Billy Dyer and Other Stories
By William Maxwell
Knopf, 112 pages, $18
It`s been nearly 12 years since the publication of William Maxwell`s laconically eloquent, award-winning novel ”So Long, See You Tomorrow,” a book that for many of us who had long admired Maxwell`s fiction seemed to be an apotheosis of sorts. He had returned to the novel form after a hiatus of nearly 20 years; he was more than 70 years old; and the book had the feel of a kind of summing up, an examination of childhood mistakes and adult guilt that glimmered with a patina of unsentimental nostalgia. And as far as the novel form is concerned, maybe that book will in fact be Maxwell`s perfect last word.
But this winter, at age 83, he has brought forth a volume of short fiction, ”Billy Dyer and Other Stories,” all spoken in the voice of one man, that has much the same impact as ”So Long, See You Tomorrow.” Indeed, the narrators of the two books could be the same. The novel`s narrator went unnamed, though if the reader knew even the most superficial facts about Maxwell`s life, there would be a persistent suspicion that much of the work was autobiographical, a suspicion that the novel encouraged.
In his new book, Maxwell goes further in consciously blurring the distinction between fiction and ”real” life. He weaves prima facie autobiographical details into the life of the narrator-such as his birth in 1908, his childhood in Lincoln, Ill., his family`s move to Chicago, his matriculation at the University of Illinois-and other details, as well, that we feel are surely from Maxwell`s own life: from the death of his mother by flu in 1918 to an uncle`s lost arm to a brother`s lost leg to the death by blight of two elm trees in the yard of the family home.
These are all details we encountered in ”So Long, See You Tomorrow” as well, and as we read, we strongly sense the author`s personal struggle in his senescense to come to terms with his youth. Then, deep into this volume of stories, the narrator indirectly reveals his own name: Maxwell.
Normally one of my pet critical peeves is a reliance on authorial biography to invest meaning in a work of fiction that by its very nature must stand on its own, organically complete. But the intersection of life and art becomes an important issue in ”Billy Dyer,” as Maxwell-the-narrator explains in the title story: ”For things that are not known-at least not anymore-and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood.”
Consider that notion in connection with this observation in another story, as the narrator describes his childhood home: ”Whether this is an actual memory or an attempt on the part of my mind to adjust the past to my feelings about it I am not altogether sure.” So it is throughbout the book;
the writer falls back on his imagination to fill in the past and then allows that imagination even to re-orchestrate the past to reflect and express the writer`s feelings. This is the essential posture of any fiction writer, after all.
But ”Billy Dyer” is not entirely about the imaginative process. Indeed, the central yearning of Maxwell in these stories is not to understand his art but rather to imagine his way into the hearts of people in his past whom he failed fundamentally to understand at the time. A black family whose son left Lincoln to become a doctor, a young school teacher who disappeared to die of tuberculosis, a ne`er-do-well uncle, a Jewish family whose son joins the Cub Scouts, an aloof father, a beloved but antagonistic brother-having outlived them all, Maxwell now yearns to re-create them.
In pursuit of this, the stories move from reflections on personal documents of the past-local histories, old photos, home movies, business documents, personal papers-to Maxwell`s sketchy literal memory to wonderful bursts of elegiac prose, the best of which takes the ultimate and necessary liberty of fiction, the creation of the sensual reality of others. And it is in this that Maxwell the author is at his best.
In the finest of these stories, ”The Front and the Back Parts of the House,” Maxwell says of his father: ”Three nights out of every week he slept in godforsaken commercial hotels that overlooked the railroad tracks and when he turned over in the dark he heard the sound of the ceiling fan and railway cars being shunted.” Coming to terms with an aloof and often absent father, Maxwell`s invocation of the spinning of the fan and the distant clanking of those freight cars is a ravishing act of imaginative compassion.
And in the same story, Maxwell even moves toward his mother, whose early death seems to have cut him off almost entirely from her. The narrator fails, really, to find his way inside her-and that constitutes an illuminating counterpoint to his basic quest-but he gets this close, at least, to his grief: ”My mother`s clothes closet was empty. Her silver-backed comb and brush and hand mirror were still on her dressing table, but without the slight disorder of hairpins, powder, powder puff, cologne, smelling salts, and so on, they were reduced to being merely objects.”
As a young teenager, Maxwell goes to the hospital to visit a favorite aunt who is dying of cancer. He finds her in the corridor in a hospital gown and with her hair in braids. She looks at her nephew, but it is ”as if she were looking at somebody she had never seen before.” Maxwell observes:
”Since then, I have watched beloved animals dying. The withdrawal. Into some part of themselves that only they know about. It is, I think, now unknown to any kind of living creature.”
It seems to me, after reading ”Billy Dyer,” that this is the place where all artists inevitably go. Not simply to die in psychic privacy, however; rather, they go there to speak, to seek out all those moments of human disconnection and shunt them into art where we can feel, at last, as if we understand one another. In this lovely little volume of stories, William Maxwell does this with great grace and the wisdom of many thoughtful years.
