It starts with trouble, p.10
It Starts With Trouble, page 10
For the next several months, however, until the commissioning of his ship in July, there was more monotony than threat to Goyen’s existence. His primary tasks involved organizing and training new sailors coming into the base, but he had time to go to the movies most evenings and to the officer’s club a few blocks from his barracks. He helped the educational officer administer the tests for admission to Officer’s Candidate School and on his day off joined outings to the countryside, including a day on Mount Rainier. As was customary by this point, he regularly worried about his mother’s health and reported to her about his own; constipation and hemorrhoids were high on his list as well as some new sinus trouble he thought might be contributing to the headaches he had suffered since he was a boy. And he now had time to write, not just the several personal letters every few days but new fiction meant as a weapon against the “dullness” that threatened him.17
In March of 1943, Goyen told Hart that he had “been trying to write” and had produced “a few typewritten pages of a hard, concentrated core of something as a result.”18 The untitled story included with the letter concerns a young man, David, who lives with his family in a small house in a sweltering, stagnant city. Like many of Goyen’s surrogates, David is moody and restless, “a youth who could not sit down, for misery had stung his soul and put a wandering in his blood and there was a bitter beauty caged like a bird in his mind.”19 His mother watches over him, but she is less a caring figure than a type of emotional vampire, who has “parched or burned out all the beauty and urge to nobility in those of this house except for the few little flowers and crystals of it which her prey had managed to secretly hide away, like beasts of winter, in some occult place.” She is allied to the “huge wooden cross with the Savior hanging, nailed through his hands and feet, from it” that dominates the house. The father, presumably one of these victims, has been declawed like an “ancient cock without his spurs,” and the two sisters, Martha and Anna, are violently at odds: one openly sexual, the other cold and disapproving.
David is an artist just coming into maturity, a stifled romantic who needs desperately to escape the confining house: “This house, then, could not hold him; it was no cage for one who knew what he knew. He belonged in some great place. He was urged to it, for he felt himself strange and primitive and he did not want yet to be discovered. . . . Who in this house could understand this?” He fantasizes about saving Anna—the repressed, lonely sister—but finds her dead in her room, and she quickly becomes his mirror image, taking on his secret burden: “Had she loved someone, silently, all these years? What had wasted her life away? . . . He realized, too late, that Anna would have been the only one he knew to whom he could have given his secret.” Shortly thereafter, Martha brings “into the house a strong dark man” and announces her pregnancy. The man, whose face “had all the colors of [David’s] paint pots in it,” carries “a power or magnitude . . . which dwarfed the family to weaklings and made them pale and weak-voiced.” As though in response to this new power, David then finds the determination “to bend [his] knowledge to some cause and some end: to paint it or write it or sing it or dance it out to the world.”
In the strictest sense, the story seems related to Goyen’s time in Houston between assignments. In an earlier letter to Hart, he had written vaguely about “those strange days at home”: “I have learned to benumb myself so that many times it is as though I walked in a dream. This I especially have to do while at home, for it would have been too much had I allowed myself to feel.”20 But in the accompanying letter, he suggests other, deeper sources: “I think it has been Raymond trying to get written down. Or perhaps Sterling, I am not clear.”21 The reference is to two of Goyen’s prewar male passions, both relationships having since ended, though he kept track of Sterling Price III throughout the war and sometimes corresponded with him or his mother. The comment, elliptical as it is, is characteristic; in other words, he realized that these emotional turbulences were at the root of his work, but he wasn’t necessarily sure which wound was the source that was now groping toward dramatic clarity. It also makes clear the relationship between Goyen’s hidden homosexuality, his own conception of his role within and against his family, and his self-determined mission to be an artist, the one who tells. It is the repression of the household and David’s inability to tell his secret—particularly to the dominating, religious mother—that creates his prophet-like burden. In other words, for Goyen, writing about his sexuality did not involve revealing it. Instead he let a charged silence push against the surface of his stories in a way that produced dangerous but still buried tremors of feeling.
