William Goyen, who died at the age of 68 in 1983, was born in Trinity, Texas, in 1915. He is the author of the acclaimed House of Breath (1950), The Collected Stories (1975, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1977), and the novel Arcadio (1982), as well as numerous plays and short works. Mr. Goyen lived and worked primarily in New York and Los Angeles with his wife, the actress Doris Roberts.
Along with so many other visionary authors, I have the diarist Anaïs Nin to thank for exposing me to Goyen's poetic prose. While I was attending college in Emporia, Kansas, the fifth volume of Anaïs's already-infamous diaries had just been published and—though I lived on a student's meager income—I bought a hardbound first edition first printing. I took note of the following passage written in the winter of 1949-1950: "Possibly the only expression of American energy will be scientific, industrial, and the only vital art which can match up to it will be jazz. Possibly the American novel [will] never be written, certainly not by the new novelists who instead of maturity portray hysteria, brutality in place of feeling, clichés in place of revelation, obscenity in place of sensual vitality. But William Goyen writes House of Breath, a beautiful, sensitive novel, subtle and like a waking dream (1974:54)."
That was cue enough for me to hunt out House of Breath, which—to paraphrase Goyen's fully-sympathetic gay character Folner—was my sensual revelation. No writer, not even Anaïs, has had such a profound influence upon my own writing. I even used one of Goyen's short stories "Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt" to satisfy a directing assignment in one of my theater classes.
Continuing in her sixth diary, Anaïs wrote in the Fall of 1956 that Goyen was "a master of atmosphere and suggestion" but characterized him as a wounded writer who—though critically acclaimed, especially in Europe—had been deeply hurt by his commercial failure at home (1976:63). All these years later, Goyen has nearly been forgotten; but, in my heart, he remains a writer's writer whose work will bear the critical scrutiny of time, no matter if the buying public has abandoned him.
What struck me immediately about Goyen's writing was his access to spiritual insight through sensual experience. For me, this rang authentic, true and relevant. I discovered him before moving to San Francisco and so—as yet—had few positive gay role models. Thus, I derived much solace from House of Breath, particularly Goyen's character Folner who resonated with me to the marrow, all the more for knowing who he was. "Right away," Folner declared, "I learned what I was and went on like that, what I was and used myself for that, made no bones about—and can't say the same for most of the rest of Charity who don't know who they are. What matters if it got me death?" (Years later during the AIDS pandemic Folner's bold assertion reverberated with an eerie and disconcerting precision, but back then, when I first discovered him, he was inspirational for being a character way ahead of his time and for encouraging free self-expression.)
Goyen practiced a compassion for gender variance in 1950 that was practically unheard of at the time and his writing was equally as prescient regarding ecological concerns, which have sadly come to bear in recent years. When I headed out hitchhiking to San Francisco in 1975, it was very much in the spirit of Folner's rebellion against rural ennui. "I was wild for the world of a flashing eye and life castanetting round and stomping an insinuating foot. Sometimes in Charity I couldn't stand it any longer and would go out in the henhouse and make up dreams and play like I was something grand and royal and march up and down with a poker for a cane, with only the chickens to watch me. And then love myself and feel real again, a kind of tremor from the world ran through me." In Goyen's tale, Folner runs away from Charity, Texas with a trapeze acrobat from a traveling circus and leads a decadent but full life in the city. How could I not relate?
Once I relocated to San Francisco, I continued to familiarize myself with Goyen's writing wherever I could find it. In the Fall of 1977 I read his short story "The Shape of Light" and was so moved that I boldly phoned information in New York to get his number, and left a series of enthusiastic messages on his answering machine. I followed up by writing a letter to him through his publisher Doubleday and received a response written on Christmas Day, 1977: "Dear Michael Guillén: I'm here in Boston over Christmas and I want to tell you how much it meant to me to hear, out of the blue, your message on my answering tape. I thank you, and I thank you for following your impulse to communicate your feelings then, as you were feeling them. Of course it was an affirmation. I wonder if you could know what it made me feel? ...Thanks again for your lovely gift."
