Draperville, Illinois, doesn’t appear on any road map, but it occupies as permanent a crossroads in the American imagination as Winesburg, Ohio, or Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Like Sherwood Anderson or Thornton Wilder, William Maxwell gave Draperville, his fictionalized stand-in for Lincoln, Illinois—where he was born on August 16, 1908—something of mythic status. But the similarities go only so far. For both Winesburg and Grover’s Corners succeed as idealized types; they correspond to cherished images of small-town America. Draperville, by contrast, comes to life brick by brick, porch by porch, street-corner by street-corner; the lives of its inhabitants may be as pinched and yearning as any to be found in Winesburg or Grover’s Corners, and yet they have the quirky grandeur of the irreducible: none of them could be mistaken for anyone else, few of them could be extrapolated into archetype. This is perhaps because Draperville was neither invented nor contrived. It was a lost place which arose by an act of reclamation out of the rubble of memory.

In the two-volume set of Maxwell’s works, which the Library of America has brought out to mark the centenary of his birth, the novels and stories which have Draperville as their setting display a particular, almost indefinable vibrancy.¹ But even The Château of 1961, his rather Jamesian version of The Innocents Abroad, which takes two guileless young Americans to post-war France, could be read as “Draperville in the Loire.” His remembered mid-Western birthplace had by then become a state of mind as well as a cherished whistle-stop. Beside these novels, beginning with They Came Like Swallows in 1937 and culminating over forty years later in So Long, See You Tomorrow and Billy Dyer, his two indisputable masterpieces, the fiction Maxwell set elsewhere feels somewhat contrived. It may be the effect of re-reading them in sequence among the more powerful Draperville narratives, but even “Over by the River” and “The Thistles in Sweden,” two of his most admired short stories, both set in New York, strike me as written to order; both were published in The New Yorker (where Maxwell had a distinguished parallel career as fiction editor) and both appear calculated to appeal to the rather predictable taste of its readers. (As Christopher Carduff points out in his excellent Chronology, Harold Ross refused to publish Maxwell’s fiction set in the Midwest, insisting on locales limited to “the East Coast, Hollywood, Florida or Paris.” Ross was, in his blithely knowing way, the most unwitting of provincials.)

The Library of America edition opens with Bright Center of Heaven, Maxwell’s charming first novel, a comedy of manners published in 1934 (and out-of-print until now), and presents his succeeding works in order of publication. The five collections of short stories, forty of the inimitable fables he called “Improvisations,” a few prefaces and a brief speech of thanks to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (for the award of its Gold Medal in Fiction in 1995), are included as well. His one pronouncement on the art of fiction, “The Writer as Illusionist,” delivered at Smith College in 1955 (but scribbled down in nervous haste, at the very last minute, on the train to Northampton), rounds off volume one and shows Maxwell at his most characteristic, transforming a formal public address into an occasion for madcap parable. The second volume closes on a note of appropriate finality with his moving essay “Nearing Ninety.”

Maxwell, who died in 2000 at the age of ninety-one, ends that last essay with the words, “Every now and then, in my waking moments, and especially when I am in the country, I stand and look hard at everything.” To “stand and look hard at everything” could have been his motto as a writer. Over fifty years earlier, in The Folded Leaf of 1945, his narrator declared, “Seeing clearly is everything.” This sounds admirably straightforward. The exceptional clarity of his prose and the surface calmness of his narrative stance do give a constant impression of clear-sightedness. He seems a quiet sort of writer, unfailing in his authorial courtesy, fair to a fault, unfashionably scrupulous, even fastidious, perhaps in the end a bit too buttoned-down; an image of dusty equanimity haunts his reputation.

The appearance of this edition of his works should alter that image for good.

The appearance of this edition of his works should alter that image for good. To read Maxwell’s fiction in its entirety, one book after the other in the order of their appearance, is to gain a vivid awareness of American life in its smallest, most telling details over the course of nearly a century, from the grumpy banter of an immigrant cook in a rural kitchen to the speechless sorrow of an abandoned dog on a ruined farm. But it is also to encounter a sense of loss of such irremediable and pervasive intensity as to be almost beyond the telling. “Seeing clearly” has seldom been so ambitious.

For Maxwell, the indispensable corollary to clear-sightedness was what Henry James called “the sense of the past.” This Maxwell possessed to a remarkable degree. He was an obsessive master of the backward glance. There was nothing sentimental in this mastery; he could certainly wax nostalgic but he was no chronicler of nostalgia. His excavations of the past are often tender but more often they are hard and pitiless. Whenever he returns to Draperville, he does so the way a damaged witness might return to the scene of an accident. It is as though by tracing the faded blood-stains, by touching the half-effaced skid-marks, he can somehow reconstruct the full shock of all that befell him there. This has the added effect of casting his depiction of small-town America at the turn of the last century in an unexpected light. In Draperville, everything, down to “the order in the cupboards and the heavy propriety of the cook-stove” (as he puts it in Bright Center of Heaven), hovers at the very edge of a future which has long since passed; everything is fraught with what might be termed retrospective anticipation.

