The House of Breath

by William Goyen

Readers can now rediscover one of William Goyen's most important works in this restoration of the original text. The House of Breath eschews traditional conventions of plot and character presentation. The book is written as an ethereal address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in a small Texas town. More than a story, it is a meditation on the nature of identity, origins, and memory.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, Classics, Westerns, American, The United States Of America

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Charles William Goyen was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, editor, and teacher. Born in a small town in East Texas, these roots would influence his work for his entire life.

In World War II he served as an officer aboard an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, where he began work on one of his most important and critically acclaimed books, The House of Breath. After the war and through the 1950s he published short stories, collections of stories, other novels, and plays. He never achieved commercial success in America, but his translated work was highly regarded in Europe. During his life he could not completely support himself through his writing, so at various times he took work as an editor and teacher at several prominent universities. At one point he did not write fiction for several years, calling it a “relief” to not have to worry about his writing.

Major themes in his work include home and family, place, time, sexuality, isolation, and memory. His style of writing is not easily categorized, and he eschewed labels of genre placed on his works.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now a spider lives unbothered in the doormat that never knows a pawing foot upon it.

There is the kitchen gathered around the great worn woodstove. A faded map is still tacked on the wall. You hear the mice kicking in the turned-over oatmeal. And you hear the wind that lopes like a spectral rider round and round the house, whirls down the flues and chutes into the woodstove and thrashes the ashes and blows a wild little horn in the hollows of the stove. Then you hear a melody from a farther room and it is the wind blowing a tune in the closed shutter in the room where Malley Ganchion lived on like a mouse in the house after all the others had gone, hoping some redemption for them all would come.

Some appetite waits and lurks in the world, you remark; it is some great hunger, insect and rodent and decay hunger. This seems suddenly to be a law of the universe. Insect, mold, rat, rust, death - all wait for and get the human plunder in the end, to carry the carrion away. The vultures of this greed hover and plane over us all our lives, waiting to drop down. The leaf has its caterpillar, the stalk mildew and the worm lies crooked in the bud. And observe the little white lice, dandruff in the golden head of the marigold, the gall chancres and fistulas on the rosebush. See the shale of fly carcasses in the spiderwebs, of caught hornets and flying ants, wings folded like a closed fan (the dead of this house lie fastened in what web, stretched over what blue Kingdom?), bits of wings and antennae, all debris. The dirtdobbers' knobs of mud, lathed round and whorled smooth, hang like many lightless lanterns - €”because there is no hand to knock them down. The insects have taken over-we fight them back all our lives, but in the end they come victoriously in, our inheritors. Look in the corners, under things €”- find the little purewhite puffs and tents in which some whiskery thing lives, find the thousandlegs and stinkbugs and doodlebugs and Junebugs, find fantastic bugs with shielded backs and delicate marks and brilliant colors and designs. See a caught mouse in a trap €”- set by what futile, mocked hand? - rotted to a frail skull and a vertebra. And see over the boards of the faded floor the Sienese lines of tracks and roads and tunnels and cross-hatched marks and trails. In the bins and cannisters are weevils; the roaches, unmolested, are grown big. The legged armies have come into this house. This is the slow eating away - mold and canker and mildew and must, gall and parasite, lice and little speckled ticks and grooved worms. In a corner of the pantry (where you often ran to hide from old Mr. Hare, passing in his rumbling wagon calling “paa-ahs! paa-ahs!”) discover a ruined still life of left vegetables, whiskered and leprosied, and rotted fruit spotted with pustules and the stippled fuzz of fungus. (You remember the glassy picture in the dining room, where you ate on Sundays, that was of a sad dead blue duck dangling down a golden-flecked and purple-speckled head €”- with staring eyes that watched you - eat and pears and peaches round him; and feel that picture's ruin before you.)

And all so quiet is this eating away, except for the wind that winds a mummy cloth around the fallen splendid house delivered to its inheritors.

So this is why when often as you came home to it, down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and you had blown it. Then you thought it might not exist at all as built by carpenters' hands, nor had ever; and that it was only an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.

[Warren Fournier · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I tell you the Devil walked in the river bottoms--and cussed this town." For a unique twist on the Southern Gothic, try this weird and wild little book! But don't read it as a novel. I found that it helped to put yourself in a different mindset, as though you were reading a prose poem or listening to music. In fact, this book is extremely musical, showing what can be done with different rhythms and cadences of language. It is set in East Texas where the author was born, and he captures the musicality of the rural English spoken there, which has a lot in common with the English spoken in the bottomlands of Louisiana of which I'm so familiar.

