William Maxwell’s Improvisations

The second volume of William Maxwell’s works just came out from the Library of America — edited by my old friend Chris Carduff. The volume contains the short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, which I recently reread after many years. But it also contains forty of the very short stories that Maxwell called “improvisations” — apparently in the same way that Graham Greene separated his “entertainments” like Our Man in Havana from what he considered his serious novels. These were written as presents for Maxwell’s wife, and were sometimes rolled up with ribbon and placed between the boughs of a Christmas tree.

Although many of these stories begin “Once upon a time,” and many of them have animals as heroes or take place in what could be medieval England, they are not at all cute. The psychology of these tales is adult and rather unsettling. They have titles like “The man who had no friends and didn’t want any” or “The kingdom where straightforward, logical thinking was admired over every other kind.” I find them more satisfying than almost anything selected by Irving Howe for his anthology Short Shorts.

Here is the beginning of “A mean and spiteful toad,” which I read aloud at my book group the other day:

A toad sat under a dead leaf that was the same color it was. Most toads are nice harmless creatures, full of fears, and with good reason, but this toad was mean and spiteful. For no reason. It was born that way. One day a little girl on her way home from school saw him and nudged him gently with the toe of her shoe to see him hop. Which he did, helplessly. But the bile churned in his ice-cold veins and he said — thought not so she could hear it — You will turn against the people who love you the most. And for the whole rest of the day, under the leaf that was the same color he was, he was pleased. Of all the curses he had ever put on people and on other toads, this struck him as the most original.