If there is a fixed point in Maxwell’s increasingly deft manipulations of time throughout his work, it coincides with the death of his mother on January 3, 1919, at the age of 37. Stricken with Spanish Influenza followed by pneumonia, Blossom Maxwell died in a hospital thirty miles from home after giving birth to her third son. Maxwell later remarked, “My childhood came to an end at that moment.” But where his childhood ended, his work as a novelist began. He first wrote about his mother’s death, and the successive shock-waves of grief which spread out afterwards to engulf his father, his brother, and himself, in They Came Like Swallows. (An immediate success, chosen as a dual selection of the Book of the Month Club, the novel has remained in print since it was first published in 1937—quite a record for an author widely regarded as “neglected.”) In the novel, the older brother Robert is tormented by the fear that he has caused his mother’s death by kissing her when he was quarantined with Spanish Flu. Reportedly, this was Maxwell’s own long-held fear; it may go some way towards explaining why that early loss left so enduring a scar: Maxwell returned to the death of his mother repeatedly in his novels and stories, and did so well into old age. It was a loss which, by his own admission, simultaneously devastated him as a child and formed him as a writer. But the grief that informs these works is personal in a larger sense as well, as if the death of his mother signalled a larger death. In their quiet way, his novels are elegies for a lost America.

In They Came Like Swallows, Bunny, the younger brother (and the character modeled on Maxwell himself as a child), reflects wistfully that “what he most wanted was for time to stand emphatically still, the way the sun and the moon did for Joshua.” To make time “stand emphatically still” was a wish which Maxwell himself, not surprisingly, shared. Again and again in novels and stories, he moves through the rooms of his childhood house like a recording ghost; there’s something at once spooky and poignant in his exactitude. The precise placement of the lost objects of the past—not only the furniture in the parlor but the view from a kitchen window—loom with as much significance as their remembered contours. In The Folded Leaf of 1945, his third novel, young Lymie Peters reflects that “the odd thing was that now, when he went back to the house in his mind, and tried to walk through it, he made mistakes. It was sometimes necessary for him to rearrange rooms and place furniture exactly before he could remember the house the way it used to be.” Only by recovering the smallest details of inanimate things could the lives they surrounded be summoned back. For Maxwell—in this, oddly like the old mnemonic theorists of the Renaissance—memory itself could be represented as a house: forgotten corners and neglected nooks, if correctly recalled, might be coaxed into yielding up some eloquent memento.

Of course, as Maxwell knew all too well, nothing, and least of all words, can make time stand still. If the sheer impossibility of the venture gives his work its distinctive poignancy, it also allows him an amazing wackiness at certain moments. One of his favorite devices is to give furniture and other inanimate objects, as well as birds and beasts, speaking parts in his narrative. In Time Will Darken It, his 1948 novel of marital mistrust, a typewriter abruptly adds its two cents’ worth to a scene of great tension (“This is a place of business,” it pipes). In The Château, not only the sky, the swallows, and the statue in the square chime in, but the pissoir, “ill-smelling, with its names, dates, engagements, and obscene diagrams,” belches out a solemn geometric axiom. It’s hard to know what to make of this very Maxwellian device; certainly it’s disconcerting, as if Daffy Duck were suddenly to appear on stage during a performance of King Lear. But in a world wrested out of impossibility, as his was, perhaps it’s not so strange for a pissoir to quote Euclid.

As this suggests, for Maxwell the key to the house of the past was to be found neither in archives nor in the snapshot album—that “great American encyclopedia of sentimental occasions,” as he called it—nor in local histories or yellowing country newspapers, nor, perhaps least of all,in the deceptive twists of unaided recollection. He drew on all of these in his fiction, of course, but it was the pattern of the past, not scattered facts, which gave it meaning. And for that only story would serve. In So Long, See You Tomorrow, he spells this out:

Even so, when stories recover the past, it stands revealed as a past shot through with artful distortions, cunning hesitancies, fine-spun fabrications. To rescue the past from oblivion is not simply to call back the exact look and feel of things on a particular day at a particular time and place; it is to conjure up all the encrypted nuances, all the retrospective glosses, with which that moment—indecipherable in itself—has become encrusted. To make matters worse, memory is a scribe who delights in erasures. It is the task of the storyteller not only to capture all memory’s rubbed-out marginalia, but also to restore its strategic distortions to the light. Maxwell put it bluntly when he wrote, “In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” For this subtlest, most exacting of novelists, the house of remembrance, “with its infinite number of rooms that you can wander through, one after another after another,” had to be vast enough for all the falsehoods we dream up to make the past bearable. They, too, are part of the tale.

Notes
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