`Unvisited Tombs'

People write and paint and compose for some of the same reasons lovers carve their initials on the bark of beech trees – to announce their existence and leave a trace of it behind. Art is like DNA, our biological graffiti, and if it’s any good it might endure and move and encourage others to create a new generation of books, paintings and songs.

A writer whose work I love deeply is the late William Maxwell, longtime fiction editor for The New Yorker and author of some of the loveliest, most mysterious books in American literature, especially the novels Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow, the latter published in 1980 when Maxwell was 72. I have started reading William Maxwell: A Literary Life, by Barbara Burkhardt, and in her introduction, she quotes from her first interview with the novelist, in 1991. Maxwell preferred to be interviewed in person but to answer with his typewriter. Here’s how he explained his compulsion to write at that first meeting:

“I have a melancholy feeling that all human experience goes down the drain, or to put it more politely, ends in oblivion, except when somebody records some part of his own experience – which can of course be the life that goes on in his mind and imagination as well as what he had for breakfast. In a very small way I have fought this, by trying to recreate in a form that I hoped would have some degree of permanence the character and lives of people I have known and loved. Or people modeled on them. To succeed this would have to move the reader as I have been moved. This is the intricate, in and out, round and round, now direct and now indirect process that comes under the heading of literary art.”

Maxwell’s art, more than most writers’, is rooted in loss. When he was 10, in 1918, his mother was among the 100 million people who died in the worldwide Spanish influenza epidemic. That he considered his work a form of preservation or reclamation is no surprise to devoted readers. The figure of the dying mother recurs throughout his work. Maxwell’s fiction is deeply autobiographical but not in the banally literal sense. It’s as though he tried again and again to resolve his life’s primal scene, only to try again from another angle, using other characters with different names.

I like Maxwell’s inversion of the narcissistic instinct shared by artists and non-artists alike, as though he wished to carve not his initials but his mother’s on that beech tree. As a journalist, I often witnessed a similar impulse, knowing I was writing about someone in the pages of a newspaper who would leave no other public trace of their lives. Journalism is seldom literature, but thousands of people I interviewed didn’t know that, and surely part of the reason they agreed to speak with me was to “leave their mark” – a telling figure of speech. George Eliot honored such people in her goodbye to Dorthea Brooke, in the final paragraph of Middlemarch:

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”