Had I a Hundred Mouths

by William Goyen

  Q: How do you distinguish between the creative and destructive memory?

  WG: Through surviving it. And through knowing when to let it alone. This is why I am physical, thank God. I am physical. I would use sex. I would go digging—I dug whole arroyos, irrigation ditches where there was no water, in New Mexico. I made adobes, and lifted, and built.

  This was healing, I thought—to go into the detail of everyday life again. That was my survival, that’s why I’m here, I knew that. Because basically I wanted health, I wanted an art that was healthy and healing, that had life-force in it, life-strength. When it got into this darkness, I knew more and more to let it alone. If I was in a relationship, a love-relationship, that was dark, and was caught in it, with no way to escape from that, then it was very very dangerous for me. Or if I went home—often I would go home thinking that would restore me, but I found that black angel there, though home was a great source of restoration and healing for me, I thought. This was when I was not writing. But if there were traps that I couldn’t escape—I won’t stay where that black angel is—then that’s a dangerous time for me. And it looked to me that California might be the final trap for me. And it seemed that that dark angel, that bad angel, that I wrote about, was here.

  I came here thinking: sunshine, the flowers, and a new way of life, from New York apartment living—and I never have been able to live in New York, really. Ever! I’ve done it, but only happily in my own place, my own rooms, a nest—a life-giving place.

  Q: Not in the city, only in your nest there?

  WG: That’s right. As my present self, I’m not able to handle the place now.

  Q: But when you go home, aren’t you wiser and stronger than before?

  WG: But what I’m shown is that I’m not, and that’s the last straw! I come there vulnerable. I have come there out of seeking, and to seek is to be vulnerable, I guess. I have come there seeking, saying, “Well, that will save me,” and already now I’m open to any kind of force that can get me down, destroy me. Also I suppose that wisdom reveals that often there was a dark angel where we thought there was a bright one. I said, “Those people sitting on the porch, and singing together at night, and those stories they told, in the twilight… who was the dark figure in that house? Who among them chose that front door pane with that forbidding figure that says ‘Don’t come in this house—Who are you?—don’t enter here—you’re not welcome here.’” When I’d come with my suitcase, saying, “I’m here!” I’d see that figure on that horse saying “Come in!” and yet “Don’t! It’s just pain and darkness.”

  That house is still there, and so far as I know, that door is still there. A very precious, suspicious, dangerous door.

  I feel everything of mine is on the ground, now, but not gathered. There are still some things on the tree, that have to get ripe, but the great body of my work is on the ground, but not gathered.

  Q: You have prepared a new selection of your stories, and you seem to want a larger audience for this book in particular—not that any writer doesn’t want the largest audience possible.

  WG: I’ve been thinking about the curious kind of recognition that I have experienced, a curious misreading or misjudging of my work, I think. Or misplacing! I suppose I don’t need an explanation for it, and the reason I may seem to be asking for one is that I don’t understand it when people say my work has been ignored in Texas or the country as a whole, and it has such an audience in Europe. I used to get sick over that, to suffer over it, and something seemed wrong. I was turning out work, and it seemed worthy of being recognized, I mean of being acknowledged, at least. Acknowledgment of my existence as an American writer: neither praise, nor dispraise, but, “Here!”—with my hand up. “Present!”

  —REGINALD GIBBONS

  This interview was transcribed from six hours of taped conversation recorded over three days in November 1982, at William Goyen’s house in Los Angeles. He had been mortally ill but had apparently recovered almost completely; matters of art and life were much preoccupying him, and he had found fresh revelations about them, he felt. I had published one of his stories in TriQuarterly, and was planning a large section devoted to his work in an upcoming issue. This interview was at his invitation, and his talk was wide-ranging and urgent. There were certain things of which he wanted to speak, he said. He had not written about them; perhaps he sensed he would not have strength or time to devote to them. After he had carefully revised the edited transcript the full interview was published, with my brief introduction to his work, in March 1983 in TriQuarterly. Besides this interview, he completed only one other work before his death—the lecture on art and illness called “Recovering” [TriQuarterly, fell 1983].

  —R.G.

  * Goyen’s title for the unfinished novella whose two completed parts are “Had I A Hundred Mouths” and “Tongues of Men and of Angels.”