Backlisted - So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell - rerun

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

John introduces a rerun of an episode from November 2016, where Costa First Book nominee for My Name Is Leon, Kit de Waal joins John & Andy to discuss So Long, See You Tomorrow, the final novel by author and New Yorker literary editor William Maxwell. Rough Timings:  11'27 - You Took the Last Bus Home: The Poems of Brian Bilston 17'43 - My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal 24'47 - So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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See in-store for details. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Lot Listed, which is Andy, me and Nicky

talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. The backlisted episode you're about to listen to was first recorded in November 2016, close to the end of our first year of making the podcast. One of the things that makes these re-releases so poignant is the way they mark the passage of time. It was the first time I'd properly met Kit Duvall, and out of that grew the wonderful anthology of working-class writing Common People, which she edited, which Unbound published, in conjunction with New Writing North. I'd forgotten entirely Andy's wonderful encomium to Brian Bilston's first collection, He Took the Last Bus Home, which went on to be a bestseller, and his reading of Refugees,

a poem that has taken on an even darker meaning since, and how Alex, Andy's 13-year-old son who burst into spontaneous applause when Andy read it to him, is now in his second year at university. applause when Andy read it to him, is now in his second year at university. We've been doing this longer than we realised. What I hear re-listening to this episode is three people in awe of a work of literature. William Maxwell does that to you. Kit's readings from the book have an intensity that brought us close to tears at places, and I found myself moved all over again. Not least because re-listening summed up something quite unexpected. We say during the discussion that Maxwell's work is all to do with home, family and intimacy. Listening to it again, I was suddenly struck that none of us back in November 2016

had any idea of the dark cloud of COVID on the then still distant horizon. Rereading They Came Like Swallows in Lockdown, in a first edition Maxwell himself had inscribed to me, was one of the things that gave me solace and courage during that dark time. As Andy says in the podcast, it is the account from three different perspectives of his mother's death and the last great pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918. That is a young man's book, and So Long See You Tomorrow, his last novel, revisits the pain of

that death 40 years later. This theme, how books anchor us to the past, and how our reading of them changes as we grow older, now seems like one of Batmister's most persistent themes. As you're about to either remind yourself or discover, Kit Duvall was a wonderful guest, a reader who has become an important writer. It's hard to think she was at the very beginning of her career then, and her insights into the craft and hard-won simplicity of Maxwell's prose are as fresh now as when she first made them. I've never asked her, but there is a Maxwellian flavour to the titles of the books she's published since, the novel The Trick of Time

and her beautiful memoir from 2022, without warning and only sometimes. Listen, and then please, do read some William Maxwell. I've been trying to get people to do that for the last 27 years, and the hour that follows, in the company of two deep and careful fellow readers, might just be my best shot yet. So, John, how's your week been? Well, I've had better weeks, Andy.

I've spent most of it unable to move in any kind of meaningful way. Luckily, like, you know, locked in syndrome, my eyes still work, so I've been able to read. But I have been afflicted by that most marvellous of 18th century, you know, the malady of kings, the gout, which has struck me down. Well, I shouldn't.

What we should all pause and think is actually it's really painful. My father-in-law suffers from gout and can barely move. But it serves him right for living like a Tudor. A third of all men. Well, I have to say, much as I'd love to, I mean, I look much like Falstaff and I like to feel that I live with that kind of spirit. But, in fact, it's a bit more prosaic. I mean, a number of people I know who suffer from gout are thin as whippets

and are fit as fiddles. It's a sort of genetic thing about your inability to process uric acid. And I suspect that, you know, there are probably deep other reasons for why we come down with these inflammatory illnesses like cancer. But it's not much fun. But it does mean, if you're feeling even... What have you been able to do? Well, I can read and I can write emails.