That he had long since acquired the habit—and taken on the psychology—of living a double life is obvious but important to keep always in view. From his earliest sense of himself as an exile to his adolescent traumas of rebellion and silence, Goyen had developed not merely the ability to think of himself as divided but also the determination to claim self-division as an artistic mark, a sort of destiny. As often as he pounded his fist about revelations to come and the need for a recovered wholeness, he worked diligently to avoid exposure and, in his writing, sought to keep the tension of secrecy alive, avoiding or incapable of analysis. Sexuality was both root and branch of this emotional isolation, and the letters to his family and to Hart during this stage of the war provide some of the most striking evidence of Goyen’s ability to live two delicately joined but mutually repellant lives. To Hart he is all passion, decrying his loneliness or revealing a new, apparently overwhelming crush. “I have found my Christopher and my Icarus,” he wrote in May. “He has come here, out of the sky, and I have never been so disturbed in all my restless life. . . .”22 The Icarus in question was William E. Velte, a Pennsylvania carrier pilot of German background who was in Bremerton awaiting a court-martial for breaking Navy regulations by flying under a bridge. In an effusive letter to Hart, Goyen poured out a new version of his prewar romantic history with other men: “Oh S. P. III was a young beautiful fool, a cheap and a passing, bitter beauty; R. W. was a Walpurgis-Nacht and a Michelangelo’s cherub, but here, here is a human being, full blown, who has his hand on the reins and sees . . . all, all of it, the misery and the beauty.”23 Velte was more mature and better educated than Goyen’s Houston attachments, an aspiring writer who read Chaucer and wrote drafts of a play during his house arrest. He had studied in Germany and played the cello, and planned to get an MA in English at Columbia after the war. His letters suggest an almost overwrought aesthetic sensibility undiminished by his membership in the Grumman Hellcat Fighting Squadron 10, and it isn’t surprising that Goyen would find him a welcome presence in the dull wartime atmosphere. However, the relationship had little time to develop. Velte, too, was soon at a distance, off again on combat missions on the USS Enterprise, leaving Goyen to idealize him in memory while continuing to chafe and yearn against his isolation and boredom.
To his parents he wrote only of a new friend who “likes books and music.”24 Of his straight love life, Goyen was vague when writing his mother or father, speculating at times on what it would be like to be married but always eager to assure Emma in particular that he wasn’t serious about anyone yet. A good deal of this talk revolved around a young woman from Houston he had been seeing at least since he joined the Navy. Nell Schedler worked as a clerk at the University of Houston and was a friend of the family; for a time during the war, she shared an apartment with Goyen’s sister Kathryn and her two young children. Though it isn’t clear whether Nell was Bill’s first steady girlfriend, by the time he left for Notre Dame they were clearly a couple. He corresponded with her regularly through 1944 and spoke on occasion to his mother and father of the possibility of marriage. In late 1944 these discussions increased in frequency and seriousness. In part, Goyen was responding to the example of the many married friends around him, Navy buddies and their wives who played a large part in the Casablanca’s social life. He knew there were advantages to being married while in the Navy (toward the end of the war, he complained bitterly about the extra points toward discharge granted to married officers), but even more, he seemed eager to show those around him that he was serious about this long-described girlfriend. His monotonous duties in Puget Sound had also made him more and more depressed and desperate; talking about marriage may have been a way of dreaming himself forward into some more preferable reality.
