From Poets & Writers Magazine, May/June 1994, 36–47. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Poets & Writers, Inc., 72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012. www.pw.org.
At age eighty-five, William Maxwell’s appearance is at once endearing and a bit disconcerting. He is thin and slightly frail, and on his head grow solitary white hairs. Yet he is also energetic—enthusiastic, at times even agile in a boyish way. Dressed in a pale green suit with a yellow knit tie, he answers the door of his Upper East Side apartment with a slightly uneven but reassuring smile.
Maxwell has lived in this Manhattan apartment for over twenty-five years—a period that accounts for less than half of his career as a publishing fiction writer. (He and his wife, Emily, also own a house in Yorktown Heights, New York.) His first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, appeared in 1934. (Maxwell now dismisses the book—long out of print—as hopelessly imitative.) Since then he has published six more novels; three collections of stories, including his latest book, Billie Dyer and Other Stories (Knopf, 1992; Plume, paper); a fascinating, semi-imagined history of his family, Ancestors (Knopf, 1971); and a collection of essays and reviews. (Except where noted otherwise, all of Maxwell’s books are available in paperback from David R. Godine.) His novel So Long, See You Tomorrow (Knopf, 1980) won an American Book Award (now known as the National Book Award), and he is considered by many to be among America’s greatest writers, though his readership remains limited.
Maxwell is better known, in fact, as a New Yorker fiction editor—one who, from 1936 to 1976, helped shape the work of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, John O’Hara, John Updike, and countless other celebrated writers. Joining on as an assistant in the magazine’s art department soon after his arrival in New York, Maxwell became part of its celebrated editorial staff—Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Brendan Gill were just a few of his colleagues.
Maxwell’s own writing has changed both much and little over the years. In early books such as Time Will Darken It (Harper & Bros., 1948), which the Boston Globe called “as near to perfection as it is possible for a novel to be,” Maxwell seemed more willing to describe at length and to speculate about his characters’ motivations, and even their futures. So Long, See You Tomorrow, however, is a mere 135 pages and says much simply by what it leaves out. Yet one can fairly easily spot a Maxwell sentence—deliberate in tone yet informed by sympathy, precisely paced, and essential to whatever paragraph it calls home. Maxwell admits that the evolution of his current, almost-skeletal style was largely influenced by his work as an editor; yet he also claims that, during his years at the New Yorker, he became increasingly inclined to leave stories alone, assuming that the writer had good reasons for whatever he had done.
If Maxwell’s style has changed over the years, his subject matter for the most part has not. Nearly all of his work takes place in the Illinois of his youth and has its roots in the death of his mother in the influenza epidemic of 1918, when Maxwell was ten. From his second novel, They Came Like Swallows (Harper & Bros., 1937), right through So Long, this loss has been his muse. It is amazing how much he has remembered and set down about this cherished period—a childhood that ended halfway through.
Maxwell’s office, where this interview takes place, is well lived-in yet also surprisingly makeshift. His desk is a wooden card table, his work light a Tensor lamp mounted on what seems to be a rolling hospital IV stand. There are bookcases and file cabinets, several tidy stacks of magazines and folders, a small bed, a television, and a photocopier. His typewriter is a 1980s-style Smith Corona sitting on a classic wood-and-metal typing table the kind that forces your knees together. On the wall behind his chair hang his daughter Brookie’s painting for the cover of Over by the River (Knopf, 1977), his first collection of short fiction, and a small Walker Evans portrait of the poet Robert Fitzgerald, Maxwell’s longtime friend and advisor.
As I am setting up my two tape recorders, explaining with embarrassment that I like to “cover” myself in case one fails, Maxwell asks if I would mind if he typed his answers to my questions. At first I assume he means to use the typewriter to think with; but no—he wants to type out his complete answers, without saying a word into either of my machines. Apparently this has been Maxwell’s practice for some time, but I have not read of it in any of the articles about him. I am taken aback, but Maxwell says, “Try it for a while.”
For most of the next two hours, I sit in a comfortable green chair and watch Maxwell type. While working he is completely immersed, unaware of my eyes trained on his face or wandering about the room. After completing each answer, Maxwell turns the typewriter table toward me and allows me to peruse his work. On a few occasions I ask him to expand this or that aspect of an answer, and he graciously obliges. The final product is a cogent interview with the um’s and uh’s already eliminated, but also lacking some of the intangible virtues of a spoken interview—the offhand remark, the facial expression that leads to a follow-up question.