So effectively, I exist just as much as anybody else. I get myself elected as president on that basis. Indeed, indeed. That's been another thing. The strange thing about about gout it's close fellow traveler is is melancholy yeah it does make you quite depressed i don't know whether that's a function of pain generally but i think it's that's funny because i've got that covered i i've got melancholy and you've got the gas. I've got melancholy. Well, it's also, it's a good

preamble because I think melancholy comes up a lot with the writer of this book we're going to be discussing in Backlisted. Great segue. Great segue. So, hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Once more, we're gathered

around the kitchen table in post-industrial Islington, the canal side office of our sponsors Unbound, the website that brings authors and readers together to create great books. I am John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller. I am the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Our 50 great books, open brackets, and two not so great ones, closed brackets, saved my life. And joining us today is the author Kit Duvall. After a 15-year career in the legal profession, Kit's first novel, My Name Is Leon, was published earlier this year by Penguin.

And as of yesterday, it's just been shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award. So a big and not-at-all patronising, well done you. Thank you. And thanks. How do you feel about being on an awards shortlist? I think it's great. I'm not one of those people that would ever say, oh, no, it's beneath me. I don't believe in them.

I'm just massively chuffed. I want the award. I want to win. Yes. Excellent. You will call over broken glass. Yes. I'm still totally, I still think the greatest acceptance speech of all time

was Antonio Bayer saying, I'm delighted because now it means I can buy that swimming pool from a house in France I've always wanted. Which I just thought, yes. Yes, enjoy. Enjoy. I mean, I thought a wonderful thing that Philippe Sainz did giving his prize, the Bailey Giffords, to the refugee charity. But I thought a lot of rather pointless discussion

about whether authors should or shouldn't give it. It's totally up to the author. I mean, I think he's a QC, right? And it's a brilliant book, by the way, East West City. But don't shame people into thinking, I can't have this money and enjoy it, and in some instances use it to pay my electricity bill. It's all on fags and booze, frankly.

I literally have got a story about this that I would so like to say out loud now, but I can't. But if, as Danny Baker would say, if you press the red button now while listening, you'll be able to hear that story. And so, John, digressing already brilliantly, the book that Kit has chosen for us to talk about is So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. And I just want to tell very quickly

before we get on to the next bit how we came to be sitting around this table. So, Kit, you and I did a panel, didn't we, last month up in Durham. Durham. What was that panel about? It was about what makes a classic and what qualifies as a classic and are there any overlooked classics. So we were talking away for the…

Not at all germane to this podcast. classics. So we were talking away for the... Not at all germane to this podcast. For the amusement and edification of an impressively sized audience. Yes. So we were talking away and we were talking about a novel called Stoner by John Williams

and we were, I'm not carrying this one alone, we were agreeing that although that is a very good book, it maybe isn't a classic. It's a good book, it a very good book, it maybe isn't a classic. It's a good book. It's a good book. It's a good book. Maybe it's not a classic.

And Kit said, I'll tell you what is a classic, though. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Have you heard of that? Heard of it. Heard of it. I said, and I approached you afterwards and said, I know a podcast you could come and appear on. Because, John, what is your connection with this book?

Well, my connection is that I published it in the UK. I think it had actually been published by David Godwin and Secker and Hardback. Right. That was mine. But it had done absolutely nothing and disappeared. And I was, literally, it's one of those stories i was at frankfurt and had a meeting with uh the andrew wiley agency and um didn't usually presage anything of interest and i was given a copy of uh all the days and nights the um the stories of william maxwell

which had just been uh published by Knopf in the States. You know, the classic thing, you don't really realise. I had a vague notion that Maxwell had worked at the New Yorker, and I hadn't read So Long, See You Tomorrow. But I got a kind of care package of Maxwell books from various out-of-print editions from Wiley, took them back and started to read them. And there was that thing, this is just, I mean, an outrage.

It's like discovering, you know, this almost never happens for a publisher. A truly great 20th century writer who isn't in print, and incredibly at that stage, who is still alive. It was like... Yes, we should say we're talking about the book was published in 1980, wasn't it? It was serialized in the New Yorker. That's right.

