A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations

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Summary: For All Of Us Who Love William Maxwell
Review: Fourteen writers who knew and loved the incredible William Maxwell have written beautifully about him in this fine collection of "memories and appreciations." In addition to the editors, Charles Baxter, Michael Collier and Edward Hirsch, other writers included are John Updike, Donna Tartt, Alice Munro, Shirley Hazzard, Anthony Hecht, Richard Bausch, Paula Fox, Alec Wilkinson, Benjamin Cheever, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Annabel Davis-Goff. There is also a previously unpublished speech of Mr. Maxwell's. It is almost as if these writers read each other's notes since they express practically the same sentiments with only minor differences as they each see him through the prisms of their own experiences. They describe him as loving, generous, kind, gentle, modest, dignified, thoughtful, tremendously interested in the lives of other people, never glib. The superlatives go on and on. Born in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1908, Mr. Maxwell apparently had an idyllic childhood until he lost his mother to influenza during the horrible epidemic of 1918. That single event, which he wrote about again and again in both his fiction and other writings, shaped the rest of his life. According to Mr. Wilkinson, when Mr. Maxwell's mother died, he "gave up any belief in a god who protected human happiness. No sensible person can fail to be astonished by creation, he thought, but the idea of an old man watching over individual lives, a being who judged, kept track, and intervened, who favored one person over another, a figure from a story-- such a version had no meaning for him." Ms. Davis-Goff says he believed in love, not in God, and that he wrote about the redeeming nature of love. Edward Hirsch in one of the most moving essays in the collection-- that made my eyes burn-- reminds us that Mr. Maxwell's religion was literature. He was happily married to his wife Emily for many years and died at the age of 92 only 8 days after her death. As an editor for THE NEW YORKER for forty years, Mr. Maxwell published many fine writers including Eudora Welty, John Cheever, John Hersey, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov et al.

These for the most part are beautiful essays-- John Updike's contribution is a poem-- written about a most beautiful man. Many of them should cause those of us who already adore William Maxwell to reread him or introduce him to a new generation of lovers of literature. One is reminded again of the difference between fine literature and popular fiction and why Updike and Tom Wolfe should never be discussed in the same paragraph.

There are many wondrous sayings of Mr. Maxwell included here: that all he asked of life is the privilege of being able to read, that the the only part he would miss about dying was that he couldn't read Tolstoy, that either you retire from life or you advance to meet it, that when he first read Yeats' early poetry he "felt as if fairy dust had been sprinkled on him." And you have to love someone who says that "every writer has a lifetime ration of three exclamation points." In addition to the Maxwell quotations, many of the writers discuss at considerable length his works, particularly his novels. The most successful of the essayists, rather than analyze them, let Mr. Maxwell's works speak for themselves. Shirley Hazzard describes the last year of Mr. Maxwell's life, with his wife slowly dying of cancer, when he reread Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE. "He said, 'It is so comforting.' We rejoiced together over certain scenes, not 'discussing' or dissecting them but paying, simply, the tribute of our delight." That's the best way to enjoy this extraordinary book. Just pay tribute with your delight.