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Over the past year I have become a big fan of the nonprofit publisher The Library of America and their books (see their inspirational 25th Anniversary movie here). For sometime, the dust jackets on their editions turned me away. I’m not a huge fan. However, I got one of the books, took the jacket off, and, wow, it’s a beautifully crafted cloth book. You can bend each cover back until they touch, and the spine will not break or deform. I now have a row of Library of America volumes, jacketless, in a beautiful line on my bookshelf. Incidentally, I got a good start on my row by becoming a subscriber. Each month a new book arrives, jacketless but in a hard sleeve. The terms of the subscription are more than generous. There are no hidden costs.
That row of books, however, has turned out to cause another problem. I do most (90%) of my reading on my commute to work. There’s just no way I’m going to pack these beautiful books, no matter how durable, on the train and subway I take to my office. So I’ve been getting these books that I desperately want to read but couldn’t quite figure out a way to do it. Finally, I decided that my weekend reading, as limited as it is, is going to be devoted primarily to my LOA stock. And first on my list was William Maxwell. I loved – loved — his final novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, so I took down LOA Volume 1 and read his first, Bright Center of Heaven (1934).
Before I talk about Bright Center of Heaven, another word about the LOA volume. I typically do like to get my books individually packaged. For example, I’d rather get an author’s individually published short story collections than a collected works or something similar (just a preference, not a rule). I won’t be getting the LOA’s volumes of Philip Roth anytime soon, because I like to have all of his individual books taking up room on my shelf. However, I’ve realized that I don’t mind these collected editions of novels much at all, especially when they come as nicely packaged as these do. Another benefit, these volumes come with articles and essays and random bits from or about the authors. They are masterfully edited. Often, they often come with things that are essentially unavailable elsewhere. In this case, that unavailable thing is Maxwell’s first novel, written when he was just 26 years old. After two modest printings, Maxwell suppressed its republication for the rest of his life. He thought it was weak and derivative.
Well, to be honest, it is a bit derivative. When I read the novel, I didn’t know much about its publishing history, other than that it was out of print for around 70 years. I knew nothing about the book itself. However, after only 20 pages or so, I could tell it was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf, particularly To the Lighthouse (one of my favorites — in fact, Woolf is one of my favorites; she’s not on my blog because I read all of her work before I started blogging). I later read John Updike’s tribute to Maxwell and review of this LOA volume in The New Yorker (where Maxwell worked pretty much from just after this book was published until the 1980s) where Updike mentions that Maxwell felt he’d lifted everything from To the Lighthouse.
That’s not quite true, and I’m glad this book is available now. Maxwell was too hard on himself. While similar in style to Woolf, Bright Center of Heaven is still its own creation, and it shows that Maxwell was already a brilliant observer and writer, just the type that The New Yorker would pick up to work for it for a half-century.
This book takes place in Meadowland, an artists’ colony in the upper Midwest run by Mrs. West (the setting is inspired by Maxwell’s own time in a similar place in Wisconsin). Mrs. West is a widow and the mother of two adolescent sons. She brings about the central event in the novel: the visit of a Harvard-educated black lecturer named Jefferson Carter. Mrs. West has invited him and says, “I’ve always been a little hyped on the subject of Negroes. I always feel I can pardon them things I wouldn’t put up with in my own, don’t you know, because of what we have done to them.”
This is “outlandish” to many of the community’s residents, and his mother’s strange ideas is particularly hard for Nigel:
It was a special and excruciating kind of agony for him that Nigel should find his family queer. With every particle of his being he wanted to be like other people and do the things they did. But there was always his mother doing outlandish things, like bringing a Negro to Meadowland, and he had to stick up for her, no matter what. “They’re all right, if you don’t mind Negroes.”
