For anyone interested in the way good writing gets put down on the page and published, this book is a gift, plain and simple. For actual practitioners it’s more-a handbook of professional practice, as that practice is carried out in New York publishing. The book is a collection of letters, and through the exchange of correspondence the reader follows a duo working together to produce as much of the best writing they can.
The letters unveil the relationship between writer and editor, when that relationship is as it should be. This partly occurs, perhaps, because both correspondents are writers; it just happens that one has a half-week job as an editor. Once they begin putting together publishable stories and writing to one another about them, the pace at which they build on each other’s abilities is enlightening.
Though family members and other editors occasionally join in the exchange, most of the letters are between Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell. O’Connor, a protege of Yeats and AE (George Russell), was a notable figure in the Irish literary Renaissance kindled by Yeats and Russell. O’Connor was indeed a Renaissance man. Self-taught, a translator of Old Irish and Gaelic, he wrote poetry, short stories, plays, biographies, autobiography, memoirs, literary criticism, cultural criticism, history, essays, reviews, and polemics. As he said of himself, “I had always wanted to write poetry, but I realized very early on that I didn’t have much talent that way. Story telling is a compensation; the nearest thing one can get to the quality of a pure lyric poem.”
At the time of his death in 1966, O’Connor was recognized as one of the foremost Irish writers of the century. No less an eminence than V. S. Pritchett wrote in 1969: “It has often been said that Ireland is packed with genius but is short of talent. Frank O’Connor was one of a distinguished generation who had both. His powerful and outspoken voice, above all his moral courage-not a common Irish trait-gave him the air of a thunderous but unbullying Dr. Johnson.”
Frank O’Connor was a pseudonym, adopted so that Michael O’Donovan could publish freely in politically polarized Ireland, with its Victorian sensibility. Think of the years of brouhaha and backroom litigation, for instance, merely to publish James Joyce’s tame Dubliners. And feisty O’Donovan had been imprisoned, as a young man, for being an Irish revolutionary. So when William Maxwell calls him Michael early in their correspondence, we sense what the scrupulous editor of the collection, Michael Steinman, suggests: the closeness of their relationship. Maxwell eventually signs himself “Bill” or merely “B,” and O’Connor comes to call him “Willie.”
William Maxwell? He is one of the most highly regarded yet least bruited of contemporary American writers-though he has recently been “discovered” by pbs and Charley Rose and other come-latelies. He was also an editor at the New Yorker for 40 years, and during most of those years was in his office from Monday to Wednesday only, busy with his own writing the rest of the time. He has published six novels and four short-story collections, over a dozen books altogether, and his voice, “simultaneously very personal and clairvoyant,” as John Updike has noted, “is one of the wisest in American fiction. As well as one of the kindest.”
Still as wise and personal and clairvoyant and kind as ever, Maxwell, now in his eighties, continues to write. His collected stories, All the Days and Nights, was published in 1994 by Knopf. And it is not presumptuous, I think, to say that he has had as much influence on the direction of American fiction from the 1940s to the present as any single person-unobtrusively, with no trumpeting or discursive manifestoes or self-congratulatory proclamations.
He first edited poetry at the New Yorker but soon came to occupy the post of senior fiction editor-if such a designation can be ascribed to anyone in that magazine’s formerly loose organization, with everything feeding to William Shawn at the top. During his tenure there, Maxwell encouraged and edited and helped to raise to its highest level the work of O’Connor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John O’Hara, J. D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Shirley Hazzard, Harold Brodkey, Mavis Gallant, John Updike, and, in his American incarnation, Nabokov.
There were literally dozens of others, and a book of correspondence with Maxwell as large as this one, nearly 300 pages, could probably be gathered from every one of those dozens-except for Cheever, who periodically burned his letters. And if Maxwell had been on hand when Raymond Carver began publishing in the New Yorker, Carver might have been his, had Maxwell been able to endure the content, because Carver’s prose is an unwitting example of the outworking of Maxwell’s influence.
Maxwell’s hallmark as writer and editor is poetic simplicity, with an undercurrent of heartbreaking emotion, as if a plain-spoken Scots scientist had been hot-wired to the mysteries of creation. A common editorial comment, at least to this clinger to Maxwell’s coattails for a decade, was “Isn’t there a simpler way of saying it?” Sometimes there wasn’t, but as often as not there was. And often, too, while the writer explained what he or she wanted to say, Maxwell jotted those words on a set of galleys, and said, “That’s so much clearer!”