There is a narrative, of sorts, but it comes to you drifting in snippets of memory, and by the time you've finished, your own mind has filled in the gaps, like trying to tell someone a dream you once had, or a story from your childhood that you only partially remember. It is essentially a semi-autobiography centered around a house in the fictional village of Charity, where multiple members of an extended family are all crammed together, living in a kind of harmonious chaos with themselves and nature until they and their town gradually succumb to the ravages of a changing America.

I am not usually a fan of stream-of-consciousness writing. It is often done by pretentious writers who think they're writing the next "Ulysses," but end up just rattling off a grandiose exhibition of stuff they know--obscure musicians and artists, cities and street names from around the world, out-of-context politics. If you've ever followed the long list for the Booker prize, you know exactly what I mean.

But "House of Breath" is a product of true inspiration. Author William Goyen was serving on an aircraft carrier during World War II when he began to record memories of his past for posterity. Whether or not he felt truly in danger during his service, being in such a situation is not much different than that of Marcel Proust when he realized he was wasting away from tuberculosis. Proust found his muse for one of the longest novels in history. Goyen, on the other hand, chose the short and sweet route. Nevertheless, he was informed by the wordsmith of the great French authors of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, particularly Arthur Rimbaud. As a mutual fan of French writing from this period, I can clearly see the influence in Goyen's English.

I did very much enjoy this book, but I recognize that this is a divisive work. As I said, it is weird. There is very little in the way of linear plot or even conventional sentence structure. Often, the author resorts to improper spelling to mimic the sound of the rural Texas accents and dialect. All of this can get on one's nerves if you are not in the right mindset. But perhaps most disorienting is the changing points of view. The book starts out being told by a man returning home, and for a while I got confused until I realized that someone else had also started narrating--and it was the freaking river! And boy, this is one dirty-talking river! Cue the Issac Hayes:

"By me, in these woods, you... played your fingers over my hairy rock-moss and lay against my sandstone and ached and cramped and burned... Just you hard against my rock; and in your trousers, all over you, hot and running like glue—you washed you in my waters; and by my waters you lay down and wept, and slept, by me. From then on you were aware of the feeling water could make you have, O we were lovers, I had you rising and falling in me and you left something in me and it was mixed with my rich sediment and my spume, O we were lovers; and I cast your sperm mixed in my spume and sediment onto the land..."

Okay, easy now--that's enough. You're moving a little too fast there, river! Anyway, the point is that the narrative changes perspective in ways you couldn't possibly anticipate, so you literally just have to go with the flow. Pun intended.

The only thing negative I have to say is that this sure isn't the feel-good story of the year. It's downright depressing at times. Various testimonies of old people wasting away with tumors and cataracts and Bell's palsy, talking about how their little rural town decayed as the young folks moved to the city while modernity moved in. Cheery stuff.

But as much of a downer as it is, the overall message is certainly a powerful one--and prescient for being written eighty years ago. Certainly, this book describes the fate of many an American small town and many an American family. When I was growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, I lived with my parents, my sister, my aunt and uncle, my two cousins, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. That was considered rare by that time, and today it is unheard of. Nowadays, what family I have left is scattered to the farthest boundaries of the country. No doubt the same is true for you, and I think we miss out on that sense of kinship, which is one of the themes of this book. My own children will never know what it is like to grow up with multiple generations helping each other, playing together, and sharing memories like I did. Goyen wrote this from homesickness, and hoped to make the reader homesick too.

If you decide to give this book a try, I recommend you buy a copy, because this is one that you may want to revisit from time to time even if you don't initially connect with it. I think it's worth the small investment.

Beautiful, gritty, and haunting.

SCORE: 4 pillow-talking rivers out of 5

[Robert Jacoby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought so highly of this work that I wrote the Wikipedia page for it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hous...

I tried reading it once, got a few pages into it, and could not understand what he was doing with words. I put the book down. And I did not pick it up again for a year or two. When I did pick it up again, I could not put it down. Every page was a new revelation of what could be done with the English language.

When I finished this book I could not write my own fiction for about 3 months, I was so stunned by what Goyen had accomplished.

[Cosimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Camminai senza una casa

“E tutto è così silenzioso, in questa erosione, al di fuori del vento che avvolge fasce da mummia intorno alla superba casa caduta, ormai consegnata agli eredi. Per questo spesso, quando ritornavi lungo la strada in un pulviscolo di pioggia, ti pareva che la casa si posasse su un fragilissimo velo di fiato, esalato da te. Allora pensavi che, forse, non esisteva affatto, come prodotto delle mani d'un carpentiere e forse non era mai esistita, ed era solo l'idea di un tuo respiro, e con lo stesso fiato che le aveva dato la vita tu potevi disperderla”.

The House of Breath è un libro del 1950, candidato al National book award e vincitore del Mcmurray award come opera prima; fu scritto da William Charles Goyen, scrittore e insegnante di letteratura che partecipò alla guerra in marina: originario di Trinity in Texas, crebbe e studiò a Houston e dopo la guerra visse prima in una comune in New Mexico e poi in diversi stati americani e in Europa, stabilendosi infine a New York, godendo di diverse borse di studio ma senza mai mantenersi con il lavoro letterario. Contenuto nel testo, al centro del racconto, c'è il paese di Charity in Texas, con il fiume, la ferrovia, la segheria, il campo deserto e il vento. Qui si sviluppa una favola decadente, una visione tormentata. Voci di vivi e morti interpretano monologhi intrecciati che confessano colpe corali e dialoghi irrequieti che trasfigurano il dolore della solitudine e l'agonia del tempo in una natura di alberi, cose e animali sempre meno reale e sempre più simbolica, a rappresentare le contraddizioni e il bisogno di evasione e di ricordo di coloro che la abitano. Protagonista del racconto è una famiglia umile e disperata che lotta per la vita in un contesto di disincanto e miseria, dove la comunicazione e il linguaggio sembrano svanire in una astrazione segreta e immutabile e in una corporeità sempre segnata dal peccato e dalla malattia. William Goyen intreccia abilmente eleganza poetica e espressionismo grottesco in una trama ad andamento non tradizionale né lineare, nella quale combina la ricerca spirituale sulla natura umana con la descrizione realistica e semplice del quotidiano. Tracce della sua infanzia infelice e malinconica sono il linguaggio rurale, la mitologia biblica e un senso della storia come destino condiviso e reciprocità che cambia i soggetti; la sua scrittura è intensa e potente, nasce sincera da un ferita aperta, come mezzo per sopravvivere, una sorta di poesia in prosa, una sequenza polifonica di canti e arie musicali e liriche. Il male ti arriva gratis, è stato acquistato per te, come dono. Ma ruba la Gioia, mi disse Christy, trovala e rubala dal mondo, soffri, ma ruba la Gioia come un ladro di disperazione. Le tematiche trattate sono ampie e plurali, marcate da un eclettico nomadismo della parola: scrive di violenza e sessualità, amplessi e identità di genere, diversità e duplicità, rovina e malattia e religione, emotività e sentimenti, follia e disgrazia. Tutto ruota intorno alla famiglia, con i suoi ruoli e il legame (che legame esiste tra noi tutti?) e le relazioni: l'amicizia e l'amore e la parentela convivono nella carne e nello spirito, nella polvere e nella pelle, entrando in conflitto tra ambiguità e negatività, demoni personali e sensibilità contaminate. Tensione dove si apre una realtà dietro alla realtà, un segreto svelato dentro di sé, in uno specchio o una mappa interna del mondo affettivo e morale. Si ritrovano in questo romanzo, ricco di spiritualità, una notevole originalità stilistica e innovazione tecnica, in un'atmosfera southern gothic che rimanda a O'Connor e Faulkner e Anderson, dove la presenza del paesaggio anima i perturbamenti e le difficili interiorità degli individui, in una dimensione cosmica dell'essere, solo e disorientato nella natura.

“A volte, poiché sono un fallito, nel mondo, io do la colpa del mio fallimento a tutti voi, che mi avete confuso tanto, da ragazzo, che non riesco più a farmi ordine dentro, oppure dico che mi avete fatto diventare così falso con me stesso che ormai sono irreale e non potrò mai più diventare vero. Invece devo capire che sono un fallito perché mi sono dato a tutti e non mi è avanzato un briciolo di me per me... voglio dire, la parte di noi stessi con cui si esiste e si agisce, che ci teniamo stretta, per esistere e agire”.

Un'intervista all'autore:
Goyen Paris Review

[Jacob Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

from sawdust to sawdust.