After the session, Maxwell seems more at ease. When I tell him I felt guilty watching him do all the work, he replies, “It must have been very boring for you.” As we are walking out, he takes me to the window of his spacious living room; through the fog one can see the East River and the Triborough Bridge. It is obviously a view he treasures.
After talking with him, one feels that there are two Maxwells—the precise, business-like writer and editor, and the retiring, apologetic, cordial man. Yet they are also one—Maxwell is as committed to a sense of now-rare civility and decorum as he is to the perfection of words on the printed page. One wonders if there will still be such writers—or human beings—in another hundred years.
Q: First, I wonder if you could say a little about why you prefer to conduct interviews in this way—typing out answers to questions spoken by the interviewer.
A: Some while back I had a couple of rather bad experiences with interviewers, partly because I am inclined to mumble and partly because the interviewer didn’t remember accurately what I said, and the results were distressing to both of us. When I read somewhere that Vladimir Nabokov didn’t talk to interviewers but would answer questions that were submitted to him in writing, I thought of this way—of answering on my typewriter in the interviewer’s presence, so that he would carry away with him the facts as I saw them, and whatever my ideas at that moment were. It makes his work easier and saves me from having to go back and correct misconceptions, or see them published and not be able to do anything about it.
Q: You have written so much about your childhood—a childhood that began in the era of the horse-drawn carriage—I wonder how writing fiction has changed your view of memory.
A: I suppose it isn’t true, but I sometimes wonder if I skipped what is referred to as infant amnesia—that is to say, the point when children of five or six forget nearly everything that happened to them and start all over again. I remember things that happened (and that nobody could have told me about) when I was just barely able to stand up. And things I used to think happened when I was four proved to be when I was three. I don’t think my memory is any more reliable than the next person’s, but there is a great deal that I do remember, correctly or otherwise. Within the last two or three years the quality of my remembering seems to have changed, and it is as if the past and present were all one, that the past is present; and I do not simply remember something that happened long ago but am living it. For example, soon after my mother died, I stopped being able to remember her face clearly, and now it has come back to me.
Q: You have distinguished in other interviews between the storyteller and the writer—the storyteller being fanciful and the writer more literal. Could you say more about the difference between the two?
A: The storyteller, as I think of him, is the inheritor of an ancient tradition, and his effects are to a considerable extent spontaneous and surprising even to him. I think of the writer, as distinct from the storyteller, as a person with many threads on his mind that have to be woven together in a way that is aesthetically successful and intellectually responsible. He is given to rewriting, to worrying about style, and his job is essentially to find the form and meaning that are inherent in the material that, to all intents and purposes, has chosen him.
Q: You have said elsewhere that your favorite authors make writing seem “as natural as speech, and for the best writers it is all one thing.” Yet your own technique, as I understand it, is to clip sentences from paragraphs and save them until you find a place where they fit. Why does your own, very deliberate method seem to conflict with the “naturalness” you admire in other writers?
A: Ordinary speech, if the speaker is an interesting person, holds one’s interest partly because it is spoken, but when it is transcribed proves to be repetitious and often has dead spots, when the speaker is communicating by his expression and tone of voice rather than by the words. I have a concept of a literary style based on ordinary speech in its syntax and variety of sentences, but that is carefully pruned of the dead wood—is alive, laconic, says what it means and means what it says, and is the result of hard labor, and owes half its meaning to its carefully planned context. I know when I write a good sentence, but often it comes in the midst of a passage that is only partly in focus, or just plain dull, and so I cut the good sentence out and save it for another context. It seemed to me when I finished So Long, See You Tomorrow that half the sentences had been in nine or ten different places, tentatively, before they found the right one and were locked in. I can imagine a very clear mind (John Updike’s, for example) that would know right away where the sentence belonged, but I operate more by trial and error, because I don’t always know what I am trying to do, what the material demands.
Q: Since you have been an editor as well as a writer, I wonder how you feel about seeking advice from editors on unfinished work.
