Word: goyen
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...FARTHER COUNTRY (182 pp.)-William Goyen-Random House...
...William Goyen is bound by ties of good fellowships: the Southwest Review Literary Fellowship in 1948, Guggenheim in 1951 and 1952, the McMurray Award for the best first novel by a Texan, The House of Breath, in 1950. His latest work has two qualities that are likely to pluck at a patron's purse strings:1) it is clearly not written in the hope of making any money; 2) it is so unclearly written and hard to read that some people may conclude that it must...
...heroine of In a Farther Country is a New York-exiled New Mexican named Marietta McGee-Chavéz. She is Scotch-Irish-Spanish, dreams interminably about the Old World but lives on gloomy West 23rd Street with a shopkeeper named MacDougal. Author Goyen's point is that great emotional disunity results when so many different elements are present, e.g., how can a woman dream about "birds and bells in a romantic musical city" when a guy with a name like MacDougal is trying to climb into bed with her? How can she capture the ravishing spells...
...mixed as herself; they spin poetic stories in a troubadourish vein, seek peace and unity in the heart of a whirl of fantasy. In a Farther Country fades out with Marietta and one of her wacky acquaintances revolving in a dream world to the accompaniment of a fancy Goyen epitaph: "Her body became like a long yellow stalk, going up to seed in her hair . . . The room was dark except for the flashing ... of the sign across the street that said Moving and Storage . . . [These] words . . . seemed to be the last pronouncement about human life...
...Author Goyen is nettled when people confuse him with the lunatic fringe of highbrow Dixie. He insists he is a true Texan whose "themes . . . have no affinity with the eccentricities of Southern personality or Gothic bizarreries." He has never lived in the Deep Southern states. "only passed through them on a train." Just the same, so susceptible an author should not take such a risk again...