'To Make Sadness Bearable and Beautiful'

In 1992, William Maxwell’s future biographer, Barbara Burckhardt, asked the novelist to name his favorite writers. It’s a conventional question, one we all might ask when meeting someone we know to be an ambitious reader, but Burckhardt makes it more interesting by specifying the writers Maxwell prized “at different points in [his] life.” This suggests that Burckhardt recognizes literary tastes and obsessions and affinities often change across a lifetime. Maxwell replies: 

“Yeats. Arlington Robinson. Cummings. Wylie. De la Mare. Then, later, it settled down mostly to fiction. I spent two years reading hardly anything but Colette. Another two years with Elizabeth Bowen. Then Hardy. Forster. Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov. James. When I finished Tolstoy’s Master and Man, and came to the description of the dead horse with his mouth full of snow, I felt like getting down on my knees to Tolstoy. It struck me as close to the center of existence as it is possible to come in writing. Nabokov, also, two years. It wasn’t so much that I got something from them, though of course I did, as that they were the company I chose to keep at the time.”

 

A respectable pantheon for a man of his time and our time. Maxwell was born in 1908, which perhaps accounts for Elinor Wylie. Nabokov’s presence may come as a surprise to some but Maxwell served as his editor at The New Yorker beginning in 1955. It’s the nod to Chekhov I find most revealing. Every writer of fiction sooner or later is compared to Chekhov, and occasionally the comparison is even accurate, as in Maxwell’s case. The work of both men reminds me of what Whitney Balliett wrote in 1962 about the great clarinetist Pee Wee Russell:

 

“His blues were an examination of the proposition that there must be a way to make sadness bearable and beautiful.”

 

This comes to mind because Di Nguyen, proprietor of the literary blog Little White Attic, has been enduring a difficult time and finds solace in reading Chekhov. Twice of late she has written about him – here and here – and she says: “On this blog, I have avoided identifying with characters and tried to write about literature with detachment, but reading is still a subjective thing, especially during a difficult time.” I’m not certain how well Maxwell is known in England, but I’ll recommend his novels and stories, especially Time Will Darken It (1948) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). Among Maxwell’s recurrent themes was, as he put it, “the fragility of happiness.”

 

Between 1983 and 1987, Ecco Press issued, in 15 paperback volumes, Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov’s stories. Each came with a blurb on the back cover, amounting to a miniature essay by contemporary writers, including Eudora Welty and William Trevor. Maxwell supplied the blurb for Vol. X, The Horse-Stealers (1921):

 

“It seems to be part of the human condition that a wall of glass separates one life from another. For Chekhov it did not exist. Though no Church has seen fit to canonize him, he was nevertheless a saint. The greatest of his stories are, no matter how many times reread, always an experience that strikes deep into the soul and produces an alteration there. The reader who has lived through ‘Ward No. 6’ knows forever after that his own sanity is provisional. As for those masterpieces, ‘The Lady with the Dog,’ ‘The Horse-Stealers,’ ‘Sleepy,’ ‘Gooseberries,’ ‘About Love,’ ‘In the Ravine,’ – where else do you see so clearly the difference between light and dark, or how dark darkness can be.”

 

[The interview quoted above can found in Conversations with William Maxwell (ed. Barbara Burkhardt, University Press of Mississippi, 2012).]