'The Pure Astonishment of Life'

William Maxwell writing to Sylvia Townsend Warner in February 1960:

“I am reading or was reading the most deadly book about Yeats, by an American professor named Richard Ellmann. No conversations, no anecdotes, no descriptions of what he wore or had to eat. He could just as well have been a certified public accountant. No astonishment.”

 

We could say Maxwell is reacting like a novelist, certainly not like an academic. Or perhaps his reaction is that of any dedicated reader. Ellmann’s first two books were devoted to Yeats, and I don’t know which one Maxwell was reading. The only Ellmann title I’ve read is his 1959 biography of James Joyce, an early specimen in the overinflated, resolutely dull biography category. I remember it as a laborious slog, ironic given that Ulysses bursts with comedy and felt life. Maxwell speaks for the common reader, those of us who expect books to be vivid, true to life, even exciting. In 1997, in his new introduction to The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press), originally published by Knopf in 1989, Maxwell writes:

 

“[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.”

 

A capacity for astonishment is not confined to any particular form or genre. It can be modest and muted, as in a Chekhov story (“Gooseberries”), or exulting, as in a poem by Yeats (“All Soul’s Night”). In an April 1955 letter to Warner, Maxwell praises her like this: “Do you know you have the most astonishing gift for bringing imaginary houses to life?” In March 1977, the year before Warner’s death, he writes to her: “But someday I shall astonish you as you astonish me every time I get a letter from you.”

 

[The letters quoted are from The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell 1938-1978 (Counterpoint, 2001).]