Some light visitations

For the first of tonight's October bookshelf wanderings I'll beg a modest indulgence. {Looks around furtively.} It's not about ghosts or haunts at all!

But it is from the pen of M. R. James, master of the ghost story, and it does feature the creature I'd most trust to manage a ghost, a cat. So surely it will do? It's from a letter to his friend Jane McBryde, then about nine years old, sent December 23, 1914. The season of ghosts, in England, and surely never more so--if not in the usual, light-hearted way--than at the end of that horrible first year of World War I. Spirits surely clustered thick about the land that Christmas. Despite the times, however, James conjures up some non-supernatural cheer:

My sister has been with me for about three weeks now, and has brought with her a large beautiful black cat who is so nervous that he won't speak to anyone: my own cat has not even seen him yet, but she suspects that something is being kept from her and takes it a little to heart. "Of course it is very likely that I"m not fit to be trusted," she said last night, "only I like to be told so; then I know where I am. If you like to have German spies in the house, it's no business of mine. It might become my duty to speak to the police about it, and it might be very unpleasant for some people if I did: but of course I don't want to make trouble only I do like people to be straightforward and say what they mean," and so on and so on. I said, "What makes you think there are German spies in the house?" "Oh nothing, nothing whatever, only when one sees meals being carried up to one of the bedrooms--and much better meals than ever I see downstairs--and when the maid take particular care that one shouldn't go into that room, and when one sees with one's own eyes a great vulgar black cat climbing the mulberry tree as if the whole place belonged to him: why, then, I think the time has come to put two and two together and speak plainly, but old as I may be, I'm not too old to see through a glass door." There was a great deal more, and at the end of it she burst into tears and laid her head on the fender and said nobody loved her and she had better go and bury herself in the garden or drown herself in the fountain.

Pleasantly silly, no?

Not wanting an October post to be entirely ghost-free, however, I'll share another passage I came across today, from the introduction to The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner, written by her friend William Maxwell, who also served as the volume's editor:

According to some notes that were taken down from Miss Townsend Warner's dictation in 1966, her mother fell into labour at the sound of a knell--a Harrow governor had just died--and she was born with a caul, which the midwife claimed and probably sold to a sailor as a protection against death by drowning. The ghost of her maternal grandmother visited her cradle.

Sadly, the notes didn't mention who actually saw that ghost. But, Maxwell continues:

She herself as a grown woman not only believed in ghosts but (in a letter that has managed to make itself invisible to me) described how she saw them, on two different occasions--the daughter of the house, who had died a year or two before her visit, and an old man who had taken his own life.

It would be just like a letter dealing with ghosts to spirit itself away, wouldn't it?

William Maxwell on interruptions

Today finds me with even less time than the preceding few weeks--which makes the selection an easy one. From a letter sent by William Maxwell to Eudora Welty on October 19, 1953:

I started to get some writing done, but there was an interruption. Blessed are the interrupted, for they shall etcetera.

We now return you to whatever it is you're failing to get done.

Conversations with William Maxwell

I've little time tonight, but I do want to share at least a couple of bits from Conversations with William Maxwell (2012), if for on other reason than to try to help spread the word of the book's existence to Maxwell fans who, like me, may have missed it when it was published in the spring.

It's clearly a book that I'll be reading and referring to for a long time; what I have to offer tonight are the merest quick gleanings, a browser's miscellany. Like this exchange with the book's editor (and Maxwell's biographer, Barbara Burkhardt, from 1991, which follows as discussion of the presence of a commenting narrative voice in The Folded Leaf:

Burkhardt: Why did you move away from this type of storyteller in your later works and increasingly use first person?

Maxwell: When I was younger I tried to use the first person and couldn't. The result was inevitably loquacious and without form. I think I learned how not to be loquacious, how to construct a self that would pass with the reader, from reading E. B. White, who is so candid, but so, so disarming. If I had done So Long in the third person I wouldn't have been as close to the painful center of the book, or been able to be a witness as well as an actor.

