'Alive and Vivid'

“I believe that it behooves the living, for our own sake, to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .” 

That’s William Maxwell in 1980 when he received the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, given every five years for the most distinguished novel published during that period. For once, they got it right. Maxwell was honored for So Long, See You Tomorrow, his finest novel, published when he was seventy-eight. Here is the remainder of his sentence, so typical of Maxwell’s graciousness:

 

“. . . and so I would remind you now of Louise Bogan, or her ravishing formal poetry and her literary criticism, so free from intellectual display and so on target. Because of her encouragement at a critical period of my life I stopped being a full-time editor and went back to writing novels and I therefore have her to thank for the fact that I am standing where I am this minute.”

 

Bogan had died a decade earlier, on February 4, 1970, at age seventy-two. Maxwell’s obituary for her appeared in the February 7 issue of The New Yorker. He wrote of his friend:

 

“To say that she was one of the finest lyric poets of our time is hardly to do her justice; her best poems have an emotional depth and force and a perfection of form that owe very little to the age she lived in and are not likely to go out of style, being a matter of nobody’s style but her own. She was a handsome, direct, impressive, vulnerable woman. In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling.”

 

We’ve all heard funeral eulogies delivered by strangers to the deceased, collages of cliché, just as we’ve heard award-show acceptance speeches that amount to Olympic-class displays of ass-kissing. The most important thing in the Howells speech is a homely four-word phrase: “for our own sake.” We are diminished as men and women if we forget our dead.

 

Back in the seventies, at the first newspaper where I worked as a reporter, the first thing I wrote was an obituary for a farmer whose last name was Campbell. That’s all I remember but I’ve taken it as a sign. I was given my theme: “to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .” That goes for our personal dead and the writers whose memory we keep alive by reading their books.