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.
Reginald Gibbons
1998
The House of Breath Page 15