An Author Beloved but Flawed

For 40 years, William Maxwell worked as an editor at the New Yorker. He edited the fiction of J.D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, John O’Hara, Harold Brodkey, and many others. He did as much as any in this starry group to shape the singular sound and feel of the “New Yorker Story.” This fictional species – at its best urbane, indirect, topically particular, and thematically understated, and at its worst knowing, cataloging, clubby, and slight – has reproduced so successfully that in workshops from Boston to Berkeley it is now the model for a good short story.When Maxwell died in 2000, he had, as an editor and friend, influenced generations of writers. He had also produced, through extraordinary diligence, more than a dozen works of fiction, essays, reviews, children’s books, and volumes of correspondence, most of which is still in print.“A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations” (W.W. Norton, 234 pages, $23.95), a recent collection of reminiscences by his friends, strives to establish two things: that Maxwell was a great writer and that he was a great man. The collection starts out with a straightforward recollection byDonna Tartt, and an image of the long-lived writer and New Yorker editor shimmers briefly into view. The contributors include Anthony Hecht, Alice Munro, and Paula Fox. Yet by the last page of the book, we know the subject less well than when we began.Many of the reminiscences are shaped like love stories, but without the sad denouement, the realization that the beloved is only human. They are remarkably alike: The writer meets Maxwell at a party or reading and it’s love at first sight.“I loved him the instant I saw him,” reports Ms. Tartt. Charles Baxter wonders about this strange power of attraction: “He … was beloved by many, several of whom (I include myself) were bewildered by their own feelings about him, but who had those feelings anyway.” Edward Hirsch writes: “It startles me to realize that William Maxwell was already an old man when I fell in love with him.” Indeed, the great age difference between Maxwell and many of the book’s contributors may have something to do with their uniform tone.Maxwell was by all accounts – though there are none in “Portrait” – a fine editor. The quality of his attention is cited repeatedly, the “concentrated glow of his company,” the intently listening face of “remarkably eerie sweetness” and “radiance.” When he chose a friend, he was emotionally, intellectually, and materially unstinting. He shared his love of literature like a child who lets you play with his trains.The essays in the book that concentrate on Maxwell the writer are truly strange. In them, as well, his loyalty and largesse are repaid generously, and at the expense of clear-sightedness and rigor. Maxwell was a talented, serious, dedicated writer. But watching his old colleagues try to turn him into a great one unleashes in the reader a flood of mythological and literary adjectives: Herculean, Sisyphean, procrustean, quixotic.William Maxwell was born in 1908 in a middle-class enclave of the small town of Lincoln, Ill. When he was 10, his mother was “carried off” by the deadly Spanish Influenza, just days after the birth of her third child. For the rest of his life, Maxwell would revisit his early childhood happiness, his mother’s death, and his bereft family with an obsessional avidity. It was the axis around which his life and work revolved. His acute emotional responsiveness lasted into old age and is remarked on by nearly every memoirist.Maxwell attended the University of Illinois in Urbana, spent a year at Harvard, and then went back to teach writing at his alma mater, and began to write himself. By 1936, he had completed two novels and was living in New York, where he got a job at The New Yorker, first as an art editor and eventually fiction editor.As an editor, Maxwell’s ability to fall happily into another’s world was invaluable. He spoke to his writers with an intimacy that was somehow noninvasive. His tact was exquisite. His comment to Frank O’Connor about that writer’s anxious edit is typical: “if you want it out, we will of course abide by your decision, but occasionally a writer’s vision of his own work, after a lapse of time, can be overstrict, and we wonder if, in this, you aren’t doing some slight damage to the story.”“As a writer,” however, Maxwell admitted, “I don’t very much enjoy being edited.” That is too bad. Had he listened as well as he advised, Maxwell’s work would surely have profited. It appears that his resistance to criticism grew along with his career.