And then it was published. You published it in 97. By the time our edition came out, the Harville edition came out, So Long, See You Tomorrow. So Long, See You Tomorrow was his last novel. The stories were published after that. Yeah. So that's why this is going to be a slightly different episode of Backlisted.

But like all episodes of Backlisted, I start off by saying to John, or he says to me. Well, I'm going to say to you, Andy, what have you been reading? Thanks. This is going really well. We've been doing this for a year. Is it our 25th now? Yeah.

Gosh. Amazing, isn't it? So I've been reading a book that I'm going to state openly is published by Unbound. I have no connection to Unbound beyond the fact that I come and sit in their kitchen once a fortnight and we talk about books. But this is a book called You Took the Last Bus Home, The Poems of Brian Bilston.

And it's a brilliantly funny, clever book of poetry by a man who's not really called Brian Bilston, I believe, who is known as Twitter's Poet Laureate. And I had been following him on Twitter for a while. And I'll just read you the title poem first. It's called You Took the Last Bus Home. It goes, you took the last bus home. Don't know how you got it through the door.

You're always doing amazing stuff. Like the time you caught that train. Oh, wow. Right? So he's really funny. There's a sort of slightly John Hegleyish thing going on maybe a little bit stevie smith i know he really likes stevie smith as we do here on backlisted and so i've been reading some of these poems with my son my son who's 13 and i read him one of these poems and he guffawsaws with laughter, right? He genuinely, so we're reading them, and we're enjoying reading them,

and then we got to a poem called Refugees, and I'm going to read this poem, and all I'm going to say about this poem is we read it, and at the end of it, my son burst into spontaneous applause and took the book into school with him and got his teacher to read it out to the class. So I'm just going to read this poem. It's called Refugees. And what you need to know is it has a note at the bottom that says, now read from bottom to top. So here it is. now read from bottom to top. So here it is. They have no need of our help, so do not tell me these haggard faces could belong to you or me. Should life have dealt a different hand? We need to see them for who they really are. Chancers and scroungers, layabouts and loungers with bombs up

their sleeves, cutthroats and thieves. They are not welcome here. We should make them go back to where they came from. They cannot share our food, share our homes, share our countries. Instead, let us build a wall to keep them out. It is not okay to say these are people just like us. A place should only belong to those who are born there. Do not be so stupid to think that the world can be looked at another way. Now read from bottom to top. The world can be looked at another way. Do not be so stupid to think that a place should only belong to those who are born there. These are people just like us. It is not okay to say build a wall to keep them out. Instead, let us share our countries, share our homes, share our food. They cannot go back to where they came from. We should make them

welcome here. They are not cutthroats and thieves with bombs up their sleeves, layabouts and loungers, chancers and scroungers. We need to see them for who they really are should life have dealt a different hand these haggard faces could belong to you or me so do not tell me they have no need of our help good grief isn't that brilliant have you heard that before no it's fantastic isn't that incredible incredible technically brilliant but also the reversal reversal is so, it's so deeply satisfying as well because you're mounting a sense of outrage as you read it. Yes. And then it completely, I mean, it's...

Perfectly constructive. I really, it really blew us away. You know, we've been reading what is a very accomplished, funny, enjoyable book, and then he just throws that down. And given the various events that have happened in the incredible year of 2016, one that we're all enjoying, let's not forget there's still nearly six weeks to go. Who knows what could happen? It's so great.

William Trevor this week as well. William Trevor. So it's called You Took the Last Bus Home, The Poems of Brian Bilston. I can't imagine it wouldn't be a much-welcomed Christmas present, wouldn't you say, John? Well, it'd be churlish of me. But, yes, I mean, he's so creative and so creative on the page.

