I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights.
Recently I found myself in
Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of
William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening
scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting
from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking
to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders.
I wasn’t recalling the
words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the
text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late
seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King
because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy
contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I
carry it as a latent memory.
There’s a semi-popular
theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy
quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the
pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa
Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha
King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to
it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical
baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my
private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I
value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind,
through no effort of my own.
Time Will Darken It, along with So Long,
See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel. In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith
College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing
a rabbit. He writes:
“The novelist’s rabbit is
the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by
extension, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is
all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently
dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught in a net of narration. . .
. . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned
Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I
have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real
thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.”
The finest writers of
fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell
died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.