THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503100298
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS
The Collected Stories
WILLIAM MAXWELL
Alfred A. Knopf. 415 pp. $25.
UPON READING THESE 23 stories and 21 ``improvisations,'' I find it remarkable that William Maxwell is not better known. Rarely do his stories make the standard fiction anthologies for undergraduates; neither his work nor his name is found in survey texts of 20th-century American literature. Yet Maxwell, now in his 80s, writes better and deeper stories than most of his contemporaries.
Most of these pieces, dating from 1934 to 1992, appeared in three earlier collections. Long associated with The New Yorker, Maxwell sets a number of them in New York.
In ``A Game of Chess'' (1965), two brothers and their wives meet in New York, but love has long since turned into complicated rituals of oneupsmanship. Hugh has given up a steady job to paint full time; Amos, the older one, is visiting New York from his farm management business. Hugh is restrained, suspicious; Amos blunt, emotional. Little embarrassments and petty angers dot the evening, but Amos shakes Hugh's hand with mist in his eyes. Hugh sees the whole episode as craft, Amos' attempt to cut him down to size. Only later, when Hugh looks at his hand, does he realize the baiting, the goading, the warmth from Amos have other ends than doing him in.
Maxwell's other primary venues are France and his home state of Illinois. Like many of his approximate generation, Maxwell cannot resist a good expatriate story when he finds one. In ``The Pilgrimage'' (1953), the Ormsbys tour postwar France with Michelin guide in hand and recommendations from home in mind. Ray wants just that special restaurant, that precise dish, that the Richardsons discovered in Perigueux; Ellen would like a quiet evening, a nice meal. Undissuaded, Ray orders, leaves, finds another place, orders again. Maxwell teases anxiety out of that most mundane of situations, the bull-headed American tourist.
Even more devastating is ``The Gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel'' (1969). John and Dorothy Reynolds are back in France where they visited 18 years before. In John's mind memory has created an unspoiled spot, village life without cars, happy, courteous waiters, love between traveler and resident. But in a visit to the famous cathedral, nothing plays true to the past: ``The summer air reeked of gasoline. And there was something he saw that he could not get off his mind afterward: an old woman who had tried to cross against the light and was stranded in the middle of the street, her eyes wide with terror live a living monument.''
Many of Maxwell's later stories play out versions of his own youth in Lincoln, Ill. Lincoln is downstate (as natives call anything south of Chicago), small, with black and white residents. Maxwell's narrators replay tapes of the past, to find some note, some silence, that will explain anomalies.
In ``The Front and Back Parts of the House'' (1991), a writer tries to link together his middle-class white life with that of a black woman, Hattie Dyer, who once worked for his family. On a return home, he by chance meets her and gives her a hug; from her, nothing comes - no hug back, no word, only averted eyes. Maxwell makes that moment an opportunity for variations, post-mortems, forays into different stories, but always returning until something like intuition tells the narrator he has found the puzzle.
The improvisations are, Maxwell says, little stories he wrote mostly for his wife on some occasion. They almost all use tale form: ``Once upon a time,'' begins one of them, ``there was a man of no particular age, a carpenter, whom all kinds of people entrusted with their secrets.'' Witty, deliberately timeless, ``the carpenter'' and the others make a fitting close to a volume that speaks of human frailty with uncompromised humanity. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University. by CNB