It shouldn't surprise me, I suppose, that Maxwell drew lessons from White; writers take their models where they find them. And the two do share a commitment to precision, clarity, and sentence-by-sentence quality--but White's lightness of touch, his self-deprecation, the conversational tone of even his most obviously worked over lines nonetheless seem far from Maxwell's seriousness, melancholy, and stateliness.

The best bit I've come across thus far is from an "All Things Considered" interview conducted in 1995, soon after the publication of Maxwell's marvelous All the Days and Nights: Collected Stories. In response to host Linda Wertheimer's statement, "You also write a fair amount about age," Maxwell replies,

I do think being an old man is the most interesting thing that's ever happened to me because of all sorts of strange experiences, the opening up of memory, which I expected, and of the enjoyment of life being progressively greater instead of diminished by age. That was a surprise. And memory is the most remarkable part of all because you live in the past, you live in the present, and you, like everyone, live in the future. Only when you're old, they pass so easily into each other without any effort at all so that the past is quite as real as the present, and the future is, of course, problematical and that's interesting.

Such a satisfying answer, and a heartening one to those of us on our perpetual way, god willing, to being old. That's the goal, isn't it: to hold on to your past while never losing your engagement with the present and your sense of a future.

Maxwell follows that answer with a description of an incident that, for me, raised goose bumps:

I've also had one amazing experience in the night in the dark in bed. I suddenly was able to remember in detail the house I grew up in and left when I was twelve years old. And I went form room to room seeing things that I hadn't remembered for seventy years and more. And being able to look as if I were actually there, as if the house was actually there, I saw that level of the bookcase, I saw pictures, I saw empty rooms, I saw furniture, and could look at it as long as I wanted to. It was as if some shutter had slipped back in my mind and I had absolute, total memory of the past.

Maxwell's description of the experience makes it seem truly uncanny, and it feels as if it ought to carry a hint of dread, of the perils of trespassing, but it doesn't--in fact, his verdict on it is that it was "a marvelous experience," and that it made him believe "that everything is fair, absolutely everything." I suspect that William James might have classed it as a religious experience.

That seems a good way to glide into the haunted precincts of October, with its annual serving of stories of ghosts and ghouls. The coming week may see spotty blogging, but trust me: soon after the spirits will make their presence felt. As the haints put it: have a good weekend--I'll see you on the other side.

In the blaze of midsummer, autumn beckons

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I have a gift for contentment. The moments are relatively rare when I'm looking ahead or behind, willing myself not to be where I am and doing what I'm doing. The grass is almost never greener. There is always the risk that such a tendency will turn pathological, inertia metastasizing, but on on a day-to-day basis it's far from a bad platform on which to build a life.

--

I don't use "gift" casually. I know that my ability to find contentment is in large part a compound of upbringing, habit, and deliberate choice, but it usually feels like more than that, like something given. I've had the wherewithal to take advantage of it, but I didn't earn it in the first place. I've never had even the slightest leanings toward religious belief, but one teaching from Chrsitianity that I have always found useful is the concept of grace--favor not earned but freely given. That's how I feel about my contentment, and I'm grateful.

--

I do, however, have a habit of looking ahead to the next season. Autumn is the favorite, but as it starts to bite I wonder about winter and its snows; winter, lingering, prompts hopes of spring, and spring--along with baseball--brings thoughts of summer nights. Summer, well, until Stahl family vacation in July, it holds its own.



--

My year includes six major holidays: Opening Day, the first day of the playoffs, the first day of the World Series, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the seven days of the annual Stahl family vacation. Christmas, the chief in this pantheon when I was young, is always on the verge these days of being relegated to the minors, its consumer mania only just balanced by the way it gathers the family and the pleasures offered by its music. If it weren't for Charles Schulz and Vince Guaraldi, it would likely have been stricken long ago.

