Had I a Hundred Mouths: New and Selected Stories, 1947-1983

Amazing circles of stories - and a voice in stories I'd never heard anything like. I couldn't love all of the stories - but admired each one. "Bridge of Music, River of Sand" was among my favorites - it's pointing to nowhere but exploring everything a person might be thinking confronted with an inexplicable situation that no one else witness or might believe. The title of the collection alone drew me in and that first story "Had I A Hundred Mouths" that opens the book - the connection between a succession of stories never fully complete but strong enough to stand apart. I am now hunting up some of Goyen's novels that were in the author's list - "House of Breath" - to read more of his work.

Goyen wrote a number of novels, but his true forte was the short story. Even his extended works have the feel of connected stories (something Goyen himself observed when he once called his works quilts, made of many patches). HAD I A HUNDRED MOUTHS gathers his greatest early stories with stories written shortly before his death from leukemia in 1983. There are unforgettable tales here, mixtures of realism and fantasy,the gothic and the quotidian, that nearly make Goyen a twentieth century Hawthorne. Among the best of the later pieces are "Arthur Bond", a story of obsession, and "Precious Door," in which man struggles against nature and himself. "White Rooster" is perhaps the best known of his early stories, another tale of obsession, madness, and willfulness, and other gems from the same period include "Rhody's Path", in which Goyen's ubiquitous theme of restlessness and searching for one's place in the world is given poignant expression, and "The Grasshopper's Burden", which I read as an allegory of the misunderstood artist trying to make his way in an indifferent or even hostile world. Goyen's themes are often dark, but he leavens the heaviness with humor and a masterful use of Southern/Southwestern vernacular. Goyen toiled in near-obscurity for many years. His lyricism, humor, and insights into love and loneliness entitle him to wider recognition and readership.

This is a collection of stories that seem to seethe from the imagination of a writer of astounding power. Some are interwoven... some just reach out and ensnare you with their seductiveness. None are for the faint of heart. Joyce Carol Oates wrote a five-page introduction for this book - and even she could only scratch the surface of this East Texas spirit that shed its body in 1983. A MUST for every writer!