Imperishable Maxwell.(William Maxwell )

To those who knew him, William Maxwell as a person--soft-spoken yet incisive, moist-eyed yet dry-voiced, witty yet infallibly tactful--threatened to overshadow Maxwell as a writer. We aspiring authors who enjoyed his unstinting editorial attention and gracious company tended to forget that, for four days of the week, he stayed at home and wrote, reporting to the typewriter straight from breakfast, often clad in bathrobe and slippers. He had finished two novels, the second of them a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, before finding, in 1936, employment at The New Yorker, where he remained, with a few interruptions, as an editor until 1975; he continued as a contributor until 1999, when he was ninety-one years old and in his last year of life. Now his writing is what we still have of him, and it warms the heart to hold almost all of his fiction in two sizable, relatively imperishable Library of America volumes ($35 each), timed to be published a hundred years after his birth, in Lincoln, Illinois. The books have been scrupulously edited by Christopher Carduff; his "Note on the Texts" is exceptionally full, tracing Maxwell's earlier novels through their several revisions, and his twenty-nine pages labelled "Chronology" approach the intimacy and interest of a full-length biography. For the year 1945, for instance, we read:

In June, Maxwell ends therapy with Reik, upon whose couch, he says, "the whole first part of my life fell away, and I had a feeling of starting again."

Three years later: "In fall 1948, Maxwell, dismayed by poor sales of new novel and by lack of enthusiasm at Harper's, returns to The New Yorker on part-time basis." Abrupt details supply, in Carduff's notes, a sense of drama largely absent from Barbara Burkhardt's stately, exegetical "William Maxwell: A Literary Life" (2005). Carduff's Chronology entry for 1950 reads:

Struggles to imagine opening scene of book about France, but is undecided whether material would be better treated in first or third person, as fiction or as straightforward travel memoir. In fall he and Emily, after five years' trying to conceive a child, attempt to adopt, but Maxwell's age, 42, presents bureaucratic difficulties.

People already well acquainted with Maxwell's work will be fascinated to read, at the outset of the first Library of America volume--"Early Novels and Stories"--the author's first novel, "Bright Center of Heaven" (1934), which Maxwell, after a sold-out edition of a thousand volumes and a largely unsold second printing of another thousand, in effect suppressed. In 1958, when his new publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, undertook to reprint in its Vintage paperback line three earlier novels, Maxwell declined the offer to include "Bright Center of Heaven," finding it, upon rereading, "hopelessly imitative" and "stuck fast in its period." In a Paris Review interview, he said, "My first novel . . . is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired." Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," especially, is imitated in the drifting weave of action and interior reflection, and in the rhythms, paced by commas, of the long descriptive sentences. Ten years after the novel's publication, he reread it and wrote, "I . . . discovered to my horror that I had lifted a character--the homesick servant girl--lock, stock, and barrel from 'To the Lighthouse.' " But these borrowings do not taint the peculiarly American innocence of the setting--Meadowland, an informal artists' colony in rural Wisconsin--or the indigenous ebullience borrowed from the Midwestern novelist Zona Gale. Meadowland was based upon Bonnie Oaks, a hospitable farm near Portage, Wisconsin, where Maxwell spent a number of summer months and one winter. Gale lived nearby, and, in many conversations, she shared with the young Maxwell her belief that artists should find "excitement in the presence of life" and bring out "the mysterious beauty of the commonplace" and the "brighter" aspect of reality.

Brightness is everywhere, indoors and out, in his first novel. With a confident empathy, the twenty-five-year-old author moves among a dozen residents and guests at the place. We partake of the interior sensations of the owner, a widow battling mental confusion, and of her two adolescent sons, and of a young woman sleeplessly coping with an unintended pregnancy, and of her oblivious, bookish lover, and of a crusty hired hand left over from the days when this was a serious farm, and of a concert pianist as she practices her drills, and of a painter wrestling with the abstract qualities of two oranges and an oil can, and of a "pestilential and garrulous youth" with no discernible artistic dedication, and of a homesick German cook, and of a sickly Southern spinster, and--the focus of the novel's suspense--of a Harvard-educated black lecturer, an ardent advocate of racial equality. Though critics have found fault with the black character, he seemed to me plausible and complex enough--the earliest of Maxwell's many honorable attempts to portray African-Americans.

"Bright Center of Heaven" gives those of us who knew him as the mature master of a deliberately low-key prose a new Maxwell--bolder, more overtly poetical, more metaphysical, and frequently surreal. The book's title comes from a bizarre vision entertained by Amelia, the racist Southern spinster, as she sits, stunned into muteness, at the ...