Book Report: So Long, See You Tomorrow

9. William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) (2/15/21)

I learned about this book in a New Yorker article, "The Best Books We Read in 2020." The recommendation was by Rebecca Mead, who writes brilliant profiles for that magazine. In her post she says, "I’ve been thinking about how to make literary use of memory. How might one capture the way that images or encounters lodge in the imagination and become, over time, layered with meaning?"

That is precisely what this short (135 pages), exquisite book does. It is part memoir, with Maxwell, in his late 60s, thinking back to an incident—a murder/suicide, involving once close friends and infidelity—from his youth. But that sparks all sorts of other associations: his own mother's death from influenza; his difficult relationship with his father; a fleeting friendship with—as it turned out—the son of the murderer; Maxwell's own long-held feelings of guilt for not reaching out to the friend, Cletus. 

But halfway through, Maxwell (who, by the way, worked for 40 years as an editor at the New Yorker, consorting with the best) turns to, not fiction exactly (though it is), but richly contextualized imagining. As he puts it in introducing this section, "If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any." 

The bulk of the story takes place in about 1922, in small-town/rural Illinois. The details that Maxwell summons up, not just the sensual ones but also the emotional, are, as I said, exquisite. Every bit of his account is convincing, and deeply moving. In it, he tries to make sense of—or perhaps better, provide coherence to—lives falling apart.

He continues from the above quote:

The reader will also have to do a certain amount of imagining. He must imagine a deck of cards spread out face down on a table, and then he must turn one over, only it is not the eight of hearts or the jack of diamonds but a perfectly ordinary quarter of an hour out of Cletus's past life. But first I need to invent a dog, which doesn't take very much in the way of prestidigitation; if there were cattle there had to be a dog to help round them up. In that period—I don't know how it is now—farm dogs were usually a mixture of collie and English shepherd. The attraction between dogs and adolescent boys can, I think, be taken for granted. There is no outward sign of trouble in the family. The two farms are both on the right-hand side of the new hard road and have a common boundary line. The Wilson house [where the murder took place], with its barns and sheds, is next to the road and an eight of a mile closer to town. To get to where Cletus lives you have to drive up a narrow lane that has a gate at either end of it. When it is almost time for Cletus to come home from school the dog squeezes herself under the gates and trots off up the road to the mailboxes, where she settles down in a place that she has made for herself in the high grass with her chin resting on her four paws. These mailboxes . . . are on posts and look like wading birds.
     In the very few years since my father disposed of the horse and carriage, there has been a change in the landscape. It is now like a tabletop, the trees mostly gone, the hedges uprooted in favor of barbed wire—resulting in more land under cultivation, more money in the bank, but also in a total exposure. Anyone can see what used to be reserved for the eye of the hawk as it wheeled in slow circles.
     If a farm wagon or a Model T Ford goes by, the dog follows it with her eyes but she does not raise her head. She is expecting a boy on a bicycle.

The dog, as it happens, makes an excellent observer.

I flagged so many beautiful passages. Here's one from near the end, speaking of loss and neglect:

Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen—the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washday, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
     His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-backed copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.
     Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too—the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the open door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

I know end-of-year best-of lists irk some people. But I am very glad I checked this one out, and stumbled on this gem.

(Here is an excellent essay about Maxwell by A. O. Scott.)