* * *
It seemed that whenever I read one of Goyen's short stories I felt compelled to write him a letter and I began to dream of staging The House of Breath as a theatrical production in San Francisco. I didn't hear from Goyen again, however, until September 1978 when he wrote me from Los Angeles: "Dear Michael: After a long time of physical troubles, I'm here resting and doing some writing until the end of October. My wife is working here in films and television and so I commute (now that I've finished my Princeton University tenure) between L.A. and N.Y. I'm just recovering from surgery and am lying close and low as I heal and regain my strength. I shall return to N.Y. at end of October and be there for the month of November at the N.Y. address you've used.
"Meantime, I haven't forgotten your beautiful letters to me and your hopes to do some work in the theater with The House of Breath. Of course you are welcome. Could you write to me here or call me if you're still interested? It's been many months of problems and please forgive my silence.
"Meantime, you might even write to my agent, Audrey Wood ... just to let her know what your feelings and wishes are. Only to inform her, nothing more.
"I do hope all is well with you and that your life is full and fruitful. I am a year into a long piece of work which I love. But mainly trying to recover right now.
"If I'm strong enough it may be possible for me to come to San Francisco late October before I go to New York, to visit my nephew, Don Gerrard, who co-published The House of Breath. ...Yours sincerely, William Goyen."
* * *
It was only later that I realized Goyen was suffering from leukemia and, thus, not well enough to visit the Bay Area. But within a week or two of receiving his letter, a hardbound copy of the 25th anniversary reprint of The House of Breath arrived in my mailbox with the inscription: "For Michael Guillén, wishing him his own joy and fulfillment." Then in January 1979 I received a copy of "Precious Door" as a New Year's greeting. Again, it wasn't until just these past few years that I finally understood that "Precious Door" was the first story Goyen had published in 10 years! In retrospect, I can understand why "Precious Door" and his novel Arcadio—written as he was dying and published after his death in 1983—meant so much to him. If House of Breath was way ahead of its time in its sympathetic depiction of a gay male, Arcadio went even further in supporting the rights of the intersexed. In 1988 his final collection of short stories Had I A Hundred Mouths was published and then, amazingly, in 1994 his novel Half A Look Of Cain was finally published after being ignored by publishers for 40 years.
I've been wandering in the House of Breath, listening intently in the abandoned corners for something that was once said to me (something I once read). I can't remember exactly how it was said (when I read it), but it was something that only the passage of time can articulate meaningfully; something about looking back at one's life—at who I used to be—and feeling that who I am now and who I used to be are like two people staring at each other across a great chasm, wondering who in the world the other might be? And so I find myself at both sides of this chasm created by the space of 35 years with questions flying back and forth like so many gusts of wind in a canyon. "How could you have grown so old?" the young one asks. "How could you have been so young?" the elder replies.
At the age of 21, I hitchhiked to San Francisco in the summer of 1975 with a red and yellow cardboard suitcase I inherited from my sister and $20 in my pocket. Young men were pouring into the city from all over the country: as if we had heard a beacon and were responding with the youthful enthusiasm of our dreams and desires. We had come to change the world and to find our lives in the changing.
35 years later, I am 57 and the time has come for me to reconfigure my relationship with San Francisco. It is as different a city now as I am from the boy who hitchhiked here, hungry for love, hungry to be an artist: a writer, an actor, a singer of songs, a lover. I have decided to retire to the sagebrush deserts where I'm from and to answer another call that I hear off to the horizon. And in that harmony of remembering the call I first answered and leaning towards the call I now hear, I am steeped in rituals of recapitulation, claiming again what has been mine even as I let it go. Somewhere in the middle are these words. The chasm shapes these words.
