Biography: A diligent, astute biography of the acclaimed author and former editor of the 'New Yorker', writes Eileen Battersby.
More than five years ago, in the Summer of 2000, writer Richard Ford greeted me in the lobby of a Kilkenny hotel with an expression of kindly sorrow and the following words delivered in his softly menacing Mississippi drawl: "Well, there's poor Bill Maxwell, gone and died, just a week after his wife". "Bill" was better known to most readers as William Maxwell, the revered fiction editor of the New Yorker magazine and an author of subtle genius, as typified by his magnificent late short novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow.
Maxwell died just short of his 92nd birthday and for anyone who had read his work, or benefited from his editorial genius, he was already an immortal. Ford's announcement carried that familiar hint of wonder, when the living have only just discovered that someone they knew is now gone, a member of the newly dead. Here was one great American writer lamenting the loss of another.
And William Maxwell, from Lincoln, Illinois in the Midwest, was great, his reputation resting on a small body of quietly inspired autobiographical fiction that includes They Came Like Swallows (1937), The Folded Leaf (1945), Time Will Darken It (1948), The Chateau (1961) and his masterwork, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), as well as many fine short stories, such as Over By The River, The Thistles in Sweden, the Billie Dyer stories, and The Front and the Back Parts of the House. Considering the regard in which Maxwell's fiction is held, it is surprising to discover that this book by University of Illinois academic Barbara Burkhardt is the first major critical study of Maxwell's life and work.
This is an honest, perceptive and textually-based book. Burkhardt does not presume; she lets the work speak for itself and her use of the facts, as well as of letters and personal testimonies from those who knew him, such as close friend John Updike, is meticulous, yet she avoids reducing the narrative to a roll call of famous names sharing anecdotes. She never invades nor does she assume the mantle of intimate. Burkhardt, whose reading of the fiction is sagaciously thorough, met and interviewed her subject late in his life and found him courteous, helpful and eager to answer as exactly as possible.
Decades of working with writers, including Cheever, Updike, Frank O'Connor and JD Salinger, helping them, and writing himself, left him interested, not weary. Maxwell, though tested as a child by his adored mother's early death, the depression which lead to his suicide attempt as a young man, and his loneliness before meeting Emily Noyes, to whom he would be married for 55 years until her death the week before his own, never tired of attempting to encapsulate life and living. For him, the small moments created history.
Both his personal philosophy and his artistic manifesto are brilliantly expressed in a reply he gave to one of Burkhardt's questions during their first interview. "I have a melancholy feeling that all human experience goes down the drain, or to put it more politely, ends in oblivion, except when somebody records some part of his own experience - which can of course be the life that goes on in his mind and imagination as well as what he had for breakfast. In a very small way I have fought this, by trying to recreate in a form that I hoped would have some degree of permanence the character and lives of people I have known and loved. Or people modelled on them. To succeed, this would have to move the reader as I have been moved. This is the intricate, in and out, round and round, now direct and indirect process that comes under the heading of literary art."
Most fiction is a variation on the theme of any author's life. According to Burkhardt, Maxwell's was strongly autobiographical, far more than I had realised. She also correctly points out that for all the gentle understatement of his craft, Maxwell's approach, such as his handling of the theme of young male friendship in his third novel, The Folded Leaf - based on his experience of a love triangle culminating in his suicide attempt - can be deceptively daring. If the tone is gentle, reflective, the themes do include murder, possible adultery and passion as well as loss. Although a Midwesterner, when Maxwell turns to humour his comedy possesses Southern flair.
The gestation of The Folded Leaf was slow. It took about seven years, partly because of the increasing demands of Maxwell's editorial role at the New Yorker. During this period, the war years (1938-45), he was far from happy. Ill-health had prevented him going to war, not that this had upset him. His despair was more personal. According to Burkhardt, after work he isolated himself in his apartment. "He didn't answer the phone and walked the streets at night trying to overcome insomnia. In his early thirties, he felt uncertain about his life's direction."
Referring to his "severe self-doubts", Burkhardt quotes a conversation in which Maxwell recalled his early 30s, "I didn't seem to be growing. I didn't have anybody to love, nobody to love me, and I had no wife, no child. I was just an incomplete person." Throughout the book, there are similar examples of Maxwell's candour as a man and as a writer. He did marry, and 10 years into his marriage, Maxwell, by then well into his 40s, became a father. The tragedy of his mother's death during the influenza epidemic of 1918, when Maxwell was 10, never left him or his fiction. The theme of a mother's death was constant and Maxwell was always drawn to older literary women as friends and mentors.
At no time does Burkhardt sentimentalise her subject, and she responds to the fiction as a textual critic. She consistently places the work within the context of Maxwell's life and he always saw his writing as a reflection of the various phases through which his life moved. Virginia Woolf proved an important stylistic influence. Having first encountered To The Lighthouse as a student, Maxwell immediately identified with its emotional resonance. "Maxwell also recognised Mrs Ramsay, James's mother, as reminiscent of his own." In an interview with George Plimpton, Maxwell said, "how close Mrs Ramsay is to my own idea of my mother . . . both of them gone, both leaving the family unable to navigate very well. It couldn't have failed to have a profound effect on me".
Emotion defines Maxwell's vision, as does a prevailing sense of justice. At the heart of So Long, See You Tomorrow is the older Maxwell's regret at his boyhood self's failure to speak to his friend, after the boy's father had committed a crime of passion. It is this guilt that dominates the story, not the narrator's grief for his dead mother. Elsewhere in his writing Maxwell looked at racial attitudes, from the black as well as white perspective. For all the stylistic grace and elegance, there is an edge to Maxwell's work, as well as social history worthy of McGahern.
Seldom has a biographer or literary critic achieved as astute a reading of a writer's life and work as Burkhardt has in this diligent, workmanlike study that is direct, unpretentious and invaluable for admirers of one of 20th-century US fiction's finest masters.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
William Maxwell - Literary Life. By Barbara Burkhardt, University of Illinois Press, 308pp. npg