I want to consider some comments about William Maxwell that
Edward Mendelson makes in his “Magus: William Maxwell,” included in his new
essay collection Moral Agents.
Maxwell was a longtime New Yorker
fiction editor and author of, among other works, the novella So Long, See You Tomorrow, which
originally appeared in The New Yorker
(October 1 & 8, 1979). In his essay, Mendelson says,
“Saintly” is a word that recurs in everything written about
Maxwell and his work. But in the same way that his friends ignored the
primitive, amoral magic that governs the realistic-looking world of his
fiction, they ignored his contempt for any ethical understanding of life – any
way of thinking in which actions have consequences, and events are the outcome
of human choice, not of arbitrary, impersonal forces.
That first sentence isn’t true. There’s at least one piece
on Maxwell’s work in which “saintly” doesn’t occur, namely, John Updike’s great
review-essay, "Imperishable Maxwell" (The
New Yorker, September 8, 2008; in Updike’s Higher Gossip, 2011).
Mendelson appears intent on setting Maxwell up as a “saint”
in order to show he really wasn’t. His talk of Maxwell’s “contempt for any
ethical understanding of life – any way of thinking in which actions have
consequences, and events are the outcome of human choice, not of arbitrary,
impersonal forces” is low snark. Maxwell was a moralist to the core. It’s just
that his morality, unlike Mendelson’s, wasn’t judgmental. Alec Wilkinson, in
his My Mentor (2002), says,
His friends often felt that no matter what they did, he was
unlikely to view their behavior judgmentally. It is not that he was without
opinions concerning right conduct, or that his moral standards were elastic;
it is that once he regarded someone as a friend, he was likely to consider his
or her actions sympathetically, as a response to the complications of life or
as understandable within the context. He was aware that people don’t always act
in their best interests, and often make choices that appear to work against
them. [My emphasis]
What irks Mendelson is Maxwell’s lack of plot. He says, “All
of Maxwell’s novels have a story but no plot.” He defines plot as “the means by
which fiction portrays the consequences of actions.” He further says,
Maxwell succumbed to an error common among writers who
organize their work for the finest possible rhythms and textures: the error of
thinking of plot as mechanical and therefore trivial. As he explained to John
Updike: “Plot, shmot.”
But I think Mendelson misinterprets what Maxwell meant by
“plot.” Maxwell took his plots from life. As Alec Wilkinson says in My Mentor,
Somewhat subversively, he [Maxwell] believed that the
patterns of ordinary life, acutely observed, provide more drama and structure
and emotional resonance than purely imagined events are likely to.
I agree. Most novels’ plots seem artificial – “cumbersome
caravans of plot and scene and ‘conflict,’ ” James Wood calls them ("Reality Testing," The New Yorker, October 31,
2011). It’s why I find Maxwell’s So Long,
See You Tomorrow so appealing. It reads like a painstaking attempt to be as
true to life as possible. Where there is fabrication, it’s admitted. At one
point in the story, Maxwell says,
If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction
strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I
would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.
Tastes differ, and Mendelson is welcome to his dogged quest for
“moral content.” As for me, I’m with Maxwell: “Looked at broadly, what
happened always has meaning, pattern, form, and authenticity. One can classify,
analyze, arrange in the order of importance, and judge any or all of these
things, or one can simply stand back and view the whole with wonder” (from the Author’s Note of Maxwell's superb 1989 essay collection The Outermost Dream).
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