The mural scale of the indictment (in an aggrieved mind) is one that Maxwell did not strive for again. The novel, though not long, is ambitious in the reach of its human diversity and the extravagance of its metaphors. Emotional nuances are reified into audible objects:
“Merry sunshine, Amelia!” Mrs. West’s voice flew toward her husband’s half-sister like a volley of silver arrows, intending to undo with their brightness the work of years of indigestion. The arrows struck harmlessly against the breastplate and the helmet. They fell with a clatter at Amelia’s feet.
A page later: “Amelia, too scandalized for speech, wrapped her disapproval round her and laid the folds of it at her feet.” These overanimations are eddies in the “bright confusion” of this long day in the upper Midwest. Myth leaks into the humdrum: Whitey, the younger of Mrs. West’s sons, “is the family Ariel.” When Mrs. West takes a hurried hand in the preparation of lunch, “the air about her grew bright with the combat” and the cook surveys the mess in the kitchen “without expression save for the utterly dead look of one who sees her sons slain by the invader, her daughters violated, and her house pulled down about her head.” A palpable modernist influence, aside from the subtle, quirky domestic realism of Woolf and E. M. Forster, is that of James Joyce, particularly of Ulysses, which explodes as it progresses into a cosmic inclusiveness. A day in Dublin, a day in Wisconsin are alike sufficient samplings of humanity—random test cores plumbing the depths of existence. Homeric metaphors give epic magnitude to an eighteen-year-old boy’s labor of unrequited love:
As a mountain-climber is sometimes startled at the sight of one small flower growing miraculously out of the bare rock, and stops to gaze at its petals, white veined with blue, and at its yellow-and-blue center; and then the mountain-climber goes on up the precipitous wall of rock with less of weariness in his knees and a lighter pack on his back, so did the flower of Thorn’s small hope refresh him and make the weight of his hurt feelings less burdensome to him.
An achieved and reciprocated love demands an even wider verbal stretch: “Beyond the shadow of all doubt she was certain that if he let go, if he took his hands from her face even for a second, she would fall headlong. She would be bruised and battered against ten thousand unnamed stars.” The “heaventree of stars” that hangs over Leopold Bloom at day’s end is glimpsed from another longitude.
In his next novel, They Came Like Swallows (1937), Maxwell subdues his figurative language to describe the most momentous event of his life: his mother’s sudden death in the flu epidemic of 1918–19, after childbirth, at the age of thirty-seven. “My childhood came to an end at that moment,” he later wrote. “The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.” Modest specifics, clearly rendered, replace the sometimes florid style of the first novel. The voice and form did not come easily: Carduff’s Chronology tells us, of the year 1935, “Plans autobiographical novel about death of his mother; writes seven drafts of the opening section but is happy with none of them.” The work was completed with the help of the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and a patron in Urbana, who gave him, in exchange for grading papers, four dollars a month, room and board, and privacy. “Without this arrangement,” he later said, “I doubt very much that the book would ever have been finished or that I would have continued to be a writer.” He also credited his friend Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator, with persuading him that “life was tragic” and “literature was serious business.” The novel is not simply autobiographical; the lies of fiction were employed to get at the nearly unbearable heart of truth. Maxwell was ten when the flu seized his family and his mother died; his alter ego in the novel, Bunny, is eight. The subtracted two years sharpen the child’s vulnerability and simplify his picture of events. He does not understand, for instance, that his mother is pregnant, even though other characters can see that she plainly is, and he has no grasp of pregnancy’s timetable. Nor does the novel, divided into three parts, confine itself to his point of view; the actual death and its immediate aftermath are shown as perceived by Bunny’s rough-and-tumble thirteen-year-old brother, Robert, and by his similarly masculine, unsympathetic father. If Bunny’s section, titled “Whose Angel Child,” is one of Maxwell’s most brilliant transformations of memory, the next two, told from well beyond Bunny’s point of view, testify to the author’s powers of imagination.
Bunny, the angel child embodying the helpless infantile dependence upon maternal nurture that never totally leaves us, is, from his older brother’s point of view, a tyrannical rival. When Robert prepares to say goodbye to their mother, who is heading off to what will prove to be a fatal hospital stay, “he started toward her, but Bunny was there first, tugging at her and sobbing wildly into her neck.” As she comforts her younger son, her husband impatiently consults his watch, and Robert never does get to say his farewell. A few minutes later, Bunny is busy courting the good will of his new caretaker, Aunt Clara:
Although his face was streaked with tears, Bunny was pleased with himself. Robert recognized the symptoms. And he saw that Bunny was making up to Aunt Clara—starting up the stairs in front of her as if she were the one person that he liked and depended on. Just as he did to Irene, or to Sophie, or to anybody who happened to be around and could get him what he wanted.
In the third section, the briefest, Clara returns Bunny to his grief-stricken father, James Morison, and the tearful child looms as a puzzling responsibility; he tells him, “There, there. You mustn’t, son. You mustn’t take on so. You’ll be sick,” and struggles “with the large buttons on the child’s coat.” Having determined in his daze of grief to sell the house and give the children to one of their aunts, so “there would be no trace … anywhere” of his dead wife, Elizabeth, he “turned to the doorway, and saw Bunny staring at him with Elizabeth’s frightened eyes.” The network of family connection reclaims him.