--

In the introduction to the career-spanning collection of his work Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell writes,

I am sure that most of the influences responsible for one's cast of mind are too remote and mysterious to be known, but I happen to know a few of the influences responsible for mine. . . . Aunt Annie would lead us to the cemetery, and there she would pause at a grave and tell us about the man or woman down below. At some of the graves my mother and my Aunt Mary would chime in, but Aunt Annie did most of the talking. "This man buried here," she would say, "was a cousin of ours, and he was so mean I don't know how his family stood him. And this man here," she would continue, moving along a few steps, "was so good I don't know how his family stood him." And then she would become more specific. Some of the things she told us were horrifying and some were horrifyingly funny.

--

Up in the Old Hotel, it astonishes me to realize, was published twenty years ago next month. Joseph Mitchell, though he hadn't published a word for nearly thirty years, was still with us then.

--

Last week was the eleventh year of the annual Stahl family vacation. We always traveled in the summer when my sister and brother and I were kids--sometimes my father would come home one day and say that he and his father had finished their work on the farm and thus the next two weeks looked clear, and we'd be away the next day. As we grew up and, serially, went to college, the vacation fell away, victim to the scheduling problems that plague all family endeavors. But soon after she had her first child, my sister--wanting, I think, for her son and his siblings and cousins (all then merely prospective) to know his aunts and uncles and cousins better than we'd known ours--convinced us to give a new, different family vacation a try. Ever since, we've been renting a house for a week in July every year.

--

A few years ago in June I had a dream in which I woke up to discover that it was Thursday of Stahl family vacation week and that I'd somehow piddled away the majority of the week, not in the comfortable, companionable way that is the essence of vacation--which, without effort or plan, draws you closer to family--but in the frenzied, forgettable, workplace-like way of the Wordsworthian admonition:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

The intensity of my relief on realizing it was a mere dream is hard to describe.

--



With spouses and children, there are twelve of us now, and six years ago we settled, I think for good, on South Haven, Michigan. South Haven is a resort town in a very Midwestern style--there are no fancy restaurants and few places that I trust to pour a martini. Oh, there are shops, but they're selling nothing you need, aside from the used bookstore (where this year I picked up an Anchor paperback of Joseph Conrad's Chance with an Edward Gorey cover). What the South Haven house has to offer is a porch, proximity to the beach, and quiet, and what more could you possibly need?

--



The first few days of vacation found me reading what I think of as the Inexhaustibles: enjoying another of the hundred-plus volumes on the Donald Westlake bookshelf and two of Rex Stout's seventy-three Nero Wolfes. Consumed at a comfortable pace, the works of these authors--to whose ranks could be added P. G. Wodehouse--will see a reader through decades of lazy vacations. Their comforts feel endless.

--

One of the Stouts I read, Over My Dead Body (1940), introduces Nero Wolfe's daughter, which is a shock if for no other reason than that Wolfe has assembled such a complete proxy family in his brownstone on 35th Street. And an actual daughter introduces the troubling concepts of time and age, both banished from Stout's universe--a not insubstantial part of the pleasure of Wolfe, Archie, Fritz, Saul, et al. is that their selves and relationships are fixed, subject to none of the cruelties of change, age, and loss. Time will not, to twist William Maxwell's phrase, darken them.

--

The week was hot, unusually so, and in a twelve-person house the air conditioning is necessarily regulated by the most sensitive of the group. But Wednesday night rocketlass decided to open our bedroom window, affording entry to an illicit breath of outside air . . . and soon after midnight her incorrigibility was rewarded by the unmediated power of a thunderclap, followed by a hard rain, the first this parched shore had seen in months. It poured, satisfyingly, all night.

--

In any gathering, I'm always the first up in the morning. As Norman Maclean puts it, "I get up early to observe the commandment observed by only some of us--to arise early to see as much of the Lord's daylight as is given to us." The morning after the thunderstorm, I woke to a gentle, drumming afterthought of a rain and took my coffee to the porch a good hour before even the two-year-old would be likely to wake. With me I carried W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants (1992). The newly cool, moist air rippled on the skin the way it does in the earliest days of autumn.

