Imperishable Maxwell (original) (raw)

“Bright Center of Heaven” gives those of us who knew him as the mature master of a deliberately low-key prose a new Maxwell—bolder, more overtly poetical, more metaphysical, and frequently surreal. The book’s title comes from a bizarre vision entertained by Amelia, the racist Southern spinster, as she sits, stunned into muteness, at the dinner table with a black guest: “The candles soared toward a heaven of blue and white larkspur, and in the bright center of heaven Amelia saw a great black face with gold-rimmed glasses.” Her sense of outrage finds another expression in her suddenly hearty appetite, where she has previously been a picky, invalid eater. Nothing is predictable at this social occasion, which ends when the black visitor, Jefferson Carter, batters his way out of a screened tent where the postprandial discussion, despite the liberal dispositions of the white participants, has irritated him into a rage. “These seven people,” he thinks, “had no meaning beyond themselves, which was to say that they had no meaning at all. They did not express the life of the nation. They had no visible work. They were all drones and winter would find them dead.” The mural scale of the indictment (in an aggrieved mind) is one that Maxwell did not strive for again. The novel, though not long, is ambitious in the reach of its human diversity and the extravagance of its metaphors. Emotional nuances are reified into audible objects:

“Merry sunshine, Amelia!” Mrs. West’s voice flew toward her husband’s half-sister like a volley of silver arrows, intending to undo with their brightness the work of years of indigestion. The arrows struck harmlessly against the breastplate and the helmet. They fell with a clatter at Amelia’s feet. A page later: “Amelia, too scandalized for speech, wrapped her disapproval round her and laid the folds of it at her feet.” These overanimations are eddies in the “bright confusion” of this long day in the upper Midwest. Myth leaks into the humdrum: Whitey, the younger of Mrs. West’s sons, “is the family Ariel.” When Mrs. West takes a hurried hand in the preparation of lunch, “the air about her grew bright with the combat” and the cook surveys the mess in the kitchen “without expression save for the utterly dead look of one who sees her sons slain by the invader, her daughters violated, and her house pulled down about her head.” A palpable modernist influence, aside from the subtle, quirky domestic realism of Woolf and E. M. Forster, is that of James Joyce, particularly of “Ulysses,” which explodes as it progresses into a cosmic inclusiveness. A day in Dublin, a day in Wisconsin are alike sufficient samplings of humanity—random test cores plumbing the depths of existence. Homeric metaphors give epic magnitude to an eighteen-year-old boy’s labor of unrequited love:
As a mountain-climber is sometimes startled at the sight of one small flower growing miraculously out of the bare rock, and stops to gaze at its petals, white veined with blue, and at its yellow-and-blue center; and then the mountain-climber goes on up the precipitous wall of rock with less of weariness in his knees and a lighter pack on his back, so did the flower of Thorn’s small hope refresh him and make the weight of his hurt feelings less burdensome to him.

An achieved and reciprocated love demands an even wider verbal stretch: “Beyond the shadow of all doubt she was certain that if he let go, if he took his hands from her face even for a second, she would fall headlong. She would be bruised and battered against ten thousand unnamed stars.” The “heaventree of stars” that hangs over Leopold Bloom at day’s end is glimpsed from another longitude.

In his next novel, “They Came Like Swallows” (1937), Maxwell subdues his figurative language to describe the most momentous event of his life: his mother’s sudden death in the flu epidemic of 1918-19, after childbirth, at the age of thirty-seven. “My childhood came to an end at that moment,” he later wrote. “The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.” Modest specifics, clearly rendered, replace the sometimes florid style of the first novel. The voice and form did not come easily: Carduff’s Chronology tells us, of the year 1935, “Plans autobiographical novel about death of his mother; writes seven drafts of the opening section but is happy with none of them.” The work was completed with the help of the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and a patron in Urbana, who gave him, in exchange for grading papers, four dollars a month, room and board, and privacy. “Without this arrangement,” he later said, “I doubt very much that the book would ever have been finished or that I would have continued to be a writer.” He also credited his friend Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator, with persuading him that “life was tragic” and “literature was serious business.” The novel is not simply autobiographical; the lies of fiction were employed to get at the nearly unbearable heart truth. Maxwell was ten when the flu seized his family and his mother died; his alter ego in the novel, Bunny, is eight. The subtracted two years sharpen the child’s vulnerability and simplify his picture of events. He does not understand, for instance, that his mother is pregnant, even though other characters can see that she plainly is, and he has no grasp of pregnancy’s timetable. Nor does the novel, divided into three parts, confine itself to his point of view; the actual death and its immediate aftermath are shown as perceived by Bunny’s rough-and-tumble thirteen-year-old brother, Robert, and by his similarly masculine, unsympathetic father. If Bunny’s section, titled “Whose Angel Child,” is one of Maxwell’s most brilliant transformations of memory, the next two, told from well beyond Bunny’s point of view, testify to the author’s powers of imagination.

