dovegreyreader scribbles

Time Will Darken It ~ William Maxwell

My recent introduction to the writing of William Maxwell has seemed like a pure, self-indulgent pleasure because I think I've finally found a way into the writing of U.S. male writers. The ramparts have always felt heavily guarded from where I sit by the likes of Pynchon, Roth, Bellow, Updike et al and somehow I've never managed to skirt my way around them to find the writing that I truly wanted to read and could identify with in some way.
That's all highly judgemental of me because actually, of those four, I've only read one book by one of them (Herzog by Saul Bellow) so suggestions welcome because I have promised myself an exploration of it all one day, but perhaps it is also a demonstration of how tricky it can be to side-step the big shouty voices in search of the gentle whispers.
Everything has changed with the arrival of William Maxwell.
My introduction with They Came Like Swallows, a book which for me joins the honoured ranks of those which pitch a child's inner voice with note-perfect accurately, followed by So Long, See You Tomorrow and most recently Time Will Darken It.
Now I'm adding in some background reading, so alongside the very engaging Paris Review interview I also have Barbara Burkhardt's biography, William Maxwell - A Literary Life.
Whilst I have undoubtedly slipped into rocky crevasses in the past, with too much reading emphasis on the life and insufficient on the writing (Virginia Woolf) it is still proving a revelation to discover more about William Maxwell as I read along. He is a writer with immense and untold sensitivity and knowing where in his life those sensitivities may have come from feels quite essential for me now.
I was therefore interested to read of a serious suicide attempt in his sophomore year at university, a failed attempt obviously, but one which Shirley Hazzard referred to as she memorialized William Maxwell in 2001.

'Maxwell knew that quiet desperation can't be counted on to stay quiet, that heartbreak can grow irrepressible,"....An attempt at suicide "that extreme and most solitary experience must always be set, by survivors against subsequent distress. I sometimes thought it a spectral presence in Bill's equilibrium and in his greatest pleasures. Photographs of Bill and Emmy when their daughters were small have the radiance of a reprieve, as though Bill marvelled, like George Herbert, It cannot be / That I am he / On whom Thy tempests fall at night.' "

Reading that has given me a new perspective having just turned the final page of Time Will Darken It because I sense that 'spectral presence' radiating in William Maxwell's writing here too. I'll give nothing away but if you've read the book you will know the moment and if you haven't there is no way you will miss it.
This is small town America, and the home of lawyer Austin King, his wife Martha and their young daughter Abbey is open for a month-long visit from the Potters, relatives from the Deep South.
It's July 1912 and Elm Street, Draperville is about to host an invasion, and I always think of the sinking of the Titanic when I see anything set in 1912. It seems like an apposite and intentional choice of year in which to set a book where collisions with unseen hazards are rife, many of them hidden out of sight... that 9/10's worth below the waterline.
Yes, a month-long visit, think about visitors and stinking fish after three days and know something of the newly-pregnant Martha's dismay at her husband's unstinting offer of hospitality.
The fragility of the King's marriage is delicately exposed in the opening paragraph

'The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and neighbours he had invited to an evening party would be ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.'

By nuance and gesture, body language and small asides, the parlous state of affairs between Austin and Martha quickly becomes clear, whilst little Abbey brings a child's simple and straightforward perspective to the proceedings.
It is the unmarried adult children of Family Potter, arrogant and self-assured Randolph and breathy and impressionable Nora who cause the most disruption, with Potters Senior ranking a close second.
And poor Austin, or was it poor Austin?
Did I want to shake some sense into Austin...I'm not sure but Austin perhaps the definitive mystery to be fathomed throughout the book for me as I read.
Intrinsically good and kind-hearted or just plain foolish...
Passive and seemingly weak-willed or too well-mannered and tightly buttoned to stray beyond the bounds of politeness and social custom.
Thus far you can perhaps tell that William Maxwell is the master of characterisation and seemingly ordinary situations, there is no sitting back and feeling like the shy reader here, I knew these people and I wanted to know much more each time I picked up a book which I intentionally eked out over four weeks of slow, languid, involved reading.
But just wait until you meet Nora.
Nora, deeply frustrated by the constraints of the life of the unmarried daughter and the increasingly aged parents and the stifled, unreachable opportunities which suddenly seem within her grasp as her obsessive infatuation for Austin starts to blossom insidiously.
Meanwhile Martha, already less than enamoured with her own life and marriage, stands by and watches helplessly and may I say with remarkable control and restraint as Austin, flattered or foolish (reader's decision I think) seems to find the attentive preening of his feathers quite to his liking.
Enough of the detail I hope for you to see what a joyous month-long reading time I've been having with this one and why other books, read alongside out of necessity for deadlines, have fallen some way short.
But if I'm considering again those sensitivities that William Maxwell may bring to his writing from his own experience then this book is full of them.
There was that defining moment when I did know Austin's pain, that he did possess that self-awareness that I had been doubting and when I turned round all my thinking, I knew that William Maxwell knew that pain too.
Time Will Darken It has been one of those remarkable, unmissable reading experiences for me.

