'I See Flaws in Masterpieces'

Several nights ago I reread the title story in William Maxwell’s Over By the River (1977), a loose, largely plotless account of a young couple living in Manhattan with their two daughters. One of the minor pleasures of good fiction is the incidental detail, included by the writer not to make an editorial point or even to reveal character but simply as an acknowledgement of life’s bountiful randomness. John Cheever does this often, as does Tolstoy. Sometimes all I remember of a story after many years is one of these precious, insignificant details.

Early in the story, a police officer is posted at the corner of East End Avenue and Gracie Square. He keeps an eye on a junkie who seems to be casing a drug store. It’s between three and four in the morning. People are already walking their dogs in Carl Schurz Park. “Amazing,” the cop thinks. “Dreamlike.” The junkie disappears, then briefly reappears to steal a bicycle from an apartment building. We learn from the narrator he has done time in Rikers Island, Sing Sing, Auburn and Dannemora. He leaves with the bike, gone forever from imagination.

The cop watches a woman in a long red coat picking through a trash basket. He has seen her before: “She was harmless.” Here is the detail supplied by Maxwell that touched me: “When she found something useful or valuable, she stuffed it in her dirty canvas bag, the richer by a pair of sandals with a broken strap or a perfectly clean copy of Sartor Resartus.” Why Carlyle? I have no idea. The choice of title is amusing, unlikely and somehow appropriate, and I can’t tell you why. Later, while walking the family dog, the husband of the young couple finds the woman, apparently dead, lying on a stoop along East Avenue: “The red coat did not stir. Then he saw the canvas bag crammed with the fruit of her night’s scavenging, and backed down the steps.” Like the bicycle thief, the dead woman disappears.

Maxwell reliably delivers what he once called “the breath of life.” For much of his long life, besides being the fiction editor for The New Yorker, he was an industrious writer and reader. He is not a “writer’s writer” but a reader’s writer. The novel he devoted the most time to, The Chateau (1961), is a disappointment, but at least two of them are masterpieces – Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). In 1997, Maxwell published an essay, “Nearing Ninety,” in the New York Times Magazine:

“Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the 'Autobiographies' of William Butler Yeats. As it is, I read a great deal of the time. I am harder to please, though. I see flaws in masterpieces. Conrad indulging in rhetoric when he would do better to get on with it. I would read all day long and well into the night if there were no other claims on my time. Appointments with doctors, with the dentist. The monthly bank statement. Income tax returns. And because I don't want to turn into a monster, people.”

Maxwell was born on this date, Aug. 16, in 1908 and died on July 31, 2000.