`From Another Place'

Out walking in the city where I lived in upstate New York, I passed an alley in which light flared from an open door at the rear of a building. It was an evening in autumn, cool and clear, when objects appear more vivid than usual. I investigated and found a glassblower at work in his shop. He answered questions and permitted me to watch as he pulled molten glass like taffy and fashioned a set of vases. His motions were small and precise, like any conscientious artist, like a carpenter, cook or writer.

William Maxwell agreed to an interview with the Paris Review in 1981, not long after publishing his final and finest novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow. Readers know his prose is graceful, precise and transparent, and so was his conversation as elicited by his friend and interviewer, Brendan Gill. Here’s Maxwell talking about writing, revising and biding one’s time in a manner that reminds me of that glassblower 10 years ago:

“There’s something in the Four Quartets about language that doesn’t disintegrate. 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 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 finally 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. They come out one by one, and sometimes in dubious company. Those sentences that are really valuable are mysterious – perhaps they come from another place, the way lyric poetry comes from another place.”

At 73, Maxwell possessed the least tangible and most important of artistic virtues – patience. Somewhere, Kafka said impatience is a form of laziness. If so, the great artists and even the less great are Job-like in their willingness to actively, creatively wait. The Eliot passage Maxwell was probably alluding to, from the “East Coker” section of Four Quartets, is worth quoting at length:

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres –
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

“A different kind of failure” is reminiscent of Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Of course, Maxwell may have been thinking of this passage from “Little Gidding”:

“And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.”

“Exact without vulgarity.” “Precise but not pedantic.” As Maxwell says: “Those sentences that are really valuable are mysterious.” If writing were easy and predictable it wouldn’t be half so satisfying or worth waiting for. Last week, on Aug. 16, we observed the centenary of Maxwell’s birth.

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull contributed this from Eric Hoffer: "If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences."