To those who knew him, William Maxwell as a person—soft-spoken yet incisive, moist-eyed yet dry-voiced, witty yet infallibly tactful—threatened to overshadow Maxwell as a writer. We aspiring authors who enjoyed his unstinting editorial attention and gracious company tended to forget that, for four days of the week, he stayed at home and wrote, reporting to the typewriter straight from breakfast, often clad in bathrobe and slippers. He had finished two novels, the second of them a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, before finding, in 1936, employment at The New Yorker, where he remained, with a few interruptions, as an editor until 1975; he continued as a contributor until 1999, when he was ninety-one years old and in his last year of life. Now his writing is what we still have of him, and it warms the heart to hold almost all of his fiction in two sizable, relatively imperishable Library of America volumes ($35 each), timed to be published a hundred years after his birth, in Lincoln, Illinois. The books have been scrupulously edited by Christopher Carduff; his “Note on the Texts” is exceptionally full, tracing Maxwell’s earlier novels through their several revisions, and his twenty-nine pages labelled “Chronology” approach the intimacy and interest of a full-length biography. For the year 1945, for instance, we read:
People already well acquainted with Maxwell’s work will be fascinated to read, at the outset of the first Library of America volume—“Early Novels and Stories”—the author’s first novel, “Bright Center of Heaven” (1934), which Maxwell, after a sold-out edition of a thousand volumes and a largely unsold second printing of another thousand, in effect suppressed. In 1958, when his new publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, undertook to reprint in its Vintage paperback line three earlier novels, Maxwell declined the offer to include “Bright Center of Heaven,” finding it, upon rereading, “hopelessly imitative” and “stuck fast in its period.” In a Paris Review interview, he said, “My first novel . . . is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired.” Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” especially, is imitated in the drifting weave of action and interior reflection, and in the rhythms, paced by commas, of the long descriptive sentences. Ten years after the novel’s publication, he reread it and wrote, “I . . . discovered to my horror that I had lifted a character—the homesick servant girl—lock, stock, and barrel from ‘To the Lighthouse.’ ” But these borrowings do not taint the peculiarly American innocence of the setting—Meadowland, an informal artists’ colony in rural Wisconsin—or the indigenous ebullience borrowed from the Midwestern novelist Zona Gale. Meadowland was based upon Bonnie Oaks, a hospitable farm near Portage, Wisconsin, where Maxwell spent a number of summer months and one winter. Gale lived nearby, and, in many conversations, she shared with the young Maxwell her belief that artists should find “excitement in the presence of life” and bring out “the mysterious beauty of the commonplace” and the “brighter” aspect of reality.
Brightness is everywhere, indoors and out, in his first novel. With a confident empathy, the twenty-five-year-old author moves among a dozen residents and guests at the place. We partake of the interior sensations of the owner, a widow battling mental confusion, and of her two adolescent sons, and of a young woman sleeplessly coping with an unintended pregnancy, and of her oblivious, bookish lover, and of a crusty hired hand left over from the days when this was a serious farm, and of a concert pianist as she practices her drills, and of a painter wrestling with the abstract qualities of two oranges and an oil can, and of a “pestilential and garrulous youth” with no discernible artistic dedication, and of a homesick German cook, and of a sickly Southern spinster, and—the focus of the novel’s suspense—of a Harvard-educated black lecturer, an ardent advocate of racial equality. Though critics have found fault with the black character, he seemed to me plausible and complex enough—the earliest of Maxwell’s many honorable attempts to portray African-Americans.
“Bright Center of Heaven” gives those of us who knew him as the mature master of a deliberately low-key prose a new Maxwell—bolder, more overtly poetical, more metaphysical, and frequently surreal. The book’s title comes from a bizarre vision entertained by Amelia, the racist Southern spinster, as she sits, stunned into muteness, at the dinner table with a black guest: “The candles soared toward a heaven of blue and white larkspur, and in the bright center of heaven Amelia saw a great black face with gold-rimmed glasses.” Her sense of outrage finds another expression in her suddenly hearty appetite, where she has previously been a picky, invalid eater. Nothing is predictable at this social occasion, which ends when the black visitor, Jefferson Carter, batters his way out of a screened tent where the postprandial discussion, despite the liberal dispositions of the white participants, has irritated him into a rage. “These seven people,” he thinks, “had no meaning beyond themselves, which was to say that they had no meaning at all. They did not express the life of the nation. They had no visible work. They were all drones and winter would find them dead.” The mural scale of the indictment (in an aggrieved mind) is one that Maxwell did not strive for again. The novel, though not long, is ambitious in the reach of its human diversity and the extravagance of its metaphors. Emotional nuances are reified into audible objects:
An achieved and reciprocated love demands an even wider verbal stretch: “Beyond the shadow of all doubt she was certain that if he let go, if he took his hands from her face even for a second, she would fall headlong. She would be bruised and battered against ten thousand unnamed stars.” The “heaventree of stars” that hangs over Leopold Bloom at day’s end is glimpsed from another longitude.
