'It Seems Another You Is Involved'

“I wish there was something between love and friendship that I could tender him; and some gesture, not quite a caress, I could give him.” 

Emotional lives are seldom consistent or schematically simple. We are not cartoons, with our only options being the primary colors of love, hate or indifference. Emotions blur and mutate. Some are inappropriate, and we know it, or ought to. Some we don’t even suspect are simmering. Above, Louise Bogan is writing to her friend Morton D. Zabel on this date, June 2, in 1941, about her colleague William Maxwell. Bogan met him in 1938. She was eleven years his senior. Maxwell seemed to have the gift for happiness Bogan never possessed. Both worked for The New Yorker. Maxwell was a fiction editor and novelist, Bogan a poet and poetry reviewer. (I think of her as one of our best critics; or, rather, one of our best readers. See her essays on Henry James, Yeats and Yvor Winters.) Bogan describes a visit from Maxwell:

 

“One afternoon he came up, and we played records, and he is the most wonderful record-listener I have ever met. He really breaks right up, and is shattered, and is frank, and is disapproving, and is delighted, so that it seems another you is involved: another expression of one’s own taste, only fresher.”

 

One can see the attraction. Maxwell’s mother’s death in the influenza epidemic in 1918 when he was ten years old left him fragile yet resilient and extraordinarily sensitive. Few writers have been so emotionally naked yet tough. He never broke, and spent his life as a writer recounting in various guises his boyhood loss. Bogan’s biographer, Elizabeth Frank,  says the pair “lived in the same creative universe.” She encouraged him to turn what started as a short story into his third novel, The Folded Leaf (1945). Bogan was recently divorced and Maxwell wouldn’t marry until 1945. Their intense friendship might easily have turned into something else. Bogan tells Zabel: “Maxwell is really an exquisite human being.”

We might think of the extreme, undiluted emotions as residing in the pulp realm. Literature dwells in a trickier, more ambiguous region, as we often do.

 

[See A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]