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Click on a book cover to read more about it. You can order these books from Amazon.com They Came Like Swallows
The Folded Leaf
The Chateau
Time Will Darken It
Ancestors
So Long, See You Tomorrow
The Outermost Dream
All the Days and Nights
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Nearly all of William Maxwell's novels explore the world of children and the disruption of the nuclear family. With delicacy he evokes childhood nuances many of us scarcely remember in novels such as They Came Like Swallows (1937), The Folded Leaf (1945), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). These three novels treat similar incidents in subtly different ways. From their evidence, we can infer that Maxwell repeatedly turned to a specific memory of his past, and retold it numerous times in an effort to either understand it or put it to rest. Other authors have used writing as therapy, for once a troubling situation has been set down on paper it is in some sense controlled. Maxwell the author takes charge of a tragic situation which left Maxwell the child almost helpless: his mother's death from influenza. Fortunately, the young Maxwell found compensations for his grief: friendship and the comforts of place. An understanding friend is a proper remedy for a mourning child who finds little compassion at home. Likewise, the familiarity and permanence of a childhood home can reassure a confused boy who has lost his mother. It is possible to chart Maxwell's growth as a novelist by his development and perfection of this tragic story.
Memories of childhood both delight and haunt Maxwell; he returns to them countless times for material for fiction, straying from these small town novels concerning children only occasionally to write books with more adult themes, such as Time Will Darken It or The Chateau. All three novels feature a character who is unathletic, artistic, sensitive, shy, and withdrawn. Bunny, Lymie, and the narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow all bear relation to William Maxwell. It is not difficult to imagine Bunny or Lymie growing up to become fiction writers, or perhaps artists. It is precisely this kind of boy that interests Maxwell, and something compels him to tell similar versions of their stories over and over, both in novels and short stories. The timid, scholarly, friendless youth who overcomes tragedy appeals to Maxwell, and to his readers. It is fitting that Maxwell felt driven to write these stories down; they belong to a world that does not exist anymore. Today, one can visit any small town in Illinois or crowded Chicago tenement and find lonely boys, but with crucial differences. They lack the Midwestern morality, the leisure time to create their own imaginative games, and often the love and support of both parents. Most young boys channel their free time into video games and television, and derive personal values from their favorite sit-com.
Not boys like William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., who was born on August 16, 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. As a child, Maxwell played alone, without many friends. He did not play sports, but preferred to read and play in his old house. He was very close to his mother before her unexpected death. His father worked as a fire insurance salesman, and his job required him to travel all over Illinois. After his father remarried, the Maxwell family moved to Chicago. In high school, Maxwell developed an interest in art and literature. He received a B.A. from the University of Illinois in 1930, and earned his M.A. at Harvard the following year. Maxwell then spent two years on the English faculty of the University of Illinois. He left this position in 1933 and was without a full-time job until he joined The New Yorker staff in 1936. For nearly 40 years he served as a fiction editor, until his retirement in 1977. He presently lives in New York City (Rood, Ross, and Ziegfeld).
From his past Maxwell extracted memories and anecdotes both nostalgic and bitter in order to create fiction. Evidently he showed little concern for libel laws, since his characters almost always match up to members of his family. Maxwell described his approach to creating characters in his short story "The Front and Back Parts of the House."
Characters in fiction are seldom made out of whole cloth. A little of this person and something of that one and whatever else the novelist's imagination suggests is how they come into being. The novelist hopes that by avoiding actual appearances and actual names (which are so much more convincing than the names he invents for them) by making tall people short and redheaded people blond, that sort of thing, the sources of the composite character will not be apparent. (Billie Dyer 103)
The Maxwell nuclear family can be described easily enough. They all follow a basic model: the mother is a nurturing friend, the father aloof and distant, the older brother a crippled bully, and the younger son (usually the protagonist or narrator) is a sensitive dreamer.
