PAST MASTERS: WILLIAM MAXWELL

Tribute at the Century Association

Bill Maxwell greeted me with kindness and amazing trust when I first arrived as an editor with The New Yorker’s Fiction Department in the autumn of 1956. Along with an assemblage of other remarkable editors, we worked together every day for twenty years, in the utmost happiness. We disagreed on occasion, sometimes passionately, but with never a harsh word and—what’s more startling—never a staff meeting. Bill and I were different but it didn’t bother us. He once wrote that there are editors who are natural “yes” sayers and others who are natural “no” sayers, and he and I would agree, I think, about where we each belong in that lineup. I also recall a day when I came back from lunch carrying a parcel from the Music Masters store, down in the lobby, and when Bill asked I said it was a record for my younger daughter, who was then about five years old. His daughters, Brookie and Kate, were a few years older than my two, and I knew that they had been raised from the cradle on Brahms and Heifetz and Chopin, so I was embarrassed when I took out my purchase, a Little Golden Record that featured Tom Glazer singing “The Little Red Hen.” Bill looked at this object with wonder—he’d never seen such a thing—and he said, “Oh, Roger, you’re so worldly.”

I’m going to read a brief passage from “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” which was published in 1980. It’s a long story or a short novel, of surpassing power and sadness. Like so much of his fiction, its setting is Lincoln, Illinois, his childhood home. One of the protagonists is the narrator, William Maxwell, whose voice you will recognize:

My father was all but undone by my mother’s death. In the evening after supper he walked the floor and I walked with him, with my arm around his waist. I was ten years old. He would walk from the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather’s clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room. Or he would walk from the library into the dining room and into the living room by another doorway, and back to the front hall. Because he didn’t say anything, I didn’t either. I only tried to sense, as he was about to turn, which room he was going to next so we wouldn’t bump into each other. His eyes were focused on things not in those rooms, and his face was the color of ashes. From conversations that had taken place in front of me I knew he was tormented by the belief that he was responsible for what had happened. If he had only taken this or that precaution…. It wasn’t true, any of it. At a time when the epidemic was raging and people were told to avoid crowds, he and my mother got on a crowded train in order to go to Bloomington, thirty miles away, where the hospital facilities were better than in Lincoln. But even if she had had the baby at home, she still would have caught the flu. My older brother or my father or I would have given it to her. We all came down with it.

It sometimes surprises me that I remember the settings and events of Bill Maxwell’s childhood almost better than my own: the house on Ninth Street, Grandfather Blinn, Hattie Dyer, Aunt Annette. The fabled short-fiction writer Alice Munro once told me that she had been in the habit of visiting the towns and cities that were closely connected to the works of great American writers—Oxford, Mississippi, for Faulkner, for instance. Lincoln, Illinois, she said, meant the most to her. Every street corner seemed intimately familiar and close at hand. It was like coming home. We feel the same way, incidentally, about John Updike’s boyhood town of Shillington, and its people and places—Grandfather Hoyer, Pep Conrad’s store, the sandstone farmhouse. But we shouldn’t be much distracted by this appropriation, nor attribute it only to the skills and obsessive attention of these wonderful writers, who have circled back over these same trails again and again in their work. I believe, rather, that their stories are the same stories that we tell ourselves, each of us, over and over, every day and every night, returning to our own distant or recent past, possibly in search of happiness but much more often in the hope of finding an unexpected window or bend in the path there. We want our stories to come out differently, but they never do. Except in the detail, what we find so often in the writings of William Maxwell is our lives relived—with the same questions asked, and with answers or the chance for amends still elusive—but now illuminated with the courage and persistence of a great companion. This is perhaps the very first purpose of fiction and, most assuredly, one of the rewards of art.

Thank you, Bill.

October, 1998