WILLIAM MAXWELL
ANCESTORS
William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and two books for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for his novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
INTERNATIONAL
BOOKS BY WILLIAM MAXWELL
All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories (1995)
Billie Dyer and Other Stories (1992)
The Outermost Dream (1989)
So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)
Over by the River and Other Stories (1977)
Ancestors (1971)
The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing (1966)
The Châteaux (1961)
Stories (1956)
(with Jean Stafford, John Cheever, and Daniel Fuchs)
Time Will Darken It (1948)
The Heavenly Tenants (1946)
The Folded Leaf (1945)
They Came Like Swallows (1937)
Bright Center of Heaven (1934)
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1995
Copyright © 1971 by William Maxwell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1971.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maxwell, William, 1908—
Ancestors: a family history/by William Maxwell.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1971.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48145-0
1. Maxwell family. I. Title.
[CS71.M465 1995]
929’.2’0973–dc20 94–31109
Author photograph © Dorothy Alexander
v3.1
For my cousin Mimi Miller,
who provided me with a genealogical structure
to hang the family stories on—
most affectionately.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
1
My Grandfather Maxwell was a lawyer in Lincoln, Illinois, and one of his clients, out of affection for him, brought back from a visit to Scotland a sepia photograph of Caerlaverock Castle. This ruined fortress is the ancestral seat of a Scottish family of some importance, members of which have held the titles of earl of Morton, earl of Nithsdale, Lord Maxwell, and Lord Herries. I don’t know what place of honor the photograph occupied in my grandfather’s house or office, for he died before I was born. During my childhood it hung over the horsehair couch in my Aunt Maybel’s sitting room. When I was tired of reading I used to lie on the couch and stare at it. Steeped in storybooks, I expected history to show, like emotion on a human face, and it did not seem possible that any splendor had ever fallen on these particular castle walls. Instead of a proper drawbridge there was a light wooden bridge, painted white, with railings, as if it were a building in a public park. The castle itself appeared to be damp and mouldy and in the middle of nowhere, and I found it hard to imagine anyone living in it. It was referred to in the family as the Maxwell castleproudly, but also as if that was all there was to know about it. I didn’t think to ask somebody where it was.
My ignorance lasted about forty-five years, until my daughter Kate at the age of ten took The Scottish Chiefs out of her school library and when she was a few pages into it raised her head to ask a question about Scottish history. I had been watching her with pleasure. At about that same age I read and reread this rather stilted and old-fashioned novel, which is about a lost cause—the insurrection led by Sir William Wallace against the English king, Edward I. The moment he was successful—at one point he drove the English entirely out of Scotland—the Scottish nobles either deserted his banner or divided his councils by their jealousy. They perjured themselves, they changed sides again and again. Even Robert the Bruce. Most of all Robert the Bruce. Wallace alone never wavered, a boy’s hero that no historian has ever had to apologize for.
I got up and went to the bookcase and took down Volume I of Green’s A Short History of England. As I was turning the pages of the section on the conquest of Scotland, to my astonishment I came upon the Maxwell castle. There was no mistaking it, even though the castle in the engraving was only an inch and a half high and it was not the view in the photograph but from the other side. Furthermore, since the caption under the engraving read, “After J. M. W. Turner,” I was obliged to conjure up a little man with a hook nose, in an ill-cut brown tailcoat, with very small hands and feet, setting up his easel where there was a good view of the castle and the plain.
Someone I know went to Caerlaverock Castle two or three years ago and, discovering later that I was interested in it, dug up the Ministry of Public Building and Works Official Guidebook sold at the castle gate. From this I learned, for the first time, that Caerlaverock is triangular in shape—the photograph didn’t show it—with four big round towers and two moats, one inside the other. It stands on a peninsula of the Solway, which in Medieval times was one of the main highways into Scotland. It was built toward the end of the 13th century, probably by the English to use against the Scots, but fell into their hands. In 1300 Edward I led an English army into Scotland for the siege of Caerlaverock. There exists a rhyming account of this incident, in Old French, and I am indebted to the Guidebook for the following passage from it. Even though it is a translation, it has an eerie quality. It is not just a written description but a voice speaking, from such a remote past, and in the special and highly characteristic language of that past: “Caerlaverock was so strong a castle that it feared no siege before the king came there, for it would never have had to surrender, provided it was well supplied, when the need arose, with men, engines and provisions. In shape it was like a shield, for it had but three sides round it, with a tower at each corner, but one of them was a double one, so high, so long and so wide, that the gate was underneath it, well made and strong, with a drawbridge and a sufficiency of other defenses. And it had good walls, and good ditches filled to the brim with water. And I think you will never see a more finely situated castle, for on the one side can be seen the Irish Sea, towards the west, and to the north the fair moorland, surrounded by an arm of the sea, so that no creature can approach it on two sides, without putting himself in danger of the sea. On the south side it is not easy, for there are many places difficult to get thro
ugh because of woods and marshes and ditches hollowed out by sea where it meets the river.”
