新部落
I think, therefore I am. - René Descartes
Put the following article here in my admiration of W. Maxwell, one of the greatest American literature giants.
A Master Is Given His Due
By STEWART O'NAN
September 5, 2008; Page W6
Maxwell: Early Novels And Stories; Later Novels And Stories
(Library of America, two volumes, $35 each)
When William Maxwell died in 2000 at the age of 91, America lost one of its greatest writers. While widely loved within the literary world, he was not a celebrity, a marquee name on par with Salinger or Cheever or Updike, all three of whom Maxwell edited for the New Yorker. Now, with the release of the Library of America's two- volume edition of his fiction, William Maxwell may finally take his place beside his more famous friends and contemporaries.
William Maxwell in his New York apartment in 1995.
Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Ill., a small town in the middle of the state. He was a frail, sensitive boy, prone to tears and thus all the more tormented by his older brother, who was a rough and tumble sort, despite having lost a leg in a carriage mishap. In 1919, during the flu epidemic, his mother contracted the disease; nine months pregnant, she died of its complications after childbirth. "I couldn't understand how it had happened to us," Maxwell later wrote. "It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be."
To compound the loss, the family moved to a new house in a less gracious neighborhood. All that was familiar and comforting was gone. It is no surprise that one of the first books that shaped Maxwell's earliest fiction was Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," a paean to a happier era made possible by an all- providing mother as well as a rumination on the ravages of time.
Maxwell left Lincoln for the University of Illinois, where he felt at home among the literary crowd, and spent a summer working in rural Wisconsin at an artist's colony, where he fell under the spell of novelist Zona Gale, whose great personal warmth and intellectual generosity toward younger artists he would later emulate. He would re-create that cloistered world in his first novel, "Bright Center of Heaven" (1934), a comic pastoral involving the arrival of a "colored" intellectual.
While the book was well- received, Maxwell himself later chose not to have it reprinted, saying that the African-American character wasn't well done. "Bright Center of Heaven" has been out of print for more than 70 years and almost impossible to find, which makes its inclusion in the first Library of America volume especially welcome. While the influence of Woolf is apparent, and there's perhaps too much glib chatter, the narration is sure-handed and the broad cast of characters interesting. It's a first novel, but well beyond apprentice work, and rarely embarrassing.
By the mid-1930s, Maxwell had gone off to Harvard, graduated and begun teaching. But in the midst of the Depression, he decided to throw off his teaching job and move to New York, hoping to find work as an editor. He failed and went back to Illinois to work on his second novel, "They Came Like Swallows" (1937), a fictional reimagining of his mother's death and its immediate effects from his own point of view and those of his brother and father. He later said that he wrote the opening section of the book, "Whose Angel Child," more than 100 times, often in tears. Its evocation of 8-year-old Bunny Morrison's world before its impending destruction is deft, at once whimsical and heartbreaking. Maxwell's pity and compassion are amazingly clear-eyed.
"They Came Like Swallows" was a Book of the Month Club Main Selection and gave Maxwell the means to live in New York City. He had recently become a fiction editor at the New Yorker, working under Katherine S. White and Gus Lobrano. From the beginning of his tenure at the magazine, Maxwell found himself having to balance his editorial responsibilities against his own work: The situation, however enriching in other respects, ultimately limited his output.
His third novel, "The Folded Leaf," wouldn't appear until 1945. An examination of the passionate attachment between two teenage boys, it was an unlikely best seller at the time (and might be an even more unlikely one today), given the near-explicit eroticism between Spud Latham and Lymie Peters, whose history and temperament match Maxwell's own. The book is, among other things, an extraordinary evocation of youthful ardor.
In "Time Will Darken It" (1948), Maxwell returns to small-town Illinois and the past, to Draperville in 1912, to deliver a large-scale novel of manners. That summer, lawyer Austin King and his family entertain their distant and shady relatives from Mississippi. Free-thinking cousin Nora falls abjectly in love with stolid Austin, despite his wife, Martha, being present and hugely pregnant. The gossip that attends their every move threatens to destroy his good name, yet Austin is incapable of crushing Nora's designs. Of all of Maxwell's novels, "Time Will Darken It" has the busiest canvas and satisfies in its many connections and disconnections the way Tolstoy does.
Sadly, "Time Will Darken It" was a failure commercially and sent Maxwell into a funk. In the early 1950s he contemplated giving up writing fiction altogether. For more than a decade he struggled to conceive and shape his next novel, "The Chateau" (1961), an account of an American couple's tour of France in 1948. Much of the material came directly from Maxwell's own travel journals, and the novel often feels episodic and uncompelling -- as if we are merely following the couple around and occasionally taking their emotional temperature. Nevertheless, "The Chateau" was a best seller and was shortlisted, with Joseph Heller's Catch-22, for the National Book Award.