These characters populate They Came Like Swallows, a story about a Midwestern childhood and the tragic loss of a parent. Maxwell's second novel is his first to articulate his feelings about the loss of his mother. That is about all it does. At this point in Maxwell's career, he focuses on only one major element in each novel. His third novel, The Folded Leaf handles the troubled adolescent's struggle and So Long, See You Tomorrow brings both themes together. In Swallows Maxwell is just beginning to discover ways of rendering complex and often contradictory emotions. They Came Like Swallows begins in November 1918, with the Morison family awaiting news of the Armistice. Among other family concerns is the outbreak of "Spanish" influenza, which necessitates quarantines and closings of churches and schools. The novel is divided into three books, with the action being told first through the eyes of eight-year old Bunny, then thirteen-year old Robert, and finally Mr. James Morison.
Peter "Bunny" Morison enjoys a special relationship with his mother, one of confidence and secret sharing. Bunny, Elizabeth's "angel child"(Swallows 11) has no friends from school, and relies on her to play marbles with him, tell him stories, and offer protection from Robert's bullying tendencies and his father's harsh temper. Unlike his peers at school, Bunny avoids baseball and other games, preferring to paint or build villages with blocks. This makes him the object of teasing from other boys, to which he responds with tears.
Robert lost his leg several years earlier in a buggy accident. He now wears an artificial leg and indulges in imaginative fantasies of his leg miraculously growing back. James Morison is a reserved man with frustrated hopes for his crippled son, and a lack of understanding for the sensitive nature of Bunny. He depends on his wife Elizabeth to nurture the boys; it is a task he cannot fulfill. Several times throughout the novel he hopes their new baby will be a girl, one he can pamper and spoil. By dividing the duties of narrator between the three Morison males, Maxwell shows the importance of Elizabeth Morison to each of them. While this is touching at times, V.S. Pritchett considered this narrative technique a failure which prevented unity, though his review was otherwise favorable (CLC 305). This criticism is a valid one; Maxwell's transition from one character to the next is jarring, and Robert never captures the reader's imagination as his younger brother does. The last third of the book also fails to engage or entertain the reader on the same level as Bunny's section, partly because the material is more somber, partly because James Morison is so morose.
While their parents travel to Decatur to visit a childbirth specialist, the two Morison boys move in with their Aunt Clara and Uncle Wilfred. Immediately the boys notice a change, as Robert observes: "He would have known mostly by the smell, which was not like the smell of any house that he had ever been in. And not easy to describe, except that it was something like the smell of clothes shut up in boxes for too long a time"(Swallows 164). Robert resents having to live with Aunt Clara, and is disinclined to follow her orders. Bunny blindly obeys; he is recovering from influenza and must rest frequently. Aunt Clara's house proves to be a foreign environment, with its window shades always pulled down, plaster heads of negresses mounted above the sitting room door, and a fake fireplace. This fireplace especially troubles Robert, because he "liked things to be whatever they were. And he liked them to work"(Swallows 168). When Robert removes the false metal screen to find nothing behind it, he is further reminded of the unreality: this place is not his home.
Robert feels abandoned by his parents, who "had gone away and left him in this house which was not a comfortable kind of house, with people who were not the kind of people he liked; and he would not see them again for a long time, if ever"(Swallows 171). Ironically, Robert and Bunny do not suffer long. They receive news that their parents have contracted influenza. Robert himself has been stricken with this illness, yet daily asks Aunt Clara for news of his mother's condition. He mistakenly feels responsible for Elizabeth's exposure to "Spanish" influenza, though she actually caught it on the train to Decatur. As anyone familiar with Maxwell's fiction would predict, Elizabeth dies soon after giving birth to a son. The epigraph from William Butler Yeats identifies Elizabeth as the novel's central figure, and describes her function in the family:
They came like swallows and like swallows went,
Elizabeth is the "compass point" on which the members of her family pivot, and without her, James over-disciplines his sons, and both boys grow quiet and withdrawn. One critic has noted that the "inspiration of daily life is the wise, undemonstrative, tender woman who is awaiting another child and in the meanwhile counseling, laughing at, soothing, and loving her men folk big and little"(Loveman, CLC 305). Once Elizabeth has gone, life changes utterly for the Morison males.