I was inspired to find my life in the city by the early diaries of Anaïs Nin, which I devoured as a lonely teenager growing up in Twin Falls, Idaho. Anaïs had grown up in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, but was wooed into the city proper by the bohemian author Henry Miller. Anaïs donned a sensorial persona and literally created herself out of herself. I felt that—if she could do it—I could do it. I could live an artist's life. I could surround myself with artists. I came to San Francisco wooing the Beat poets and one of them, Harold Norse, took me under wing and—like Anaïs—reminded me that life is not only what you find but what you make for yourself. One evening while visiting Harold in his home, I spotted a photograph of he and Anaïs sitting at an outdoor café in Montmartre. Excited, I enthused about how fortunate he was to have known her. You can know her too, he said, and gave me her address. "She will write to you," he promised.
* * *
When her first note arrived, my roommate was flabbergasted. "Is this the Anaïs Nin?" he asked incredulously. "There is only one," I responded and took her lavendar card with its Pisces logo into my bedroom to read in private: "(12/01/75) Dear Michael, can only answer a few words to your beautiful letter because I have been fighting cancer for a year and very low in energy; but, your letter warmed and cheered me. When I'm well again, I'm sure we'll meet. I have many friends in San Francisco. Or when I'm well enough, you can come and visit me. Your friend, Anaïs."
* * *
Her second note came on stationary that bore the image of a geisha musing on what to write: "(08/01/76) Dear Michael, your letter was one of the most beautiful I ever received. It is a poem. It is so far-reaching and deep. I cannot answer it in the fullness it deserves because I am fighting cancer and my energy is so low. But if ever you come to Los Angeles, do call me at my unlisted number [which she provided]. Write me about yourself. Anaïs Nin."
* * *
We made plans to meet in early November 1976 and shortly before our scheduled meeting she sent her final note: "(10/29/76) Dear Michael, now that I am ill, unable to live as before for two years, I get good joy from knowing there is one person who takes, loves, responds to life as I do. I feel you are doing it for me. You respond exactly as I did. I gave you my unlisted number and—if I am in any good state at all—I will be glad to see you. But I feel all is not lost should I have to disappear. Your feelings, visions, ecstasies are those I wish to live forever. Anaïs."
I realize now that she knew even then that she was about to die, which came to pass the following January. But to this day I marvel at the opportunity of our brief interaction and her blessing which has confirmed my life: a benediction from the Goddess of the Doves of Absence. The young man on his side of the chasm declares, "That benediction was mine." The elder smiles, "And it remains mine as well."
I first learned of Luise Rainer—as with so many other of the creative individuals of her generation—through the diaries of Anaïs Nin. If I recall correctly, they befriended each other about the time that Rainer was separating from her first husband playwright Clifford Odets and what sticks in my memory is Nin's descriptions of Rainer's suffering at the time, especially one episode where she sat on the steps of her home painfully enunciating the word "masochism", which lends credence to the ascription by film historian Emanuel Lefy that Luise Rainer was the "most extreme case of an Oscar® victim in Hollywood mythology" (All About Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards, Continuum International Publ. 2003, p. 314). It wasn't until years later that I caught Rainer's Oscar®-winning performance as the Chinese peasant woman O-lan in The Good Earth (1937), which came offered to participants at the first-ever TCM Classic Film Festival in a brand new print from Warner Bros., with Rainer—at 100!—present to converse with TCM host Robert Osborne.
The TCM notes for The Good Earth state: "Luise Rainer became the first actor to win two Oscars and the first to score back-to-back wins with a role that gave her fewer lines than the average supporting performance. Playing the devoted, long suffering farmer's wife in Pearl Buck's epic tale of life in a remote Chinese province, she didn't need words. She relied on her expressive eyes and exquisite body language to bring O-Lan to life. The performance was showcased in one of MGM's most impressive productions. The studio had devoted six years to developing this tale of a Chinese family struggling to survive war, famine and a spectacular plague of locusts. The original director, George Hill, shot location footage in China while studio researchers sent hundreds of home furnishings and props back to Hollywood. After Hill's suicide, the project lay dormant for two years until Sidney Franklin took it over. Although MGM production head and "boy wonder" Irving G. Thalberg had originally planned to shoot The Good Earth entirely in China, he eventually had technicians transform 500 acres of Chatworth, CA, into terraced Chinese farmland. This was the last project Thalberg brought to fruition and he fought tirelessly to realize Buck's vision to the fullest. When he died shortly after principal photography ended, Mayer gave Thalberg what he would never take himself—on-screen credit for his work."
Led to the stage of The Egyptian Theatre on the offered arms of two young strong men, Rainer beamed as the audience took to their feet in a cheering standing ovation. The event, however, proved a near disaster. Though Rainer had managed to make it to Hollywood from Vienna inbetween spewing plumes of ash from Iceland's erupting volcanoes, she accidentally broke her hearing aid earlier in the morning and could not hear a word of what Osborne was asking her. With cameras rolling—the conversation was being filmed for future broadcast on TCM—the otherwise poised Robert Osborne seemed momentarily nonplussed until someone from the audience shouted out the suggestion that he write down his questions and rushed to the stage with a notebook pad and pen so he could do so. Ever gracious, Osborne expressed his gratitude to his audience's ingenuity.
Rainer apologized for the fact that she had to limp into the theater assisted by others. Her comment underscored the commonly-held belief of yesteryear's "stars" that they owed glamour to their fans.
Asked how she developed her characterization of O-lan, Rainer said that she first of all fought against the excessive make-up the studios wanted to apply to "turn" her Chinese. "Are you mad?" she told them. She refused to wear such a mask. As an actress who worked "from the inside out", she believed that—if she couldn't become O-lan—no amount of make-up was going to do the trick. She claimed her interpretation was largely gestural, based upon the small gestures she had observed in Chinese women. It's difficult not to address the faint trace of racism in such a comment, let alone that many today believe the role should have rightfully gone to Anna May Wong, who—by MGM's refusal to consider her for the role—faced the most severe disappointment of her career. Despite consideration of what Wong might have brought to the role of O-lan, wide berth must be given to Luise Rainer who had her own issues with the Hollywood system.
On the set during one of the crowd scenes Rainer dropped her pocketbook and as she bent down to look for it she knocked heads with one of the Chinese extras who was helping her search. The extra recoiled, shocked, but then smiled and let out a garbled laugh, and in that moment Rainer knew that this Chinese woman was O-lan and that she would base her character on this woman, who she found demure and loveable.
Asked about working with co-actor Paul Muni, who played her husband Wang Lung, Rainer recalled that he was a "naughty" man who was quite different from her not only in his acting style but how he approached the project. They were never on a first-name basis. She called him "Mr. Muni." Muni's wife would sit at the monitors to make sure her husband looked better than anyone else. "I was not so much in love with him," Rainer admitted.
As for what it was like to work with Louis B. Mayer, Rainer recalled that—in Mayer's eyes—she was "a little crumb". He couldn't make her out because she wasn't interested in becoming a "star." He called her a Frankenstein and said that—if they weren't careful—she would end up ruining MGM. She refused to sit on his knee like the other young actresses and not only was she disinterested in being one of his stars, she didn't even want to be one of the tools in his dream factory. She wanted to create beautiful films and create characters whose feelings she could share with others. It was the process of creating her characters that mattered to her. She didn't believe in "acting"; she believed in being. For her the human personality possessed as many layers as an onion, of which an actor was required to be aware, so that as they peeled back each layer—ranging from murder to love—they could eventually arrive at deep feeling, deep beauty.
It is the warmth of human beings that enhances her own existence, Rainer attested. She recalled that Greta Garbo adored her and her beauty, her face, down to her perfect feet. When Osborne asked her, "What about Luise Rainer today?" she promptly answered, "Here!"
