An Irishwoman's Diary

Everyone has their idea about the moment they became a grown-up. For some it was that time they risked life and limb and parental wrath driving Dad's car too fast on an icy road, or swam across a forbidden lake, or declared a crazy love for the wrong sort of boy. For me it was a milder act. As an undergraduate with an essay on medieval universities to write, I sat down in the college library to read a short novel by a US writer whom I had never heard of - and one who was from neither the South nor New York, but from Illinois. The essay was late, but I had a fine excuse: the book was wonderful. It also meant, at least to me, that by deciding to read it before I wrote my essay I was exercising a form of intellectual independence.

Murder in Mid-West

A few years later, I found myself reviewing it. It had just been published in Britain for the first time, eight years after it had won the American Book Award. The novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow was written by William Maxwell. It tells the story of a murder that took place on a farm outside a small Mid-West town in the 1920s. The narrator is looking back over the years to his now distant boyhood. His mother had died and the lonely boy made friends with a fellow 13-year-old. The narrator is middle-class and living in a comfortable if sad home, while his friend is the son of a poor tenant farmer.

Far worse than poverty is the fact that boy has been subjected to painful tensions between his parents. Finally the farmer ends shoots and kills another tenant farmer, his wife's lover. For the narrator the true horror of the memory, and far greater than the crime, was his own failure to act as a friend to the boy. The book is a masterpiece. But its publication came and went and that was that. Maxwell, a quiet master, seemed destined to remain America's best kept literary secret - until Harvill, Britain's most enlightened publishers and the company which has brilliantly served foreign-language fiction by publishing W.G. Sebald, Jose Saramago and Haruki Murakami, as well as US writers such as Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, began re-issuing the best of Maxwell. So Long, See You Tomorrow reappeared in 1997, this time to louder praise. Richard Ford best summed it up: "It makes greatness seem simple."

Time Will Darken It, an inspired social comedy with a profound sting, appeared in a Harvill edition in 1998, exactly 50 years after its first US publication. Last year The Folded Leaf, originally published in 1945, followed. Again, it is wonderful - the account of an intense relationship between two very different youths and an examination of the society moving around them. The characterisation is subtle and exact.

Sympathetic, understated and wise, Maxwell missed nothing. The Chateau (1961), in which a young American couple travel to France, was among Elizabeth Bowen's favourite novels. Next year Harvill is re-issuing They Came Like Swallows.

Story collection

Maxwell's story collection, All the Days and Nights (US 1994, Harvill 1997), is a collection to be kept to hand like Chekhov, Maupassant, Mc Gahern, Cheever, Ford or Frank O'Connor. O'Connor is important in Maxwell's story, because for many people William Maxwell remains best known as the New Yorker fiction editor who guided the genius of Cheever, Updike, Eudora Welty and others, just as an earlier editor of genius, Maxwell Perkins, had nurtured Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.

O'Connor was already an established New Yorker writer when he began working with Maxwell. The two became close friends. Their correspondence, The Happiness of Get- ting it Down Right (Knopf 1996 - the title is a phrase of Maxwell's celebrating the editing process) not only gives extraordinary insights into the writer/editor relationship but also is a vivid portrait of a friendship with the men writing about many aspects of life from books, to lunch, to their respective children and Maxwell's piano playing.

It's a book that sends the reader back to O'Connor's stories and also to Maxwell's work. For all his kindness and warmth, Maxwell was also an honest reader. He always said what he believed. His reaction to The Man of the World was to telegram O'Connor on May 29th, 1956: "From Here It Looks Very Much As If You've earned Your Way Into Heaven." A few days later he wrote: "So beautiful and so moving. And perfection, beside everything else." But he could also express misgivings and even O'Connor had stories rejected.

The letters ended with O'Connor's death on March 10th, 1966. But Maxwell never forgot him and he and his wife continued to be close to O'Connor's widow. In 1976 he retired from the New Yorker after 40 years - with some relief, saying to his wife: "Thank God I will never have to reject another manuscript."

News of a death

The other day in Kilkenny, Richard Ford held a copy of The Happiness of Getting It Down Right. "Well, poor William died, just a week after his wife," he said. Although Maxwell was two weeks short of his 92nd birthday, the news of his passing, on July 31st, still caused an intake of breath.

Maxwell, a civilised, old-world gentleman, had become a calm, immortal presence. He and Emily had been married for 55 years. As a writer he always claimed that almost three-quarters of his material had been provided by his childhood. He admitted to having never recovered from the death of his mother when he was 10. It was probably fitting to hear of the death of one great American writer from another great American writer. William Maxwell, ever with a feel for the right words, would have approved of the simplicity of Ford's comment.