Robert is not the only one who initially blames himself for his mother's death. James Morison made the decision to board the train that exposed them to sickness. This is the one mistake he expects to haunt him throughout his life, a charged moment when any number of things might have resulted from his choice. In time, however, James relents, deciding: Neither Robert nor anyone else was responsible for Elizabeth's death. It was what people intended to do that counted—not what came about because of anything they did. James saw that, clearly. And he saw that his life was like all other lives. (Swallows 265)
The novel ends soon after this revelation, and the reader never learns if the two boys also discovered a way to deal with their mother's death. That is a story Maxwell will pick up later, in So Long, See You Tomorrow, but the characters will have different names.
Compared to his later novels, They Came Like Swallows is rudimentary; the sentences are kept short, simple and declarative. One might consider this Maxwell's attempt to reproduce the effect of eight-year old Bunny's speech, or even Peter's, except for the fact that James Morison's section features the same choppy prose. The entire novel is written in the third person, so there is no attempt at colloquial diction, except in dialogue. Given the year of the novel's composition (it was published in 1937, when Maxwell was only 29) one might suspect Maxwell fell under the spell which bewitched many young writers in the 1930s: the infectious prose of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had not yet suffered his decline, and eager writers across America were paring down their sentences to match his direct, objective style. However, critic Amy Loveman pointed out that the prose in Swallows has a "deliberate inarticulateness of emotion which lends it strength and beauty"(CLC 305). This inability to express emotion in concrete form is a condition suffered by all three Morison males. Bunny is too young and naive to understand that his mother will not be coming back, and Peter is at a rebellious adolescent stage which prompts him to respond to grief with anger. James Morison, far from an understanding father who can comfort his sons, withdraws into himself after his wife's death.
Maxwell's third and best known novel, The Folded Leaf, tells the story of a friendship between two boys in Chicago. Maxwell beautifully evokes the 1920's, and some passages are reminiscent of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. However, beneath the beautiful veneer of boyhood triumph and heartbreak, a tragic story makes itself known. Events are presented in ambiguous terms without being explained later. Overall, The Folded Leaf is a puzzling novel, one deserving of a second or third read.
Its protagonist Lymie Peters is a thin, unathletic boy who earns good marks in school. Several years after his mother's death, Lymie has difficulty remembering her appearance. His only photograph of her is a retouched reproduction which confuses him. Maxwell's approach differs here from Swallows, which begins with the boy's mother still living. This decision indicates Maxwell wanted his story to progress to the next stage, adolescence. While she was alive, the Peters lived in a two-story Victorian house with
a mansard roof and trellises with vines growing up them. . . . The house was set back from the street and there was an iron fence around the front yard, and in one place a picket was missing. As a child he seldom went through the front gate, unless he was with some grown person. Bending down to go through the hole in the fence gave him a sense of coming to a safe and secret place. (Folded 44)
Mr. Peters sold this house after his wife's death, and Lymie's memory of it has grown fuzzy. He often rearranges the furniture mentally until he can picture the house exactly as it was. This activity helps alleviate the gloom surrounding him in his present residence, a cheap and dirty furnished apartment. Life with his father is solitary and without warmth. Most meals are taken at the Alcazar Restaurant, where Mr. Peters flirts with waitresses and struggles to make conversation with his son, who struggles as well: "School was one world, home was another. Lymie could and did pass back and forth between them nearly every day of his life, but it was beyond his power to bring the two together" (Folded 35). Lymie and his father have little in common.
Charles "Spud" Latham moved with his family from a spacious home in Wisconsin to a comfortable Chicago apartment. Spud hates Chicago, and wants to move back to their white frame house with "thirteen-foot ceilings and unreliable plumbing and a smell that was different from the smell of other houses and an attic and swallows' nests under the eaves and a porch, a wide open porch looking out over the lake"(Folded 11). Maxwell's idyllic description contrasts country and city life, while maintaining the value of place. The fact that Spud can differentiate between the aromas of various houses shows his predilection for order and security.
In addition to the nostalgia he holds for the Wisconsin house, Spud misses having friends. Lonely and frustrated, Spud picks fights to let off steam. During these fights, his complicated emotions surface:
All the rancor against his father for uprooting him, all his homesickness. . . his contempt for the dressy boys who sat around him in the classrooms at school… his resentment at being almost but not quite poor, at having to go through his sister's bedroom to get to his own—everything flowed out through his fists. (Folded 41)
Not until Spud befriends Lymie does his anti-social behavior find a positive outlet in boxing.
