{"id":4375,"date":"2010-10-27T23:32:11","date_gmt":"2010-10-28T03:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=4375"},"modified":"2016-06-23T17:31:29","modified_gmt":"2016-06-23T21:31:29","slug":"william-maxwell-bright-center-of-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/10\/27\/william-maxwell-bright-center-of-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"William Maxwell: Bright Center of Heaven<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Bright Center of Heaven<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby William Maxwell (1934)<\/span>\r\nThe Library of America: Early Novels and Stories<\/em> (2008)<\/span>\r\n167 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
Over the past year I have become a big fan of the nonprofit publisher The Library of America<\/a> and their books (see their inspirational 25th Anniversary movie here<\/a>). For sometime, the dust jackets on their\u00a0editions turned me away.\u00a0I’m not a huge fan.\u00a0However, I got one of the books, took the\u00a0jacket off, and, wow, it’s a beautifully crafted cloth book.\u00a0You can bend\u00a0each cover\u00a0back until they touch, and the spine will not break or deform.\u00a0I now have a row of Library of America\u00a0volumes,\u00a0jacketless, in a beautiful line on my\u00a0bookshelf. 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<\/a> are more than generous.\u00a0There are no hidden costs.<\/p>\n
That row of books, however, has turned out to cause another problem. I do most (90%) of my reading on my commute to work.\u00a0There’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.\u00a0So 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\u00a0my LOA stock.\u00a0And first on my list was William Maxwell. I loved\u00a0—\u00a0loved<\/em> — his final novel So Long, See You Tomorrow<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0so I took down LOA Volume 1 and read his first, Bright Center of Heaven<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
Before I talk about Bright Center of Heaven<\/em>, another word about the LOA volume.\u00a0I 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.\u00a0However, 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.\u00a0Another benefit, these volumes come with articles and essays and random bits from or about the authors. They are masterfully edited.\u00a0Often, 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.\u00a0After two modest printings, Maxwell suppressed its republication for the rest of his life. He thought it was weak and\u00a0derivative.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0I 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<\/em> (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<\/em> (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<\/em>.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> is still its own creation, and it shows that Maxwell was already a brilliant observer and writer, just the type that The New Yorker<\/em> would pick up to work for it for a half-century.<\/p>\n
This book takes place in Meadowland, an artists’ colony in the upper Midwest run by\u00a0Mrs. 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\u00a0Harvard-educated black lecturer\u00a0named Jefferson Carter. Mrs. West has invited him and\u00a0says, “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.”<\/p>\n
This is “outlandish” to many of the community’s residents, and his mother’s strange ideas is particularly hard for Nigel:<\/p>\n
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.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One of the strengths of the novel — indeed, one reason it is reminiscent of To the Lighthouse<\/em> — is how many characters Maxwell inserts into the foreground, allowing their consciousness to flood the page. He follows them\u00a0for 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\u00a0seems vaguely\u00a0inattentive; 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).<\/p>\n
Another interesting character —\u00a0and one whose concerns, I think, reflect Maxwell’s —\u00a0is a young painter. She tries again and again to get her art to rise above the merely representational:<\/p>\n
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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This “something more” is what Maxwell is getting at as he introduces character after character in Bright Center of Heaven<\/em>. The artist’s struggle is nicely undercut later in a thought\u00a0Jefferson Carter has\u00a0as he\u00a0bursts out of a tent in a fury despite the “good intentions” of the white hosts:<\/p>\n
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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Bright Center of Heaven<\/em> 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\u00a0writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews William Maxwell’s debut novel, Bright Center of Heaven<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,115],"tags":[926,1012],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-4375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-william-maxwell","tag-1930s","tag-1012"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/Maxwell-Early-Novels.jpg?fit=328%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-18z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4375"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18844,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions\/18844"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4375"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}