Though in theory the castle could have held out forever against Edward I, he took it without much difficulty, and it remained an English stronghold until after he died. When it became clear that there was less reason to be afraid of Edward II, the keeper of the castle for the English, Sir Eustace Maxwell, declared for Robert the Bruce. He was besieged at Caerlaverock but held out. Later on (it being Bruce’s policy to deny the English any stronghold that might prove useful to them in a later campaign) the castle wall was pulled down in places, so that it could not be defended. By 1347 the castle was again fortified and being lived in, and Herbert of Maxwell delivered hostages there, after submitting to Edward III, and in return had letters of protection “to himself and to his men and to the castle, with its armor, victuals and other goods, and the cattle which were in it.” A good deal of the present castle was built at this time. It went on figuring prominently in the Scottish wars for the next three hundred years, until it capitulated to the Covenanters in 1640. They made an uninhabitable ruin of it.
There is no evidence that any ancestor of mine ever lived in Caerlaverock Castle, even in the capacity of a kitchen boy or swineherd. Tenant farmers commonly took the surname of their landlord, and so it does not follow that every Maxwell is a blood relative of every other person of that name. The nobility and the gentry, who would have come by their names directly and not through adoption, didn’t emigrate to America. But the photograph was all the proof the older generation required that the loins from which they had sprung were ultimately aristocratic, and if it ever occurred to them that their religious affiliations were with those who stripped the castle of its furnishings and pulled down the roofs and made a breach in the walls, they kept this unsatisfactory thought to themselves.
Without the photograph it is doubtful if my first cousin, William Maxwell Fuller, would have gone to the trouble of making a genealogy of his (and my) Grandfather Maxwell’s family. His mother, my Aunt Bert, was my father’s favorite sister. I loved her, but Max I hardly knew at all. He was ten years older than I was, and grew up in a different place. I saw him from time to time at family gatherings, and talked to him alone only once, when he was in his late thirties. He had a brokerage business in Cincinnati, and was married, with a twelve-year-old daughter. I was living in Greenwich Village, and he came east on a business trip and took me to dinner at an expensive restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue. We were beautifully at cross purposes all evening. I thought he had called me out of a sense of duty, whereas in fact it was because something—that I was a misfit introverted child, that he was fond of my mother and father, that I represented the younger brother he wished he had had—made him interested in me. All I know for sure, and I wish I had known it on that occasion, is that he was immensely pleased and proud of me because I had published a couple of novels.
I can see us now so clearly, in that lime-green hotel dining room—his face across the table from me, and his double-breasted dark-blue pin-stripe suit, and his courteous manner of speaking, and his habit of lighting one cigarette from another—that it almost seems possible to live the evening over again the way it ought to have gone.
At first, in our efforts to lift the relationship to where it seemed to belong, we were not quite natural with each other. As people go, we weren’t much alike, but it wasn’t true either that we had nothing in common. He was named for my father and so was I. Max spent the early part of his childhood and I spent all of mine in a small town in the dead center of Illinois. We both went to high school in Chicago. My father felt that Max had failed in his responsibilities to his mother, but we could hardly talk about that. When other relatives got around to speaking of my writing, it was to point out kindly that there were novels which did sell—historical novels with lots of action in them, and plot. And that were afterwards bought by the movies for a considerable amount of money. It was not a conversation I wanted to repeat with Max. I had been in Cincinnati once, overnight, and hadn’t called him. So we couldn’t talk about Cincinnati. I had never met his wife and daughter. And I didn’t own any stocks and bonds. Meeting my eyes over the top of his menu, he urged me to have turtle soup with him. I don’t think I did. I can’t remember what I had. But when his soup came he summoned the headwaiter grandly and demanded a glass of sherry to put in it, and I wondered how he knew that this was what you were supposed to do.
As we ate, he asked one question after another. I have done it myself so many times since with somebody who was younger and not very talkative. It is the only thing you can do. He asked about my job, and about what it was-like living in New York, and I saw how attentively he listened to everything I said. He was like an imaginary older brother—interested, affectionate, perceptive, and more securely situated in a world of his own making. I liked him very much, but I went on answering his questions with a single statement that obliged him to think up some new question—instead of saying to him, “I was living in a rooming house on Lexington Avenue and I had dinner with somebody from the office one night who said there was a vacant apartment in the building where he lived, so I went home with him, and the door was unlocked but there weren’t any light bulbs, and I took it because I liked the way it felt in the dark. The rent is thirty-five dollars a month. You go past an iron gate into a courtyard with gas streetlamps. It was built during the Civil War, I think. Anyway, it’s very old. And my apartment is on the third floor, looking out on a different courtyard, with trees in it. Ailanthus trees. I like having something green to look at. Technically it’s a room and a half. The half is a bedroom just big enough for a single bed, and I never sleep there because it’s too like lying in a coffin. I sleep on a studio couch in the living room. The fireplace works. And once when I had done something I was terribly ashamed of, I went and put my forehead on the mantelpiece. It was just the right height.
“The kitchen is tiny, but it has a skylight that opens, and by putting one foot on the edge of the sink and the other on top of the icebox I can pull myself up onto the roof, and I sit there sometimes looking at the moon and the stars. In the morning, when I’m shaving, I hear the prostitutes being brought to the women’s prison. Shouting and screaming. Though I’m on a courtyard, it’s never really quiet in New York the way it is in the country. Just as I’m drifting off at night I hear a taxi horn. Or I hear the Sixth Avenue el, and try to fall asleep before the next one comes. The building directly across from my windows is some kind of a factory, and in the daytime the workmen come out and stand on the fire escape talking, and when the doors are open I can hear the clicking of the machinery. At night there is a cat that sits on the fire escape and makes hideous sounds like a baby having its throat cut, until I get up and throw beer bottles at it. If I don’t get any sleep I’m no good at my job. It’s an interesting job and I like it and I’m lucky to have it, but I have to deal with so many people all day long that when night comes I don’t want to see anybody. When the telephone rings, which isn’t very often, I don’t answer it. I let it ring and ring and finally it stops, and the silence then is so beautiful. I read, or I walk the streets until I’m dead tired and come home hoping to fall asleep. At the far end of the courtyard there’s an intern from St. Vincent’s Hospital who never pulls his shades. I see his light go on about eleven. He has a girl—she is so nice—she brought him a balloon when he was sick. But there is another girl she doesn’t know about who sleeps with him too. Next to the factory, on the second floor, there is a young married couple. In the morning when I’m drinking my coffee by the window, the sunlight reaches far enough into their apartment for me to see the shapes of their bodies under the bedclothes. Sometimes she comes to the window in her nightgown or her slip and stands brushing her hair. You can tell they’re in love because their movements are so heavy. As if they were drugged. And once I saw him sitting in his undershorts putting on his socks. Everything they do is like a painting.
“I tried to get a job in New York once before
, in 1933, before my first book was published, and couldn’t. It was like trying to climb a glass mountain. The book had two favorable reviews but it didn’t cause any commercial excitement whatever, so I went home, and started another novel, and when that petered out I started another, and made my savings stretch as far as possible, and took help from friends. Not money. Room and board, in exchange for doing things for them that they were perfectly able to do for themselves. This was so I wouldn’t feel obligated. When I finished the second book I came back here and this time I managed to stay. But my job takes up so much of my energy that I write less and less. I can do stories, but that’s all. And not many of them.
“I’ve fallen in love three times in my life, and each time it was with someone who wasn’t in love with me, and now I can’t do it any more. I have friends. There’s a place uptown where I can go when I feel like being with people, and the door is never locked, you just walk in and go through the apartment till you find somebody, and they set an extra place at the dinner table for me without asking, and so I don’t feel nobody cares whether I live or die. But I can’t sleep at night because when I put out my hand there isn’t anybody in the bed beside me, and it’s as if I’d exchanged one glass mountain for another, and I don’t know what to do …”
We left the restaurant together, and shook hands under a street light, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
If I had put my cards on the table, would he then have laid his down too? Perhaps. And perhaps not. I really don’t know. Usually what triggers this response is the similarity of two experiences, and ours were not at all similar. Shortly after he was born, his mother divorced his father and so far as I know never saw him again. Max spent the early part of his childhood in my Grandfather Maxwell’s house, and then in my Aunt Maybel’s. That as a boy he lay on that horsehair couch looking up at the picture of Caerlaverock Castle there can be no doubt. When he was six years old, his mother remarried. She divorced that husband too. Around the turn of the century it was not common for women to extricate themselves from marital difficulties. Rather than be exposed to public criticism, they dramatized their misery or cultivated what they referred to as their nerves. My aunt didn’t go in for either one. She was high-spirited and strong-willed and at close quarters unmanageable. She was also very pretty, and so fond of a good joke—or even a bad one—and she doubtless could have gone on marrying and divorcing, but instead she went to work in a corset factory in Chicago.