--

I'd read Sebald before and not been convinced. It was in 2000, and I was newly entered into a job that has become a career, newly moved to a condo that has become a home, and about to begin a marriage that has become life itself. Sebald's melancholy was not what I was looking for or needed, and I didn't respond to it. But that Thursday morning last week, half of vacation behind me, an unexpectedly autumnal feel in the air, Sebald's words met me at the right time and place, and I sank into his stories of loss and doomed attempts to recover what is forever gone.

--

"When I think back to those days," one of Sebald's characters writes, "I see shades of blue everywhere -- a single empty space, stretching out into the twilight of late afternoon, crisscrossed by the tracks of ice-skaters long vanished."

--



Autumn is for re-reading, and in particular for re-reading books about loss and regret. So I turn again to Norman Maclean's A River Runs through It and Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, and William Maxwell, all of William Maxwell. I doubt I'll ever stop re-reading those books.

--

Jewett writes, "There was a silence in the schoolhouse, but we could hear the noise of the water on a beach below. It sounded like the strange warning wave that gives notice of the turn of the tide." Mary Poppins, remember, promises to stay until the wind changes. Seasons, however we spot them or define them, are important.

--

I am regularly surprised, returning to A River Runs through It, by how conversational and wry it is, the way that Maclean's narrator--Maclean, in other words--cocoons the wound at the book's center in casual observation, self-deprecating wit, and ironic folksiness, the better to enable it to emerge, beautiful as it is painful, when the time comes to turn our gaze full upon it. Away from the book, we remember its pain and the beautifully rendered prose of its emotional swells; back with it again we are reminded that it's more like life itself than that memory would have us think, prosaic and silly and funny and even a bit vulgar.

--

In A River Runs through It, Maclean's narrator talks with his wife after he's returned her ne'er-do-well brother, sunburned and hungover, from an ill-fated fishing trip, and the subtext of the conversation is his own troubled brother:

"I am trying to help someone," she said. "Someone in my family. Don't you understand?"

I said, "I should understand."

"I am not able to help," she said.

"I should understand that, too," I said.

Grace is a shade of fortune, and when I think of it--unearned in the face of the world's misery--I feel even more grateful. We've not thus far needed, in our family, the help that Maclean's brother needed and couldn't find a way to accept, so our vacations together are peaceful and comfortable and happy. These are the people I am easiest with in all the world.

--

I read Sebald Thursday and Friday, and Saturday came and we packed up amid happy tears. The calendar turns, and we look ahead to next year. It's not unreasonable to think that we have decades of these vacations ahead of us, and I hold to that thought.

--

It was 93 degrees today in Chicago, but the days are drawing in and, Stahl vacation behind, autumn beckons.

--



"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it."

Thanksgiving

Charles Baxter's strange, beautiful, moving novel The Feast of Love (2000) is full of passages worth quoting: unusual and striking images, perceptive thoughts. I've used some of them recently over at the Annex, and to take us into Thanksgiving--and what will probably be a subsequent week of at best spotty blogging--I thought I'd share a couple of lines that give a sense of the novel's abundance of heart. They are written in the voice of an old professor of philosophy, a specialist in Kierkegaard, and they come late in the book, when he's wrestling with grief over his estrangement from his son:

Every night I take up my watch by the front window. I have my lamp and my book. I listen to Schubert on the phonograph. Next to my family, Schubert is the love of my life; if he were to return to earth, he could come to my house and take any of the objects here he wanted.

I spend a lot of time thinking about--and feeling thankful for--what I owe to my cultural heroes, writers and musicians and artists, but I've never thought of it quite that way. But I like it, the idea of opening the door to an admired revenant and saying, "Here, what's mine is yours. Take, and be welcome." Our household gods could be shared.