He's got a brilliant thing he does with Excel spreadsheets, manages to find poetry in an Excel spreadsheet. What I love about him actually is his ability to go from the kind of the silly, which is like the first poem is, you know, the catching the bus, to something like refugees, which is actually really, I mean, it's truly affecting and it expands again that sense of what poetry can do, which I think if I was teaching poetry to a screen-based generation of young kids, Brian Bilston would be a brilliant place to start because he just gives you that sense that words can do things that nothing else can.

There's a really brilliant poem here called Life is an Inspirational Quote. Do you know that one? a really brilliant poem here called life is an inspirational quote you know that one every day is a second chance and each day a festering boil to lance paint the sky and make it yours i'll add this fun task to my long list of chores imagination is more important than knowledge yeah it helps me pretend i made it through college. And so on and so forth. When he writes his poems on Twitter,

they're obviously within the restrictions of the form. Or else he... One of two, one of three. Or else he does a little screenshot. Are these new, or are these collected from... I think these are collected

from Twitter and some new poems as well, right? There's some new stuff as well. I mean, it's a surprisingly, I was amazed, it's a surprisingly chunky book. And only £12.99, tremendously good value.

Thank you for the money for those Christmas, that tricky last minute Christmas buy. I've actually been reading another book this week, which is the Costa First novel shortlisted My Name is Leon by the author Kev Deval. It's something I never, never,

the first time I've ever done that on this podcast, but I was reading it last week. And I can say, I'm going to look at you while I say this, it's absolutely brilliant. It is absolutely brilliant, right? I heard you talk about it in the summer, and there were a couple of things I wanted to mention about it. The first thing is, no spoilers,

but there is a scene that takes place in this book during the Notting Hill... Riots. Yeah, riots. In what year? 1981. In 1981, which reminded me, and anyone who listens to this podcast regularly

or knows my work will know, I wouldn't say this lightly. It totally reminded me of Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes, which is my favourite book. Oh, wow. Which has a scene in the Notting Hill race riots of the late 1950s. Okay. And just on the level of being able to read different approaches

to a similar scene, you did great. And you don't even know the book. No, I don't. No idea. So that's the first thing. The second thing was, I know when I saw you talking in the summer, you were talking about social workers. Yes.

And one of the things that My Name is Leon does so brilliantly is deal with social workers as though they were human beings. Yes, absolutely. Could you say, was that something you really wanted to do in the book? What I wanted to do in the book was to be fair and to be true. I mean, that was my overriding consideration when I wrote the book, that I wanted this to be not a book about blame. It's so easy to blame lots of people in the book because there's a crap mum, there's an alcoholic father, there's a really awful foster carer,

and there are some dodgy social workers. When I say dodgy, from a 10-year-old boy's point of view, because they've taken him away from his mother that's no spoiler i wanted to be i mean i've worked with social workers for many many years and i've seen these people up against the cold face in the most difficult circumstances having to remove children having to go and to the most terrible circumstances and remove children out of violent houses, drug dens and so forth, doing their best. And what we hear from social work, what we hear from the press and what we hear about social workers is how bad they are

because they're in the press when things go wrong, when they fail to act on a child and that child's killed or whatever. 99.999% of the time they're doing fantastic work under the most difficult circumstances and I wanted that to be true in the book and for the adults to see in the book of course from a nine-year-old boy's point of view you're keeping me from my mom so I don't like you but actually the adults can read through that and say, what's the choice here? What is the choice that social workers have? I just thought it was so, in a way it's a real indictment of,

you know, we want these children to be looked after as best they can while doing it for as little money as possible and demonising the people who do it. Yes. You know, and your book just gives them such dignity and makes it clear it's such a tough thing to have to deal with, a situation that shouldn't even be happening, right? Quite, exactly.

They're not there because things are great. Because when things are great in your life, you'll never see a social worker. It's when things start to break down, you're getting these people coming into your most private, intimate life and making a judgment and sometimes taking your children or putting your grandmother in a care home or whatever it is. They're coming in and doing the nasties from generally speaking people's points of view. And certainly from the press point of view, media point of view, that's what we see of them. Them coming in and doing the nasty.

