Reading Note:
The Thread So Far
14 July 2015

It seems to have started with Kate Bolick’s Spinster, which I read in late April. Bolick prompted me to look into Maeve Brennan, the New Yorker‘s Long-Winded Lady. At about the same time, Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Joseph Mitchell, Man in Profile, came out.

It was that conjunction, that accidental pairing of two New Yorker writers (who formed a sort of pair in real life) that made the magazine, and not any particular writer, my new center of gravity. I read Kunkel’s earlier biography of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor, and from this I learned the measure of Ross’s industry, his devotion to The New Yorker as expressed in hours reading proofs and launching queries that, sometimes, reflected a good deal of sophisticated knowledgeability. I explored Wolcott Gibbs and A J Liebling, who were no longer writing for The New Yorker when I began to read it, but whose prose styles are still recognizable as templates for today’s magazine. I read Gardner Botsford’s memoir, and want to read it again. I dug up a copy of Here at The New Yorker, only to find that I am still as allergic to Brendan Gill’s chatty complacency as I was when it came out. Turning in the other direction, I decided to re-read The Château, and I have been lost in the work of William Maxwell ever since.

Which brings me to Barbara Burkhardt’s William Maxwell: A Literary Life. Burkhardt struck up a friendship with Maxwell while she was writing her dissertation on his novels, and he chose her to help organize his papers and shepherd them to the University of Illinois, the school they had in common. Her book is solid and I daresay reliable, but it is also somewhat academic, given to repeating key words and prone to slightly fatuous claims, such as that each of Maxwell’s books constituted an important step in his development. I’d withhold my complaints altogether if there were another book about Maxwell, more focused on his life and on his career as a New Yorker editor, but,  if there is, I don’t know about it.

The ground for my renewed interest in Maxwell — I had something of a crush on him in college, and sometimes that’s fatal, not because you outgrow a writer but because you don’t know that you’ve grown up, that he or she is no longer the same writer who appealed to your youth; for years, I wrongly thought that I “knew” Maxwell — was prepared by Philippa Beauman’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor, when I had a crush on her, a few years ago. Beauman quoted many letters between Taylor and Maxwell, who was almost her only editor; her stories were published in The New Yorker or they weren’t published at all. I began to see Maxwell in a different light, and I’d like to see more. But Maxwell’s career as an editor is not really in Burkhardt’s brief. You can learn more about Maxwell’s life from the Chronology that editor Christopher Carduff has appended to the Library of America volumes. It’s from that source that I learned the answer to two questions that I couldn’t stop itching: where, exactly, on East 86th Street did Maxwell and his family live (544); and whether the Maxwell girls, Kate and Brookie went to the Brearley (they did — or at least Kate started out at Kindergarten there). Christopher Carduff, by the way, has brought all of Maeve Brennan’s stories back into print. Hats off!

I’ve even been roaming The New Yorker archives, fishing out two stories that Carduff declined to include in the LoA books. The first one, “Never To Hear Silence,” was published in 1937. It is brief but painful: a young scientist whose work has been invalidated by an innocent error has to listen to his wife’s nonstop advice about what to do about it. The young man’s problems clearly surpass his troubles at the lab: he has married the wrong woman, and cemented his mistake with two children. There is a slightness about the story, relative to Maxwell’s other stories, that explains Carduff’s decision; but I’d have included it anyway, because it attracted the interest of Louise Bogan, the poetry editor at The New Yorker, and she became one of the several mentors who helped William Maxwell become himself. The story is also quite short.

My other catch is more doubtful, and has no place in the LoA. When it appeared, in 1964, it was signed “Gifford Brown,” a pseudonym that Maxwell used whenever he was writing about his older brother, or some other person who might take offense. Edward Mendelson mentions it in the NYRB essay that I touched on yesterday.

One omitted story, “The News of the Week in Review” (1964), is an acid portrait of a neighbor in Westchester, where Maxwell had a country house. He published the story under the name Gifford Brown, a pseudonym he used when he didn’t want neighbors or relatives to notice the unpleasant things he was writing about them. The secular saint portrayed by Maxwell’s friends could never have written it, but the real Maxwell did.

I don’t know what Maxwell is up to here. I’m not entirely sure that I can attach the “acid portrait” to the right character. Is it Reinhold, the garrulous neighbor who asks to have the narrator’s Sunday Times if he’s done with it, or Weidler, an off-stage figure with whom Reinhold is engaged in a dispute about the posting of roadside mailboxes? This mailbox imbroglio reminded me of many such trivial crises during my time on Candlewood Lake, but I can’t see choking a story out of it, unless it’s to point out how trivial rural crises can be. (The story betrays many signs of the animosity between country people and encroaching suburbanites.) Nor could I discern the feelings of the narrator about any of this. Of course, I read the story contentiously myself, aiming not to enjoy it but to determine if Mendelson is making any sense, and I’m not sure that he is. It’s all a muddle. Clouding the whole business is Maxwell’s use of the pseudonym, which indicates that even he took it all too seriously.

Whether, when I’ve gone through all of Maxwell (whether or not that means re-reading They Came Like Swallows and The Folded Leaf), I’ll continue this New Yorker thread is hard to say. With Maxwell, the atmosphere is quiet, not effervescent with intoxicated anecdotes. Maxwell does not inspire questions about who slept with whom. That sort of gossip is never interesting for very long, and without some altogether new tidbit it is simply unappetizing. Maxwell’s questions take the opposite direction. What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction — that sort of thing.

During the Cold War, the line between fiction and nonfiction was closely policed. That’s part of why books like In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song were thought to be so challenging when they were published. What they challenged was that line. The line has been effaced, but not the widespread feeling that it ought to be there. Children of the scientific revolution, we like to know  whether what we’re being told is actual or hypothetical. This does not, however, capture the difference between what we mean by “true” and “false,” which are much bigger, more complicated words. The vulgar association of truth with actuality is a failing that springs from the natural hostility of the commercial mind to the unbridled imagination.

In our spoken dealings with each other, it is probably best to be frank about what we know to be the case. Writing, however, requires more testing. Almost everything that is written down is a kind of history, a claim that something did or didn’t happen. What thinking minds have discovered in recent years is that the fictional can be true. Middlemarch is true in a way that no history of England at the time of the Reform Bill could possibly be. We have come to see the virtues of touching up accounts of actual occurrences with fictional devices, some of them as innocent as the stitching together into one speech of internally consistent remarks made by one person on two occasions, some of them a lot more inventive. One of the purposes of education is to provide readers with the ability to gauge how close the alignment of actuality and truth ought to be in any given case.

William Maxwell’s work teaches us that truth and falsity are not philosophical absolutes, at least not for the likes of us mortals. They will help us to distinguish what happened from what didn’t only indirectly, by calling on things that we know that are not part of the story. Why else should I find that what Maxwell says happened in Lincoln, Illnois in the winter of 1918-19 is interesting? There are still people who believe that fiction is a waste of time because it’s “just made up.” But made up of what? Great literature is made up of truth. In that regard, it all really happened.