And of course it was. So when O’Connor defines for himself his sense of the story as “a pure lyric poem” it helps explain the excited concurrency between the two as they work at “the happiness of getting it down right.”
The phrase is Maxwell’s, from an essay collected in a Knopf festschrift to O’Connor in 1969. That essay, called “Frank O’Connor and The New Yorker,” appears along with brief comments by family members as an appendix to the letters, and it is worth the price of admission alone-for its affectionate portrait of O’Connor and, in a subsidiary sense, a look at “the disease of perfectionism,” as Maxwell puts it, that used to reign at the New Yorker.
In a letter from 1954, O’Connor writes, “I accept all the admonitions, which, by this time, you must be tired of giving out. As usual on all the minor things which you pick out for correction, you and Lobrano are right. [Gus Lobrano, who first worked with O’Connor, had become ill.] You are in immediate relation to the audience.”
And Maxwell, who commonly turned letters around the day he received them, immediately responds: “They aren’t admonitions, as I’m sure you know, but the illusions of perfectionators, and individually we would probably get tired and quit worrying about this kind of thing, since the story stands or falls elsewhere, but we keep each other at it.”
In his introduction to a collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letters, Maxwell wrote in 1982,
The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy. There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter’s surviving are fifty-fifty, at most. And there is the element of confidence-of the relaxed backhand stroke that can place the ball anywhere in the court that it pleases the writer to have it go.
Letters of that quality fill this collection, and at one point Maxwell whacks a backstroke that emphasizes the colloquial nature of such letters when he compliments O’Connor on an improvement to a story: “We are using the insert, and feel that the use you made of the notebook was a stroke of well why not say genius.”
Or this from O’Connor: “I had promised myself lunch with you and Don Congdon [O’Connor’s agent] IF I managed to finish the story I was doing for you. It has inspired me to a point when the story is almost right but there’s still a small knot in the middle which would drive you crazy. Maybe despair will drive me to solve the problem tonight or tomorrow in which case I’ll phone you and come.”
O’Connor lived for several years in the United States, serving as professor or writing instructor at such institutions as Stanford, Northwestern, and Harvard. On one of his first visits to the states he met a student at Harvard, Harriet Rich, and soon married her; in 1958 they had a child, a daughter, whom they named Hallie-Og. Only a few years before, Maxwell, then in his forties, and his younger wife, Emily, had a daughter, Katherine, then another, Brook, and gradually the letters brim with details of family life. Every writer at some time must make a decision about how he will include his family in his writing, indeed his life, or not include them, and both these writers happily make as much room for their families as they can-another lesson that many practitioners need to learn.
To Harriet, for whom Maxwell develops a fondness and addresses when O’Connor is busy or not responding to letters, he says in mid-June of 1958,
Kate and Brookie . . . have kept us up between eleven and three or four for three nights running. First Brookie woke up and refused to go back to sleep, so Emmy went to bed in her room, with the window closed, in the kind of general discomfort she contrives for herself when I am not around, out of a belief that comfort isn’t everything, and I couldn’t get back to sleep because I never can when she is removed from beside me, and so thought about the New Yorker all night (TOO MUCH EDITING GOES ON HERE) and what should happen the following night but four violent thunderstorms in succession.
Maxwell as editor was efficient and thorough, sometimes sending off four or five pages of advice, yet diffident. He set himself aside for the sake of a story. He favored no particular style, as the variety of writers he worked with suggests, but stood for clarity and that simpler way of saying it. Something of his manner of handling details in daily life, as he explains it to O’Connor, was present in his editing; when a decision or conflict faced him, he wrote, his practice was to wait, silent, “with my hands in my pockets,” until it resolved itself. He generally trusted O’Connor and other writers to solve conflicts in stories and elsewhere themselves and gave them leeway to do that, while turning away the worst of the checkers’ queries with a stroke of a pencil, saying, “That’s simply nonsense.”