One of the strengths of the novel — indeed, one reason it is reminiscent of To the Lighthouse — is how many characters Maxwell inserts into the foreground, allowing their consciousness to flood the page. He follows them for a few pages, in which they are very well developed, moves on to another, and then comes back later. By the end, we have come to know well some dozen characters, all connected in some way by the community, but each with her or his own concerns. I found them all interesting and engaging. My favorites to follow were the young lovers. He’s bookish and seems vaguely inattentive; meanwhile she cannot sleep because she is trying to find a way to cope with an unintended pregnancy (he doesn’t know yet, though she mouths the words to him when he isn’t looking).
Another interesting character – and one whose concerns, I think, reflect Maxwell’s – is a young painter. She tries again and again to get her art to rise above the merely representational:
She looked again at the canvas. Anybody could see that the oranges were oranges. The oil-can was clearly an oil-can. She could paint well enough where the thing itself was concerned. It was something more she wanted — some revelation of the identity within forms, of the relationship between two spheroids and a hemispheroid out of which emanated a thin curved spire.
This “something more” is what Maxwell is getting at as he introduces character after character in Bright Center of Heaven. The artist’s struggle is nicely undercut later in a thought Jefferson Carter has as he bursts out of a tent in a fury despite the “good intentions” of the white hosts:
These seven people 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.
Bright Center of Heaven is very different in tone, style, content, scope than Maxwell’s late masterpiece, and it is certain that Maxwell got even better, managing to become a spare, limpid writer rather than the somewhat abstract one we see here. I prefer the later style, and I think in terms of substance and control the later book is better too, but it is a shame this book has been inaccessible for so long. It is a great start to the career of one of America’s best and most compassionate writers.
I loved and still love William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. I think it is a classic of American literature and should be more widely read. So, when looking toward my next glimpse into the archives of The New Yorker for this feature, I wondered whether Maxwell had ever published any short stories in his own fiction section of the magazine. Well, not only has he, he also published what could be considered a series of stories, entitled “Two Old Tales About Men and Women” (and other varieties such as “Two Old Tales About Women,” “More Old Tales About Women,” “Further Tales . . . ,” etc.). In 1958, these tales made the part of four of the magazines. In 1965, the series returned with five more offerings.
Meaning to start at the beginning by reading “Two Old Tales About Women (Found in a Rattan Tea Caddy c. 1913),” published March 15, 1958, I instead accidentally picked up “Two Old Tales About Men and Women,” the second appearance of this strange series, published June 21, 1958.
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As the title suggests, there are two stories. If you’ve read So Long, See You Tomorrow, a beautiful narrative by a man looking back on his youth, you might be surprised, as I was, by the way the first tale begins:
Once upon a time, there was a country so large that messengers journeying from the capital to the frontier were often never heard from again.
I wasn’t expecting the tale to be a kind of fable. I had been expecting something lonely, something a bit more reflective. But here the main character is the King who rules a land with no regard for time. Everything that happens happens drawn out over hours or even years.
It took the King a long time to realize that something was wrong and another five years to consider carefully what he ought to do about it. The council of state had not met since his father’s time, and when it finally convened, at his order, the King’s opening remarks took three weeks, after which the council adjourned and met again in the following autumn.
The solution to the problem (the coffers are empty and spending is going up) is to build a big marble watch. Before the watch can be completed, though, the kingdom is overthrown by some enemy. The King goes into hiding for a while, until finally news comes:
The enemy — never, it seemed, very large in number — had grown weary of subjugating so inactive a country, had provoked a war with another small neighboring state, and had not been heard of for nearly six months.
This is a strange little story, more strange because it just wasn’t what I expected from Maxwell or The New Yorker. I don’t want to suggest it is slight, though, just because it takes the form of a fable. Furthermore, the writing is top-notch, very fluid and very clever.
The second story is a bit more what I expected from Maxwell. Here’s how it begins:
Once upon a time, there was a half-crazy woman who lived off the leavings of other people, who shook their heads when they saw her coming, and tried not to get in the conversation with her. They wanted to be kind, but there is a limit to kindness, and the half-crazy woman was so distracted that anyone listening to her began to feel half-crazy, too.