After the surprise appearance at his door not of Schubert, but of one of the book's other characters, the professor goes on to think to himself,

I think of a poem I had to memorize in college: "Love makes those young whom age doth chill,/And whom he finds young, keeps young still." Something like that.

The unexpected is always upon us. Of all the gifts arrayed before me, this one thought, at this moment of my life, is the most precious.

On my way home tonight, with Baxter and gratitude and generosity on the brain, I happened to turn to a piece Baxter wroter for A William Maxwell Portrait, a collection of memories of a writer for whose work I feel immense gratitude. Baxter's account of Maxwell is perceptive and gentle and convincing; its best moment is this scene, which is so vivid and inviting it makes me ache with that longing that accompanies good history writing--oh, to have been there.

As the afternoon went on, the light began to fail, and by evening the apartment was almost completely in darkness. We were still talking, even though we could hardly see each other. Maxwell did not seem to want to turn on any of the lights. He said he loved the darkening and the departure of the light from the room because it made the objects in it more lively, and when his wife came home, flipping on the switch as she came in, I saw his face again, rapt with attention. He told his wife that it was as if he and I had gone for a walk in the woods.

Elsewhere, Baxter draws from Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow a line that seems suitable to send us to the Thanksgiving table, that "generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is."

Happy Thanksgiving, folks. Enjoy your families.

Dreaming in words

In an essay about friendship with William Maxwell in A William Maxwell Portrait, poet Michael Collier writes of Maxwell's intense involvement with words, especially late in life:

Toward the end of his life, reading and writing came together in a kind of painful synesthesia. In the spring of 2000, one of his letters admitted, "I can't find anything to read that isn't overstimulating. I am about half way through War and Peace and if I read that after dinner I go on living it in my dreams. Awful things that I know are going to happen, scenes I have made up in my sleep and sometimes just writing."

This is something I struggle with as well: any reading I do in the time leading up to going to bed is guaranteed to stay with me through the night. My dreams become suffused with the language of the author I'd been reading; I spend hours in some nebulous state between reading, writing, and living the words of the novel, wrestling (often stressfully) with its problems and thinking in its language. The most recent book to take me over like that was Murakami's 1Q84, which did not make for restful dreams--the oneiroi made sure that Murakami's flat language was even more freighted with dread than it is in daylight hours.

I had always assumed this was common among serious readers, but Collier's account makes Maxwell's case sound unusual. Am I wrong? Is this something you experience? And is it, like with me, bad enough that it makes you avoid in bed much of the time?

Visiting

On the way back Sunday from a weekend in St. Louis, where we had gone to watch a baseball game--participating, in a way, in an activity from olden days--the sign for the town of Lincoln, Illinois tempted us off Interstate 55. For Lincoln is where William Maxwell was born, and it seems wrong to pass, again and again, a place that figures prominently in the work of a favorite writer without pausing to simultaneously pay homage and see, and imagine with, the remnants of the early twentieth-century town whose streets a young Maxwell walked.

The town looks like any number of Illinois small towns, including the one I grew up in: a courthouse anchoring a town square surrounded by a mix of local businesses and ghostly empty storefronts; quiet, tree-lined streets lined with a mix of large, century old wood-frame mansions and smaller, midcentury houses; a small park, functionless since the end of the days of the local brass band; quiet, deep, fundamental quiet.

Maxwell, in Ancestors (1971), wrote of Lincoln:

At the point at which I began to have a general working knowledge of persons, places, and things--that is to say, about 1912--Lincoln was a modestly flourishing county seat that seemed to have been there forever. It was not even very old, though it did have the air of being deeper in the shadow of the past than many of the towns around it. Nothing of any historical importance had ever happened there, or has to this day.

Forty years later, I suspect that closing statement remains true.