In his next novel, “They Came Like Swallows” (1937), Maxwell subdues his figurative language to describe the most momentous event of his life: his mother’s sudden death in the flu epidemic of 1918-19, after childbirth, at the age of thirty-seven. “My childhood came to an end at that moment,” he later wrote. “The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.” Modest specifics, clearly rendered, replace the sometimes florid style of the first novel. The voice and form did not come easily: Carduff’s Chronology tells us, of the year 1935, “Plans autobiographical novel about death of his mother; writes seven drafts of the opening section but is happy with none of them.” The work was completed with the help of the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and a patron in Urbana, who gave him, in exchange for grading papers, four dollars a month, room and board, and privacy. “Without this arrangement,” he later said, “I doubt very much that the book would ever have been finished or that I would have continued to be a writer.” He also credited his friend Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator, with persuading him that “life was tragic” and “literature was serious business.” The novel is not simply autobiographical; the lies of fiction were employed to get at the nearly unbearable heart truth. Maxwell was ten when the flu seized his family and his mother died; his alter ego in the novel, Bunny, is eight. The subtracted two years sharpen the child’s vulnerability and simplify his picture of events. He does not understand, for instance, that his mother is pregnant, even though other characters can see that she plainly is, and he has no grasp of pregnancy’s timetable. Nor does the novel, divided into three parts, confine itself to his point of view; the actual death and its immediate aftermath are shown as perceived by Bunny’s rough-and-tumble thirteen-year-old brother, Robert, and by his similarly masculine, unsympathetic father. If Bunny’s section, titled “Whose Angel Child,” is one of Maxwell’s most brilliant transformations of memory, the next two, told from well beyond Bunny’s point of view, testify to the author’s powers of imagination.
Bunny, the angel child embodying the helpless infantile dependence upon maternal nurture that never totally leaves us, is, from his older brother’s point of view, a tyrannical rival. When Robert prepares to say goodbye to their mother, who is heading off to what will prove to be a fatal hospital stay, “he started toward her, but Bunny was there first, tugging at her and sobbing wildly into her neck.” As she comforts her younger son, her husband impatiently consults his watch, and Robert never does get to say his farewell. A few minutes later, Bunny is busy courting the good will of his new caretaker, Aunt Clara:
In the third section, the briefest, Clara returns Bunny to his grief-stricken father, James Morison, and the tearful child looms as a puzzling responsibility; he tells him, “There, there. You mustn’t, son. You mustn’t take on so. You’ll be sick,” and struggles “with the large buttons on the child’s coat.” Having determined in his daze of grief to sell the house and give the children to one of their aunts, so “there would be no trace . . . anywhere” of his dead wife, Elizabeth, he “turned to the doorway, and saw Bunny staring at him with Elizabeth’s frightened eyes.” The network of family connection reclaims him.
The social context of these private events is never lost sight of; the novel is not only about the mother’s death but about Aunt Irene’s broken marriage, and Robert’s amputated leg, and the pious unction of Aunt Clara and her husband, Wilfred. Irrelevancies, including the terms of the First World War armistice, keep intruding. In the depths of his sorrow, “James caught a glimpse of a pocket knife: Wilfred was going to pare his finger nails.” The widower wanders out into the snowy midnight, where the bizarre apparition of Crazy Jake the local junk collector making his rounds comes to James as a revelatory call back to life. The novel, like its predecessor, is somewhat supernatural; human awareness animates the inanimate (“All the lines and surfaces of the room bent toward his mother, so that when he looked at the pattern of the rug he saw it necessarily in relation to the toe of her shoe”) and comforts the bereaved with intimations of a persisting ghost.
Novel after novel, the reconciliation of art and actuality continued to present stimulating difficulties for Maxwell. In describing, in this magazine, his friend the poet Louise Bogan, upon her death, in 1970, he said, “In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling”: such an exacting superimposition represented his ideal. It was Bogan who, when, in 1940, he showed her a short story about two boys who meet at the school swimming pool, suggested that what he had written was the first chapter of a novel. As he worked for more than four years on the novel, she provided her responses to each new installment and at the end gave the work in progress its eventual title, “The Folded Leaf” (1945). Carduff’s “Note on the Texts” relates that Maxwell in 1943 was “still struggling with the material” so noticeably that The New Yorker gave him five months’ leave at full pay so that he could finish up; even then, it took several more drafts.
