It's been said that behind every great man is a great woman. For William Goyen, a Texas writer of startling originality whose work attracted the praise of Joyce Carol Oates, there were six women who deeply impacted his life of writing. In honor of Women's History Month, we asked author Clark Davis (It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing, May
2015) to reflect on the strong women who influenced Goyen's life and work.
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William Goyen’s Six Women
By Clark Davis, author of the forthcoming It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing
In the mid-1970s, at what was arguably the lowest point of his life, William Goyen began writing a letter to his old friend and fellow Texan, Margo Jones. Goyen and Jones had met in 1937 when he was a graduate student at Rice and Jones was assembling the group that would become the Houston Community Players. Their friendship continued through the 1940s and early 1950s when Jones made her reputation as an innovative Broadway director, most notably of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke. By all accounts, they were very close—two East Texans (she from Livingston, he from Trinity), each with a high artistic drive and fervid personality.
There was nothing unusual, in other words, about Goyen writing to an old friend, particularly when he was in distress . . . except for the fact that Jones had died in 1955. Alcohol played a role in her early death, though the direct cause was carbon tetrachloride poisoning: she had fallen asleep on a newly cleaned carpet in her hotel in Dallas. (Goyen had been with her a few nights before and felt helpless and guilty in the face of her depression and drinking.) In the twenty years since, he himself had become an alcoholic and not long before writing Margo had attempted suicide in a hotel in Newport Beach, California. Now, as he remembered her “Texas-girl sweetness and . . . full-faced smile” he saw their lives as parallel: she was his “sister—demonic, rapturous insane in booze and in reverie and golden dream,” and writing to her was his chance “to speak amends of love.”
This letter to Margo Jones became part of Goyen’s never-completed autobiography, an interwoven collection of imagined correspondence addressed to several older women who had been vital presences in his life. “They were women of style and fashion, art, theatre, Letters,” he explained to one potential publisher; “all seemed . . . to be searching for, enjoying, or fleeing, an image of life that was counter to the conventional one of woman as Serving Wife, Listener Only, Mother.” The list included Frieda Lawrence, whom Goyen had come to know in Taos, New Mexico in 1946. A legendary and sometimes scandalous figure, she had left her husband and three children in 1912 for D. H. Lawrence, the author of The White Peacock, eventually moving to the US and settling with him at Kiowa Ranch, high on Lobo Mountain in Taos County. Some years after Lawrence's death in 1930 she began to spend most of her time at her house in El Prado, just a few miles from Taos Plaza.
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| Dorothy Brett, Frieda Lawrence, and Goyen in Taos. Source: Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. |
It was during this period that she met the thirty-one-year-old Navy veteran who was waiting tables at the Sagebrush Inn. In the winter of 1946 Goyen and Walter Berns, his fellow officer from the carrier USS Casablanca, planned to drive from Texas to California where they would live and write in the San Francisco area. They were captivated, however, by snow-covered Taos and decided to stay, attracted more by the landscape, as Goyen later admitted, than the literary community. When the manager of the restaurant introduced him as an aspiring writer to the table that included Frieda, Mabel Dodge Luhan, the printer Spud Johnson, and Tennessee Williams, Goyen was both embarrassed and captivated. A short time later Frieda invited him and Berns to dinner, letting them look through some of Lawrence’s manuscripts, and giving them advice that Goyen seems never to have forgotten. He described the scene in a letter to an old friend in Houston, explaining that Frieda was “a grand old woman, like a peasant Queen, a marvelous smiling face and deep husky Germanic voice, and she answers every question with a lusty and throaty, ‘Ya!’” She “was really inspired several times; and once, as a kind of valedictory, she leaned her head back, looked up toward the ceiling and said, ‘And now . . . I am old and you are young. I say to you that you must fight and refuse to compromise, refuse absolutely to compromise. I lived with a fighter and I know what it is to fight. . . .’”
