Words for Wednesday (On Thursday)

The following passage is the beginning of the second chapter of William Maxwell’s last novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. The passage tells the reader the book will be about a murder, an act the narrator is ashamed of, and, in some way, his mother. It is interesting that Maxwell enumerates the disasters his mother’s family has undergone but doesn’t include on the list, the death of his mother – an event that had life-long effects on the narrator.

I very much doubt that I would have remembered for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never laid eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn’t been the father of somebody I knew, and (2) I hadn’t done later on done something I was ashamed of afterward. This memoir – it that’s the right name for it – is a roundabout, futile way of making amends.

Before I can go into all that, I have to take up another subject. When my father was getting along in years and the past began to figure more in his conversation, I asked him one day what was my mother like as a person. To my surprise, he said, “That’s water over the dam,” shutting me up but also leaving me in doubt, because of his abrupt tone of voice, whether he didn’t after all this time have any feelings about her much, or did have but didn’t think he ought to. In any case he didn’t feel like talking about her to me.

Very few families escape disasters of one kind or another, but in the years between 1909 and 1919 my mother’s family had more than its share of them. My grandfather, spending the night in a farmhouse, was bitten on the ear by a rat or a ferret and died three months later of blood poisoning. My mother’s only brother was in an automobile accident and lost his right arm. My mother’s younger sister poured kerosene on a grate fire that wouldn’t burn and set fire to her clothing and bore the scars of this all the rest of her life. My older brother, when he was five years old, got his foot caught in a turning carriage wheel. (pgs. 6-7)

In the Fall 1982 (no. 85) edition of the Paris Review, there is a very lengthy and thoughtful interview with William Maxwell. I found the following exchange very illuminating as I found Maxwell’s prose to be so spare and so evocative – I found myself lingering over sentences and savoring them in my mind.

INTERVIEWER

Do your best sentences come from on high, or are they the product of much working and reworking?

MAXWELL

There’s something in the Four Quartets about language that doesn’t disintegrate. That’s what I try to do—write sentences that won’t be like sand castles. I’ve gotten to the point where I seem to recognize a good sentence when I’ve written it on the typewriter. Often it’s surrounded by junk. So I’m extremely careful. If a good sentence occurs in an otherwise boring paragraph, I cut it out, rubber-cement it to a sheet of typewriter paper, and put it in a folder. It’s just like catching a fish in a creek. I pull out a sentence and slip a line through the gills and put it on a chain and am very careful not to mislay it. Sometimes I try that sentence in ten different places until finally it finds the place where it will stay—where the surrounding sentences attach themselves to it and it becomes part of them. In the end what I write is almost entirely made up of those sentences, which is why what I write now is so short. They come one by one, and sometimes in dubious company. Those sentences that are really valuable are mysterious—perhaps they come from another place, the way lyric poetry comes from another place. They come from some kind of unconscious foreknowledge of what you are going to do. Because when you find the place where a sentence finally belongs it is utterly final in a way you had no way of knowing: it depends on a thing you hadn’t written. When I wrote those fables and sat with my head over the typewriter waiting patiently, empty as a bucket that somebody’s turned upside down, I was waiting for a story to come from what you could call my unconscious. Or it could be from the general unconscious. Often before poets write a poem they begin to hear the cadences of it, and then they begin to hear humming in their ears, and there are other strange manifestations, and then finally words. The last is the words.

 

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