Replaying the past
I have been reading William Maxwell's "Later Novels and Stories," the second and final volume of the writer's work published on this centenary of his birth by the Library of America ($35). Like the earlier volume, the contents of this one - two novels, many short stories, and a collection of "improvisations" - have been selected by Christopher Carduff, who has also provided notes and a detailed, indispensable timeline. Carduff quotes Maxwell as saying that he "came to feel that life is the most extraordinary storyteller of all, and the fewer changes you make [in facts and details] the better, provided you get to the heart of the matter." In fact, Maxwell's fiction expropriates real events and people so determinedly that it makes me uneasy. (To be fair, it is clear that Maxwell, himself, was not entirely sanguine about colonizing real people either.)
Just to address the many stories and novels set in his birthplace of Lincoln, Ill.: It is as if in setting down the precise material detail of a remembered world, which he does brilliantly, Maxwell is installing conditions for controlled experiments. Here, again and again, is that same small Midwestern town; that outgoing, athletic brother who has lost a limb; the mother dying when the sensitive narrator is 10; the bereft father and his remarriage; the disgust both father and brother feel for the narrator's introspective nature; on down to the repeated incidentals - the house on Ninth Street; someone badly burnt pouring kerosene on a fire; the seven-passenger Chalmers automobile.
Maxwell is exceedingly present in these stories, not in an editorializing manner, but heuristically, noting his expedients for bringing the past back. They amount to exploring what he remembered with an extrapolating imagination. And there, in a past re-created and maneuvered through, he hopes to find some resolution of the single most dreadful event in his life, the death of his mother. How could such a cruel deprivation be? And how could one go on afterward? How could his father live in the present again, get married, move on, be happy? And when asked by his son what his dead wife was like, how could he say, as he does in different stories, that that's "water over the dam"?
The father and brother are practical men, put off by the narrator's - or rather narrators' - introspection, artistic tendencies, and lack of interest in money. Their characters, repeatedly put before us, can really be summed up, and not for the best, in their apparent lack of attachment to the past and their ease with the present. They are figures whose actual reality in the real world of the present (as opposed to the past, where they are the author's creatures) is highly problematic. It's more or less what's wrong with them. In the story "The Value of Money," the adult Maxwell, visiting his father, more than once compares having a conversation with the older man to piloting a riverboat. Though there is a communion of sorts between the two of them in the end, one feels how Maxwell prefers to deal with his father through fiction, where imagination solves disconnection and supplies feelings and give-and-take of its own devising for all.
In "A Game of Chess," a story that Maxwell published under an assumed name, a reunion with his brother (in this incarnation possessed of a prosthetic arm) is likened to a chess match in which the author is outflanked by his opponent. In a chilling ending we find the narrator wondering why his brother, Amos, would wish to destroy him: "As he sat pondering this unsolvable question, he noticed his own hands, and then thoughtfully, as if he had never seen them before, moved the fingers of one hand back and forth, surprised at what a thing the human hand is, how many ways, and how marvelously, the fingers moved. And then with no shudder or feeling of any kind, he had a momentary image of the immovable sleeve, the gloved facsimile of a hand that he had so long ago become accustomed to that when he was with Amos he never gave it a thought."
It may be that the narrator is approaching an awareness that his brother is envious of his wholeness, of his having a living, vital hand. But the sense I am left with is that, while that may be true, the narrator also feels, at the level of his own version of reality, that his brother is in fact not fully human. Life in the world as it actually exists is just a series of moves by outside entities; in contrast, the way life plays out in the author's imagination is the place where it has meaning - as in this story itself, as it happens. "If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog," Maxwell wrote elsewhere, "it will often return with the bird in its mouth."
The truly superb novel "So Long, See You Tomorrow," whose title becomes increasingly charged as the story unfolds, had its genesis in an actual event but gravitates quickly to Maxwell's interior, his well-furnished world of the past. The story is ostensibly about a boy, Cletus, whose father murdered another man and killed himself. Accounts of the two families involved in the murder, and of the narrator's family, and of his own tragedy - a mourned mother, a father remarried, an old house abandoned - are generated through some newspaper research in the case of the actual crime, but more substantially through introspection, extrapolation, and imagination.
In fact, the novel is really about the narrator, now looking back at the occasions when he came in contact with Cletus, first as a playmate in small-town Illinois; later - after the murder, after both boys had left the town where it occurred - when he didn't acknowledge the other boy in a high-school corridor in Chicago. It is this incident - unpremeditated, but unkind and fraught with menace for Cletus - that scalds the narrator's soul. Murder and suicide notwithstanding, this made-up act is "the heart of the matter." "If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing," writes our narrator, "he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any." But, as there is in most of Maxwell's fiction, there is one central fact: the author's unforgettable pain, conferred now upon regret for a fictional sin. The characters surrounding it, more alive than real people, have been created out of its urgency.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached at pow3@verizon.net. 