We didn't succeed in finding the Maxwell home, where I have since been told there is a plaque, but we did climb the steps of the lovely Carnegie Library that opened in 1903--clearly architectural kin to the one I grew up patronizing--to which a young Maxwell walked to get books. And on this autumn day, under a stirringly beautiful blue sky dotted with puffy clouds, that, and the quiet, was enough. One of the qualities of Maxwell's novels and stories that keeps me coming back to them again and again is the way they seem to effortlessly bridge that gap between the prewar world--especially the prewar rural world, which was almost incomprehensibly isolated--and our contemporary, connected urban lives. Being in Lincoln, even as the occasional SUV rolled by, drew the connection close.

Elsewhere in Ancestors, Maxwell writes of his father:

In his old age my father enchanted the Rotary Club with a speech which he titled "Memories of Lincoln Way Back When." Being rather proud of this success, he presented me with a carbon copy of the notes he spoke from.

He began by describing the town in his boyhood in the 1880s--the, for the most part, unpaved streets, the original courthouse and the hitching posts all around the courthouse square, the horse fountains, the volunteer fire department, the coal-oil lamps in the houses, and the outside privies. At this time the town of Lincoln was less than forty years old. Up and down the streets of the happy past my father went, locating defunct hotels and dancing academies, banks that had changed their names or failed, dry goods stores, livery stables, boarding houses, barber shops (colored and white), saloons, meat markets, jewelers, gents' furnishings, greenhouses, ice houses, brickyards and coal mines, the collar factory and the shooting gallery.

Nostalgia has always been with us, and when you stand on the streets of Lincoln you can't escape more than a century of it. It's part of Maxwell's genius that nostalgia has little, perhaps no, part in his work; rather, he writes of loss, and time, and the way we work and work and work against their partnership.

Maxwell and Welty

I feel I could write post after post after post about What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell; instead, pressed by that demon Time, I'll simply say that if you like either writer, if you like dailyness and the pleasures of the commonplace, if you like Virginia Woolf or Thomas Hardy and would gladly talk about them and their lives endlessly, if you are more amused by the world than angered by it, if you are more saddened by the world than angered by it, if you could use a couple of examples of writers who made their art within the context of full and reasonably contented lives rather than having it deform them, well, buy the book, read it, and keep it near for the coming years. Its genius is born in the quotidian, in the way that, for most of us, if we're lucky, books and culture are part of a larger, fuller, sometimes much more trivial life, and the interplay between the daily and the lasting only heightens the pleasures of both. Such are the virtues, side by side and sentence by sentence, of these letters.

The overriding theme, however, is friendship. It's friendship within limits--you get the sense that, as in a lot of friendships that are no less real or lasting for this, certain topics are silently unremarked upon--but it's nonetheless a friendship of deep love and caring. There are many moments, on both sides, that demonstrate this, but the most memorable one comes during a rough patch in Welty's life. Maxwell's letter to her of January 24, 1967 is a marvel of care and circumspection, of careful management of topic and tone. He begins quietly enough, responding to queries about a recent illness and lamenting the drain that editing the work of other writers can be; he talks of reading Far from the Madding Crowd, calling Hardy "a magician." And then he turns serious--but he begins gently, almost imperceptibly, by, without preamble, launching into a story:

Your feeling about 1966, and fear for 1967, brought back the lowest period of my life, at the end of my sophomore year in college, when for about four or five months I really thought that the reason one thing after another turned out badly was that anything having to do with me necessarily would. So I decided on one last try, and if that didn't work, I would not try any more, ever. I had nobody to room with in my junior year and I had been introduced to somebody in a revolving door who seemed like a nice enough boy, so I got his address and wrote and asked if he'd like to room with me, and he wrote back he would, and in the fall, when we met in the dormitory, it was not the boy I had met in the revolving door--I must have got his name wrong--but a boy whom I had never laid eyes on, who had had polio, and had a withered leg, so he always dressed and undressed in his clothes closet, and he was a perfectly marvelous room-mate and from that time on everything worked out beautifully, for years and years.