What he didn’t expect, at least initially, was his parents’ strong objections. For reasons that remain unclear—or at least unspecified—Emma Goyen was hurt by her son’s hints of marriage, prompting a contrite letter home that nevertheless tried to make a case for the practical value of the match: “I feel like Nell is a person I could spend the rest of my life with, and that she will give me so much that I need to continue what I have to go through now and after the war. And more than that, I feel that she is so close to you; she loves you like her own mother, and I know you love her.”25 Part of what worried the Goyens were plans for Nell to visit Bill over Christmas. Emma and Charlie were alarmed that the two might secretly marry without involving the family. They may also have had their doubts about Nell, who was nine years older than Goyen and had been widowed in 1932. Perhaps even more relevant, she had recently faced a serious health problem, possibly tuberculosis. Even so, Goyen’s response to Merrill Street indicates that his mother was also quite simply jealous, afraid of losing the affections of a son she had come to rely on for emotional care.
Whatever the doubts and concerns emanating from Houston, in December Nell took the train north and spent the holidays with Goyen and his Navy friends. “She is such a strange little thing,” he wrote his mother, “so honest and simple and different from all the rest.” She impressed them all, particularly the other wives, with her quiet friendliness, and for a time, at least, Goyen seemed grateful for her presence and convinced of his need for her. He continued to make the case to his mother: “I just can’t do without that little girl and she cannot exist without me. I never really knew her before, but now I do, and I know that I could never find anyone else like her. I would be a fool to give her up.”26 Emma was unconvinced, however, and it may have been this resistance coupled with an increase in candor on Goyen’s part that finally induced a confession of sorts:
Mom, I do love her, in a funny sort of way. I just feel like she somehow belongs to me and to all of you. But, Mom, I’m going to tell you some things that must always be just between you and me. I know you are the only one in the family who can really keep things to yourself, and I want you never to tell this to anyone. It’ll always be just for you and me. Mom, Nell and I will never be married, we both know that. You see, we learned that up here. Because, somehow she is just not quite for me. There’s something about her—her age or her health or her strangeness that just keeps me from feeling sure of her or right about marrying her. I believe that she feels someday, somehow we might go ahead, but deep down inside she knows we cannot. We do love being together, and I feel so free and at ease with her, as I have never felt with any other woman, but there’s just something there that keeps me from going all the way. She knows this now, but we agreed to keep it always a secret from all of you.27
The letter is an important document in Goyen’s history of near-revelation and secret sharing. Almost pressured into marriage—and half willing to go along—he was able both to free himself from the obligation and to present the break to his mother almost as a kind of gift, a renewed bond of intimacy between them. It was a given that he was unable to say more of the causes of his ambivalence, though the underlying silence can at times seem like the primary condition of an unspoken compact between mother and son.
In The House of Breath, Nell appears as Evella Sykes, rival to Malley Ganchion for the affections of her son, Berryben. “She was older than him,” Malley explains in her monologue, “and had had one husband who died in Charity, and she was a kind of mother to him, I know, loved him and wanted to help him all she could” (HOB 85). And later, Berryben himself describes an autumn in a “fantasy land” that sounds very much like the Puget Sound area where he and Evella end their relationship: “‘The luminous wind was binding the autumn to the glistening world, blowing it round through trees with the sound of the breaking sea, and the sun was driving the summer away,—all love is a turning on a spit, toward, through, and away from flame—and we were like sleep-walkers. . . . With Evella I could never see myself, only hold up a mirror for Evella to see herself; and thus I became unreal’” (HOB 107).
That he let himself come close to marriage was more than anything an indication of how tired Goyen was of the Navy and how eager to get on with his life. From his arrival in Bremerton in early 1943 until his first Pacific voyage in August of 1944, he had been either in training for the initial launch of the Casablanca or training others on cruises in the Strait of Juan de Fuca north of Seattle. As the first of its class off the line, the Casablanca served as a test of the new design, and the problems encountered during its sea trials and after helped alert the builders to the need for improvements.28 At first, the shipboard activity was interesting and exciting for Goyen. As Second Division Officer, he commanded a battery of 20 mm antiaircraft guns and stood “top watch” on the bridge. According to the historian Barbara G. Jones, the overall training schedule for visiting crews on the Casablanca was rigorous: “Training for each pre-commissioning crew began with drills, including all hands at abandon ship, man overboard and the training at each position within a man’s specialty, fire drills, calls to general quarters, and muster on stations. Then, drills would be added, including gunnery or assisting with landing and takeoff of aircraft, engineering, radar, radio, ship maneuvering, and any other skills necessary to run a ship and conduct flight activities.”29 But gradually the repetition of these instructional missions began to wear (the Casablanca trained crews for all forty-nine of the CVE class ships in two-week increments from July 1943 to July 1944), and the sense of uselessness and wasted time became increasingly depressing.
