BOOKS BOOKING PASSAGE

I TALKED to William Goyen only once, at a meeting of the Texas Committee for the Humanities near Austin. By chance, I had come across an old picture of Goyen with novelist Katherine Anne Porter and Lon Tinkle, the book critic of The Dallas Morning News for many years. I mentioned the photo, in which Goyen wears a jaunty wide-brimmed hat, and he got a good laugh from the memory. Then we talked a moment more and parted.

In light of this brief meeting and having read only one other Goyen book (his first, the beautiful House of Breath), I was surprised, upon hearing of his death from leukemia in late August, to realize how much I knew about him. He was the polar opposite of the writer as personality (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Erica Jong), yet he made his mark and built his own quiet legend.

Goyen was the writer as artist, the craftsman who so slowly built his fictional house of many mansions. The writer with a jeweler’s eye for fine language. holding and caressing his words, almost hating to let them go. His output, as a result, was as slender as his books were deep. House of Breath (1950) was followed by just three novels in two decades: A Farther Country (1955), The Fair Sister (1970) and Come, The Restorer (1974).

And now comes Arcadio, Goyen’s only novel in nine years, published just days after his death at 68. It will not be a popular book, for the same reasons that his other books were not best sellers. Goyen’s books are not easily accessible-not because of esoteric language or convoluted, Jamesian syntax, but, I think, because they take us more deeply into ourselves than most of us want to go. Arcadio, for that reason, will not make good cocktail party chatter and will never be one of those cult books that people love to go off and discuss in corners. Such books, like Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes or any book by James Michener, are public books. They appeal to us as members of groups, dealing with politics or sports or war. A book like Arcadio, on the other hand, speaks to us one by one.

In the preface to his Collected Stories, Goyen wrote of his lifelong interest in what he called “the teller-listener situation.” Surveying his career, he said: “I’ve not been interested in simply reproducing a big section of life off the streets or from the stock exchange or Congress. I’ve cared most about the world in one person’s head.”

Perhaps this explains the curious place of Goyen and similar writers in our literature. Like most of our poets (and there isn’t much point in distinguishing between poetry and Goyen’s prose), his is an intensely private art. Speaking the secret dialect of the heart, Goyen takes us to the very edge of what language can do: Beyond his words is the silence of the mystic. No wonder his following was never large; there is no public vocabulary for much of what Goyen has to say.

So it is with Arcadio, which might have been subtitled A Vision. The book begins with no less than a vision, vouchsafed to a boy on an East Texas farm. Years after the event, the boy’s dying Uncle Ben recalls what he saw:

Once while hunting rabbit by the dry river I come upon a person bathing itself in a pool of Trinity River.. .I crouched down in the weeds and couldn’t believe my eyes. At first I said it’s a baptism in the river, a person’s baptizing themselves .. Twas so beautiful is all I can say.. .and then twas when I saw that it twas part a man and part a woman, the man part was sweetly washing the woman part and the woman part sweetly the man, the woman part baptizing the man and the man baptizing the woman. How twas so holy and how twas so flesh… I was divided in two almost by my feelings from it.

The old man has seen Arcadio, the mysterious hermaphrodite who is driven to sing his marvelous song to anyone who will listen. The boy has felt himself ready for the encounter; his body awakening into maturity, he is ready to go away “into the magical world where all the other visitors to my solitude dwelt.” He calls out for Arcadio, who speaks to him with the apocalyptic fervor of an Old Testament prophet: “Is your heart right? You got to get your heart right, son. Because we are living in the End Time, the Rapture is coming.”

From this moment on, the story-all the book’s stories-belong to Arcadio, who regales his spellbound listener with tales of his pilgrimage through life, from his birth to his years as a male-female prostitute to his time as a circus freak and his eventual escape from the Show.

Goyen dips deep into myth and legend in creating Arcadio, whose literary ancestry can be traced to Plato’s parable about man and woman created as joined halves of the same being but later separated, with all the problems of the human condition arising from their efforts to reunite. The blind seer Tiresias, whom Odysseus sought in The Odyssey, was also half-man, half-woman. The thrust of such stories seems to be that the hermaphrodite resolves the contradictions of the human species; he/she is complete, and, seeing life as an androgynous whole, has wisdom to impart.

But Arcadio’s knowledge has been hard-won. For a time, he was lost in a tragic narcissism, literally needing no one else for his fulfillment: “[I was] obsessed with myself, possessing myself long days on hidden beds, a tormented wheel, a howling acrobat, my body assailing my body.” He has won a costly vic-tory over the self that ends in what the evangelists like to call “a personal relationship with Jesus.” But this is a very unorthodox Christ:

And Jesucristo was with me in all those places, Oyente, in the Baths and in the whorehouse too, you wan hear.. .waiting for me to cry to him, softly knocking. And if you are sick of flesh and body and feeling and wanting and cannot put out of your mind pictures of the flesh, if you are haunted and in that bondage.. .you can recall my story and cry for the knocking hombre de reconciliation.

Reconciliation-a final harmonious reunion of all the discordant elements of our nature-is Arcadio’s goal. His double-sexed body is at once his curse and his deliverance. “In me Satanas put on one body the two biggest troublemakers ever created from flesh,” he tells his rapt listener, but it is that twin perspective that helps him to transcend his confusion.

