Alive in William Goyen is a primal affinity with the first things of creation…. He has the keen senses of the woodsman, whom no creak or rustle can elude. He registers the sensual qualities of natural things, and it is as though he himself had experienced, from within, the cycle of germination, budding, flowering, and withering of all created matter. We seem to be hearing the voice of an aboriginal American that is being constantly pushed back by industrial civilization and forced to languish in its big cities. (p. 458)

[House of Breath is a] fledgling work—but a mature one. We are accustomed to a first novel being an eruption on which ore, slag, and ashes are whirled up together; or a so-called confession; or the reaction to the shock of growing pains on the nerves. Goyen's art is of a different sort. He has pledged himself to silence and waiting; to wait until he should find the word, "strong, small, but hard as a stone," which would utter his loneliness to the world…. The breath of lived life has merged with the breath of the artist. William Goyen had the power to attend this moment. He was able to wait because this breath was energy, an energy that wanted to be caught and directed so as to become the driving force of a power station. (pp. 459-60)

Like all modern art Goyen's book is the testimony and result of a sincerity that refuses to draw the line at cruelty…. [Goyen] lays bare the cancer of the flesh and of the soul; he … proclaims the passion of man. But with him suffering and torment include compassion. The tragic agony is carried through to the catharsis. The harmony with the elemental power of earth operates in this book as a stream that washes away all stains, that purifies and heals. (p. 461)

It is no accident that this book recalls poetry. The element of poetry entirely pervades Goyen's novel. It is not as if it had isolated "lyrical passages." No, its very substance is poetic in nature. Everything that the author experiences presents itself to him in the aggregate state of poetry; a primary poetry in which the epic and the lyric have not yet been sundered. The mode of discourse is not descriptive but imaginative. This is already shown by the title…. Goyen's mode of lyrical epic is related to myth and legend. The muse of the book is the blind girl sitting on a blue, rolling, cosmic sphere, bent over her lyre, and reciting her memories in a lyric lament…. The House of Breath tells us of Charity and East Texas; when it ranges farther, it only crosses the border of the neighboring state of Louisiana. And yet this book is something other than a local novel. What we are given here is not regionalism. The language and the landscape of East Texas are only the ground here of a fabric in which living and neighboring people talk and move…. To the boy whose story is related to us the out-lines of the countries and continents seemed like the organs of a human body. The articulation and conformation of the earth has impressed itself with the utmost vividness upon his child's consciousness. In the sleepy town of Charity he has had an intuitive apprehension of the wide world and known that he himself was part of it. That is why this novel of a childhood has become a book containing a universal experience. (pp. 462-63)

From the American novel we expect brutality and cynicism; intellectual overrefinement but also primeval eruptions; morbidity and neurosis. In William Goyen's book we shall find very different elements: substantive poetry …; harmony with the deepest simplicities of existence; reunion of sexuality with love; but also an artistic discipline that is more reminiscent of Flaubert, Proust, Joyce than of Melville, Wolfe, Faulkner. (pp. 463-64)