WILLIAM MAXWELL

In his eighties, William Maxwell told me, “I love being old.” By then, Bill Maxwell had recurrent and sometimes serious bodily infirmities. His mind and spirit were perhaps at their ripest power and would remain so until his death, ten years later. Those years were blessed by his long and luminous marriage, by his love for his daughters, and by the birth of the grandson who so resembles him. Bill had long since been delivered from the burden of what had been to him, in earlier years, an incapacitating sensibility: the “difficulty of being” no longer held terrors;¹ “Fear no more the heat of the sun.”² His advancing age was as yet no hindrance to new work, and was enriched by the close affection of friends and by the homage to his art and his character that, having come rather late in his writing life, was now overwhelming and worldwide.

William Maxwell’s life, considered in outline, might seem quite divided. The childhood he would look back on as enchanted in its security—of place and family life, and through his mother’s tender love—had been sundered by excruciating loss and loneliness. His mother’s early death haunted Maxwell’s life and work, and played its powerful part in the making of a writer. He understood this very well: few men have understood themselves as deeply.

The transformation came through his chance meeting with Emily Noyes, and the development of their great, reciprocated love. The ground, however, had been in some ways prepared. There had already been a measure of rescue by language and literature, and by the discovery and exercise of talent: the painful rescue, as it often is, through self-expression, intelligence, imagination. Maxwell was not drawn to intellectualism. His gift lay in acute humane perception. His response to existence derived from vulnerability and from intensity of observation.

I don’t seek here to “explain,” only to give impressions from an unclouded friendship of forty years. Bill Maxwell took my first writing from the slush pile of the New Yorker and published it. He then took the trouble to get in touch with me and asked me to come and see him at the magazine. His encouragement, his genius, and his generosity transformed my own experience—as they did the lives of other writers. When I met Francis Steegmuller, who became my husband, we found an immediate, talismanic bond in the discovery of shared friendship with the Maxwells. Francis had known Bill since their youth at the infant New Yorker.

The human encounter came always fresh to Maxwell. Singularity was intrinsic to his own nature and to his sense of other lives. He knew the world deeply, yet remained accessible to it, detached from the contemporary trend toward exposition and pronouncement. That he kept faith with the wound of his early knowledge helped him, I think, to become a happy man.

Alec Wilkinson has splendidly written that Maxwell, in conversation, considered the effect of his words on the person whom he addressed. This does not, I feel, suggest that Bill’s responses were always acquiescent or uncritical—although indeed he was an embodiment of the sympathy and tolerance apparent in his very being. But disagreement was, with him, a reasoned matter: he was free of mere self-assertion. His views were large, but firm. Inauthenticity, calculation, and underhandedness drew his testy dismissal. He would not praise writing that he found spurious, no matter how expertly presented.

I believe that Bill would have felt the validity of Graham Greene’s remark that the novelist conserves a splinter of ice in the heart.³ He had the writer’s need to defend the secret writing mind, where objectivity and syllables must alike be nurtured and weighed, and the deeper, unshared self explored and plundered for treasure.

The rescue that came to him in the middle of his life was favored also by the climate of the New Yorker, where Bill worked for forty years—with Harold Ross, the first editor, and at length with William Shawn. Both Ross and Shawn, in contrasting ways, were oddballs and had a feeling for the talents of fellow oddballs. Ross had a reputation for cryptic humor and a brash attitude for creativity. Shawn, unprecedented and unreproducible, remains an irreducible figure in the cultural story of New York or any other city. In late years, Maxwell had his differences with Shawn. But the decades during which they worked closely and cordially together were a period of rich literary achievement that, I imagine, no prominent magazine will ever enjoy again. To have been associated with the New Yorker during that period was revelatory, fascinating, and fun. Maxwell brought his generosity of spirit to the work of others. His feeling for one’s work was never, in my experience, intrusive. He respected the creative intention. He loved fiction and loved the stories of our lives. His relations, of trust and tact, with authors are finely attested in his published correspondence with Frank O’Connor.

Maxwell paid tribute, in conversation and interviews, to another phase of his emergence from the griefs of his early years, saying that the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik had given him “a life.” Two of Bill’s comments on Reik’s interventions seem at variance with Maxwell’s temperament, although he relates them in a favorable sense. Reik felt that Maxwell should more actively seek recognition in his writing career, should be more ambitious for winning prizes. Yet it is precisely Bill’s characteristic restraint in these matters that, viewed from the perspective of his long life, appears to have deepened the wide recognition that eventually came to him and, in retrospect, even seems to have mysteriously compelled it. Maxwell’s instinct in this was appropriate and true. Bill also cites, again seemingly with approval, Reik’s prohibition: “No remorse, no remorse.” In both these correctives, it is hard to recognize Maxwell, and it seems possible that the analyst was seeking to reverse an excess of diffidence or self-accusation. A remorseless person is not an attractive phenomenon. Through responsibility and regret we come to know ourselves, and Maxwell’s personality and writings attest to these qualities in their consideration for the sensibilities of others. Bill told me that he had, in latter middle age, written to each of several persons whom he thought he had wronged in earlier years: an exercise in apology and—one would have thought—remorse. On this theme, one thinks of Yeats:

 

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

…

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.⁴

 

In his last extraordinary year of life, while Emily Maxwell was slowly dying with a grace, a philosophy, and, I would say, a beauty that remains indescribable, Bill Maxwell reread War and Peace. His solace and pleasure in the book were an event in those rooms. He said, “It is so comforting.” We rejoiced together over certain scenes, not “discussing” or dissecting them but paying, simply, the tribute of our delight. He would speak of these episodes shedding his silent tears—not in grief but for the grandeur of common humanity. Bill was steadily eating less, and when the book became too heavy for him to hold, a friend—Annabel Davis-Goff—came each afternoon and read it for him.

Five days before Emmy’s death, the Maxwells, in wheelchairs, went to the Chardin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Two days before Emmy’s death, and ten days before his own, Bill finished reading Tolstoy’s novel. The events encompassed in that last month of their lives, the tenderness quietly exchanged among the friends who visited them were entirely consonant with the qualities of that departing pair: unforgettable, unforgotten.

Bill Maxwell said that he did not fear death but that he would miss reading novels. In his own novel The Château, the American protagonist walking in autumnal light through streets and public gardens: “‘I cannot leave!’ he cried out silently to the old buildings and the brightness in the air, to the yellow leaves on the trees. ‘I cannot bear that all this will be here and I will not be.’”⁵