`A Mixture of Light and Shade'

“I wish that I had written The Great Gatsby. I wish that I had written `In the Ravine’ and `Ward No. 6.’ I wish that I had written The House in Paris. I wish that I had written A Sportsman’s Notebook. But the novelist works with what life has given him. It was no small gift that I was allowed to lead my boyhood in a small town in Illinois where the elm trees cast a mixture of light and shade over the pavements. And also that, at a fairly early age, I was made aware of the fragility of human happiness.”

These words were uttered by the man who did write Time Will Darken It and So Long, See You Tomorrow, in 1995 when William Maxwell received the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was 86. The award was presented by another master from The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, who was born two and a half weeks before Maxwell. Both would be dead in little more than five years. Maxwell’s touching words, bespeaking humility and love, come from his three-paragraph acceptance speech, the final work included in Later Novels and Stories. It joins Early Novels and Stories, published earlier this year by the Library of America.

I know my wife has already ordered both volumes for me for Christmas but I couldn’t resist taking the new volume from the library. I’m happy my time and place overlapped with Maxwell’s. I come close to thinking, when so much fiction bores or repels me, contemporary fiction in particular, that Maxwell was our greatest novelist. I can’t defend that critically or rationally, and thoughts of Melville, James, Cather, Faulkner and Bellow rush to my higher thought centers, but the part inside where language and emotion share space knows otherwise. In 1998, the late Anthony Hecht gave a book-length interview to the English writer/editor Philip Hoy. Which novelists among his contemporaries, Hoy asked, gave him the greatest pleasure? Hecht answered:

“I would list Philip Roth, Stanley Elkin, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov.”

The choice of those names confirms my impression that Hecht was a profoundly civilized man. Also read Hecht’s essay on Time Will Darken It, collected in A William Maxwell Portrait and surely among the last things the poet, who died in 2004, ever wrote.

More good news: The Library of America has announced it will publish The Sweet Science and Other Writings, its second collection of work by A.J. Liebling, in March. Included will be The Sweet Science, The Earl of Louisiana, The Jollity Building, Between Meals and The Press. For a taste of these funny, beautifully written books, savor this passage from the third volume on that list:

“People in the Jollity Building neighborhood like to be thought of as characters. `He is a real character,’ they say, with respect, of any fascinatingly repulsive acquaintance.”