She touched upon her love for her first husband Clifford Odets and how their marriage failed in divorce. Her second husband, publisher Robert Knittel, remained by her side for 47 years before his death. She adored him because he saw her as the center of the universe. "As do we," Osborne concluded the session, despite Rainer's protestations that she wanted to have more time with the audience, to answer their questions. Such was not to be.
Cross-published on Twitch. The photograph of Luise Rainer being led into the Egyptian Theatre courtesy of Movie Morlocks.
William Goyen, who died at the age of 68 in 1983, was born in Trinity, Texas, in 1915. He is the author of the acclaimed House of Breath (1950), The Collected Stories (1975, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1977), and the novel Arcadio (1982), as well as numerous plays and short works. Mr. Goyen lived and worked primarily in New York and Los Angeles with his wife, the actress Doris Roberts.
That was cue enough for me to hunt out House of Breath, which—to paraphrase Goyen's fully-sympathetic gay character Folner—was my sensual revelation. No writer, not even Anaïs, has had such a profound influence upon my own writing. I even used one of Goyen's short stories "Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt" to satisfy a directing assignment in one of my theater classes.
What struck me immediately about Goyen's writing was his access to spiritual insight through sensual experience. For me, this rang authentic, true and relevant. I discovered him before moving to San Francisco and so—as yet—had few positive gay role models. Thus, I derived much solace from House of Breath, particularly Goyen's character Folner who resonated with me to the marrow, all the more for knowing who he was. "Right away," Folner declared, "I learned what I was and went on like that, what I was and used myself for that, made no bones about—and can't say the same for most of the rest of Charity who don't know who they are. What matters if it got me death?" (Years later during the AIDS pandemic Folner's bold assertion reverberated with an eerie and disconcerting precision, but back then, when I first discovered him, he was inspirational for being a character way ahead of his time and for encouraging free self-expression.)
Once I relocated to San Francisco, I continued to familiarize myself with Goyen's writing wherever I could find it. In the Fall of 1977 I read his short story "The Shape of Light" and was so moved that I boldly phoned information in New York to get his number, and left a series of enthusiastic messages on his answering machine. I followed up by writing a letter to him through his publisher Doubleday and received a response written on Christmas Day, 1977: "Dear Michael Guillén: I'm here in Boston over Christmas and I want to tell you how much it meant to me to hear, out of the blue, your message on my answering tape. I thank you, and I thank you for following your impulse to communicate your feelings then, as you were feeling them. Of course it was an affirmation. I wonder if you could know what it made me feel? ...Thanks again for your lovely gift."
It seemed that whenever I read one of Goyen's short stories I felt compelled to write him a letter and I began to dream of staging The House of Breath as a theatrical production in San Francisco. I didn't hear from Goyen again, however, until September 1978 when he wrote me from Los Angeles: "Dear Michael: After a long time of physical troubles, I'm here resting and doing some writing until the end of October. My wife is working here in films and television and so I commute (now that I've finished my Princeton University tenure) between L.A. and N.Y. I'm just recovering from surgery and am lying close and low as I heal and regain my strength. I shall return to N.Y. at end of October and be there for the month of November at the N.Y. address you've used.
It was only later that I realized Goyen was suffering from leukemia and, thus, not well enough to visit the Bay Area. But within a week or two of receiving his letter, a hardbound copy of the 25th anniversary reprint of The House of Breath arrived in my mailbox with the inscription: "For Michael Guillén, wishing him his own joy and fulfillment." Then in January 1979 I received a copy of "Precious Door" as a New Year's greeting. Again, it wasn't until just these past few years that I finally understood that "Precious Door" was the first story Goyen had published in 10 years! In retrospect, I can understand why "Precious Door" and his novel Arcadio—written as he was dying and published after his death in 1983—meant so much to him. If House of Breath was way ahead of its time in its sympathetic depiction of a gay male, Arcadio went even further in supporting the rights of the intersexed. In 1988 his final collection of short stories Had I A Hundred Mouths was published and then, amazingly, in 1994 his novel Half A Look Of Cain was finally published after being ignored by publishers for 40 years.