The social context of these private events is never lost sight of; the novel is not only about the mother’s death but about Aunt Irene’s broken marriage, and Robert’s amputated leg, and the pious unction of Aunt Clara and her husband, Wilfred. Irrelevancies, including the terms of the First World War armistice, keep intruding. In the depths of his sorrow, “James caught a glimpse of a pocket knife: Wilfred was going to pare his finger nails.” The widower wanders out into the snowy midnight, where the bizarre apparition of Crazy Jake, the local junk collector making his rounds, comes to James as a revelatory call back to life. The novel, like its predecessor, is somewhat supernatural; human awareness animates the inanimate (“All the lines and surfaces of the room bent toward his mother, so that when he looked at the pattern of the rug he saw it necessarily in relation to the toe of her shoe”) and comforts the bereaved with intimations of a persisting ghost.
Novel after novel, the reconciliation of art and actuality continued to present stimulating difficulties for Maxwell. In describing, in The New Yorker, his friend the poet Louise Bogan, upon her death, in 1970, he said, “In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling”: such an exacting superimposition represented his ideal. It was Bogan who, when, in 1940, he showed her a short story about two boys who meet at the school swimming pool, suggested that what he had written was the first chapter of a novel. As he worked for more than four years on the novel, she provided her responses to each new installment and at the end gave the work in progress its eventual title, The Folded Leaf (1945). Carduff’s Note on the Texts relates that Maxwell in 1943 was “still struggling with the material” so noticeably that The New Yorker gave him five months’ leave at full pay so that he could finish up; even then, it took several more drafts.
The core of the recalcitrant material was the second-most-traumatic event of his young life: he attempted suicide at the age of nineteen, while a sophomore at the University of Illinois. According to Carduff’s Chronology, Maxwell had been courting a professor’s daughter, Margaret Guild, and he introduced her to his Chicago high-school frie
nd Jack Scully. When Jack and Margaret became lovers, Maxwell later recounted, “I thought I didn’t want to live any more and cut my throat and wrists with a straight-edged razor.” As the novel describes it, it is not the girl but the male friend whose defection pushes the slight, physically underdeveloped protagonist, Lymie Peters, into despair. In The Folded Leaf Maxwell describes, with a candor then rare in American fiction, homosexual passion. Swimming-pool and locker-room nudity leads to frenzied tussling, a bawdy frat initiation, a shared bed, a relationship anxiously servile on one side and gruffly commanding on the other, and, in the culminating reconciliation, a kiss on the lips. Though the physical beauty of the gruff partner, Spud, is repeatedly extolled, no description of physical interaction is more graphic than this:
Lymie slept on his right side and Spud curled against him, with his fists in the hollow of Lymie’s back. In five minutes the whole bed was warmed and Spud was sound asleep. It took Lymie longer, as a rule. He lay there, relaxed and drowsy, aware of the cold outside the covers and of the warmth coming to him from Spud, and Spud’s odor, which was not stale or sweaty or like the odor of any other person. Then he moved his right foot until the outer part of the instep came in contact with Spud’s bare toes, and from this one point of reality he swung out safely into darkness, into no sharing whatever.
Looking back, with more than a year of psychoanalysis with Theodor Reik behind him, Maxwell ascribed his suicide attempt to reading too much Walter de la Mare, which gave him a “poetic idea of life after death,” a life in which he would be reunited with his mother. A debonair note penned from his hospital bed readily accepted a female fellow-student’s invitation to a dance and referred to his attempt as “having failed to discover whether the moon really was made of green cheese.” But the italicized section in The Folded Leaf, in which Lymie recalls swallowing iodine and then, as his stomach-ache recedes, trying to slash his way through his blood’s insistent congealing, is the most harrowing page Maxwell ever wrote. Shirley Hazzard, in her eloquent tribute to Maxwell after his death, thought that his near suicide was “a spectral presence in Bill’s equilibrium and in his greatest pleasures.”
Bogan’s advice to make a novel of his vignette of two boys meeting in a swimming pool led him, it may be, to pad the slender basic story with too many details of college life and ruminations, influenced by Frazer’s Golden Bough, on tribal rites. His brave leap into sexual honesty was achieved with little assistance from his British models; Forster vaguely urged the male principals of A Passage to India to achieve Anglo-Indian connection, but left his novel about a homosexual affair, Maurice, unpublished at his death, and Virginia Woolf transmuted her androgyny into the mannered ingenuities of Orlando.
In 1945, the same year that The Folded Leaf was published—in a healthy total of two hundred thousand copies—Maxwell married Emily Gilman Noyes, a recent Smith graduate who had come to The New Yorker to interview for a possible job. She was, as those of us who knew them remember, his beautiful counterpart, with equally luminous dark eyes and the same enchanted aura of a truly rare creature. They died a week apart, after fifty-five years of marriage. As the first fruit of his happiness, Maxwell began writing a novel for which Emily provided the title, Time Will Darken It (1948). It was not easy to work at it while carrying on his editorial duties, but it flowed:
I seemed to have no more choice about this than one has about the background of a dream.… A set of characters seized me, and ran off with me. My function was simply to record what they said and did, rather than shape the goings on.
