William Maxwell

I went last night to “The Wisest, Kindest Voice,” a panel discussion on the life and work of William Maxwell that was held alfresco in Madison Square Park. The moderator was my old friend Chris Carduff, editor of Library of America’s two volumes of Maxwell. As he predicted in his introduction, the event took on the quality of a front -porch conversation on a summer evening, as the shadows gathered around the statue of Admiral Farragut, the reflecting pool, and the canopies of the old trees. (Photos are available, Media Bistro covered the event, and the National Book Foundation will soon have a complete video.)

Maxwell was the fiction editor of The New Yorker for forty years, where he edited Updike, Salinger, Cheever, Nabokov, and many others. (Nabokov, of course, never admitted any need for an editor.) He worked three days a week, leaving time for his own fiction, and according to Daniel Menaker, who took over the job from him, he got an astonishing amount of work done in those three days.

On his own time, he wrote essays, short stories, family memoir, and six novels, of which everyone on the panel seemed to agree that the last and shortest of them, So Long, See You Tomorrow, was his masterpiece.

Despite the title of the event, the participants made it clear that Maxwell was not unfailingly wise and kind. Commenting on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, he wrote in a letter, “There are more hypocrites in this country than there are Purdue chickens.” When Menaker presented him with a batch of poems previously rejected by The New Yorker’s Howard Moss, Maxwell returned them the next day with some advice: “Stick to prose.” Although, or perhaps in part because, he was an editor by profession, he was exceptionally resistant to being edited. “He was a stubborn son of a bitch,” said Menaker. “He regretted every change he’d ever made,” said the poet Edward Hirsch.

The result of that stubbornness, though, was tough, understated prose that was beautiful in its faithfulness to experience. When Maxwell took an interest in you, Hirsch said, it could be almost unnerving. “You felt that you weren’t quite worthy of his attention.”