“Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt” was originally published (as “The Ghost of Raymond Emmons”) in the February 1951 issue of Mademoiselle. It was collected in Ghost and Flesh: Stories and Tales (1952). It is currently most readily available in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (W. W. Norton).

It is ironic that, for a number of reasons, William Goyen, one of the most original and innovative voices in twentieth- century fiction, especially the short story, should now need some words of introduction. Not that the man, poet, playwright (five produced plays), and editor (McGraw-Hill), as well as fiction writer, and his work—six novels, five collections of stories, three other works—were or are unknown. Not by any means. In Europe, thanks in part to able and gifted translators, especially in France and Germany, his work has been highly honored and is widely studied. Here at home in America, aside from the many other writers who are on record as his admiring readers, he early earned and has maintained the mixed blessings of a kind of cult status. In her wonderfully perceptive introduction to Goyen's posthumous Had I a Hundred Mouths: New & Selected Stories, 1947–1983 (1985), Joyce Carol Oates celebrates the originality of his work (“A story by William Goyen is always immediately recognizable as a story by William Goyen.”). And she focuses on the paradoxical conflicts out of which his singular method grew. He is “the most mysterious of writers,” she writes: “He is a poet, singer, musician as well as storyteller; he is a seer; a troubled visionary; a spiritual presence in a national literature largely deprived of the spiritual.” On the one hand, he is lyrical and visionary. On the other, he is deceptively “artless”: “So fluid and artless are the stories that they give the impression of being ‘merely narratives of memory.’”

I like to think that William Goyen was a deep and altogether benign influence on me as a writer. As a reader, I first began reading him about the same time, 1946, that he began publishing stories in The Southwest Review, reading purely for the pleasure of it; he was for me a joyful discovery at just the time when I was discovering everything all at once.