. I called, “Christy Christy!” but only the woods, faraway, called him too; and he did not answer. Then I cried, “Christy Christy come home, come ho-o-me!” Only an echo answered and no answer from Christy came. Some burden weighed upon me, some yoke around me.
I was by the river. There, in a place, I suddenly saw the print of Christy’s body in the sand where he had kneeled down to drink, and I kneeled into it and drank as Christy had and felt at that moment that I was Christy drinking from our River. As I kneeled something swung against my face like petals of flowers and it was the birds Christy had shot and I had tied by their little legs to a string, as fishermen do fish, and had strung them round my neck. I saw that I was dappled by the blood of birds and that the beaks had beaten against my bare arms as I had run and brought my own blood there, mixed with the blood of birds.
I ran on again with his yoke of birds swinging against me, Christy’s message to me. I ran blessed with his yoke of loves, of words, his long sentence of birds, bloody and broken and speechless, sentences of his language shot out of his air and off his trees’ boughs that were his words’ vocabulary: flying words that call at twilight and twilight, nest and hatch and fly free for others, yet caged in his birdcage of mind, and betraying him, but freed by my hand on his hand; and brought down solid and sullied by beebee shot from his air by his own aim and fire (misfire!) for me to gather and make speak: answer to his caged whisper: with tongues of birds.
I ran marked and stained. How would I ever wash away all this blood of birds? O now he was bird and I was bird, he was my truth and my untruth, he was my victim, he contained me, I possessed him.
Now it was dark and I was full of fears. In a pond I passed, the moon lay fallen and small and mean among weeds and fallen branches. All birds were calling and returning to bough or nest without Christy there to try to shoot them, safe and homing at nightfall. O who would welcome me home when I finally got home?
Now the woods seemed a huge web that held Christy like a caught insect in it. Now I really loved Christy, longed for him, calling to him (O where was he?). We had come to the woods in a dream and in a quick dream he had faded away from me. The ripe cracking of his gunshot like the splitting of a ripe tree fired in my head. That I betrayed Christy! That I failed him in the woods, he who gave me all these gifts of birds, who spoke for the first time to me and waited for me to answer! To whom would I answer, to whom in the house would I answer when I came back, over the sea of bitterweeds of Bailey’s Pasture riding in home, bottled news to be broken against the hands of the House that sealed the bottle? What he had put into me, through my eyes, through my ears, and marked and stained upon my body was to be carried away, through the bitterweeds, across the River and into the world to be read out to the world. If I could only find him again to tell him this, for he would want to know. I called his name into the woods that he had called his own names into—“Christy! Christy!”—but no answer came back, only my own calling turned back into my ears.
I was by the river and so tired with all the weight of the birds. What would I ever do with them? And then I knew…. I flung them into the river. No one would ever know. They went down, a flotilla of feathers, like, a floating garden, like a wreath to the river drowned, for Otey, for Christy, for all of us I washed in the river. And then I felt so light with all my burden and I lay down close to the river’s side, and slept.
Suddenly I woke in touch with something, as forever after, in the air. Something called, something hovered, hard and real and whole as a soaring bird. O bird-cursed, birdblessed, birddrenched…. He is all our Sin and all our Vision and all our searching calling back to us, claiming us. Just when I am free and clean and myself again I hear this voice, I know this hovering—in my ascensions like wings from a bough that I think are up and away from him I am only soaring up to him—he is my air, he receives me, I fly in him back to him.
There is the river, over I must—across I’ll go.
It was morning and a new, known world. I walked straight home and as I came through Bailey’s Pasture, stained with all my stains and feathers in my hair and clinging to my clothes, the wind blew the feathers from me over the pasture and the feathers fell on the bitterweeds. Ahead, in the woodshed, I saw Christy sitting there and whittling. He did not even look up as I came through the gate and went into the house. In the house Malley was sitting by the window and Granny was nowhere to be found. No one even seemed to know that I had ever been away, and Christy never mentioned it. We never went hunting again.
Our winter was close and lay long and gray and leafless ahead. Something waited for me now—a world of magic and witchcraft in which there were secrets and dreams and fantasias, whirling in the glimmer of coming hope and hopelessness (who has not seen the gizzard-like birthmark on the luminous forehead of the moon?), and all of us speaking to each other, apart and solitary in our buried selves. All December the moon had a birthmark on it like Mrs. Childers the crazy woman had.