A: In my experience it is dangerous to show a long piece of writing in an unfinished state to a publisher. John Cheever did it with The Wapshot Chronicle, and the editor’s less-than-enthusiastic response kept him from finishing the book for at least ten years. There are, of course, exceptional editors whose responses can be trusted, but on the whole it is safer for the writer to keep the project to himself until he is satisfied with what he has written, and in a position to argue about suggested changes: I have tended to be so tired when I finished a novel that I listened to editorial suggestions more than I should have. In the case of The Folded Leaf, I combined two characters because the editor at Harpers thought the story line should be strengthened. When it was republished I put everything back the way I originally had it. With The Chateau, an editor at Knopf argued strenuously that the long coda was a mistake. In the end I turned to Alfred Knopf who said, “Have it the way you want it.” Now, if I opened the book and the coda was missing, I would feel like shooting myself.
I have sent stories that had reached the stage of a second or third (or tenth) draft to a friend who has several times proved helpful. So, for that matter, has Roger Angell, the editor at the New Yorker that I submit stories to. But I don’t send him a story unless I think it is right, and then I don’t feel bad when it is rejected. I just think the magazine and I had different ideas about it. Or sometimes, I see that they were right and the story wasn’t really all that good.
Q: It seems, though, that you have often given your works-in- progress to specific people—friends more than editors—for their reactions. In the case of The Folded Leaf [Harper & Bros., 1945] for example, you sent numerous drafts to Louise Bogan [the poet and New Yorker poetry critic]. Could you describe the role of these outside readers in your work?
A: My friendship with Louise Bogan was, and still is, very important to me. Her literary standards were so high and her judgment so strict. I was eleven years younger than she was, and open to whatever she held out to me—Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the songs of Mahler and Hugo Wolf. I showed her what I thought was a short story and she said, “Go on.” My story turned out to be the first chapter of The Folded Leaf. And because it was her idea that I should pursue the situation of the two boys I sent her each chapter as I finished it, through four versions. Once when I was stuck, and a longer time than usual elapsed between chapters, I got a postcard from her saying, “Get that boy up off the sleeping porch.” Over a period of four years she made only one criticism—about a physical description which she thought not fresh enough. When I finished the book she gave me the title.
The most important living reader I have is my wife. When I think I have finished something I take it first to her, sometimes in a state of unjustified euphoria. She has good literary judgment and a good sense of when I am or am not doing my best work. Often she has said, when I was quite pleased with something, “I think this is going to be one of your best stories,” and so sent me back to the typewriter. At various times in my life the opinions of certain people have been important to me—of Zona Gale [the novelist and playwright]; of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald; of certain New Yorker writers like Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller and Mavis Gallant; of Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose letters I edited; of now one friend and now another, depending on the material. When I came home from France in 1948 [Maxwell spent four months there during the summer] I walked into our house in the country and, with my hat on my head, sat down to the typewriter and typed out a page of ideas for a novel, and tacked it to the bookcase and never looked at it during the ten years I was writing The Chateau. [The Chateau, published by Knopf in 1961, is a novel based on Maxwell’s experiences in France.] Toward the end of that period my wife and I struck up a friendship with Elizabeth Bowen [the novelist and short story writer], and she asked to read the manuscript of The Chateau. And then she and I took some sandwiches into a quiet part of Central Park, and she told me everything that was on that (original) page, which she of course had never seen, and so I knew that I had accomplished what I set out to do.
I don’t have tens of thousands of readers, but now here and now there some connection is made, judging by the letters that come from strangers, and this is of course gratifying. I wouldn’t know how to handle a large audience. It would confuse me about who I am.
Q: Can you tell me a little about your early life as a writer. When did you write your first stories?