He conveys an agreeable, even gleeful, air from the delight he takes in everyday details, but occasionally is adamantine, usually when he has to reject a story, as if he understands how O’Connor will feel and wants to move on to a new story-as when he writes back about something he’s been urging O’Connor to finish, “This doesn’t have the breath of life in it.” If, however, he felt it had the faintest breath, several pages of suggestions poured out.
“When I was was a very young man,” Maxwell writes in a letter to O’Connor,
I had to go over a New Yorker proof with Edmund Wilson, who snorted from time to time and said in his youth he had been an editor on Vanity Fair, and that the editorial fallacy was changing things for the sake of changing things. Had I been older, I might have drawn him out, because he is always interesting no matter what he is talking about, but I just took it for a profound and witty remark, which it perhaps was. But some editors suffer from the fallacy of guardian angel-ism, and sincerely believe that they are put here on earth to protect authors from damaging their best efforts by after thoughts that are not an improvement. So I spent three intense, dedicated days going over your two versions of Man of the World, protecting what I feel is one of the most moving and beautiful stories of modern times from your itch to improve it.
O’Connor’s reply: “Thanks for your labors on the proofs. I think the results justify the means.” The means was, of course, unknown editorial tinkering.
A lyric poet, O’Connor writes letters that are often brief, and Maxwell occasionally sends telegrams, as in his initial response to “The Man of the World”: “From here it looks very much as if you’ve earned your way into heaven.” He then follows up with a letter in which he says,
I wondered also if you would know what I was trying to say in the telegram. “This is possibly the best story you have ever written” sounded too much in the accents of posterity, or at least too pleased with my own sense of judgment, but that is how I felt about it. I read it back and forth and around while I was reading it the first time-Do you know that kind of reading, where you circulate among the words and double back to give your feelings time to catch up with you, and for enjoyment. Now he has got himself in a pickle, I said, and waited, and openmouthed watched you walk right over the pickle because it wasn’t, for your purposes, even there.
Who could resist such carefully stated, level-headed praise, in the sort of letter every writer wants to receive?
More than double the number and bulk of the letters are from Maxwell, which is natural, since he is not only editor, but encourager, conscience, gatekeeper, even paymaster. The New Yorker rates were so generous it seemed a pleasure to him to send off checks, usually accompanied by a note, as this one from 1955: “I’m sending, today, a cost of living check to Matson’s office [O’Connor’s agency] for $1972.35, and thought I’d let you know, in case it might affect your traveling arrangements.” And then a concluding backhand stroke: “It is too hot even to go around in your skin.”
The magazine’s word rate was a dollar or more, and there was also a cola, the cost-of-living-adjustment Maxwell mentions, based on the rate of inflation and usually issued in quarterly payments-here nearly $2,000 in 1955. And bonus payments added increasing percentages of one’s total sales for a year to each story over four, then six, then twelve-a process so lucrative for even the mildly prolific that Maxwell referred to it as “the slot machine.”
There was also an added bonus for signing a contract that stated, in essence, that one would accept such payments. And a few minor perks, such as the beautiful and perfectly leaded Venus drawing pencils-a luxury item that O’Connor, for one, delighted in pocketing-and lunches with Maxwell at the Century Club, down the street from the New Yorker offices. It’s no wonder that Nabokov once said in a fictional context, speaking out of his experience on several continents, that it was “the kindest magazine in the world.”
Readers will come away from this collection with a sense of what it’s like to watch literary work rise from the page. And a few might be surprised to learn that the relationship of editor to writer, when operating at its optimum, is never adversarial, as contemporary melodrama seems to depict it. A good editor merely tries to get the best out of a writer, and that was Maxwell’s gift-a studied selflessness.
As a writer, he understood the effort it takes to translate people onto paper. And as a writer, or so this collection communicates, he understood there was such a thing as a literary standard, established by centuries of practice. That is what he keeps turning O’Connor toward. The dizzying middle distance in which the work on a story took place was a world he was able to enter, in his clairvoyant way, as easily as the writer-not like a hermit crab, lugging around an ungainly and alien shell, but as if he were going around in the writer’s skin himself. And what he led each writer toward, as much as each was able to follow at the moment, was that standard of excellence, where suddenly, when the writer least expected it, the standard was all that mattered, and the writer was flooded with the happiness of at last getting it down right.
Larry Woiwode’s most recent book is Silent Passages, a collection of stories.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 28
7B2lm7B20287224
