A writer's writer
The House of Breath, by William Goyen, is a remarkably sophisticated book which invented a new form of the novel. In a 1975 interview for The Paris Review, the question of alignment with his contemporaries was raised:
INTERVIEWER
Do your contemporaries interest you now?
GOYEN
They really don’t interest me very much. I still feel apart and, well, I am apart from my contemporaries. And they don’t know what to do about me, or they ignore me. I am led to believe they ignore me.
Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University commented as follows: "Given all the travails and travesties of publishing in America, The House of Breath still remains a kind of fugitive, priceless, spangled fish, dating all alone amid the myriad, dull schools of books swimming in our sea, each with a price tag for a tail."
I am a writer, and sometimes I feel apart.