[Andrew]

You’d have to be a real sicko – as I am – to like those dreamy passages in Terence Malick films of billowing lace curtains and dances through tall grasses and haunting Texas sunlight while someone breathily muses about how they truly loved over yonder in the cottonwoods. God I love that shit.

Such is House of Breath. I would frankly be shocked if Malick didn’t explicitly consider Goyen an influence, even, given the measure of similarity. The dullard critics hated dreamy Malick post-Tree of Life (Ebert, to his credit, praised To the Wonder in the last review he ever penned). Fuck that, I consider To the Wonder, along with Song to Song and Knight of Cups, to be absolute masterworks. And that’s why I loved House of Breath.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unnamed narrator remembers and thinks about a small town in Texas and the voice of the different people who lived there, in long sentences with lots of parentheses, and it looks like this:

"Now ruin has passed over all that fallen splendid house and done ruin's work on it. Now, ruin (of childhood) returning to ruin, come, purged of that bile and gall of childhood, come through the meadow called Bailey's pasture that is spun over with luminous dandelions like a million gathered shining heads, through random blooming mustard and clover and bitterweeds, over the grown-over path that was a short-cut to town when there was no circus or revival tent there. Pass one brown spotted cow folded there(remember her name as a calf was Roma and a good ride) and munching the indestructible bitterweed cud of time, and pass around the silent laboring, nervous civilisation of an anthill that swarms and traffics on and on beyond the decline of splendid houses or the fall or broken cisternwheels. The slow grinding of cud, even and measured, the twinkling, red, timeless quarry of ants and the eternal, unalterable cycle of flowers - first the white, then the pink, then red to blue to purple and finally to sunflower yellow - round and round, turning and turning, moving and moving: they mock the crooked mile that families walk, suffering and failing and passing away, over their crooked style, into a crooked Beulah Land.

"Oh you ain't got a chanct, you ain't got a chanct in this world. You are down in the back and got hemorrhoids and a stone in your bladder and you can't carpenter or work at the roundhouse and the garden's dry and burnin up in the burnin sun and you can't buy feed for the cows and chickens and I don't know what you'll ever do, just sit there on the porch and rock and spit and die one day and be buried by your poor relations. And the infernal little town dead and rottin away and all of you poor as niggers and your teeth bad and your sides hurtin say and night and no money to see a doctor in Dallas."

[Pip · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am sure this book is not for everyone, but I can tell you, it's for me. I am not usually a great lover of rural southern American lit, though as a genre it can claim some of my favorite books, but somehow, this book turned my head from the very beginning.

Here's a quote that begins to sum up what makes this book remarkable.

"For all that is lost yearns to be found again, re-made and given back through the finder to itself, speech found for what is not spoken."

The book is a kind of memoir told through many voices and perspectives, and in this quote one is twisted into realizing how memories are shared between different people, different times for a given individual, and are re-built in the written recollection of them.

Goyen mentioned that the chapters are "arias", but I prefer to think of them as photographs in a gallery. I am awed by the language, by the poetic rhythm, by the imagery, by the forces it has on my imagination, and by the stark question of what it means to be human.

[maura · Rating 5 out of 5]

nobody knows that this is the best book thats ever been written. maybe. its beautiful and ive never read someone use language the way goyen does, evoking emotions i havent felt out of fear, and drenching that feeling in honey and letting it drip down my throat. cannot recommend this book enough!!!

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really fantastic stuff here.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was introduced to Goyen by a professor more than twenty years ago, and I was smitten. His pure love of language is sometimes enough for me. This novel is not easy to read (for story), but it is mesmerizing as lyric prose. Faulkner hovers just behind Goyen, of course, but I've long thought Goyen made the best of that legacy with his own investigations of structure, memory and sexuality. The use of soliloquy in this book is also wonderful and surprising and risky. Goyen had a genius ear for human voice.

[christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous prose

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book and all the more moving and startling considering the era in which it was written.

[Taylor Cammack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proustian reveries from an East Texas writer (!!). The solace and heartache remembering a place and time faded away. A winding river of language. Planning to reread in a couple years.

[Lori Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The House of Breath is a prosy, sometimes poetic telling of life in a small town, of friendships and family and all of the disappointments that come with being different. The story is told in a stream of consciousness manner that adds fluidity to the story. Along with the host of human characters, the river and the family home get their own characterizations. The language and repetitions in this story bring a sense of awe to the reader. You simply cannot let this story go, even years after having read it. It is the most well-worn book in my collection and one I have revisited again and again since I was introduced to it in college in 2007. I can easily say that I've read it from cover to cover at least 10 times. I won't give away the details, but it is a highly recommended book.

