May 25, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Suzanne Marrs
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0547376493
499 pages
$35
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. Are there two more beloved figures in American literature of the second half of the 20th century? Folks in Jackson, Miss., still talk about Miss Welty in the way that people in Charlottesville, Va., have been known to refer to Mr. Jefferson. Shortly after Maxwell died in 2000, just a few of the admirers of this longtime New Yorker editor brought out a volume of "Memories and Appreciations." Contributors included such eminent fiction writers as John Updike, Donna Tartt, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter and Shirley Hazzard, as well as such comparably distinguished poets as Edward Hirsch, Anthony Hecht, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Michael Collier.
Welty first started corresponding with Maxwell in 1942 when she was 33 and he 34. She'd already published "A Curtain of Green" (1941), her first collection of stories, and novella "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942). Amazingly, at that time the New Yorker regularly rejected the work she submitted, and it wasn't until 1951 that Maxwell was able to persuade his masters to accept "The Bride of the Innisfallen." The next year the magazine took "Kin" and "No Place for You, My Love." (They would have been blind fools not to.) Yet from the beginning, this was more than just a professional correspondence. Maxwell not only worked with writers, he made them his friends, almost members of his family.
For Welty was, by no means, his only pen pal. According to the introduction to "The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell" -- a wonderful volume, by the way -- Maxwell also wrote regularly to John Cheever, Updike, J.D. Salinger, Frank O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, James Thurber and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. How he found the time is a mystery, since all his letters make clear that his wife, Emmy, and their two daughters were the axes of his life, along with his garden, the growing of roses and his favorite kind of reading: other people's letters. Somehow, though, he also managed to work on his own writing. "They Came Like Swallows," (1937), "The Folded Leaf" (1945) and "Time Will Darken It" (1948) transformed memories of a Midwestern childhood and family unhappiness into bittersweet works of art. While these novels were deeply admired, only his last, "So Long, See You Tomorrow" (1980), which won the William Dean Howells Medal, garnered the acclaim they all deserved. Today Maxwell's novels and short stories are, like Welty's, represented by two volumes in the Library of America.
Most letters between writers are largely given over to envy, spite, wisecracks, discussions of money, the short-sightedness of award committees, soured love affairs and the innumerable horrors of the literary life. Readers looking for such gossip will be disappointed by "What There Is to Say We Have Said." Welty never refers to her intimate relationship with Kenneth Millar (better known as detective novelist Ross Macdonald), nor does Maxwell tattle about his famous colleagues at the New Yorker. Instead, the two writers talk about family happiness and tragedy; they trade rose cuttings and books, describe their Christmas decorations. Throughout, they show to each other -- and to seemingly everyone they meet -- a gentle courtesy, a generosity of spirit, a love for people that is as strong as their love for literature. As Maxwell says at the close of one letter: "Well it's wonderful to be alive. Wonderful to be a writer. Wonderful to grow roses. Wonderful to care. Isn't it?"
Of course, Maxwell seems to lead a charmed life, full of long holidays and civilized pleasures: "We are having a lovely January, reading our Christmas books (V. Woolf's Journals, Berenson's Renaissance Art), having our ice skates sharpened, enjoying 10 inches of snow & collecting concert and theatre tickets in our bureau drawer against February torpor. This afternoon we are going to see the new wing at the Metropolitan." At times, Welty's might be the life of any genteel Southern spinster: "It's been 95 and 96 the last couple of weeks, regular courtroom weather, Edna Earle would say. Figs look hopeful this year, after none for the last two, and just the thought of a bowl of cold ripe ones with cream on them for breakfast is worth all the rest of July to the undersigned. I wish I could see you some. ... Now and then a few of us go up to a little country hotel and sit on the upstairs porch and rock awhile quietly, having drinks in the shade and country stillness, or we sit in the dark in somebody's Jackson porch to talk & play records."
When the pair do comment on their vocation, it's always worth paying attention. Maxwell describes writing as "moving sentences here and there, and getting effects and making the imaginary reader smile," then later defines the novel as "a long piece of prose narrative with the breath of life in it." Welty confesses, "As you know, I generally work at more removes or with more disguises from my own life than I did in this story." She nearly sinks a short novel with the dreadful title "The Flickering Light of Vision," but Maxwell persuades her to go with "The Optimist's Daughter." Later on, she bucks him up: "I wish you wouldn't have any fears about the stories, but as one of the same kind of sufferers over my own I understand -- that sudden dropping away of all confidence in any given sentence that looks you in the face." Both can be quietly funny. When Welty receives an unexpectedly large check from the New Yorker, she says, "Heavens! Heavens, I'm going to have the outsides of my upstairs windows washed by the Jackson House-Cleaning Service, 12 men on ladders! Thanks." On a trip down the Nile, Maxwell writes, "I feel I am in the land of Sunday School cards."
In her excellent introduction to "What There Is to Say We Have Said," editor Suzanne Marrs quotes Welty on the vivid intimacy, the "personal truth of a human being" that can be found in letters: "What we've been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago." Just so -- and what William Maxwell says of Eudora Welty's writing might also be said of this very book:
"I go about reading aloud to people, and what I read aloud ... is the passage (in the essay "Words into Fiction") about your being taken as a child to see Mammoth Cave. If I had to choose between it, and Plato's allegory, I would choose it, though I am fond indeed of the allegory. But this is the way all writing ought to be, a marvel, a joy, a joke, an experience in itself, something seen in an Easter egg, a treasure, I cannot tell you how you enriched me by writing it."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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