We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think by Shirley Hazzard

Author:Shirley Hazzard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004290, Literary Criticism/Women Authors, LCO010000, Literary Collections/Essays
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

WILLIAM MAXWELL

In his eighties, William Maxwell told me, “I love being old.” By then, Bill Maxwell had recurrent and sometimes serious bodily infirmities. His mind and spirit were perhaps at their ripest power and would remain so until his death, ten years later. Those years were blessed by his long and luminous marriage, by his love for his daughters, and by the birth of the grandson who so resembles him. Bill had long since been delivered from the burden of what had been to him, in earlier years, an incapacitating sensibility: the “difficulty of being” no longer held terrors;1 “Fear no more the heat of the sun.”2 His advancing age was as yet no hindrance to new work, and was enriched by the close affection of friends and by the homage to his art and his character that, having come rather late in his writing life, was now overwhelming and worldwide.

William Maxwell’s life, considered in outline, might seem quite divided. The childhood he would look back on as enchanted in its security—of place and family life, and through his mother’s tender love—had been sundered by excruciating loss and loneliness. His mother’s early death haunted Maxwell’s life and work, and played its powerful part in the making of a writer. He understood this very well: few men have understood themselves as deeply.

The transformation came through his chance meeting with Emily Noyes, and the development of their great, reciprocated love. The ground, however, had been in some ways prepared. There had already been a measure of rescue by language and literature, and by the discovery and exercise of talent: the painful rescue, as it often is, through self-expression, intelligence, imagination. Maxwell was not drawn to intellectualism. His gift lay in acute humane perception. His response to existence derived from vulnerability and from intensity of observation.

I don’t seek here to “explain,” only to give impressions from an unclouded friendship of forty years. Bill Maxwell took my first writing from the slush pile of the New Yorker and published it. He then took the trouble to get in touch with me and asked me to come and see him at the magazine. His encouragement, his genius, and his generosity transformed my own experience—as they did the lives of other writers. When I met Francis Steegmuller, who became my husband, we found an immediate, talismanic bond in the discovery of shared friendship with the Maxwells. Francis had known Bill since their youth at the infant New Yorker.

The human encounter came always fresh to Maxwell. Singularity was intrinsic to his own nature and to his sense of other lives. He knew the world deeply, yet remained accessible to it, detached from the contemporary trend toward exposition and pronouncement. That he kept faith with the wound of his early knowledge helped him, I think, to become a happy man.

Alec Wilkinson has splendidly written that Maxwell, in conversation, considered the effect of his words on the person whom he addressed. This does not, I feel, suggest that Bill’s

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