562
PARTISAN REVIEW
identified as "a place of silence where only the riffle of a fallen leaf,
the bend of a blowing blade of grass, the dropping of one tear or the
sounding of one measure of laughter, tells the last thing."
In a biographical note in the back of the hook, Mr. Goyen declines
to be identified as "a young Southern writer," since he is "full forty,
from Texas." He goes on to say: "The themes of my work have no
affinity with the eccentricities of Southern personality or Gothic bizar–
reries, though my work has been attracted into that category through
spurious association." I'm inclined to make the association, spurious or
not. The characters may not be Southern but they are certainly eccen–
tric. ThematicalIy the book is as Southern as you can get in the post–
Faulkner school of Welty, Williams, Capote, McCulIers, in that it
is
concerned with the wandering lost souls, the crippled of the earth, who
cannot take ordinary life, or whom ordinary life has mutilated, whose
illusions are matched against life to life's disadvantage. The moral al–
ways seems to be: judge not their actions, for all experience is enrichen–
ing and saving, if it is consumed with anguish by passive innocents.
As for "bizarreries," the book is loaded with them, a talking macaw
masquerading as a road-runner, named Alfonso King of Spain, a man–
dolin strung with a woman's hair that plays in the evening breeze, scenes
that take place at night in the pet department of Woolworth's, the items
mentioned previously, and lots more.
As for the style, it reminds me of nothing so much as medieval
Gothic jewelry, encrusted and ornamented, the rubies and emeralds
clutched in overworked silver or tin; or, for a modern image, romantic
encaustic, shining dark reds and greens, with scratchy furbelows of eerie
whites and yellows, the world in a night illumination. And this in spite
of an affected simplicity, which unfortunately is constantly dolled up,
as if true sentences had come to the author's mind, only to be smeared
and bedizened. It seems to me that Mr. Goyen's real talent for narra–
tive and description has been blurred by the influence of lady writers.
It's as if his image of life were derived from Virginia Woolfs "luminous
halo," resolved by some sort of religious impulse, and written out with
the coagulated allusive chattering of Djuna Barnes. So for all its oc–
casional richness, and daring, and sensitivity, the book seems motivated
by a spirit that is in itself delicate, dainty, and so far as I'm concerned,
dull.
The stories in Eudora Welty's
The Bride of the Innisfallen
are
about as good as her others. The subject range is wider, but they are
still hazy and humid, life seen in a disconnected dream which
focuse~