The coldest winter in anybody’s memory came to Charity. All day some days there was the wild and savage howl of the wind loping round the house; and at night in the sleet the shivering brethren horses huddled against the wind. The wind was in the shutters, swung like a ghost the tire swing and rattled the cisternwheel. Roma the cow got frozen in the ditch and Christy had to kill her. Granny sat below away from us in the cellar. Swimma was in Florida or somewhere; and Christy sat gazing at the map of the world in the kitchen or putting, wordlessly and patiently, the little ship in the turpentine bottle. I was listening to what everybody was saying and to what the blinded girl with the lyre on top of the world was singing; and our house was full of the breath of speech.
But our spring came and with it such thaws and such rains that there was the biggest flood in years and the river widened out even onto Bailey’s Pasture and was so close to the house that we could see upon it drowned wooden cows rolling like barrels, lily pads of chickens floating and little outhouses and wagonwheels. When the river finally shrank back to the bottomlands it had left in Bailey’s Pasture crawfishes and catfish, pine-needles and spores and pinecones and its golden silt and the bones of birds; and it had taken back there with it bitterweeds and sawdust and go-to-sleep flowers and even the babybuggy that we had left in the pasture to be ruined by the worst winter.
XIII
SUDDENLY I was in touch with something, in the air. Something called, something hovered, hard and real and whole as a soaring bird. O Christy, our great lover! Reach down your birdbloodied hand to me, you who decorated me with your garland of news, crowned me with your birdbays of love, blessed me with the flowers and the songs of our woods, hung me with the trappings of our woods to send me, wrought like a frieze with all this beauty, all this knowledge, alone away through my inevitable journey away from you, like a new bird, fledged by your birdridden hands, towards home (O let me go!) to get there as I could and find my own and, for the first time, earned welcome, to learn the bitter parting that gives freedom and slavery; bless me now, unclaim me, haunt me, bless me now who led me away, broke my seal of secrets, then left me—violated and ready again: pattern of all the journeys I would ever make, bird-enchanted, bird-shadowed, bird-tormented…
For I am in those woods again where the dialogue of our shared secre
ts once flew like birds from the trees of your mind to the trees of mine (but there is a clearing ahead where the river turns and flows, cuts through the trees, shall I follow it?) where there seems and seemed to be no time, nor past nor future, where once I was lost for the first time away from the house and kin-homing! How homing? O home me! Where…?—and thought of all of them, back there, Granny and Aunty and Malley and all the rest…. Who am I, separated from all of them and from home, yet with the idea of them and the idea of home in my mind, claimed and cursed by these, blessed and marked, sent somewhere? Those who will ever see me naked will find upon my thigh the blue sign, the stigma but no blemish, really lovely, like a vein in an agate or the grain in wood—and they will know the touch of the birds upon me.
There is the river, over I must—across I’ll go. For the vision burns away like cold blown breath; and when I look again it will have vanished away.
Christy make us real, make us hard and real in our lives: we who walk up and down in this autumn, trying to make ourselves real. We are involved, we are involved; and we cannot break away. All the history that we saw on the map in the kitchen pours into us and we contain it, we display it like a map for others to look at and be history; and the song of the girl on the world sings through us to be sung into others: Go into the world, go build cities, go discover countries; go spread love, go give, go make magnificence, get and give light, save and join and piece together (as you did the bits of string and cloth and whittled wood to make your ship) and show a whole and put it, combined and formed and shaped, into the world like a bottle with a ship in it. Gather the broken pieces, connect them: these are the only things we have to work with. For we have been given a broken world to live in—make like a map a world where all things are linked together and murmur through each other like a line of whispering people, like a chain of whispers a full clear statement, a singing, a round, strong, clear song of total meaning, a language within language, responding each to each forever in the memory of each man.
And then I said, “I will get up now and go now, where I belong, and be what I must be.”
I went to the bus station and really waited for a bus this time, and took it, and the next morning I knew it was no spell when I heard them calling all the names of the little forgotten towns, Normangee, Sweetwater, Cheetah, and I saw the live oak trees like old kinfolks in the fields.
Then, after a while, I was in the road going to the house and looked up and there it was, on the little rising piece of land, waiting for me. Through the mist that lay between us it seemed that the house was built of the most fragile web of breath and I had blown-it-and that with my breath I could blow it all away.
AFTERWORD
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 Fre
nch 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.
The House of Breath Page 14