Prominent in much of Maxwell's fiction is the missed connection, a charged moment with the potential to change events ever after, that often haunts characters for the rest of their lives. So Long, See You Tomorrow features such a missed connection, when the narrator fails to acknowledge Cletus Smith in a school corridor. Early in The Folded Leaf, when Lymie attempts to speak to Spud, who saved him from nearly drowning during water polo at gym class, Spud walks away from his locker, leaving Lymie behind. However, Maxwell strays from his usual pattern here; the incident is not decisive. This missed connection is only temporary, and the boys eventually become friends.
Spud develops a protective instinct toward the frail Lymie, and the two enjoy mutually beneficial friendship. Lymie hero-worships Spud; he has finally found a friend, and someone to care about in the absence of his mother. Lymie's unhappiness ends when Spud brings him home for dinner one evening. The Lathams have everything Lymie's home lacks: permanent furniture, pleasant conversation, and homecooked meals. Most importantly, Spud has a mother. Mrs. Latham instantly welcomes Lymie into their home, and into their family. She tells Spud to bring the underfed Lymie home whenever he wants. Lymie flourishes under this artificial family life and Mrs. Latham's thoughtful attention but he carries within him a vague memory of his own mother, heightened by his annual visits to her grave. Each year, on the anniversary of Mrs. Peters' death, Lymie and his father travel two hours to Galesburg, Illinois where they once lived. This provides Maxwell the opportunity to philosophize: "But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of journey"(Folded 85). This is true not only on the surface level, but also in terms of memory. Maxwell himself returns time and again to the same small towns, the same frail boys, and the moments of friendship and joy which help transcend grief from the loss of one's mother. The relationship between Spud and Lymie changes subtly, then drastically when the boys go away to the state university. The boys share a boarding house room together, and spend almost all their time in each other's company. When Spud boxes in the gym, Lymie stands by to tie his gloves on and keep time. The boys become even closer, and they share intimate experiences, such as sharing a bed: "In the big icy-cold bed they clung to each other, shivering like puppies, until the heat of their bodies began to penetrate through the outing flannel of their pajamas and their heavy woolen bathrobes"(Folded 144). Lymie relishes such moments; it is the only tenderness he has ever received. He compensates Spud for this comfort by catering to his every need, including reminding him of assignments, helping him dress, and picking up after him. Maxwell's subtle writing creates scenes that speak for themselves, which presents problems for the contemporary reader. What, for instance, are we to make of the following passage? "Lymie put his right hand inside the pocket of Spud's coat, a thing he often did when they were walking together. Spud's fingers interlaced with his"(Folded 152). There is no authorial comment on this unusual action. Apparently, Lymie sees in Spud a father figure, a surrogate mother, and a best friend.
Complications also arise within the boys' friendship. Spud's acceptance to a fraternity leaves Lymie (undesirable as a fraternity pledge) without a roommate. The boys make an effort to maintain their friendship, and Lymie often visits Spud's fraternity house. But Spud's social habits are clearly coming between them. He begins to date Sally Forbes, a girl Lymie also finds attractive. Still, the charade of friendship continues: "Lymie was there waiting by the locker, like a faithful hound"(Folded 245). And Spud considers Lymie "a sort of twin, more intelligent and more thoughtful, whom he could tell things to"(Folded 246). The balance of the friendship is uneven; it means so much more to Lymie. The narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow also derives comfort from a more or less one way association with another boy. This section of the novel is where Edmund Wilson found the most fault.
From the point where they go to college, though we continue to see Lymie from within—the more sensitive and dependent of the pair—we get rather out of touch with Spud, the athletic and instinctive one, and the girl characters, though carefully sketched, never really find their way into the spotlight with which Lymie and Spud are followed. (CLC 305)
This oversight on Maxwell's part may be considered a mistake of a novelist learning his craft, or evidence that the complex Lymie interested the author far more than the "Big Man on Campus" Spud. Yet Wilson's observation applies to Maxwell's other novels as well. They Came Like Swallows begins soundly with young Bunny as the focus, and the shift to Robert after one hundred pages is forgivable, but the remaining third of the novel forgets about the two boys, though the reader has established a relationship with them, and cares about their outcome. So Long, See You Tomorrow also loses an integral character in the course of the narrative, a fact that will be discussed later.
