Seed in Her Hair

IN A FARTHER COUNTRY (182 pp.)--William Goyen--Random House ($3).

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 be art.

The heroine of In a Farther Country is a New York-exiled New Mexican named Marietta McGee-Chavez. 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 of Old Spain amid the gasoline smells of West 23rd Street?

Distraught Marietta tries in various ways to exclude the worst of her mixed elements: she bars her ivory tower to poor MacDougal (symbol of Scotch commerce), spends hours doting on a road runner bird (symbol of the Old Spanish Southwest) in the pet department at Woolworth's (23rd Street branch). She opens her door to a bevy of characters as split-and-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.

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