“They Came Like Swallows” (1937), Maxwell’s second novel, is a lovely, heartbreaking book based on his mother’s death. Its powerful sense of inevitability, the realness of its three voices, its crafty juxtaposition of geopolitical and personal history are no accidents. Maxwell was the most careful of writers, and here, before he became too careful, before his fine eye for rooms and objects became fetishistic, before his dependence on authorial intrusion became an addiction, everything works neatly.After “Swallows,” Maxwell’s work was often proficient and occasionally exceptional, notably some of his short stories. But his major novels, “Time Will Darken It” (1948) and “So Long, See You Tomorrow” (1980), are riddled with excesses that render most of the claims in “Portrait” baffling.Maxwell once said, “I grieve for everybody who was ever born.” This promiscuity manifests itself in his work in a kind of morbid humanism. His sympathies are wide but shallow. In “Portrait,” this limitation is pounced on by Anthony Hecht and others as a sign of an “amplitude of sympathy that seems almost Russian.” But when Maxwell dips into the life of every secretary and passerby in the family saga “Time Will Darken It,” he condescends with the awkwardness of a Boston Brahmin politician, not the finesse of a Chekhov. During the plot-filled finale of that novel, we are introduced to a waitress: “From years of watching people cut up their food and put it away, a mouthful at a time, she had contracted a hatred of the human race … that was like a continual low-grade fever. If arsenic had been easily obtainable … she would have sprinkled the trays with it and carried them into the dining room with a light heart.”This is the fantasy of a New Yorker editor, not the fantasy of a waitress. For verisimilitude, Elmore Leonard beats Maxwell every time.Maxwell’s major characters have more dimension, but when he does present us with someone as satisfying as the maddeningly irrepressible Nora Potter (in the same novel), he often ruins his own portrait through wearisome explication. As writers from George Eliot to Alice McDermott show, authorial intrusion into a story can be delightful, but Maxwell’s writerly earnestness takes the fun out of it. His pronouncements are dubious: “There are only two kinds of faces – those that show everything openly and tragically, and those that (no matter what happens) remain closed.” And his metaphors clunk: “There is a country where women go when they are pregnant, a country with no king and no parliament.” This particular conceit extends for about a trimester.Maxwell’s compulsion to tinker aloud with his own story is part of a puerility that permeates his writing. He’s like a child talking aloud while playing with his toy soldiers, and too often his characters seem deployed and ready to take the field just like the painted objects with which he is enthralled. They are beautifully detailed, often wonderfully lifelike, but infused with no agency but their creator’s.Similarly childlike is Maxwell’s use of whimsy, which is frequent and leaden. Curtains, beds, and rooms talk and listen. The locusts in “Time Will Darken It” are bursting with advice. Not only is the author’s whimsical bent childlike, but so is his stubbornness in clinging to it. As Charles Baxter, one of “Portrait’s” editors (along with Michael Collier and Edward Hirsch), writes in his worshipful piece, “And that is why I want to talk about the dog.”In “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” one of Maxwell’s characters is a thinking dog named Trixie. Mr. Baxter is convinced of – if not convincing about – the dog’s important thematic role in the novel. But many of Maxwell’s colleagues worried about the dog when the book was first written and told the author so. Maxwell bridled, writing, “I don’t think there is a single detail that I do not believe to be easily possible.”Here is the dog witnessing an auction at his bankrupt farm: “a loud voice … shouting … and pounding on a table with a wooden mallet … and the animals seemed to be leaving! First the cows … And then the sheep. She could hear them baaing with fright. Then the hogs … And finally the horses, which was too much. How was the man going to plow without them?” How, indeed.Mr. Baxter accuses the skeptical reader of not just specie-ism but classism, “… why would anyone assume that a dog – a mere farm dog, at that – could possibly know what is going on around her?” It turns out that Maxwell based the portrait on his own dog, Daisy, “whose emotions and thoughts were transparent.” Barbara Bush felt the same way about Millie.William Maxwell was a serious reader, and an exceptionally responsive and generous friend. But he was not a great writer. We remain in need of a fuller portrait of him, one fair-minded, disinterested, and not afraid to criticize. As it is, we have a series of hushed encomia that obscure their subject in his own radiance.The halo is too bright to see the man.Mr. Solomita last wrote for these pages on the evolution of lying.

An Author Beloved but Flawed

An Author Beloved but Flawed

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