Ultimately, the friendship meets a crisis when Dick Reinhart tells Lymie how Spud truly feels: "He's jealous of you. He's so jealous of you he can't stand the sight of you. He comes over to the house sometimes when you're at the library and talks for an hour at a time about how much he hates you"(Folded 266). When Lymie confronts Spud with this information and denies loving Sally, Spud refuses to discuss the matter, a rejection Maxwell traces back to the origins of the boys' friendship, to their first missed connection.
It is hard to say why the devotion of years should have so little weight in Spud's particular set of scales, but then our choices, the final ones, are limited and, more often than not, predetermined by those that have gone before. In refusing to believe Lymie now, Spud was only turning away a second time from the strange boy who was waiting to speak to him in the school corridor. Perhaps he didn't want devotion. Many people don't, finding it a burden. And even the first turning away, that refusal to accept a sincere expression of gratitude lest it commit him to a friendship, must have had others before it. They may have begun very early in his life or have been handed down to him from his mother. . . . (Folded 272)
This scene provides Spud a second chance to determine the future of his relationship with Lymie, and he seems acutely aware of this opportunity. Still, his refusal to speak prompts Lymie to leave.
When friends separate for what is likely to be the last time, without hope of healing the breach between them, a species of false friendliness develops that is like the single bud that forms on a sick plant before its leaves wither and fall off. (Folded 273)
This image of a damaged friendship recalls the novel's epigraph from Tennyson, "The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud"(Folded vii) and foreshadows Lymie's suicide attempt.
Not long after this scene, the novel ends abruptly, with Lymie's ecstatic recovery. He enjoys himself at a spring dance with Hope Davison, and makes plans for the future, knowing the insecurities of childhood and adolescence are forever behind him, or at least sublimated. We accept Maxwell's sunny ending reluctantly; the obsessive Lymie has shed his dependence on Spud too easily. The ending is but another instance when Maxwell seems to be writing a novel for juveniles, rather than about juveniles. Most of They Came Like Swallows also gives this impression. But Edmund Wilson praised Maxwell's effort "to deal with young boys on a plane of detached observation as far as possible from the mere sentimentality and humor with which the subject has usually been treated in America . . ."(CLC 306). Wilson is correct in his assessment of Maxwell's writing; critics almost unanimously agree that its chief virtue is a lack of sentimentality. Richard Sullivan also noted that the rather mundane events of the novel are parts of everyday life, and not significant in themselves, but only in Maxwell's treatment (CLC 306).
Unfortunately for impatient readers, this well-written novel never goes anywhere. The Folded Leaf is reminiscent of Booth Tarkington's novels of youth; Wilson called it a "drama of the immature, with no background more glamorous than middle-class apartments and student fraternity houses"(CLC 305). The novel lacks a serious subject and its theme is commonplace; it would not be ungenerous to call it light. Still, most critics agreed that The Folded Leaf was a "sustained piece of extraordinarily good writing"(CLC 306) as Sullivan phrased it.
This good writing would be topped thirty-five years later with the appearance of So Long, See You Tomorrow, which showcased a new attitude towards storytelling and lean, unadorned prose. At least half of novel seems to be Maxwell's personal memoir (though the narrator is unnamed) relating his unhappiness and discovery of a friend. The second half is a fictional reconstruction of Cletus Smith's tragedy, and the narrator's attempt to reconcile himself with Cletus. In addition to this, So Long is a self-conscious piece of fiction, a novel about storytelling, which especially fascinates Maxwell at this stage in his career:
What we . . . refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. (So Long 27).
As we have seen, Maxwell's own childhood story undergoes minor changes with each retelling, although the core remains the same. His point is intriguing: memory is storytelling. To the skeptical, remember that in order to articulate a memory, one must put it into speech or writing. Memory must be told if it is to be communicated. The ways a person chooses to tell a memory are as diverse as the memories themselves, and stories arise from this process of communication.