The core of the recalcitrant material was the second most traumatic event of his young life: he attempted suicide at the age of nineteen, while a sophomore at the University of Illinois. According to Carduff’s Chronology, Maxwell had been courting a professor’s daughter, Margaret Guild, and he introduced her to his Chicago high-school friend Jack Scully. When Jack and Margaret became lovers, Maxwell later recounted, “I thought I didn’t want to live any more and cut my throat and wrists with a straight-edged razor.” As the novel describes it, it is not the girl but the male friend whose defection pushes the slight, physically underdeveloped protagonist, Lymie Peters, into despair. In “The Folded Leaf” Maxwell describes, with a candor then rare in American fiction, homosexual passion. Swimming-pool and locker-room nudity leads to frenzied tussling, a bawdy frat initiation, a shared bed, a relationship anxiously servile on one side and gruffly commanding on the other, and, in the culminating reconciliation, a kiss on the lips. Though the physical beauty of the gruff partner, Spud, is repeatedly extolled, no description of physical interaction is more graphic than this:
Looking back, with more than a year of psychoanalysis with Theodor Reik behind him, Maxwell ascribed his suicide attempt to reading too much Walter de la Mare, which gave him a “poetic idea of life after death,” a life in which he would be reunited with his mother. A debonair note penned from his hospital bed readily accepted a female fellow-student’s invitation to a dance and referred to his attempt as “having failed to discover whether the moon really was made of green cheese.” But the italicized section in “The Folded Leaf,” in which Lymie recalls swallowing iodine and then, as his stomach ache recedes, trying to slash his way through his blood’s insistent congealing, is the most harrowing page Maxwell ever wrote. Shirley Hazzard, in her eloquent tribute to Maxwell after his death, thought that his near-suicide was “a spectral presence in Bill’s equilibrium and in his greatest pleasures.”
Bogan’s advice to make a novel of his vignette of two boys meeting in a swimming pool led him, it may be, to pad the slender basic story with too many details of college life and ruminations, influenced by Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” on tribal rites. His brave leap into sexual honesty was achieved with little assistance from his British models; Forster vaguely urged the male principals of “A Passage to India” to achieve Anglo-Indian connection, but left his novel about a homosexual affair, “Maurice,” unpublished at his death, and Virginia Woolf transmuted her androgyny into the mannered ingenuities of “Orlando.” In 1945, the same year that “The Folded Leaf” was published—in a healthy total of two hundred thousand copies—Maxwell married Emily Gilman Noyes, a recent Smith graduate who had come to The New Yorker to interview for a possible job. She was, as those of us who knew them remember, his beautiful counterpart, with equally luminous dark eyes and the same enchanted aura of a truly rare creature. They died a week apart, after fifty-five years of marriage. As the first fruit of his happiness, Maxwell began writing a novel for which Emily provided the title, “Time Will Darken It” (1948). It was not easy to work at it while carrying on his editorial duties, but it flowed:
The events take place in a house just like Maxwell’s childhood home, and deal with men and women based upon his kin, from Illinois and Mississippi. There is no character, no Bunny or Limey, who can be readily identified with the author. An unprecedented reliance on dialogue, and the interjections of an exceptionally relaxed narrator, move the plot smoothly along. The plot is not easy to remember; there is a stove explosion in it, induced by kerosene, and a baby, but “the mysterious beauty of the commonplace” blurs individual incidents. Maxwell (who once said to me, “Plot, shmot”) was ready to dispense with the contrivances of fiction altogether.
The second Library of America volume, “Later Novels and Stories,” shows Maxwell the person and Maxwell the writer becoming indistinguishable. It opens with the long anti-novel “The Château” (1961), based closely upon a trip to France that he and Emily took in 1948. A very thinly disguised couple, Harold and Barbara Rhodes, encounter the felicities and opacities of a foreign language and society. An appended section, “Some Explanations,” rather impudently offers to clear up a few mysteries: “But if you really want to know why something happened, if explanations are what you care about, it is usually possible to come up with one. If necessary, it can be fabricated.” The book gave him no end of trouble, though its inspiration—a tribute to the beauty of France and his happiness there—was instant: a preface to a later edition of “The Château” declared that, upon returning to America, “with my hat still on my head [I] sat down to my typewriter and wrote a page of notes for a novel. . . . For the next ten years I lived in my own private France, which I tried painstakingly to make real to the reader. It was my way of not coming home.” He filled a carton with “unreadable” versions and enlisted the sometimes chastening advice of friends like Frank O’Connor, the Irish short-story writer, and Francis Steegmuller, the eminent scholar and translator from the French.