What I am trying to say is there is no pattern in years, no constancy of good or bad luck. Who knows what the day after tomorrow will bring--the very thing we most wanted and haven't allowed our hearts to hope.

If what I heard in your voice persists, will you drop everything and come to New York and settle down in the back room and let us hang garlands of love around your neck, day after day, until you are feeling yourself again?

As an outsider, by the time you reach the end of the letter, and Maxwell's heart-wrenching plea to his friend--in whom he must have sensed real despair when last he talked with her--you realize that the whole letter was written with that final paragraph in mind, its studied casualness an example of nerves held tightly under control, in order that Maxwell's own fear not unduly frighten the friend he hoped to comfort. Would that we all have friends like that, could be friends like that.

"If I keep on reading Hardy, it will come."

I've spent the past week head over heels in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, which is looking likely to become the only letters collection I've ever read straight through. I've been, and will continue to be, drawing on it in my Twitter feed and over at the Annex; few writers are as dear to my heart as Maxwell, and the correspondence seems likely to turn me into a Welty fan, too.

There are many reasons to love these letters, and I'll get into a number of them in the coming weeks, but one of the chief reasons is the way the pair share their reading--and the fact that they're both perpetually reading a couple of my favorite authors. They talk continuously of Virginia Woolf, voraciously reading every new book about her and her coterie that appears; they're gone on Forster, whom I suspect it's time for me to revisit; and they both revel in the high tragedy of Thomas Hardy.

My favorite passage about Hardy thus far is this, from a letter sent by Maxwell on March 7, 1967:

I am so glad you are working. Able to. I think about working. This idea and that. But don't take off my hat and sit down to it, for some reason. I almost had an idea in France last summer, but it faded away like the Cheshire cat's smile. But I tell myself if I keep on reading Hardy, it will come. I have just finished Tess of the D-- ---. When Angel Clare found her in that seaside resort, living with Alec D'Urbeville, and she said, "Don't come near me," and "Too late, too late," and he went away, and she went upstairs to her bedroom and [threw] herself on the floor with her head on that chair, and said "O,O,O" and then "I can't bear it," it was she and I that couldn't bear it. I will never be the same. But what do you think they talked about for those five days, in that empty house that didn't belong to them? Brazil?

This hints at a crucial aspect of Hardy: either you vibrate to the tones he works in, are willing to go with what Anthony Powell calls his "at times clumsily expressed" account of life's grotesqueries and tragedies, or you see it all as overblown and ridiculously operatic. If you're in the former camp, Hardy's novels--Tess especially--can wrench you like little else, you can't bear it; if you're in the latter, your response is likely to take the form of, "Really? Really?"

Having taken great pleasure in reading and re-reading Hardy over the years, I am glad to be in the former camp, and, now, to know that I have such distinguished company as Maxwell and Welty.

Relatives and revelations

With Christmas looming, I'll be away from the blog for a few days. It seems right, as we gather our families around us, to leave you with William Maxwell, that master of writing about the histories, irrevocable if not unrecoverable, of American families. His stately, elegiac biography of his own family, Ancestors (1971) includes a scene that simply and movingly captures the distances between family members and generations--distances that we so often learn, too late, could have been bridged, had we only allowed ourselves to make the effort.

Maxwell presents that gap as it arises during a dinner between his young self, in his late twenties and recently transplanted to New York, and his uncle from Cincinnati, who is nearing forty and living a seemingly unremarkable Midwestern life, with wife and children and a brokerage business.

I was living in Greenwich Village, and he came east on a business trip and took me to dinner at an expensive restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue. We were beautifully at cross purposes all evening. I thought he had called me out of a sense of duty, whereas in fact it was because something--that I was a misfit introverted child, that he was fond of my mother and father, that I represented the younger brother he wished he had had--made him interested in me. All I know for sure, and I wish I had known it on that occasion, is that he was immensely pleased and proud of me because I had published a couple of novels.

