'In Itself and Forever Shipwreck'

I’ve just finished rereading William Maxwell’s final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, published in two issues of The New Yorker in 1979 and as a book the following year. I read it in the magazine and I’ve since read the book – Maxwell’s finest, written when he was seventy years old -- half a dozen times. He mingles fiction and memoir without sacrificing the traditional novelistic virtues. At times, his narrator addresses the reader directly and admits he’s making up much of the story as he goes along (so did Sterne’s). Maxwell plays serious self-reflexive games a postmodernist can only envy. He has a heartbreaking story to tell and doesn’t let technique distract him or the reader. There’s nothing precious or pretentious about what he’s up to. 

On page 22 is an allusion to an un-Maxwell-like writer I didn’t remember. The narrator has walked home from school and come home to the new house his father has built for the family. As an adult surveying his past, he tells us he has never reentered the old house he was born into since moving out as a boy:

 

“[A] great many objects that I remember and would like to be reunited with disappeared without a trace: Victorian walnut sofas and chairs that my fingers had absently traced every knob and scroll of, mahogany tables, worn Oriental rugs, gilt mirrors, pictures, big square books full of photographs that I knew by heart.”

 

Some readers will be tempted to dismiss this cataloging of childhood memories as a sentimental indulgence, mere nostalgia, though I could assemble a similar catalogue myself, unapologetically. Now Maxwell the dedicated reader enters the story:

   

“If they hadn’t disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, as Ortega y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.”

 

Such an image, and I didn’t remember it. The last time I read the Spanish philosopher was in 2011 after the poet Timothy Murphy (1951-2018) sent me a copy of his latest collection, Hunter’s Log (Dakota Institute Press). In his preface, Murphy, a lifelong hunter, says his father gave him a copy of Ortega’s Meditations on Hunting (1942;  trans. 1944) when he was a boy. Years before I had read The Revolt of the Masses (1929; trans. 1932) but I had no idea where the shipwreck metaphor came from. A little digging disclosed its source in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (1925; trans. 1968). Here’s the passage, which is prompting a lot of meditation:

 

“Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown. The poor human being, feeling himself sinking into the abyss, moves his arms to keep afloat. This movement of the arms which is his reaction against his own destruction, is culture — a swimming stroke. . . . But ten centuries of cultural continuity brings with it — among many advantages the great disadvantage that man believes himself safe, loses the feeling of shipwreck, and his culture proceeds to burden itself with parasitic and lymphatic matter. Some discontinuity must therefore intervene, in order that man may renew his feeling of peril, the substance of his life. All his life-saving equipment must fail, then his arms will once again move redeemingly.”