It still has a friendly-narrator tone to the telling, but it is a bit darker, a bit lonelier and a bit more intimate than the first tale. Here we watch the woman talk to her pig, the fire, and finally death, yet this is a strangely intimate tale. It kind of felt warm, like a good holiday story.
I don’t want to talk much about the stories themselves. They are very short and to summarize them is to simplify them and take the pleasure out of Maxwell’s voice. What I’d like to find out is what Maxwell’s motive was? Why did he publish two series of these tales which read like fables, one in 1958 and one in 1965? I’m anxious to read the others, and I hope to get a better idea about the work as a whole. If anyone has any insights, they are very welcome.
William Maxwell has come up on my radar three times in the last few months: once on John Self’s review of The Château, once on my blog when Jayne Anne Phillips recommended They Came Like Swallows, and then again in two parts on KevinfromCanada’s blog with reviews of Bright Center of Heaven and They Came Like Swallows. I had never really looked into him and was shocked to find that he was the fiction editor of The New Yorker for forty substantial and influential years: 1936 – 1975 (imagine!). The only book I could find in any nearby bookstore was one of his more recent and well loved, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980; National Book Award).
The cover looks quite a lot like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and indeed the book has some similarities. This one also deals with a murder (introduced early) that shook a small midwestern farm town. However, So Long, See You Tomorrow is a completely different novel. Perhaps a good way to introduce its theme is to say this: I thought Ian McEwan’s Atonement to be a masterpiece — I don’t feel quite that way anymore. (If you haven’t read Atonement but plan to, perhaps now would be a good time to sidle away from this review — there are no spoilers concerning So Long, See You Tomorrow).
As in Atonement, here we have a guilty mind attempting to construct a fictional narrative of the past in order to get some closure:
I very much doubt that I would have remembered for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never laid eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn’t been the father of somebody I knew, and (2) I hadn’t later on done something I was ashamed of afterward. This memoir — if that’s the right name for it — is a roundabout, futile way of making amends.
The story begins by telling the bare-bone facts about the murder of a tenant farmer. We know little else about what happened other than that a tenant farmer went out one morning to milk the cows and was shot. He was discovered by his son – the children are central to the themes but on the periphery of the narrative. The narrator was a young child at the time, no more than a handful of years old. His own life had been in some upheavle because of his mother’s death during childbirth of his younger brother, his father’s subsequent remarriage, and his move into town to a newly constructed house. The construction of this house is an important motif in the story. In its description, the narrator introduces his faulty memory and the idea of story building.
I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedroom. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory — meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion — is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes in the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storytelling to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
During this trying time of his youth, the narrator befriended Cletus, the son of the soon-to-be murderer. “Befriended” might be the wrong word, though, because really they simply played together, silent to all the trouble going on around them.
My father represented authority, which meant — to me — that he could not also represent understanding. And because there was an element of cruelty in my older brother’s teasing (as, of course, there is in all teasing) I didn’t trust him, though I perfectly well could have, about larger matters. Anyway, I didn’t tell Cletus about my shipwreck, as we sat looking down on the whole neighborhood, and he didn’t tell me about his. When the look of the sky informed us that it was getting along toward suppertime, we climbed down and said “So long” and “See you tomorrow,” and went our separate ways in the dusk. And one evening this casual parting turned out to be for the last time. We were separated by that pistol shot.
The heart of the book is what follows — the narrator’s reconstruction of the years before the murder and what it must have been like in the two households involved, all of this to sooth his mind. Maxwell’s prose is sparse and beautiful, very different from McEwan’s florid poetic and sometimes beautiful prose. So silently does the story progress that the moments of violence are audible to the reader and reverberate in the later pages though silence returns. Another contrast with McEwan is that fact that Maxwell lets you know from the get-go that this is an exercise in metafiction. McEwan springs it at the end to great effect if you’re in the right mood or to frustrating effect if you feel the novelist just tried to pull a hat trick. Honestly, after reading this one, I’m leaning more to the hat-trick perspective now. Despite the foreknowledge, this one is a powerful fiction riddled with guilt and deep childhood pain.
Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.
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