The Gentle Realist (original) (raw)
October 15, 2000
BOOKEND / By DANIEL MENAKER
The Gentle Realist
n his novel ''So Long, See You Tomorrow,'' based on a true story about passion and murder on a farm in the Midwest, William Maxwell invented -- for the purpose of witnessing some crucial events -- a thinking dog. As in: ''The dog took note of the fact that he didn't do any of these things.'' And: ''The dog couldn't imagine what had gotten into them.'' This thinking dog caused a stir in the fiction department at The New Yorker when the novel was about to be serialized there in 1979. Maxwell's editor, Roger Angell, and others of us in the department thought that the dog was a mistake. On several occasions Roger urged Maxwell to put the thinking dog to sleep. Maxwell is reported to have responded, in Bartlebyesque fashion, ''I'd like to keep it.'' Roger Angell is not and never has been an easy editor to face down, but this was no contest. If you look back at The New Yorker issues of Oct. 1 and Oct. 8, 1979, you will find the thinking dog there thinking away, to say nothing of taking note and imagining. He probably suspects that some time ago someone wanted to rub him out, and he may even pause to wonder why you're there checking on him.
Maxwell, who died last month at the age of 91, was widely regarded as a sweet and gentle man. And he was -- sometimes, in his writing and editorial sensibility and in his personal and social lives, almost to the point of preciousness. If you told him that you had just taken your son to camp or that your wife had burned a roast the night before, his eyes might fill with tears. A few wiseacres at The New Yorker sometimes referred to him as ''Waterworks.'' The atmosphere at the dinner table in his apartment on East 86th Street could be so literary and artistic that it seemed to depart the hardscrabble world entirely. (Maxwell's wife, Emily, who died the week before he did, was a painter.) A lot about Tolstoy and two Elizabeths -- Bowen and Bishop. The voices so quiet and modest that they could hardly be heard. And his taste in literature could be very special. For example, he loved the elf stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner and insisted that one after another be published in The New Yorker. They were antic and -- to the mind of many of us -- limited creations, and they ceased their New Yorker materializations the minute Maxwell retired from the magazine's staff in 1976. But he stuck by them until the end. In a letter in November 1999, responding to my teasing him about those pieces, he wrote, ''Your inability to get any pleasure in Sylvia's Elfin stories has driven me back to the book. I read the first story last night and was beside myself with pleasure.''
So within Maxwell's delicacy there lurked a terse kind of assurance. In his writing, some of his sweet sentences and many of his neutral ones pull up short -- end abruptly, even curtly, as if he were requiring his language and his own voice to return to plain speech and unsweetened reality. From ''Over by the River'': ''A child got into an orange minibus and started on the long devious ride to nursery school and social adjustment.'' ''He smiled pleasantly at George and watched Puppy out of the corner of his eyes, so as to be ready when she leapt at his throat.''
More often than one might at first realize, the gentility of his style falls away altogether, and when it does, it reveals the frank and sometimes grim man who was always standing behind it and was perhaps using civility of expression in part to make more emphatic the awful shocks that -- since his own mother's death when he was a child -- he knew lie in wait for almost all of us. From ''So Long, See You Tomorrow'': ''Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.'' From ''Over by the River'': ''If people knew how little he cared whether they lived or died, they wouldn't want to have anything to do with him.''
In his conversation and his actions, Maxwell embodied this tension between civilization and its discontents, between the longing for a rational and cultured life and the bad luck and regrets and emotional anarchy that sabotage it. During those high-toned dinner discussions, when something difficult or bitter came up, as it sometimes did, you could feel both Maxwell and his wife not only accepting its arrival but almost welcoming it. In a letter to me he wrote: ''Bad behavior one never really regrets in any serious way.''
In 1975, when I was training to be a fiction editor -- working in Maxwell's office every day -- I handed him some poems of mine, hoping that he would see the genius that resided in them but that others had always been blind to. Maxwell handed the poems back to me the next day and said, ''Stick to prose.'' As an editor, Maxwell was similarly concise and efficient. In the later part of his career he was in the office only three days a week but got six days' worth of work done. (And he took an hour's nap every day.) He read, edited and responded to stories with remarkable promptness and unfailing courtesy and professionalism. Despite his sometimes rarefied literary inclinations, he was always open to strange and tough writing. And his editorial hand was the subtlest, least cavalier I've ever seen. ''Don't touch a hair on its head,'' he would say when I began to scout around for ways to show off at the expense of perfectly good writing. Unlike many editors today, he felt that his first responsibility was to the text, not to himself or to the company that paid him. In that way, in the way of the artist, he was subversive. And although he enjoyed praise and gratitude, they never seemed to go to his head; he never usurped the primary role of the author or congratulated himself or became puffed up about his sharp eye for talent or his eminent position. If he wanted an editorial change and the writer refused to go along, Maxwell never got angry. He would give way but seldom change his mind. Once, when I was frustrated about an author's resistance to fixing an obvious problem, Maxwell said to me, ''It's all right -- apparently, it's a mistake she needs to make.'' Often, when the writer saw that Maxwell would give way, with grace, he himself would give way. It was an editorial version of kung fu -- of winning by seeming to yield. But of course it was not combat; it was help.
I went to see Maxwell a few days before his death. He was lying in a hospital bed in his apartment. His family and friends were hovering in the living room and dining room, signing remembrance books, discussing the calligraphy and the exquisite paper. There was some discussion about whom Maxwell wanted to see and whom he didn't. He was impossibly thin and frail-looking, but he smiled and his eyes were warm. I went to sit in a chair, but he motioned me over to sit on the side of his bed. ''It's so lovely to see you,'' he said. ''I've decided there's not much reason to stick around, now that Emmy's gone, and I'm doing my best never to take another bite of food.'' I said, ''I hope you'll change your mind about that,'' and then I couldn't say any more. Maxwell gripped my arm with surprising firmness, as if to say, hold on. ''When my mother died and I was 10,'' he said, ''a man came to the door ostensibly to pay his respects to my father. But my father suspected that the man came in triumph or glee about my mother's death. It may have had something to do with a sexual secret. In any case, my father opened the door, saw who it was, and slammed the door in the man's face so hard that the house shook. I had never seen him do anything like that before, and I never knew until that moment that anyone could be so direct and angry in polite circles. And I haven't forgotten it since.''
As Maxwell told me this story, all I understood about it was that it seemed at once disturbing and obliquely flattering. And that the elegant economy of its telling somehow kept me from falling apart altogether. The more I've thought about it since, the stronger it has grown in my mind as a distillation of Maxwell's character, at least as I saw it: the perduring influence of his parents; his spare, sure sense of narrative; his concern about decorum and its chronic destruction by love and hate; his capacity for blunt honesty; and the openness and trust of his friendship, which lasted through his final days.
Daniel Menaker is senior literary editor at Random House and the author of ''The Treatment,'' a novel.