Maxwell’s long period of painstaking struggle included his move from Harper & Brothers, then the usual publisher for New Yorker contributors, to Alfred A. Knopf, at the founder’s invitation. Knopf’s editor-in-chief, Harold Strauss, didn’t much like the novel and wanted the second part cut, and might have prevailed had not Knopf himself intervened, genially telling his new author, “Have it whatever way you want.” The book was assigned to the editor Judith Jones, a kindred spirit who edited Maxwell’s volumes for Knopf until his death. “The Château” continued to give him trouble even after its publication. One difficulty, which had inhibited its writing, concerned the possible reaction of the French family portrayed in its gossamer fiction. He refused to let the book be published not only in France but in England, because “English books would get across the channel so easily.” Nevertheless, his French friends did eventually discover the book, and one of its purported victims, who figured in it as a deaf old lady, told him, not unkindly, when, later, he visited her in Paris, “You were very naughty to write that book. Because you didn’t speak French, you didn’t understand things.” Her son-in-law, overhearing this remark, contradicted it, saying, “He got everything right.” Yet when, later still, Maxwell attempted to obtain the family’s permission to publish the book in France, word came back “No, not now. Not ever.” It is good to be reminded, upon rereading, how delicious and dead-on “The Château” is. All the embarrassments and gratifications of European travel are preserved in the amber of Maxwell’s much pondered, seemingly casual prose. How familiar is the intimidating breakfast that greets the Rhodeses on their first morning in the handsome but chilly château, near Blois, which has been converted to a guesthouse:
It is 1948. Sugar is still rationed; war damage is still evident; blackout paper lingers on some of the château’s windows; bicycles, cigarettes, and Citroëns are in short supply. France is wounded and poor and (a word that keeps cropping up in considerations of Maxwell) vulnerable. The Rhodeses in their innocence are in the first wave of tourists, and Harold, alternately ecstatic and wary, begins “to feel as if an unlimited amount of kindness had been deposited somewhere to his account and he had only to draw on it.” He worries why this is, asking his hostess, “Are French people always kind and helpful to foreigners?” Rather hypochondriacally, he wonders how they would have been received had they come before the Marshall Plan was announced, but reassures himself that “the kindness he had met with everywhere was genuine.” Harold is thirty-four, six years younger than Maxwell was in 1948, while Barbara is about Emily’s age, the mid-twenties. The youthful intensity that Harold brings to even momentary relationships was a recognizable trait of his creator, who tells us of his hero:
On an early page, he calls his work a “memoir—if that’s the right name for it.” Maxwell knew, slightly and briefly, the boy identified as Cletus Smith, a son of the murderer; years after the scandal he spotted him in the corridor of a big Chicago high school and, shocked by surprise, said nothing to him. This failure haunted him; he never saw Cletus again. Giving this confession a context, he tells the reader the personal story already reflected in his fiction—his mother’s death, the dishevelment of grief that followed, and the move with his father and stepmother to Chicago, leaving the idyll of his boyhood in Lincoln behind. This basic autobiography is imparted with a fresh stylistic firmness, a bluntness not possible when his near kin were alive, and a note of grievance not struck before: why did nobody protect him from the brutal bullying by stronger children to which he was subjected as a delicate child? Why did neither his father nor his older brother talk to him about his mother’s death? He describes his inability to master the piano, which his omni-competent father played with ease and pleasure, as “a small plot of ground on which I could oppose my father without being actively disobedient.” His music teacher, we learn, was the go-between for the love letters his father received from the woman who became his second wife, and his son was enlisted to deliver them; he retrospectively marvels at this. As young teen-agers, he and Cletus, now living in Lincoln with his mother, meet to play, a bit dangerously, in the open framework of the new house that Maxwell’s father is building on the edge of town, an emblematic framework that the narrator, now an elderly New York sophisticate, rediscovers in Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture “The Palace at 4 A.M.,” at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the tragic romance that Maxwell, in our plain sight, invents, he shows, for a boy reared in a small city, a persuasive feel for the hard daily life of tenant farmers in the black-earth countryside around Lincoln; the bleak tale-within-a-tale of friendship and love gone miserably awry earns him a place as a prairie novelist in the naturalist Midwestern vein of Willa Cather and Hamlin Garland. The editors at The New Yorker, which printed “So Long, See You Tomorrow” in two installments, objected to the articulated thoughts of a dog, Trixie, belonging to Cletus’s family, but Maxwell, as with the second section of “The Château,” got his way. The dog’s thoughts, which are not complex, are one with his creator’s lifelong habit of personifying furniture, objects, and rooms, sometimes giving them words to speak, within the wide discourse of things that present themselves to human awareness. His tender anthropomorphism here descends even upon a lowly ant, as Cletus “with a stick . . . drew crosses in the dirt, making life difficult for an ant who had business in that patch of bare ground.”