Bunny, the angel child embodying the helpless infantile dependence upon maternal nurture that never totally leaves us, is, from his older brother’s point of view, a tyrannical rival. When Robert prepares to say goodbye to their mother, who is heading off to what will prove to be a fatal hospital stay, “he started toward her, but Bunny was there first, tugging at her and sobbing wildly into her neck.” As she comforts her younger son, her husband impatiently consults his watch, and Robert never does get to say his farewell. A few minutes later, Bunny is busy courting the good will of his new caretaker, Aunt Clara:

Although his face was streaked with tears, Bunny was pleased with himself. Robert recognized the symptoms. And he saw that Bunny was making up to Aunt Clara—starting up the stairs in front of her as if she were the one person that he liked and depended on. Just as he did to Irene, or to Sophie, or to anybody who happened to be around and could get him what he wanted.

“We’ve decided that it will be better for his later development if we speak to him only in legalese.”

In the third section, the briefest, Clara returns Bunny to his grief-stricken father, James Morison, and the tearful child looms as a puzzling responsibility; he tells him, “There, there. You mustn’t, son. You mustn’t take on so. You’ll be sick,” and struggles “with the large buttons on the child’s coat.” Having determined in his daze of grief to sell the house and give the children to one of their aunts, so “there would be no trace . . . anywhere” of his dead wife, Elizabeth, he “turned to the doorway, and saw Bunny staring at him with Elizabeth’s frightened eyes.” The network of family connection reclaims him.

The social context of these private events is never lost sight of; the novel is not only about the mother’s death but about Aunt Irene’s broken marriage, and Robert’s amputated leg, and the pious unction of Aunt Clara and her husband, Wilfred. Irrelevancies, including the terms of the First World War armistice, keep intruding. In the depths of his sorrow, “James caught a glimpse of a pocket knife: Wilfred was going to pare his finger nails.” The widower wanders out into the snowy midnight, where the bizarre apparition of Crazy Jake the local junk collector making his rounds comes to James as a revelatory call back to life. The novel, like its predecessor, is somewhat supernatural; human awareness animates the inanimate (“All the lines and surfaces of the room bent toward his mother, so that when he looked at the pattern of the rug he saw it necessarily in relation to the toe of her shoe”) and comforts the bereaved with intimations of a persisting ghost.

Novel after novel, the reconciliation of art and actuality continued to present stimulating difficulties for Maxwell. In describing, in this magazine, his friend the poet Louise Bogan, upon her death, in 1970, he said, “In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling”: such an exacting superimposition represented his ideal. It was Bogan who, when, in 1940, he showed her a short story about two boys who meet at the school swimming pool, suggested that what he had written was the first chapter of a novel. As he worked for more than four years on the novel, she provided her responses to each new installment and at the end gave the work in progress its eventual title, “The Folded Leaf” (1945). Carduff’s “Note on the Texts” relates that Maxwell in 1943 was “still struggling with the material” so noticeably that The New Yorker gave him five months’ leave at full pay so that he could finish up; even then, it took several more drafts.

The core of the recalcitrant material was the second most traumatic event of his young life: he attempted suicide at the age of nineteen, while a sophomore at the University of Illinois. According to Carduff’s Chronology, Maxwell had been courting a professor’s daughter, Margaret Guild, and he introduced her to his Chicago high-school friend Jack Scully. When Jack and Margaret became lovers, Maxwell later recounted, “I thought I didn’t want to live any more and cut my throat and wrists with a straight-edged razor.” As the novel describes it, it is not the girl but the male friend whose defection pushes the slight, physically underdeveloped protagonist, Lymie Peters, into despair. In “The Folded Leaf” Maxwell describes, with a candor then rare in American fiction, homosexual passion. Swimming-pool and locker-room nudity leads to frenzied tussling, a bawdy frat initiation, a shared bed, a relationship anxiously servile on one side and gruffly commanding on the other, and, in the culminating reconciliation, a kiss on the lips. Though the physical beauty of the gruff partner, Spud, is repeatedly extolled, no description of physical interaction is more graphic than this:

Lymie slept on his right side and Spud curled against him, with his fists in the hollow of Lymie’s back. In five minutes the whole bed was warmed and Spud was sound asleep. It took Lymie longer, as a rule. He lay there, relaxed and drowsy, aware of the cold outside the covers and of the warmth coming to him from Spud, and Spud’s odor, which was not stale or sweaty or like the odor of any other person. Then he moved his right foot until the outer part of the instep came in contact with Spud’s bare toes, and from this one point of reality he swung out safely into darkness, into no sharing whatever.

Looking back, with more than a year of psychoanalysis with Theodor Reik behind him, Maxwell ascribed his suicide attempt to reading too much Walter de la Mare, which gave him a “poetic idea of life after death,” a life in which he would be reunited with his mother. A debonair note penned from his hospital bed readily accepted a female fellow-student’s invitation to a dance and referred to his attempt as “having failed to discover whether the moon really was made of green cheese.” But the italicized section in “The Folded Leaf,” in which Lymie recalls swallowing iodine and then, as his stomach ache recedes, trying to slash his way through his blood’s insistent congealing, is the most harrowing page Maxwell ever wrote. Shirley Hazzard, in her eloquent tribute to Maxwell after his death, thought that his near-suicide was “a spectral presence in Bill’s equilibrium and in his greatest pleasures.”