[The Collected Stories of William Goyen] is the book William Goyen has been writing all his career. A born storyteller, even his four novels (The House of Breath, In a Farther Country, The Fair Sister, Come the Restorer) are composed of stories joined together by a common thread of locale of circumstance, so many beads on a string…. Covering a creative span of nearly thirty years, the book reveals what too few have acknowledged: William Goyen is one of our most distinguished and uncompromising fiction writers.

In the past, some critics have dismissed Goyen's work as too "poetic" or too "regional." (He was born in and writes most frequently of the Southwest.) Yet the surprise of his Collected Stories is the extraordinary range of his work. These stories not only transcend the regionalism from which they sprang, they also are more than poetic or symbolic. They are, in fact, prefigurative—or, to use a term more in currency, they are "mythic." The world of Goyen's imagination reveals the mythic manner in which all of us reexperience life, the way we live on a variety of levels: thought and action, dream and reality, past and present, appearance and reality, personal and collective. Goyen sees, or more probably intuits, how these levels can work together in harmony in works of art.

This is not to say William Goyen consciously employs the "mythical method" of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. Nowhere does he appear deliberately to appropriate a myth or set of myths and weave a fictional tapestry about them, hoping to add depth or counterpoint to the current secular reality through mythic underpinnings. Goyen is, rather, one of those rare mythopoeic artists, like Franz Kafka, whose best work unconsciously reflects archetypes from the collective unconscious—a fiction writer whose work exemplifies not mythology-consciousness but rather a true mythic imagination. (pp. 234-35)

"Children of Old Somebody" is obstensibly the tale of a child disowned by his elderly parents and left to grow up in a log. Later the child is removed, but too late: already it is unfit to live in society, having grown up among wild things. The sin committed against this child is our own heritage and ancestry. The innocent but disowned son roams the world, knocking on every door, reminding us of our own sins—a Christ figure, recalling Holman Hunt's famous Pre-Raphaelite painting of Jesus at the door. But the babe in the log is also a Childe Percival figure; indeed, Goyen's story relates perfectly to Jung's special phenomenology of the child: Abandonment, exposure, and danger are all elaborations of the child's insignificant beginnings (in Christ's case, in a manger) and of its mysterious and miraculous birth (in Goyen's child-character's case, not an immaculate conception, but a rather miraculous one between elderly parents). The child is a symbolic content, then, manifestly separated from its background (the mother), but sometimes including the mother in its perilous situation (as when she comes to nurse it). In Jungian terms, the log-baby is that third thing of an irrational nature which the unconscious psyche creates during a collision of opposites, on the way to "wholeness."

The log-baby recurs frequently in world mythology, and consciously or unconsciously Goyen … has struck upon a timeless archetypal situation. The fact that his child is delivered helpless unto the dangers of nature, but is endowed with superior powers to pull through, represents the strongest and most ineluctable urge in every being—namely the urge to realize itself, to achieve wholeness. (pp. 235-36)

These brief comments can only hint at the richness to be found in Goyen's stories. The collected volume is a book to be read, to be studied, to be explicated, with no fear of "spoiling" the stories through dissection. Goyen dives down deeper and stays down longer in the human psyche than most American writers practicing fiction today. In these twenty-seven stories he depicts the timeless conflicts between the past and the present, the visible and the invisible. Characters who on first encounter seem bizarre—bearded sisters, a solitary flagpole sitter, a man who lives in a child's playhouse—come to be perceived as archetypes for man's great struggle for wholeness, what Jung calls the process of individuation. The waking and dream lives of Goyen's characters create a meandering pattern in which meaningful individual strands become visible, then vanish, then return again—shifting patterns of water and dust, ghost and flesh, lost and found, dismemberment and wholeness. William Goyen's central vision is finally seen as man in the process of psychic growth. (pp. 236-37)