So Long, See You Tomorrow features characters similar to those in Maxwell's second and third novels. Like Robert Morison, the narrator's brother also lost his leg in a carriage accident. The narrator's mother died of double pneumonia after giving birth to her third child in 1918, just like Elizabeth Morison. Significantly, the narrator of So Long (like Lymie) has only a retouched photograph to remember his mother by, and this complicates any reconstruction of her features he may have been able to achieve. And the narrator's father (a state agent for a small fire insurance company) is stricken with guilt for making the same fateful decision as James Morison: to board a crowded train during a season of epidemic. All his life Maxwell has tried to articulate his grief. He expressed it over and over in his novels and short stories, including "The Man in the Moon" and "My Father's Friends," but that has not been enough. Maxwell now attempts to tell the whole truth. He has travelled from the stark reality of his mother's death to the fictive treatment of this incident, back to a straightforward narration of her passing, and what it has meant to him. In an interview for The Paris Review, Maxwell discussed the recurring incident of his mother's death:
I had written about this before, in They Came Like Swallows and again in The Folded Leaf, where it is fictionalized out of recognition, but there was always something untold, something I remembered from that time. I meant So Long, See You Tomorrow to be the story of somebody else's tragedy but the narrative weight is evenly distributed between the rifle shot on the first page and my mother's absence. (qtd. in Plimpton 46)
In this revealing statement we find that Maxwell ends up writing about himself and his misfortunes even when he intends to write about others. Perhaps as a result of his ability to empathize with others, Maxwell cannot help but tell his own sad story while he tells Cletus Smith's story.
So Long, See You Tomorrow stands out among Maxwell's past novels and is difficult to categorize. Both a memoir and a novel, both fiction and something too real to be fabricated, this recent work is distinguished from his other novels by another element: its first person narrator, presumably Maxwell himself. This was a conscious decision on Maxwell's part to create the narrator as a character, not just a plot device (Plimpton 44). Ancestors marks Maxwell's transition from veiled autobiography to direct autobiography. This nonfiction work gave Maxwell a taste of the narrator as "I" for the first time. The short stories he published in The New Yorker at this time (later collected in Billie Dyer) moved him towards this significant step. One story in particular influenced Maxwell's treatment of So Long, See You Tomorrow. "The Front and Back Parts of the House" features a narrator who has written a novel about a young lawyer and his pregnant wife who invite distant relatives for a visit in 1912. Sound familiar? The novel is Time Will Darken It. By claiming to be the author of that novel, the narrator also identifies himself as William Maxwell. Most writers vaguely resemble their characters or vice versa, but Maxwell takes this to an extreme. His unique openness with the reader tells a very personal story about a writer who takes too many liberties with the stories of people he has known. Another change in this recent novel is Maxwell's attitude towards his subjects. He is well aware of the affectless qualities his male protagonists demonstrate, and makes almost sarcastic references to the "over-sensitive-artistic-son syndrome"(So Long 13). This novel, or novelette, is only 135 pages, and Maxwell draws his characters with broad strokes at times, as in the above characterization. This economy of words is another improvement; So Long is not long at all. It is half the length of Swallows or Folded Leaf, yet it won the American Book Award for Fiction and the William Dean Howells Medal for the most distinguished work of fiction published during the preceding five years (Plimpton 39). Maxwell has said that his fiction now finds shorter forms because he rejects dull sentences.
That's what I try to do, write sentences that won't be like sand castles. I've gotten to the point where I seem to recognize a good sentence when I've written it on the typewriter. Often it's surrounded by junk. So I'm extremely careful. If a good sentence occurs in an otherwise boring paragraph, I cut it out, rubber-cement it to a sheet of typewriter paper, and put it in a folder. It's just like catching a fish in a creek. I pull out a sentence and slip a line through the gills and put it on a chain and am very careful not to mislay it. Sometimes I try that sentence in ten different places until it finds the place where it will stay— where the surrounding sentences attach themselves to it and it becomes part of them. In the end what I write is almost entirely made up of those sentences, which is why what I write now is so short. (qtd. in Plimpton 48-49)
Maxwell's revelation of his craft not only explain the brevity of his later fiction, but also its depth. Each page of So Long contains wisdom and insight to the human condition.