[Michael Lovell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite novel. The language is so lyrical and beautiful. I read this book in college and became instantly hooked. It's a shame that Goyen did not achieve the popularity as some of his contemporaries, as he had an extraordinary gift.

[Susan L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I love this book. Hard to believe I flipped through it a few months ago and thought it looked so incredibly boring. Review later.

Grade: A-

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

book that no one reads any more - no good reason to - but it's a beautifully written novel

[Micha · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And to find out what we are, we must enter back into the ideas and the dreams of worlds that bore and dreamt us and there find, waiting within worn mouths, the speech that is ours."

[Laisrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

'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.'

William Goyen's The House of Breath transmutes distant memories of boyhood East Texas into a mythic Künstlerroman, a glowing frieze upon which emerges a town beset by all of the ailings with which small provincial towns are typically afflicted with. Torturously written over the course of his late twenties and finally published at the venerable age of 35 (though Joyce was 34 when his Künstlerroman hit the press), Goyen's novel is, as genre goes, the work of a young man. It is a different story, however, at the level of style. Read this for the prose alone: strange and unlike anything else happening in America then as now: quick, rich, and lyrical, perhaps overripe; it bursts with sensuous detail and local vernacular. It bears reality in spite of its abundant romanticism. Here, in this work, Goyen was already a mature writer in full command of his excessive powers. My only complaint - a decisive one -is that Goyen's expressive originality suffers from the limiting thinness of his theme: childhood as muse; as impulse to speak and describe one's life after childhood's destruction; authentic life being the artistic life in which childhood is saved and recalled at will and thereon willed forward; artistry an exile which redeems by returning to the past as image. Nevertheless this novel in all its belatedness had to be written: that element of creative necessity will never not be sympathetic to me. And then I said, "I will get up now and go now, where I belong, and be what I must be".

[Jivesh Mohan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover: remembering the grouping of old trees, the fall of slopes and hills, the lay of fields and the running of rivers; of animals there, and of objects lived with; of faces, and names, all of love and belonging, and forever be returning to it or leaving it again!"

Great book, very musical prose, good time overall.

[Christopher Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

A work by a relatively forgotten author, I was told to give Goyen a chance. Starting at the beginning, I have a novel I'm not sure what to do with. It's a lyrical, and masterful work of prose, but it just didn't draw me in like something similar to it would. Not quite Southern Gothic. Not quite Magical Realism. Not quite Dirty Realism. Goyen was correct when he said he wasn't an author that could fit into a box, at least not easily. However, when I compare it to works like Winesburg, Ohio or Cane, two books I've read very recently it still feels weakest of the three in capturing the spirit of small town, Midwestern-Rural Southern life. Beautiful prose gets this one only so far.

[Ellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“So this is why when often as you came home to it, down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and you had blown it. Then you thought it might not exist at all as built by carpenters’ hands, nor had ever; and that it was only an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.”

“Now a spider lives unbothered in the doormat that never knows a pawing foot upon it.”j

[Michael Esparza · Rating 2 out of 5]

An overly-Romantic prose poem. A story told in memories. But the memories are just not interesting to me.

[Deena Santori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy book to read, but I think worth reading. Sad, beautiful, touching...

[Jeff P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poem in the form of a novel. I want to like this book more than I did. There was so much beautiful writing and truth in it, but I ultimately found it too rambling and boring to capture me.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed, reading this, after the review of An American “masterpiece” that I read, that I think was in the WSJ. I read only 4 chapters— more than enough to determine the nature of the work. It is, by the standards of today’s prose, overwrought. It is poetic, lyrical, but … gay. Is it homosexual? I don’t know and don’t care to find out because there wasn’t enough other to keep me reading. Other- what happened to Sue Emma? An interesting character, but to find out, one must wade through too much poetry - ode to a house. Not me. Not enough life left to invest.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relativamente fácil de ler, o rio fala. Lembrou-me um pouco de to kill a mockingbird.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had difficulty in the beginning of this book because I’m so unused to reading anything like it - it was like remembering a dream.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

I see why this is a quiet classic, but it didn't move me - it felt like an AI-generated Southern Gothic exercise.