A: The first story I published was in my high school magazine, and it was about an aristocrat who, during the French Revolution, hid in a grandfather clock. It must have derived from my reading, and wasn’t followed by anything for about ten years. In college I wrote poetry that was, I am afraid, rather noticeably under the influence of Elinor Wylie and Walter de la Mare. During the year that I spent as a graduate student at Harvard I met and became friends with Robert Fitzgerald, who was the real thing, and I came to the conclusion that, though I loved poetry, I was not a poet.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, I was living in the house of a member of the English department, Garreta Busey. One day she got a letter from a friend on the Yale faculty asking her to do a forty-page condensation of the life of Thomas Coke of Holkham, an eighteenth-century agriculturalist. He introduced in the House of Lords the bill to recognize the American colonies, but his major work was the improvement through breeding of strains of sheep and cattle. Miss Busey asked me to work on the assignment with her, and while she did the agricultural parts, which interested her but did not interest me, I condensed the passages about Coke’s life. The biography contained a good many details about the life of the period—for example, there was his aunt, Lady Mary Coke, who divorced her husband because he was a scoundrel (unheard of—the divorce, I mean), and dressed her servants in pea-green and silver livery, and when she was depressed used to fish in the ornamental goldfish pond, and in her old age slept in a dresser drawer. In short she was a character in what might have been a novel. She also suffered from the delusion that the Empress Maria Teresa was trying to take her servants away from her. I wrote about her, about the balls, the great houses, etc., with so much pleasure that when the job was done I turned to and wrote my first novel, about the goings on on a Wisconsin farm that I had first-hand acquaintance with. I also, when I was working on that farm, met Zona Gale, who was a kind of fairy godmother to me, and made me feel that it was a wonderful thing to be a professional writer.
After my first novel was published, I naturally wondered what else I could write about, and the “what else” turned out to be my mother’s death. Many years later, I was having lunch with Pete Lemay, who was the publicity director at Knopf at the time, and he told me about Willa Cather, whom he had been taken to see. Not many people were, since she was a recluse. After he had described her, I said, surprised by what he had told me, “Whatever do you think made her a writer, do you suppose?” and he said, “Why, what makes anyone a writer—deprivation, of course.”
Q: I wonder what deprivation led you to be a writer. Was it your mother’s death?
A: Well God knows it was a deprivation. Probably the answer is yes. If you search in the background of any serious writer, it isn’t very long before you come upon a major deprivation of one sort or another—which the writer through the exercise of imagination tries to overcome or compensate for, or even make not have happened.
Q: In the story “The Front and the Back Parts of the House” [from Billie Dyer], which I gather is largely true …
A: It is entirely true.
Q: … you deal with the anger of someone who thought she recognized her husband in a character in one of your novels. I wonder if this kind of experience makes it more difficult to escape into the fantasy of fiction. Do you ever worry about the effect your writing will have on your friends and family?
A: I do sometimes worry about using material taken directly from life, but my worrying is inconsistent and arbitrary. I never worried about writing about my Aunt Annette’s husband, who could easily have sued me for invasion of privacy, but when I wrote about the French family in The Chateau I suffered the torture of the damned—but that didn’t keep me from writing about them. After the book was published I refused to let my British publisher have it, lest it hop the Channel. One member of the family happened to have a son in school in America and came for his graduation just at the time the reviews were appearing. She read the book and went home and didn’t tell anybody about it. After a number of years the other members did discover the book, and wrote me that it was naughty of me but could they please have a copy. Over the years we have discussed whether it was all right to allow the book to be translated and published in France, and they finally came to the conclusion that it was not, ever, and, since I was very fond of them, I have abided by their decision.
Q: In “The Holy Terror” [also from Billie Dyer] you tell another true story about a horrifying incident in which your brother lost one of his legs—an incident you have written very little about. And I am also struck in your work by how little you reveal about your father, emotionally, as compared to your mother, even though she died much earlier. I wonder why you have written so little about some aspects of your childhood and so much about others.
A: My brother’s accident figures in They Came Like Swallows. In that novel, written when I was in my late twenties, I put down what I believed at the time to be true. My Aunt Annette read the manuscript and though she knew it was untrue didn’t correct me, probably because she couldn’t bear to tell me that she was the person who was driving the carriage, not her husband. The true story is in “The Holy Terror.” As for my father, unlike my mother he was not dead and I owed him some consideration, especially since he had no real grasp of the nature of literary writing, of literature, and I didn’t want to write about him in a way that would make him feel exposed or that I had no feeling whatever for his natural desire for privacy. In any case, I am under the impression that I have written revealingly about him, in They Came Like Swallows, So Long, See You Tomorrow, “The Value of Money,” and “The Front and the Back Parts of the House” [both stories from Billie Dyer]. As for why I have written so little about some aspects of my childhood and so much about others, surely it is a matter of psychological pressures, often unconscious. In any case, a writer is chosen by his material, not the other way round.