Yet the structure of So Long, See You Tomorrow frustrates the expectations of the traditional-minded reader. The narrator disappears after the first section of the book, and the focus shifts to new characters: the murderer, his son, his wife, the victim. This ambitious narrative approach could have been disastrous, but Maxwell has obviously learned the craft of fiction well enough to handle such complexities. Robert Leiter considered this technique
a bold narrative leap . . . the narrator takes himself out of his story and moves back in time to a point before the murder. He wants to know what it is like to be a child whose father will come to murder a man. Then he wants to know more—what it is like to be that very man, that man's wife, the lover himself. . . .(CLC 308)
Maxwell even takes us inside the consciousness of Cletus Smith's dog. So Long demonstrates an experimental yet assured author working at the height of his abilities. Maxwell abandoned the alternating-chapter method of developing characters which he used in Folded Leaf, and the "world-through-the-eyes-of" approach of Swallows. This novel has considerable depth, with much higher stakes because of its subject matter: murder and adultery.
Regardless of these serious themes, two familiar elements are present: friendship and place. When his father sells the Ninth Street house, which held fond memories of the narrator's mother, the narrator is devastated. His house had a history and tradition, located in a neighborhood with "the air of having been there since the beginning of time"(So Long 22). It is the only house the young narrator had ever known, and he associates the warm feeling of security created by his parents with the physical structure of the house itself. Like Lymie Peter's house, it is ornately furnished: "Victorian walnut sofas and chairs that my fingers had absently traced every knob and scroll of, mahogany tables, worn Oriental rugs, gilt mirrors, pictures, big square books full of photographs that I knew by heart"(So Long 22). His father wants to be rid of the house because it constantly reminds him of his lost wife, a memory he must put behind him if he is to go on living a complete life.
Most of the children in Maxwell's novels have lost a parent, a traumatizing event. The inherent tragedy is the children's inability to cope with such a loss. They suffer from a lack of sympathy from adults, who can scarcely contain their own grief. This problem still troubles and puzzles Maxwell.
Maxwell's own father provided little comfort after Eva Maxwell's death, and his fiction reflects this indifference. People fail to communicate in meaningful ways at the times when understanding and kindness are most needed, Maxwell proposes. Rather than repress unpleasant feelings and ideas, people with troubles need to talk about them. At one point in the novel, the narrator reflects on the value of such honesty, he wishes someone would say: "People neither get what they deserve nor deserve what they get. The gentle and trusting are trampled on"(So Long 109). This world view appears cynical, and while it is overstated, it is precisely the type of statement needed to console a child who cannot understand why his mother has been taken from him. Understanding the indifference of the world is the first crucial step towards becoming an adult.
While their new home is being built, the narrator and his family live in a rented house on an unpaved street. This transition home is smaller, in poor condition, and has a tiny front yard. The house next door to it is identical. To the narrator, the neighborhood seems to have "no past and no future, but only a wan present in which it was hard to think of anything to do"(So Long 22). Fortunately, the narrator soon finds something to do; he discovers the construction site where his new house is being built, in Park Place. In this fashionable new subdivision across from a cow pasture, yards are smaller and houses are closer together. But what interests the narrator is the scaffolding of his future house.