The fault, if any, with “So Long, See You Tomorrow” lies in the device of the self-conscious, conspicuously confiding author: when the author becomes the main character, the other characters appear secondary, and their actions and decisions become ripples within the central feat of storytelling itself. Cletus hardly exists compared with the boy the narrator once was; remembering the two boys testing their equilibrium in the half-built house, Maxwell writes, “It occurs to me now that he was not very different from an imaginary playmate.” When he searches his high-school yearbook for any image or mention of Cletus, he finds none, as if the character were fictional after all. The contract between writer and reader, which calls for a willing suspension of disbelief, has been quietly abrogated. When the author casts off his cloak of invisibility, and a novel is no longer (as Stendhal put it) “a mirror that strolls along a highway” but one that strolls down Memory Lane, he stands in front of the curtain either as a memoirist or as a fabulist exulting in the magic of make-believe; Maxwell in his shorter late works was now one and then the other. Those already well acquainted with Maxwell’s work will surely find something new and delightful in the forty fabulous “improvisations” that the editor has assembled from the twenty-one that Maxwell included in “All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories of William Maxwell” (1995) and nineteen published in sundry places between 1957 and 1999. The earliest of them all, “The Woodworker,” was written in 1946, as a Christmas present for Emily. In a National Public Radio interview in 1995, he explained the genesis of this improvisatory mode:
“A Final Report” (1963), inventorying the estate of Aunty Donald, a female neighbor who used to carry the author as a frail infant on a pillow, was the first short story that posed as a reminiscence and called the fictional Draperville Lincoln. He said, “I found I could use the first person without being long-winded or boring, and at the same time deal with experiences that were not improved by invention of any kind.” Pieces of fiction closely portraying his father and his older brother followed—the latter, “A Game of Chess,” signed with the pseudonym Gifford Brown to protect his brother’s feelings. The marvellous very short story “Love” (1983) commemorated Miss Vera Brown, his fifth-grade teacher, whom all her students loved, and who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three. The longer “Billie Dyer” (1989) drew liberally upon historical research in its portrait of a Lincoln black man who became a prominent physician in Kansas City and appeared as one of Ten Most Distinguished Men in Lincoln’s centennial pageant, in 1953. The story gave its title to a collection of memoirs, including among the subjects Maxwell’s father’s friends, his mother’s brother Ted, his own brother Hap as a child, and William Dyer’s sister Hattie, who had cared for Maxwell’s Grandmother Blinn and then worked for the Maxwells for five years. In the story “The Front and the Back Parts of the House,” Maxwell tells how, on a return visit home, he found Hattie in his Aunt Annette’s kitchen and impulsively put his arms around her: “There was no response. Any more than if I had hugged a wooden post.” He later traced the snub to an invented black drunk, in “Time Will Darken It,” whom Hattie took as a portrait of her husband. He was not, but Maxwell did believe, ever more strongly, that reality was the best fiction. In that same recollection, he says in an aside that even when the author imposes the disguise of a name on characters, actual names “are so much more convincing than the names he invents for them.” Apropos of “Billie Dyer,” he told an interviewer, “For me, ‘fiction’ lies not in whether a thing, the thing I am writing about, actually happened, but in the form of the writing . . . a story, which has a shape, a controlled effect, a satisfying conclusion—something that is, or attempts to be, a work of art.”
He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. In “Nearing Ninety,” he likened death to lying down for a pleasant afternoon nap and found “unbearable” only the thought that “when people are dead they don’t read books.” His shapely, lively, gently rigorous memoirs, out of the abundance of heartfelt writing he bestowed on posterity, are most like being with Bill in life, at lunch in midtown or at home in the East Eighties, as he intently listened, and listened, and then said, in his soft dry voice, exactly the right thing. ♦