Accepting his life as a holy freak of nature, Arcadio pursues and extends his dream of reconciliation, wandering the Southwest in search of his scattered family. These travels give the novel all the plot it needs, since Goyen is not concerned with the great world of captains and kings, but with that private world “in one person’s head.” Casually turning from one episode to another (“But then one day there was Hondo…”), Goyen keeps his focus on his odd storyteller.

It is always risky and usually presumptuous to try to find the writer in a work of fiction. But after Goyen’s death, the closing lines of Ar-cadio seem pregnant with larger meaning: Sometimes, Uncle Ben, I do not wish to live any longer in this world. Sometimes I want to go home, where we all were. That simple house of early solitude and strangers rises before me, built again.. . Arcadio! Your creator Ben has come to me through you. And I, both teller and listener, solitary maker, grand and absurd and homesick, who am I? Arcadio is filled with such haunted, beautiful language-’palabras grandes” as Arcadio puts it. Its evocations of childhood and adolescence, for example, are so vivid as to be startling, until we remember that this is what great artists always do: It is their business to help us recall those buried, almost forgotten moments of being which we have grown too busy or too cynical or too reasonable to remember. For this, we owe writers like William Goyen a debt we can never repay.

AFTER THE almost suffocating inwardness of Arcadio, it should be a relief to read a book that takes us out of ourselves and into the loud, brawling world that waits beyond our navels. A book with gusto, glamour and guts, a barnburner of a page-turner that will have us riveted! from Word One and may be-who knows-the one book we should read if we read only one book a year. Or, what the heck, every other year.

But On Wings of Eagles, Ken Follett’s paean to H. Ross Perot, is not that book. Considering Follett’s subject matter (the daring raid on the Tehran prison to free two EDS employees in the early days of the Khomeini revolution) and his track record (he has written best-selling fictional thrillers such as Eye of the Needle and Triple), Follett has not made much of a book out of this adventure.

On Wings of Eagles reminds me of Road to Resistance, George Millar’s account of his days as a member of the French Resistance. Far from being a gripping tale of Nazi-bashing, replete with hidden machine-gun nests and bold patriots leaping from rooftops, Road to Resistance was a thudding bore that lost itself (and the reader) in a maze of trivial detail and left the impression that fighting Hitler’s hordes was mostly a matter of waiting in some cozy chalet, sipping a modest little vintage and waiting for those klutzy Germans to self-destruct.

For similar reasons, On Wings of Eagles fails as a book, despite the undeniable valor of its principals. I take no pleasure in saying this because we do not want such books to fail. It’s like watching Mickey Mantle strike out in the Old-Timer’s Game. Homage should be paid to heroes, always in short supply in a bureau-cratized world, and the EDS employees who went into Iran, led by Lt. Col. Arthur D. (Bull) Simons, were genuine heroes.

But they deserve a better chronicler than Follett, who writes as if he were already preoccupied with counting the money this book will earn him. (As of early October, On Wings of Eagles had soared to Number Two on The New York Times Best Seller List.)

Perhaps non-fiction is not Follett’s game. That might account for the sluggish, wooden dialogue that drags at the eyelids:

“His wife died.”

“Lucille?” Perot had not heard. “I’m sorry.”

“Cancer.”

“How did he take it?”

“Bad.”

Or try another sample-just one more.

“They haven’t been released and the jail says they aren’t going to be.”

“Aw, damn.”

Moving, huh? Of course, the faithful will argue that Follett is reconstructing dialogue from conversations held years before and is, after all, trying to stick close to what was said while pruning out the incoherencies and hem-hawing of everyday speech. A tough job, no doubt. But this begs the real question: Why so much dialogue, anyway? Readers would have been better served had Follett summarized more and “dramatized” less, especially since much of the dialogue does little to advance the plot and nothing to develop the characters.

Even more irritating is Follett’s incessant use of what we’ll call the Portentous One-Liner. As witness:

The bus was not there.

They waited an hour.

Boulware decided the bus was not going to come.

See Ken write. Such strained attempts to hype the suspense only highlight the fatal flaws of this book: Follett is simply too remote from the action; and he is not free, as he is in his novels, to play God and invent, embellish, wipe out dull characters or meld several tedious incidents into one composite scene. He must stick to the facts-fects recalled for him by people some three years after the raid.

In too many ways, On Wings of Eagles reads like just what it is-not a company history, but close: a company adventure story. Despite Follett’s denials, it is naive to think that Perot’s only stipulation was that the portrayal of Bull Simons, who died in 1979, meet with his approval. We are asked to believe that Perot invited a famous writer inside his company and told him to just write any old thing he liked.

And the result of this nearly untrammeled freedom just happens to be a book filled with flawless individuals. Nobody is lazy, dishonest, lustful, jealous or incompetent-at least, nobody on the side of the EDS angels.

But what should we have expected? Perot, we learn, can stroll into the Pentagon and order up satellite photographs of all the airports between Tehran and the Turkish border. With Follett’s help, we even know what Perot was thinking (or would have been thinking, had he known his thoughts would be on the best-seller list): “This is just like going into McDonald’s.”

He makes it look so easy.