My brother’s affliction, as it was called, certainly colored my childhood and had, in all probability, psychological effects I wasn’t conscious of. In any case, it was a fact in my growing up. My father was too, of course, but he was away three nights and four days of every week. As a small child I loved him as much, or something like as much as I loved my mother, but he was not really fond of children—when I was an adult he confessed once that he enjoyed my brothers and me more after we were grown. And of course we were of completely different temperaments. As I have grown older my view has become more charitable, less colored by the Oedipal conflict. But it is hard to do much with the emotional life of people who are essentially practical. My father was romantic in his feelings toward my mother, but about everything else, a matter-of-fact business man. I should say, though, that he took seriously his responsibilities to his sons, and at certain critical moments advised us seriously, in ways that were important. For example, when I took my wife home for the first time, I thought for several days that he didn’t appreciate what she was like, until he said, when we were alone together, “There has been no one like her in our family for three generations. She is like a star.” And then he went on to say, “If you will always think of her first, she will always think of you first.” It is a good way to keep marriages out of the divorce court. At least, there have been no divorces among my father’s children.
Q: I sense a theme of atonement in So Long, See You Tomorrow and in your more recent stories an attempt to redress a variety of past mistakes. Is this a recent development in your work of a longstanding subject?
A: As a child I went to Sunday school until I was fifteen or sixteen; with that much exposure to Calvinism (it was a Presbyterian Sunday school) it would be odd if I didn’t feel guilty about what were obvious failures toward other people. That is to say, I have a standard of behavior that I try to live up to, and when I fall below it, I am troubled. In my old age I have twice written letters of apology for ancient lapses from kindness or proper behavior, and felt better when I did it, though the person I wrote to, in both cases, had no recollection of the offense. I don’t think, though, that in general I am guilt-ridden. I just try to behave decently, and regret the occasions when I didn’t do what I feel I ought to have.
Q: A point that has come up numerous times in this interview is the way in which your fiction straddles the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. I wonder if you could talk about the differences you see between the two genres.
A: For me “fiction” is not whether a thing, the thing I am writing about, actually happened, but rather in the form of the writing. Half of the details and characters of The Folded Leaf are based on actual events, half are invented, and when I read the book now I am no longer sure what I invented and what is a memory. Later on in my writing, I came to feel that life is the most extraordinary storyteller of all, and the fewer changes the writer makes the better, provided that you get to the heart of the matter. But with events that occurred so long ago that there is now nobody you can go to and talk about them, I think it is only sensible to fall back on one’s imagination, which is supported by the experience of daily life. The important distinction is between reminiscence, which is a formless accumulation, and a story, which has a shape, a controlled effect, a satisfying conclusion—something that is or attempts to be a work of art and not merely an exercise in remembering. The reader far too often wants to know if a story actually happened, in which case it is not, for him, fiction. But that isn’t how I see things. Instead of giving himself to the story as a story, he wants his curiosity (which is pointless) to be satisfied. I admire writers who don’t have to depend on actual experience for their material and storytelling, but I am not one of them.
Q: Having spent so many years as a writer, I wonder if you have any other advice you might give an as-yet-unpublished young writer.
A: Publishers have to be concerned with the bottom line, and magazines have their own purposes, which do not always exactly coincide with the writer’s, and so ultimately the writer must trust his own judgment about what he has written. What has kept me going throughout my life is reading—the strength and example of other writers whose work I read with wonder and admiration. Conrad, for example. I don’t see what any unpublished writer can do except have for himself the highest standards he can imagine, and hope that the quality of his work will be perceived. The payment at best usually doesn’t amount to a living wage, but the satisfaction of being a writer is considerable. The double life—that is, to have another means of support—is maybe better than a life devoted exclusively to writing, with the wolf at the door.
The literary agent Diarmuid Russell, who was the son of the Irish poet AE, once remarked that there was no end of talented writers and what really mattered was energy. Certainly it is vital to literary work. But so is belief in oneself and one’s talents. So is the love of writing itself, for itself. Of giving form and, where possible, beauty to the filling out of an idea.