Had I a Hundred Mouths (37 page)

Q: You revise and revise your work, don't you?

WG: But something is never changed. And that's what I know not to change. I can't say that it's words: it's the vision, and it is never changed. There are no “revisions” for me, in that sense. I'm really in trouble if I try to change that. But it's not as if my first
draft
were holier than any other.

Q: Your attitude is nothing like that of the Beats, then, for whom the spontaneous composition was sacred?

WG: Those states were induced, those visionary states. Now, in the last five years, I've read the Beats, and I've found there's something there. But at that time, the fifties, they were crazy, and I was trying to be sane. My God, I
started
by being crazy, why would I want to induce insanity? And writing kept making me sane, at least tying me down somewhere. So I couldn't hear any of that, then. They scared me, too.
Wild
people… I find that when I get a little depressed or morbid I want to stop talking. It's probably that I've just used it up. That's a good sign, to me.

Q: A clear signal, you mean?

WG: Yes, I think it is, to let it alone So that I don't get into other feelings—fear. And the kind of memory that is not creative. There
is
a destructive memory, too, that has nothing to do with recreating life, and I know when it is, more and more. I used to brood on it, and use it, and think it was a part of my creativity—it really was demonic. It came when it came. I was a prey to it. I drank to stop that, obsessed and on the verge of insanity. I'm through that. I was afraid of those things of
mind
, and I just joined the ranks of many others. The destructive memory was all that would come to me then, and you have to learn through the destruction—if you survive—when it is creative, when it is a building thing. I think some poets never knew that. I thought at that time that the idea of insanity in poets was somewhat hallowed. And there was such a false feeling about that. There still is. I have not much patience with it now, I just consider them ill, people who need help. And once they are restored, then their process goes on again. But the madness of the poet, and the poetry that came out of madness and suicide and all that—it impresses me less and less. Too much destructive memory. And I feel that a lot of poets begin to use that as a way of life, a pattern of behavior, even as a creative pattern.

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.

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!”

—R
EGINALD
G
IBBONS

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.”