I can see us now so clearly, in that lime-green hotel dining room--his face across the table from me, and his double-breasted dark-blue pin-stripe suit, and his courteous manner of speaking, and his habit of lighting one cigarette from another--that it almost seems possible to live the evening over again the way it ought to have gone.

At first, in our efforts to life the relationship to where it seemed to belong, we were not quite natural with each other. As people go, we weren't much alike, but it wasn't true either that we had nothing in common. He was named for my father and so was I. Max spent the early part of his childhood and I spent all of mine in a small town in the dead center of Illinois. We both went to high school in Chicago. My father felt that Max had failed in his responsibilities to his mother, but we could hardly talk about that. When other relatives got around to speaking of my writing, it was to point out kindly that there were novels which did sell--historical novels with lots of action in them, and plot. And that were afterwards bought by the movies for a considerable amount of money. It was not a conversation I wanted to repeat with Max. I had been in Cincinnati once, overnight, and hadn't called him. So we couldn't talk about Cincinnati. I had never met his wife and daughter. And I didn't own an stocks and bonds. Meeting my eyes over the top of his menu, he urged me to have turtle soup with him. I don't think I did. I can't remember what I had. But when his soup came, he summoned the headwater grandly and demanded a glass of sherry to put in it, and I wondered how he knew that this was what you were supposed to do.

As we ate, he asked one question after another. I have done it myself so many times since with somebody who was younger and not very talkative. It is the only thing you can do. He asked about my job, and about what it was like living in New York, and I saw how attentively he listened to everything I said. He was like an imaginary older brother--interested, affectionate, perceptive, and more securely situated in a world of his own making. I liked him very much, but I went on answering his questions with a single statement that obliged him to think up some new question--instead of saying to him, "I was living in a rooming house on Lexington Avenue and I had diner with somebody from the office one night who said there was a vacant apartment in the building where he lived, so I went home with him and the door was unlocked but there weren't any light bulbs, and I took it because I liked the way it felt in the dark. The rent is thirty-five dollars a month. You go past an iron gate into a courtyard with gas streetlamps. It was built during the Civil War, I think. Anyway, it's very old. And my apartment is on the third floor, looking out on a different courtyard, with trees in it. Ailanthus tree. I like having something green to look at. Technically it's a room and a half. The half is a bedroom just big enough for a single bed, and I never sleep there because it's too like lying in a coffin. I sleep on a studio couch in the living room. The fireplace works. And once when I had done something I was terribly ashamed of, I went and put my forehead on the mantelpiece. It was just the right height."

In order to give you a sense of the prose and of the regret underlying Maxwell's memories, I've had to quote at greater length than fair use guidelines would countenance. I wish I could keep going, as the mesmerizing parade of images continues for pages; by themselves, those pages are a sufficient reason for you to hurry out and pick up a copy of Ancestors. Maxwell lets his imagined self keep talking, offering not confessions but scattered, impressionistic gifts of his actual life, a life that in reality he casually assumed his uncle wouldn't--or maybe even couldn't--understand. Had he but thought to attempt that openness, he wonders, might it have even led to a similar revelation of hidden personality on the part of his uncle? What portion of life's losses and lonelinesses can be laid at the feet of just such unnecessary, unconsidered reticence?

It's a strain that runs through Maxwell's work, that lament for the chance not taken, the word not spoken. In a brief four-page story, “The Room Outside” (1998), that my friend Joe (who recently wrote about an unexpected encounter with Maxwell's enduring presence) dropped on my desk the other day, there's a moment when Maxwell's regret turns into self-lacerating anguish; an account of a wintry afternoon spent with friends is interrupted by a parenthetical cry:

(Why did I never see them again when I liked them so much? How could I have been so stupid as to leave everything, including friendships, to chance?)

This holiday season, as we come together with relatives strange and familiar, perhaps we should let Maxwell be our guide: Ask. Answer. Reveal. Remember. Listen. Listen. Listen.