`A Kind of Living Death'

When William Maxwell agreed to be interviewed by Barbara Burkhardt, who was preparing to write his biography, he made a peculiar stipulation: She could interview him in person but Maxwell would answer for the record only with his typewriter. What an odd scene it must have made – Burkhardt seated across from the novelist, carefully posing her questions; Maxwell mutely turning to his Coronomatic and writing his replies in silence, sometimes typing for as long as five minutes. He told her, “I think better on the typewriter than I do just talking.” I understand the wish to articulate one’s thought with the utmost care, and anyone familiar with Maxwell’s understated prose knows he left no room for sloppiness or unintentional ambiguity. Still, what was Burkhardt thinking while Maxwell, already 82 when she met him, silently addressed her queries? Did she ever grow frustrated with the way he subverted intimacy? As a reporter I’ve interviewed thousands of people, and my experience is that the best interviews, the most spontaneous, unguarded and revealing, turn into conversations.

To the credit of both writers, Burkhardt elicited brilliant, revealing responses from Maxwell. She uses one of the best as the final paragraph of William Maxwell: A Literary Life (2005):

“`I think it is somehow unimaginative to consider the universe as the product of chance,’ he told me. He paused a moment, looked over his tortoise shell glasses, and then continued to type: `I am inclined to say that it is the product of God knows. The evidence offered in Nature is so astonishing and so consistently on the side of an Intention. I did not escape the influence of seven or eight years of Sunday School, and believe we ought to help each other when it is possible, that the self-centered life is a kind of living death, that life on any terms is a privilege and that we ought to be grateful for it and use it to our best ability, and not be frightened or frantic when we reach the end of it. But instead stand, accepting, like a flower that has gone to seed.’”

I thought of these words as I watched Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1962) for the first time in many years. Tomas Ericsson, played by Gunnar Björnstrand, is a pastor losing his faith and humanity . What hit me forcefully on this viewing was Ericsson’s profound self-centeredness: “The self-centered life is a kind of living death.” When a parishioner, Jonas Persson (Max von Sydow), confides that he is contemplating suicide, Tomas responds with platitudes and self-pity. Almost his first words are: “Everyone feels this dread to some extent.” Honestly enough, Jonas asks: “Why do we have to go on living?” Tomas has no answer. Jonas leaves the church and kills himself.

The stark northern landscape, the cold interiors and Tomas himself remind me of R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet-priest. Readers of The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, will recognize Thomas in Tomas. Both were impossible men, abusively self-absorbed. When Tomas despairs of “God’s silence,” he sounds one of Thomas’ great themes, as in “Via Negativa” from H’m (1972):

“Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too: but miss the reflection.”

Tomas’ failing is not strictly psychological, as contemporary viewers might believe (as though Prozac would turn the Rev. Ericsson into the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale) , but starts in that shadowy region in all of us where the moral, emotional and spiritual overlap. Tomas’s mistress, Märta Lundberg, played by Ingrid Thulin, writes a long letter to her lover. As Tomas reads it, Bergman has Thulin, in one of the great performances in film, read the letter aloud directly at the camera – a sort of inversion of Maxwell typing his answers to Burkhardt. A school teacher and nonbeliever, Märta writes, “You have a lot to learn.”

Maxwell suggests that an unwillingness to help others, the life-in-death of unfettered self-centeredness and the failure to treat “life on any terms” as a privilege are linked to the denial of “Intention” in the design in the universe. Egotism ensures suffering. As Märta jokes, “Another Sunday in the Vale of Tears.”