We never see when they come in, they do great, great things. And also, if you have an interest, as I do, in the confectionery of the early 1980s. Of course, yes. Kit has that covered as well. Absolutely. Did you have to research that? I did, actually. I had to eat quite a few Curly Whirlies, Rolos, which aren't made anymore,

actually. Rolos aren't made anymore. Rolos aren't made anymore? They're not made anymore. The last Rolo. It's gone. But I've lost two fillings to Curly Whirlies in the name of research. I did go to the website of Roundtree. I feel another podcast is highly bursting out. And I ate quite a bit, yeah, and it was lovely.

They're only 10 pence. I had to find the melting point, actually. You know, gripped in a little boy's hand, what is the melting point of the curly world? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Found it, found it. Brilliant. So when did you, to go back to So Long, See You Tomorrow, then, when did you find this book?

When did you first encounter it? I think I read it in the 90s. I don't know, mid-90s. I can't remember. It would have... I mean, I picked everything on what it looked like. I mean, you know, I never... I didn't have any reference.

I had... It's just like a bottle of wine to me. You know, I literally go for the label. And I just saw it and thought, I don't know this. I haven't heard this. And the edition that I have here, which is the one published by Harville, published by John Mitchinson, in fact. Yes.

So he made the decision to make this book look like this, which is why you picked it up. Absolutely. Amazing. Because it's beautiful and spare. And it also is a perfect, that cover is a perfect reflection of what's inside to me. Obviously, you don't know that before you've read it,

but it's perfect. Just the look of the book. Can I, shall I read the blurb on the back? I think we should, we should definitely talk a little. I think we should get straight into Maxwell because there's so much.

Let's do, let's start with a blurb. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what. My reading this week, Andy, has been mostly William Maxwell. That's it. So I'm just,

I'm afraid I'm just folding my after. I mean, it's much more interesting to hear. You've had a lot to deal with. Well, it's been great, I mean, on one level. Yeah, yeah. And just I've started My Name is Leon, and I saw it talk at the Penguin Sales Conference earlier this year and was just so struck by the utter confidence

and clarity with which you talked and the fact that you were prepared, which it sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but actually novels about social workers, novels about the subjects that are still tragically rare. So rare, absolutely. And it's sort of madness if you think about the culture that we live in and what fiction can do. I mean, you're in a tiny little potted account.

The thing that Andy and I bang out all the time, the transforming quality of fiction, that it can change the way you think about it and enlarge your sympathy and empathy for other people and also get you, I mean, Maxwell we'll come on to, is a really good example of an author that can do that for you. So I'm going to read this blurb in a minute and I'm looking forward to reading it because I reckon it was written by John Mitchinson. It probably almost certainly was. Great. OK.

We'll come on to that. But I was wondering, could you just read the first few paragraphs or two paragraphs of So Long, See You Tomorrow? Yep. Chapter one, See You Tomorrow. Yep. Chapter one, a pistol shot. The gravel pit was about a mile east of town and the size of a small lake and so deep that boys under 16 were forbidden by their parents to swim there. I knew it only by hearsay. It had no bottom, people said,

and because I was very much interested in the idea that if you dug a hole straight down anywhere and kept on digging, it would come out in China, I took this to be a literal statement of fact. One winter morning, shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot, or, they agreed, heard what sounded like a pistol shot or they agreed it could have been a car backfiring within a few seconds it had grown light no one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it and they didn't see anyone walking on the road the sound was not a car backfiring a tenant farmer named lloyd wilson had just been shot and killed. And what they heard was the gun that killed him. It's so good, isn't it?

I mean, it's so special. I've got a quote from Maxwell here about the beginning of the book. This is from his Paris Review interview. Have you got it? We've both been. Oh, yeah, it's an amazing interview. He says, originally the first sentence of So Long, See You Tomorrow was, very few families escape disasters of one kind or another.