Between novels, Maxwell published stories, mostly in the New Yorker. Christopher Carduff, the Library of America's editor for the two Maxwell volumes, handily groups them by era so that the reader can hear the echoes or see the foreshadowings of neighboring and longer works. As a realistic story writer, Maxwell isn't in the same league with his charges Cheever and Updike, but his playful fables and improvisations give us a different view of him.
As an editor Maxwell was a legend -- painstaking and tough, but trusted. When J.D. Salinger finished "The Catcher in the Rye," the story goes, he drove to Maxwell's house and read it aloud to him. From the late 1940s through the mid-1970s, as the New Yorker's main fiction editor, Maxwell published Frank O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Shirley Hazzard, Larry Woiwode, Alice Munro and hundreds of others. Three days a week he worked in the office; during the other four he was a novelist.
As he grew older, his production, already slight, declined. The nonfiction "Ancestors" (1971, and not included here) returns to Lincoln, propounding on events from childhood that he had transplanted to Draperville in his fiction. He published the rare story, but it wasn't until 1980, almost 20 years after "The Chateau," that Maxwell's next, and last, novel appeared.
Like most of his best work, "So Long, See You Tomorrow" takes place in Lincoln, though this Lincoln is both remembered and overtly imagined. Maxwell had never used a first-person narrator in a novel before. Here he self-consciously employs a first-person persona that could be construed as a factual one. "This memoir," the narrator writes, " -- if that's the right name for it -- is a roundabout, futile way of making amends." Maxwell returns to an event from his teen years -- a thoughtless snub of another boy -- and to a murder in his old hometown. The narrator's circumstances are Maxwell's -- the dead mother, the new house -- and the details of the murder are lifted from actual newspapers of the time. What Maxwell gives himself permission to invent, begging the reader's indulgence, are the interior lives of the people involved in the killing, including the boy he snubs, Cletus Smith.
Like Maxwell, Cletus Smith loses everything, and the juxtaposition of the two boys, told from a distance of 60 years, is haunting: "He was always ready to do what I wanted to do. It occurs to me now that he was not very different from an imaginary playmate." Maxwell undercuts any nostalgia for the past by concentrating matter-of-factly on the injustices of the time and the tragedies of chance. "The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice," he writes. While nothing in "So Long, See You Tomorrow" is remotely comforting, the very act of telling the story redeems and rescues that lost world, because of the pity and generosity that Maxwell has for his characters, including his younger, callow self.
"So Long, See You Tomorrow" is a masterpiece, a bold artistic flight, re-imagining the author's most potent material, telling his story in an unexpected way with power and concision. The novel is only 135 pages long and yet has great depth and breadth. With this heartfelt metafiction, Maxwell, who first published alongside Fitzgerald and Hemingway, shared the shelves (and shortlists for major awards) with Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison.
Later Maxwell would return to Lincoln, again in the first-person, in "Billie Dyer and Other Stories" (1992). By now he was recognized as a major writer but, already in his mid-80s, had lost touch, as he put it, with the place where stories come from. As he was dying, he asked a friend to read him "War and Peace." He was afraid he wouldn't live long enough to hear the end. He did, happily, lamenting only that there would be no more reading for him after death.
"Only through literature," E.M. Forster said, "can the past be recovered." William Maxwell did his best trying to do exactly that. "At a fairly early age," he said, "I was made aware of the fragility of human happiness." Yet he also said: "For every deprivation there is always some gift." The Library of America volumes, like all of his work, are a rich and substantial gift. One hopes that there is a volume of his nonfiction to come, and another of his letters.
Mr. O'Nan's latest novel, "Songs for the Missing," will appear next month from Viking.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB122057759023902143.html?mod=2_1578_middlebox
谢谢科夫错爱！经典都是抄来的。:-))
我也希望能多写一些中文文章，更好的与大家交流。只是我打中文的速度实在是太慢，慢如蜗牛爬行，再加上上网的时间有限，图省事就只好打英文和转贴一些文章。真羡慕那些打中文的快手博客。
周末愉快！
这里尽是经典
如果能多一些中文的文章，可能更便于英文水平较差的比如科夫这样的读者阅读 :)
Excellent input, Melly!
As society advances, the concept of "reading" changes, as well, in the direction that fits people's need better. There is no doubt that people nowadays spend less time to READ BOOK, but I don't think they "read" any less than the old generations as there are much more varieties of media today that people can "read" and gain info from. In that sense, the concept of reading is broadened and different now.
As for the quality of reading materials, it would be hard to specifically compare between different generations, different cultures, and even different writing styles. It seems, more or less, what people read in the old days are more "elite" literatures, while it is the "fast food" reading materials that to a large extent dominate the contemporary readers.
Thanks for the sharing!
Anyway, I am not a fanatic of literature. I enjoy the story more than any other literature element.
Happy Holiday.