Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers by Edward Mendelson

Author:Edward Mendelson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781590178065
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2015-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

he was unrepentant when he confronted this aspect of his life. . . .“If I had to do it all over again I don’t suppose I would change anything. The writer in me would say, how dare you?”

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the religion of art was effectively a High Church movement, favoring esoteric doctrines and ornamental, ritualistic styles. By his example, and through his influence at The New Yorker, Maxwell founded a Low Church movement with a laconic style and a bleak dogma of hopeless stoicism. Most American priests of the religion of art had exiled themselves to Europe in order to worship in the same High Church with Mallarmé and Rilke. Maxwell’s imagination always returned to its first home in Lincoln, Illinois.

Among his circle Maxwell spoke of himself in messianic pronouncements. “I grieve for everybody who was ever born,” he wrote to one friend. He said to another: “I saw people all around me, saw what they were like, understood what they were going through, and without waiting for them to love me, loved them.” The New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson, in his mostly worshipful memoir, My Mentor: A Young Man’s Friendship with William Maxwell (2002), was only twice disappointed by him: once over a trivial matter, once because Maxwell had nothing to say when he begged for advice about his failing marriage and his love for another woman. “I knew only that I had asked for help and that he had refused to consider the matter.”

But Maxwell had no hidden wisdom that he was holding back. He had nothing to say about erotic and moral choices for the same reason he was contemptuous about plot: he cared about art and the past, not about choices that might shape the future. “The best thing I can do for you is listen,” he once told Wilkinson. To his friends, Maxwell was a sympathetic and attentive physician of souls, loved and adored by his patients, to whom he gave opiates because it never occurred to him that they might be cured.

Maxwell took almost twenty years to finish his last and shortest novel, years in which he published two collections of short stories, cultivated his circle, and, in 1975, retired from The New Yorker. So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), dedicated to Robert Fitzgerald, is the summa theologica of his religion of art. Its story recreates the forgotten events that occurred in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1921, when a husband killed his wife’s lover and himself. Before the killings, Maxwell had been casually friendly with the killer’s son, whom he calls Cletus Smith. A few years later, in his Chicago high school, Maxwell was surprised to see “Cletus” in a hallway, but passed by silently and never saw him again.

Now, a half-century afterward, he writes a novel about Cletus and the murders as “a roundabout, futile way of making amends” for his silence. He knows his gesture may be futile, but only a priest of the religion of art

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