So Long, See You Tomorrow ~ William Maxwell

What a good thing you're all there, because how readily I had slipped into seeing So Long See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell as a sequel to They Came Like Swallows.
I still didn't know sufficient about William Maxwell to see what was going on here and that had been partly intentional, it can be the joy and the puzzle of discovering a new (to me) writer. It's tempting to search out everything written about an author in these circumstances but I'm being measured, not going overboard and thus far I have gleaned the bare facts.
So I've gathered that William Maxwell was the fiction editor of The New Yorker from 1936 to 1976, and worked with 'literary greats such as J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever and Eudora Welty, amongst others.'
That John Updike thought William Maxwell had a voice that was

"one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction."

That much of his writing is autobiographical and that I'd sell a ferret (running out of cats) to read The Paris Review interview (Issue 85 Fall 1982), just a bit too expensive to buy online so I'm desperately hoping it will be in the next Canongate collection. Those interviews are unsurpassed, such a literary treasure trove, each one telling me so much that I want to know about a writer, with that well-placed and disarming question revealing so much more depth in those conversations.
I did track down an interview with Barbara Burkhardt author of William Maxwell - A Literary Life just for some more on William Maxwell's use of autobiography in his fiction because I'm starting to want to fill in some gaps,

'Maxwell’s mother died when he was ten years old, during the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1919. He did not intend to keep returning to his mother’s death, yet it was the central fact of his life and work and kept resurfacing when he wrote fiction taken from some aspect of his own experience. He kept the material fresh by reconsidering it from different vantage points as he aged and by continually experimenting with different narrative techniques....'

And in the end I had to order the book, suddenly I know enough about William Maxwell to want to know it all... quite how did the death of his mother affect this boy of ten sufficiently for it to constantly surface in his fiction? 

So Long, See You Tomorrow is narrated by a man in his fifties attempting to reconstruct events from his teenage years, a friendship whose loyalty is tested by the murder of Lloyd Wilson on his Illinois farm. It is a  murder of passion committed by the friend's father and slowly but surely the evidence and the circumstances are revealed.
It was the nameless narrator's introduction of himself that had me barking up the wrong sequel tree.
All those details about the death of the mother in childbirth, the relentless and timeless pacing around that such a loss involves, the family shut off from each others' grief and each suffering their own version of this terrible loss and of little help to each other, the remote and distant older brother and all explained in William Maxwell's pitch perfect prose

'...I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave.'

Does a single sentence come any more perfect than that?
Am I right, was William Maxwell as gentle and as humble as he sounds?
Those observations of a child's world as an adult and with such perfect attention to the little details in They Came Like Swallows, now reshaped, reordered into a new and shifting perspective. This feels like William Maxwell gently manipulating the viewpoint to see what else might be revealed, not only to us but to himself.
Have you ever gone back to a place you knew well as a child?
It's size and shape is fixed in your child's mind's eye and invariably huge, and then you get there as an adult and find something comparatively reduced and slightly disappointing.
Why a picture of a Cornish beach you may ask, well my lasting memory of this child's eye distortion is Elephant Rock on Bossiney beach in Cornwall.
When I was six, it towered over me and the beach, when I went back for the first time in my thirties, it seemed almost like a miniature version of the one I thought I knew, far less imposing.

'...a small segment of the past, remote and yet in perfect focus, like something seen through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.'

You see, William Maxwell pins it down perfectly.
Moment's like this are captured time and again in a book that will bear many readings whilst doubtless yielding new insights each time.

To my ears this was Bunny's adult voice and assuming as I did that premise I was instantly rewarded with so much, because when I turned the final page of They Came Like Swallows my greatest wish was to know how Bunny may have fared in later life.
So if not a sequel can it be termed a continuation?
An exploration in fiction of William Maxwell's life?
If all you Maxwell aficionados could please keep on straightening out my thinking about him I'd be very grateful, and I can only apologise if I'm carving up a beloved rare gem, into a rough diamond before your very eyes with all this tentative thinking out loud.
There are of course risks to be taken with the fallibility of memory and the narrator acknowledges this,

'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 with the telling..'

'...what I thought happened was so different from what actually did happen that it might almost have been something made up out of whole cloth.'

But as Barbara Burkhardt suggests,

'By the time he published So Long, See You Tomorrow in 1980, he said that all he wanted was to say exactly what he meant “in the only exact way of saying it.” Working so intently with other writers’ prose helped him to refine his own'

I'm currently reading Time Will Darken It and at snail's pace William Maxwell's 1966 short story collection , The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing & Other Tales whilst keeping Truman Capote's Paris Review interview observation on the art of the short story uppermost in my mind

'After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? '

I think I know the answer...