The narrator climbs around the unfinished house, enjoying the freedom of being able to walk through walls. Finally he has found a pleasing activity to occupy his free time. He has not enjoyed himself since his mother's death, and begins to feel he has "found a way to get around the way things were"(So Long 25). The skeleton of the house reminds Maxwell of Alberto Giacometti's strange modern sculpture, "Palace at 4 A.M." The scaffolding has one other interesting aspect. It is where the narrator begins his friendship with Cletus Smith. Cletus is an understanding friend who never criticizes the narrator's lack of athletic ability. Before he met Cletus, the narrator preferred to play alone, and never strayed far from his street to places where stronger boys might pick on him. The narrator brings imagination and enthusiasm to the relationship, and Cletus is willing to follow along. With the appearance of Cletus three themes unite: friendship, place, and fiction-making. These themes are bound to the unfinished house, and remain associated with such a place in Maxwell's memory. Cletus fills a gap in the narrator's life, one that his disinterested father and selfish older brother do not choose to fill. Two events disrupt this friendship. First, Clarence Smith murders Lloyd Wilson, and Cletus no longer shows up to play with the narrator. Next, the narrator's family moves to Chicago, where the narrator is accepted by his peers regardless of his failure at sports. And one afternoon he encounters Cletus Smith in a high school corridor, and they pass by each other without speaking. This missed connection with Cletus Smith is the impetus for So Long, See You Tomorrow, a memoir the narrator called a "futile way of making amends"(So Long 6). The second half of So Long is a deliberate artificial construction, an attempt by Maxwell to understand a variety of worlds. Through this understanding, Maxwell grows in seriousness with each novel. His first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, was a light comedy, a form to which he never returned. They Came Like Swallows chiefly concerns a family's loss of an exceptional woman, seen mainly through the eyes of her children. Maxwell's third novel addresses seedier issues, as it chronicles an adolescent's self-discovery. Not only are themes such as sexuality and suicide introduced, but Maxwell's entire tone is more mature. Maxwell actually improved with age; his career is a paradox; he began as a novelist, producing three books within a scope of a dozen years, then wrote a children's book, The Heavenly Tenants. Time Will Darken It appeared in 1948 to mixed reviews, and was followed by a collection of short stories in 1956, a collaborative effort with other writers, including John Cheever.
Evidently, Maxwell writes with a cyclical mind that can temporarily abandon a novelist's concerns for those of a short story writer. He put aside his own work for years at a time in order to edit stories by other writers for The New Yorker, then returned to the novel form with So Long, See You Tomorrow, his first novel since 1961's The Chateau. The Chateau abandoned Maxwell's trusted themes and locales for Paris, focusing on the discrepancies between expected human relationships and the realities of Europe. Richard Gilman called it an anti-novel that questions the novel "as a source of accurate knowledge and solutions to problems"(CLC 307). Evidently, Maxwell had lost faith in the novel form, or was confused as to where his novelistic career was headed. In the intervening nineteen years, Maxwell published two collections of stories and an autobiographical memoir, Ancestors (1971). The voice Maxwell demonstrated in So Long showcased a rested talent, hardened sensibilities, and brilliant control most writers do not possess. For all his delving into the past and his heavy reliance on memory, Maxwell is not a nostalgic writer. Just as sentimentality robs people of genuine emotion, nostalgia is false to the objects of memory. Places and friends Maxwell has loved, whether they are Lincoln or Chicago, his mother or Spud Latham, receive honest evocations and sincere portraits. Perhaps it is best to let Maxwell himself explain his purposes. "I write about the past not because I think it is better than the present but because of things that happened that I do not want forgotten" (Cont. Authors 346). In his dedication to retelling these meaningful events with feeling and intelligence, Maxwell has ensured that they will be remembered. Works Cited
Gunton, Sharon R., Ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 19. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1981.
Locher, Frances C., Ed. Contemporary Authors. Volumes 93-96. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980.
Maxwell, William. Ancestors. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1971.
---. Billie Dyer and Other Stories. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1992.
---. The Folded Leaf. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945.
---. Over By the River and Other Stories. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1977.
---. So Long, See You Tomorrow. 1980 rptd Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1993.
---. They Came Like Swallows. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937. ---. Time Will Darken It. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1948.
Mooney, Martha T., Ed. Book Review Digest. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1980. p. 816.
Plimpton, George, Ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Volume 7. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Rood, Karen L., and Jean W. Ross and Richard Ziegfeld, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Yearbook 1980. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1981.
Tennyson, Alfred. "The Lotos-Eaters" qtd. in William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945.
Yeats, William Butler. Poem excerpt qtd. in William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937.
Acknowledgements
Michael Wilwohl, John Fitzpatrick and Dr. William Craft are worthy of heartfelt thanks for suggesting careful revisions and structural changes. I am grateful to Dr. William Heath for the generous loan of Writers at Work from his personal collection. I appreciate Becky MacDonald's assistance with interlibrary loans of Maxwell's books. Hood College deserves special thanks for the same reason.
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