BOO KS
561
TWO SOUTHERNERS
IN A FARTHER COUNTRY. By Williom Goyen. Rondom House. $3.50.
THE BRIDE OF THE INNISFALLEN. By Eudoro Welty. Horcourt, Broce.
$3.50.
Toward the end of William Goyen's
In a Farther Country–
an exotic decameron, or, better, shabby
Grand Hotel-an
evangelist–
type woman provides this bit of information: "Lying in the brown grass,
his brown body stretched out on the grass, I put pollen and seed in
the thick glistening hair on his underbelly, where they shone in the
sunshine like little sparkling lights. He did the same to me; was that
a sin? He nailed me to the cross with his hammering; he lay me out
lightly as the cross, arms stretched out, legs stretched out, and he nailed
me to the earth with the terrible spike of love." While the content of
this passage is not typical of the book, it is interesting to note that this
strange mixture of sex and theology comes at the climax of a novel
that has been leading up to something. The boy was seventeen and the
lady thirty-five when it happened, and the lady had a twin sister who
died mysteriously upon confronting puberty, and took beauty with her,
and visited a sense of death on the lady. The lady then became a
schoolteacher and eventually met the Mexican boy, who was destined
for the seminary but, in the end, couldn't resist nature and the lady,
until he died, which somehow laid the sister's ghost and reveals God's
spirit projecting the beautiful face of ourselves through the dirty masks
we wear.
Most of the novel takes place in a West Twenty-Third Street apart–
ment called "Spain," reached by a built-up fire escape from a shop
called "Artifices of Spain."
It
is presided over by Marietta McGee–
Chavez, last living mistress of the "Colcha stitch," and recluse from
the terrors of the outside world. Her guests include a sedentary en–
thusiast whose thwarted ambition is to dance like a whirlwind, a rotund
murderer who dies on a couch and gives occasion for the wake which
provides the stories that comprise the novel, an English poetess whose
culminating thrill in life occurred when she spent a night pouring quar–
ters into a machine that vibrated her bed, a patient priest and nun
whose salvation technique is to let people talk out their obsessions, and
others, all with gruesome experiences of death, near-death, life-in-death,
all seeking to unloose the heart that is buried within our hearts.
And so Spain is a land beyond "Spain," "a place of joy shot through
with the unworded sadness congenital to the human race." It is also
