It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing

by Clark Davis

William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an “orphan,” Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.

It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen’s life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen’s relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen’s life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.

390 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2015

Reviews

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was turned on to Goyen in college, and again when I read Anais Nin's Journals a few years later. I read Goyen's first novel House of Breath, and it really changed my life. Made me want to write again (I was dabbling in music, theater, arts, traveling, and all sorts of other paths). So I was really excited when I saw Clark Davis was writing a biography of Goyen. He is not an easy person to explore- he led a double life for years (sexuality-wise), and was an outsider to the New York publishing scene. And yet, he was so true to his own path in an artistic manner, so original, unique, and kept digging into fictional characters from his East Texas youth (and Houston, also). Davis writes: 'He was insistent that writing was not therapy. It was, however, a way to be, to exist through the rescue of all that was lost in a life.' I'd say, please read this, and then also read his work, listed at the beginning of this monumental biography.

[Bookforum Magazine]

"Reading Goyen is to be immersed in an opera of language (arias inflected with Texas idiom), one uncannily addressed to you in particular."

–René Steinke on Clark Davis's It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing in the April/May 2015 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/022_01

[David Parson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clark Davis's biography is a wonderful introduction to a writer I'd never heard of, but have devoured quickly. The best way to enjoy the biography is as a companion piece to Goyen's fiction. Goyen is a man who must be read. Had I A Hundred Mouths, a greatest hits, if you will, of his stories, is a masterpiece.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young boy with pitcher ears sits in a closet, hunched over paper piano keys pasted onto a piece of cardboard. The boy’s mother has made him the cardboard piano so he can practice silently, without fear of discovery by his father; in this East Texas home in the 1920s, the longing for artistic expression is a punishable offense, at least for a boy.

In his revealing new biography of the writer William Goyen, "It Starts with Trouble", Clark Davis offers this episode from Goyen’s childhood as a kind of primal scene: a boy forced so deep into himself by a stern father and well-meaning mother that his artistry develops as a desperate, autotelic feedback loop, masterful eloquence in search of a listener. As metaphor, the closet is almost too perfect — especially given that Goyen’s artistic urges grew in tandem with, and seem to have become intertwined with, intense and nonconforming sexual urges. Even as his writing began to find a limited but appreciative audience, Goyen’s bisexuality remained, for lack of a better word, closeted; throughout the more permissive 1970s and until his death in 1983, the open secret fueled some of his strangest and most inventive fiction.
[. . .]

Read my full review:
http://www.texasobserver.org/biograph...