Building up to a coral reef
Patrick Skene Catling
TIME WILL DARKEN IT by William Maxwell Harvill, £10.99, pp. 302 William Maxwell edited New Yorker fiction for 40 years, most influentially, under Harold Ross and William Shawn. Even Maxwell's conversation in the intimate informality of the Blue Bar of the Algonquin, just around the corner from his office, I remember, was fastidiously hesitant, punctuated (the punctuation was palpable) with rather more commas than were required for syntactical clarity. The charm of his anecdotes resided in the elegant manner of the telling: there were no narrative gimmicks or uproarious punchlines.
Time Will Darken It, a circumspectly realistic romantic tragedy about the family of a conscientious lawyer in a small town in the Middle West in the 'gentle Calvinistic era' immediately before the first world war, was first published exactly 50 years ago, when Maxwell was 40. By then, he had already formed the careful, unsensational style, matter-of-fact, with pale glints of poetry, which was to dominate and inspire a whole generation of The New Yorker's foremost writers of short stories, including John Cheever and John Updike. Maxwell tried to make his writers courteous.
It was evident, sometimes too evident, in the old New Yorker, when it was an entirely American magazine, that Maxwell did not insist that stories should be motivated by plot. He was more interested in character, settings, atmosphere and, above all, the quality of language itself. In extreme cases, in the later works of J. D. Salinger for example, New Yorkerese could lead to the stultifying immobility of artistic self-regard. Maxwell, however, in his own fiction kept things moving. In Time Will Darken It, they move slowly, but there is a continuous, inexorable, fatal development, a low- key drama which packs quite a surprising emotional wallop.
Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1908. His novel is set in a similar small Illinois town he calls Draperville, in 1912. The belle époque there could hardly be called very belle, but in such a place it was a time of communal stability and outward calm.
Austin King has inherited his locally celebrated father's partnership in a respected law firm. The father was a judge, and while Austin occupies the firm's larger office he is aware that he cannot fill his father's shoes. Even so, he is able to keep his family in bourgeois security and com- fort in one of old Elm Street's substantial houses with circular bay windows, wide porches, 'carpenter's lace' and fresh white paint:
The outermost branches of the trees maples and elms, cottonwoods, lindens and box elders — had managed to meet in places over the brick pavement.
As the accretion of minute organisms grad- ually builds up a coral reef, so the listings of concrete particulars enable Maxwell to establish an easily imaginable environment for believable inhabitants. Here is a typical passage, which seems to anticipate the restrained lyricism of E. B. White:
Between quarter to two and quarter after three an age of quiet passed over the house on Elm Street, over the richness contained in cupboards, the serenity of objects in empty rooms . .. A fly settled on the kitchen ceiling. In the living-room a single white wheel-shaped phlox blossom hung for a long time and then dropped to a table without making a sound. On a dusty beam in the basement a spider finished its web and waited. Just when the arrangement of the furniture, the disposition of light and shad- ow, the polish and sweet odour of summer seemed final and the house itself a preserved invaluable memory, Ab (the Kings' young daughter) awoke and called out to her mother.
The tranquillity of the menage is disturbed, decorously, by a family of Mississippi cousins. The Potters come up North from their unsuccessful cotton plan- tation, stay in the Kings' house for four weeks and three days, and domestic rela- tionships change. The amorous imbalance of Austin and Martha's marriage is jolted by an impossible one-sided love affair. There are a dramatic crisis, entropy, a lament Cif there is no such place as Purga- tory, there is at least Elm Street on a grey day in January'), but the author's prose endures unimpaired. Time has not dark- ened it.
`It was a fly-on-the-wall camera team.'
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