When the New Yorker bought it, the editors were troubled by the fact that for the first 20 pages, it read like reminiscence. A good many readers don't enjoy that sort of thing. And over the years, the New Yorker had been blamed for publishing too much of it. Very dry, Maxwell, isn't it unbelievable actually if writers don't put down what they remember all sorts of beautiful and moving experiences simply go down the drain forever in any case the New Yorker was afraid that readers seeing also that it was very long would stop reading

before they discovered that it was really about a murder so i moved things around a bit at the beginning because that phrase does appear yeah the phrase that he was going to start with that does appear in the book wherever you're going you better believe american express will be right there with you heading for adventure we'll help you breeze through security meeting friends a away? You can use your travel credit. Squeezing every drop out of the last day? How about a 4 p.m. late checkout? You just need a nice place to settle in? Enjoy your room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. So he, but he, we should say that William Maxwell,

the fact that you need to know about William Maxwell is not merely that he was a novelist. He wrote half a dozen novels we're going to talk about in a minute. He was also the fiction editor at the New Yorker magazine. For 40 years. For 40 years in an era of the great, where he was the editor of. His list of authors, do you want, I mean. Well, we'll come

on to it but but what the man the person that we're talking about today is a craftsman in the best possible sense craftsman of stories sentences both those things um and talk about sentences as well Yeah So let me just read the blurb then on the back of this copy of So Long See You Tomorrow So you John Mitchinson wrote this I got the quote from Richard Ford as well Did you? Do you want me to read that as well?

Okay so what No don't read it It's alright says Richard Ford Do you want me to read that as well? Okay, so what? No, don't read it. Well, you can if you want. It's all right, says Richard Ford. No, he doesn't. He says something more in-depth than that. So Ford says,

For writers of my generation, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow is the book that made us all think we needed to write a short novel, and magically, since Mr. Maxwell's book is so magically deaf but being profound, that we could do it. But my God, what a model to take on. Easier to bottle the wind.

It possesses that daunting quality impossible to emulate. It makes greatness seem simple. Wow. That's a pretty good quote, isn't it? That's what I call a puff quote. Yeah. And then you wrote. Right. You following Richard Fulke. Follow that And then you wrote. Right. You following Richard Full.

Follow that. Here he comes. Two families deep in rural Illinois had shared much and then too much with jealousy leading finally to sudden death. A tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers, the narrator whose mother died young, and Cletus Smith, a troubled farm boy, is shattered. It is Cletus's father who has committed the narrator, whose mother died young, and Cletus Smith, a troubled farm boy, is shattered. It is Cletus's father who has committed the murder,

and now the son retreats wholly from public view and the stares of the morbidly fascinated. The narrator never exchanges another word with Cletus, but many years later he sees him in the bustling corridor of a Chicago high school. They pass without a word. Fifty years on, still haunted by guilt that he has failed in a fundamental act of compassion and friendship, the narrator tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he vividly conjures up two families, two failed marriages, and the farm tragedy that led Clarence Smith to murder his

neighbor. Wow. Again, you know, I receive no payment for saying this, but that's really good. Very good. That's really good. I thank you. Well, it does address one of the things you have to address with this book is there's no point in spoiler alerts because you already know within the first few pages you know that somebody's been killed

and you know who the murderer is so that's it's that's one of the things I love most about the book I think is that it's it it is a it is a mystery it is a kind of a thriller but it's it's attempting to put together the to unpack the reasons that the motives the emotions that fed into this kind of act I should just add I've got another little quote here, which is very relevant to what you were just saying, what we were just talking about, where the Paris Review interviewer says, how do you know when it's time to write another novel? Is it some sort of instinctual act, like the impulse that impels birds to migrate? And Maxwell says, I expect to live

forever, and therefore I never get worried about what I ought to be writing or about anything undone. In the case of So Long, See You Tomorrow, I was sitting at my desk and something made me think of that boy I had failed to speak to. And thinking of him, I winced. And I saw myself wincing and I thought, that's very odd. Indeed, after all these years, you should have a response so acute maybe that's worth investigating and that's and so that's what i set out to do now having read more maxwell in the last month or so i had read this before i think that i realized kit and i we were saying weren't we

