The publication in 1980 of William Maxwell's superb short novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, was deservedly marked by its winning the National Book Award. In it, an old man recalls an episode from his boyhood which not only changed his way of thinking but also helped make him the man he became. The story concerns the bleakest, most desperate of crimes of passion, but for the narrator, the most important element was his own response to the son of the man who committed the murder. Simple, direct, limpid and quietly profound, it is one of the those books a reader never forgets.
Almost as significant was the fact that its author, William Maxwell, was seventy-two at the time and for all his working life had been known more as an editor of genius than as a writer. During his forty years with the New Yorker, Maxwell helped the careers of some of America's - indeed, modern literature's - finest writers: John Cheever, John Updike and Eudora Welty.
As is the case with another great Southern writer, Peter Taylor, the strength of Maxwell's art lies in its restraint. Both have Jamesian qualities. There are no special effects, everything is observed calmly, almost dispassionately. Many of the pieces in Maxwell's collected stories, All the Day and Nights, reflect the indefinable quality of whatever it is which makes a work of prose a classic. Throughout Maxwell's wonderful novel Time Will Darken It (Harvill, £10.99 in UK), his gentle, but at times barbed, observations succeed in creating a cast of characters who are human, flawed, not entirely likable, but convincing. First published in 1948, when Maxwell was forty, the book now celebrates its 50th anniversary at a time when his literary reputation is secure. Since the publication of So Long, See You Tomorrow, Maxwell has been one of the writers readers want to tell each about. It is a bit like joining a secret society. Though it was quietly published by Secker & Warburg in London in 1986, the book's reception was surprisingly mute. Last year, another British publisher, Harvill, republished it as a paperback original and this time, Maxwell was discovered. Thanks to Harvill, his readership in this part of the world is expanding.
Set in small-town Illinois in 1912, Time Will Darken It is, at just over 300 pages, a big yet laconic novel. On the surface the story seems almost too simple. A wife nervously into her second pregnancy resents her husband's decision to invite newly discovered Southern relatives to their home. From the outset, this wife, the beautiful Martha King, is presented as someone who simply does not understand either herself or Austin, her husband. He is devoted to her, partly because she is beautiful and distant. His life is an artificial construct, the product of years of conditioning. "Austin's whole long boyhood had been full of visiting aunts and uncles and cousins who came and stayed sometimes for a month or more . . . Such continuous open hospitality was dying out; it was a thing of the past. Martha King didn't entertain easily and casually the way Austin's mother had.. . ."
Clearly opposed to having visitors, Martha retreats into a sulk, leaving Austin aware he can do little to appease her, passively determined to act the host to relatives he has never met. Within a couple of pages, Maxwell not only evokes Martha and Austin as two strangers acting out a marriage, but he introduces a colourful gathering of minor players, the more effusive Southerners contrasting with the reticent Northerners, all trapped by the social tensions which bind families.
Among those present is old Mr Ellis, who prepares to offer a well-worn anecdote only to be told: "Grandpaw, you've told that story at every gathering you've been to in the last twenty years . . ." The old man counters well: "I know I'm a tiresome old fool, but just remember that people can't help it if they live too long. You may live too long yourself." It proves a devastating counter-attack, the impact of which Maxwell notes with characteristic, formal understatement: "the embarrassment that followed this remark was general." The prevailing atmosphere is competitive and Maxwell allows this to continue beyond the party itself. The older Southern visitors have a repertoire of safe, socially acceptable topics for small talk. Meanwhile the community itself, with its vicious gossips who meet up in "The Friendship Club" - "no reputation was safe with them, and only by being present every time could they hope to preserve their own" - is sustained only by layer upon layer of social controls. In some ways it echoes the hierarchical societies found in any 19th-century French or German novel.
Pretensions are exposed but never ridiculed. Mrs Beach presides over a modest home cluttered by souvenirs from her various travels abroad. "In every room and on every wall there was some testimony to this wonderful advantage which she had had over nearly everyone else in Draperville." Imprisoned in this domestic museum, which contains along with the souvenirs "a hundred mementos and votive offerings to Mrs Beach's marriage and motherhood", are her two middle-aged daughters. "Over the piano a row of familiar heads - Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Schumann - testified to the importance and value of great music, and did what they could to make up for the fact that the piano was not a Steinway."
Austin King is a lawyer, not by ambition but because his father was one. Now he is working with his father's former partner, and his career seems, as does his life, to have come to a halt once he had persuaded Martha to marry him. Into his safe, dull world comes Nora Potter, another of the "foster" relatives, invariably a target for unhappy married men: "Why, Nora wondered wildly, why should it always be a married man who maneuvers his way around the room until he ends up sitting beside me?" Despite this, she becomes obsessed with Cousin Austin. His ambivalence is brilliantly handled by Maxwell. The more Nora exposes her feelings, the more sympathy she earns.
This is a shrewdly observed novel about people watching, waiting, looking for signs and usually missing them. Above all, it is a highly realistic look at life and lives. Maxwell's achievement lies in his ability to look at ordinary experience and, without resorting to sermons or moralising, reach a moral, human conclusion.
