'More Than the End of the Story'

I’m never at a loss for something to read when there’s a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson in the house – three copies, in fact, including an early American reprint of the Croker edition, published in 1847 and made famous by Macaulay’s give-no-quarter review (“ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed”). Despite Macaulay’s perverse verdict, Boswell supplies readers with the quality we want above all others in almost any book: a faithful simulation of life, a taste of what it means to be a human being. William Maxwell has the final word on the subject:

“[W]hen I read for my own enjoyment I cannot—or mostly do not—read authors whose way of writing doesn’t give me pleasure. But of course style is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.”

Maxwell wrote this in 1997 in the new introduction to The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press), originally published by Knopf in 1989. He was eighty-eight and would live another three years. In the early years of this blog I often wrote about Maxwell’s seven novels, especially Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). More readers have thanked me for introducing them to Maxwell than to any other writer. One of them is designing a web site devoted to his work. It’s reassuring to see an English writer, the late Justin Cartwright, celebrate Maxwell’s work in Spectator USA. The piece was originally published by Slightly Foxed. Cartwright suggests novice readers of Maxwell start with that final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, certainly his finest. “The richness is in the detail,” he writes, and continues:

“And this is, for those who love Maxwell, his uniqueness — a vividly, almost obsessively, remembered childhood; gentle, often amusing ironies; and a deep sense of loss, all recreated with unobtrusive skill. Maxwell couldn’t be further from the world of New York writers like Mailer and Baldwin, which he shared. In some ways he reminds me of Jane Austen, with just a touch of Raymond Carver.”

That last sentence is baffling, especially the reference to Carver, a writer I could never take seriously. A more accurate antecedent is another novelist much of whose best work is set in the Midwest, Willa Cather. But looking for kinships among writers, real or imaginary, is a mug’s game. Maxwell wrote unlike any of his contemporaries. Not all of his books are successful, and The Chateau is a genuine grind. I suggest The Outermost Dream to interested readers. In his reviews, Maxwell purposely avoided novels (“Too much of a busman’s holiday.”) For decades he was the fiction editor for The New Yorker. Maxwell instead writes about biographies, memoirs, diaries and correspondence. As always, he is drawn to life as lived. Interestingly, nine of the book’s nineteen essays are devoted, at least in part, to female writers. Like any good writer, he was aesthetically androgynous. He opens the new introduction like this:

“I can never get enough of knowing about other people’s lives. It is why, when I open the morning newspaper, I turn first to the obituary page, hoping for more than the end of the story.”