The events take place in a house just like Maxwell’s childhood home, and deal with men and women based upon his kin, from Illinois and Mississippi. There is no character, no Bunny or Lymie, who can be readily identified with the author. An unprecedented reliance on dialogue, and the interjections of an exceptionally relaxed narrator, move the plot smoothly along. The plot is not easy to remember; there is a stove explosion in it, induced by kerosene, and a baby, but “the mysterious beauty of the commonplace” blurs individual incidents. Maxwell (who once said to me, “Plot, shmot”) is ready to dispense with the contrivances of fiction altogether.
The second Library of America volume, Later Novels and Stories, shows Maxwell the person and Maxwell the writer becoming indistinguishable. It opens with the long anti-novel The Château (1961), based closely upon a trip to France that he and Emily took in 1948. A very thinly disguised couple, Harold and Barbara Rhodes, encounter the felicities and opacities of a foreign language and society. An appended section, “Some Explanations,” rather impudently offers to clear up a few mysteries: “But if you really want to know why something happened, if explanations are what you care about, it is usually possible to come up with one. If necessary, it can be fabricated.” The book gave him no end of trouble, though its inspiration—a tribute to the beauty of France and his happiness there—was instant: a preface to a later edition of The Château declared that, upon returning to America, “with my hat still on my head [I] sat down to my typewriter and wrote a page of notes for a novel.… For the next ten years I lived in my own private France, which I tried painstakingly to make real to the reader. It was my way of not coming home.” He filled a carton with “unreadable” versions and enlisted the sometimes chastening advice of friends like Frank O’Connor, the Irish short-story writer, and Francis Steegmuller, the eminent scholar and translator from the French.
Maxwell’s long period of painstaking struggle included his move from Harper & Brothers, then the usual publisher for New Yorker contributors, to Alfred A. Knopf, at the founder’s invitation. Knopf’s editor-in-chief, Harold Strauss, didn’t much like the novel and wanted the second part cut, and might have prevailed had not Knopf himself intervened, genially telling his new author, “Have it whatever way you want.” The book was assigned to the editor Judith Jones, a kindred spirit who edited Maxwell’s volumes for Knopf until his death. The Château continued to give him trouble even after its publication. One difficulty, which had inhibited its writing, concerned the possible reaction of the French family portrayed in its gossamer fiction. He refused to let the book be published not only in France but in England, because “English books would get across the channel so easily.” Nevertheless, his French friends did eventually discover the book, and one of its purported victims, who figured in it as a deaf old lady, told him, not unkindly, when, later, he visited her in Paris, “You were very naughty to write that book. Because you didn’t speak French, you didn’t understand things.” Her son-in-law, overhearing this remark, contradicted it, saying, “He got everything right.” Yet, when, later still, Maxwell attempted to obtain the family’s permission to publish the book in France, word came back: “No, not now. Not ever.”
It is good to be reminded, upon rereading, how delicious and dead-on The Château is. All the embarrassments and gratifications of European travel are preserved in the amber of Maxwell’s much-pondered, seemingly casual prose. How familiar is the intimidating breakfast that greets the Rhodeses on their first morning in the handsome but chilly château, near Blois, which has been converted to a guesthouse:
Talking in subdued tones, they discovered the china pitcher of coffee under a quilted cozy, and, under a large quilted pad, slices of bread that were hard as a rock and burned black around the edges from being toasted over a gas burner. The dining-room windows offered a prospect of wet gravel, long grass bent over by the weight of the rain, and dripping pine branches. The coffee was tepid.
It is 1948. Sugar is still rationed; war damage is still evident; blackout paper lingers on some of the château’s windows; bicycles, cigarettes, and Citroëns are in short supply. France is wounded and poor and (a word that keeps cropping up in considerations of Maxwell) vulnerable. The Rhodeses in their innocence are in the first wave of tourists, and Harold, alternately ecstatic and wary, begins “to feel as if an unlimited amount of kindness had been deposited somewhere to his account and he had only to draw on it.” He worries why this is, asking his
hostess, “Are French people always kind and helpful to foreigners?” Rather hypochondriacally, he wonders how they would have been received had they come before the Marshall Plan was announced, but reassures himself that “the kindness he had met with everywhere was genuine.” Harold is thirty-four, six years younger than Maxwell was in 1948, while Barbara is about Emily’s age, the mid-twenties. The youthful intensity that Harold brings to even momentary relationships was a recognizable trait of his creator, who tells us of his hero:
On meeting someone who interests him he goes toward that person unhesitatingly, as if this were the one moment they would ever have together, their one chance of knowing each other.… He lets the other person know, by the way he listens, by the sympathetic look in his brown eyes, that he wants to know everything; and at the same time the other person has the reassuring suspicion that Harold Rhodes will not ask questions it would be embarrassing to have to answer. He tries to attach people to him, not so that he can use them or so that they will add to his importance but only because he wants them to be a part of his life.