Later in the summer of 1944, Goyen’s mood lightened when the carrier finally moved down the coast to San Francisco to pick up supplies and eighty-eight aircraft to ferry to Manus, the largest of the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific. A key staging area for the impending invasion of Leyte Gulf, Manus had four airfields and a massive base built by the Americans and Australians after they took the island from the Japanese in May 1944. Relieved at finally participating in the war, Goyen wrote home enthusiastically about his first real wartime voyage, particularly his initiation as a “shellback” when the ship crossed the equator. The thrill didn’t last, however. By October, the Casablanca was back in Puget Sound training again, and Goyen was once again tired, angry, and unhappy with his daily existence.
Over the next year until the end of the war, the ship made several trips from the West Coast to the South Pacific, ferrying men and supplies to Pearl Harbor and Guam and then operating as a supply and support vessel between Samar, Manus, and Palau. The Casablanca’s cabins and below-deck areas were sweltering most of the time, and the duty was monotonous, though there were sights and incidents destined to produce lasting traumatic effects, particularly for someone with Goyen’s emotional fragility. In February of 1945, the poorly designed ship ran into a major storm while en route from Bremerton to San Diego. The waves were so large that the stern was lifting its props out of the water as they topped the crests, and the flight deck fractured when the bow dug awkwardly into a massive wall of water. The storm went on for two days, the ship shaking ominously each time it plunged through the swells, making almost all of the crew violently seasick. On a different occasion, Goyen was officer of the deck while cruising in the dangerous waters between Pearl Harbor and Guam when the convoy’s destroyer escort USS Gilmore made submarine contact. Though the alert was soon lifted, the tension of constant zigzagging and general quarters alerts remained high, particularly while the Casablanca ferried supplies from Manus to Samar in April 1945. Even Tokyo Rose, the infamous Japanese propagandist, singled out the Casablanca by name and described it as a known target for enemy submarines.
Though explicit war scenes seldom appear in Goyen’s work, the story “Children of Old Somebody” contains a brief anecdote that hints at the emotional cost of these months inside the combat zone:
For they had lately put me down from the ship into the waters in a little leaf of a boat and sent me to wait upon the spot where a plane had fallen into the sea, to hover at the rim of the broken waters to watch when a body would rise from the depths, and capture it. I waited on the leaf, at the spot of the destruction, and behold he came rising up like a weed, the drowned sailor. I, whose hands had named and shaped and blessed this sunken shape, dipped my hands into the water and lifted it from it and brought back the salvaged shape lying across my knees, sea-boy lie light on my body, to the ship. . . . (CS 81)
The situation itself is quite real, of course, though it’s unlikely that Goyen himself carried out this kind of recovery mission. However, the description does suggest the memory of an accident that occurred during a training mission off Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. While practicing carrier landings on the Casablanca, the pilot of a Grumman F4F Wildcat, Vernon Wilbur Spalding, approached the flight deck at too low an angle and was waved off. But before he could regain altitude, his tail hook caught part of the arresting cable and the plane hit the crash barrier and went over the port side of the ship. Spalding’s parachute apparently caught on the plane, and he was pulled under as the aircraft sank. The body was recovered by a trailing ship, called the “aircraft guard,” and brought aboard the Casablanca, where Spalding was pronounced dead by drowning. Though no record attests that Goyen was on duty during this incident, he may have witnessed the crash and almost certainly heard about the incident from others.30