that he what does he do he sort of he's constantly circling around yeah he worries at this thing he picks it it's like a scab that he it's it's barely healed and he keeps picking it up and seeing is the is the wound still there yes the wound is still there but like at decade-long intervals right that that that the different novels often return to very thinly veiled autobiography and the stories as well, the things that had happened. I mean, John, you know about this, things that happened to him in his childhood. Well, I think maybe we should do this.

Should we do the biography, give everybody a bit more? He was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. It's important to say that Lincoln, Illinois is four-fifths of his output of stories. He wrote lots of stories. He wrote six novels. He wrote a memoir. He wrote a couple of children's books. He's published a couple of correspondences.

Frank O'Connor, wonderfully titled. My favourite title of any book ever, The Happiness of Getting It Down Right, which is both as a writer and as an editor. His mother died in 1918 when he was 10 years old, which is the key, the absolute key to Maxwell's life. To some extent, his work is always going to be about his childhood. And this book, the last novel, is certainly about that. He moves to Chicago.

I'll come on a little bit to talk more about his mother's death. He moves to Chicago, he goes to the University of Illinois, he goes to Harvard, ends up teaching creative writing, and then finds himself at the New Yorker in 1936. He's published one novel at that point, Right Centre of Heaven. At the New Yorker, he becomes fiction editor for 40 years. Shall I just give you some of the names here? So William Maxwell was variously, at various points,

the editor of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Sylvia Townsend Warner, JD Salinger, John Cheever, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank O'Connor, Mavis Gallant,

Shirley Hazard, of course, Eudora Welty, and so on and so forth. Eudora Welty described him as, she said, if you're a writer of fiction, he was HQ, he was headquarters. So Maxwell was kind of, had this, Salinger, I didn't know this until I started to research,

Salinger drove out to the Maxwell's country home and read to them over the course of one long afternoon the entire first manuscript of Catcher in the Rye. That is how highly in regard Maxwell was held as an editor. And, I mean, it's very, very hard to find anything that, you know, he was a kind of one of those human beings. He lived a, maybe I'll say a little bit. He was very lonely.

I mean, he had a very lonely... And I think after his mother died, he suffered absolutely terribly. And you can feel the suffering for that is in the book. And he married late. He married Emily, or Emmy, as he was referred to as, the most beautiful woman he'd ever met.

And they had two daughters. His first daughter was born when he was 46. So he had the happy family life. And again, the subject, the great subject of Maxwell's fiction is family, home. He once said he was trying to write a natural history of home. And I think it's one of the things we've kind of always got to talk about with Maxwell is why is he not better known? To somebody who was, you know, he gets this reputation of being a writer's writer,

and he is that for sure. But he is also, I think he is an amazing storyteller. I must, before we move off this, I must add the... Have you got that quote, John, about sentences? Yes, I've got that quote. About sentences in The New Yorker. Yeah. So all those writers we were just talking about,

every writer requires, like writers do, requires different editorial input. So Salinger wants to read to Maxwell. Elizabeth Taylor, there's letters between Elizabeth Taylor and Maxwell, which are wonderful in terms of their, he was incredibly nurturing to her. But equally he's,

he's asked about, um, Chiva, what did you do for Chiva? You know that quote? He says, I don't know what service I provided for Chiva except to be delighted with his work.

He also had this thing is he was, he learnt very early on that editing was, it was, you know, he did as little as possible. I think when he, there's a wonderful story, which you've probably got as well, where one of his predecessors, I think it's probably, it was probably Harold Ross himself, you know, said, did you teach at any point, Maxwell? You know, and of course, he had taught creative writing. He said, the point is not, the point as an editor is not to teach other people how to write.

And it's one of those, one of the reasons I love the happiness of getting it down right, you know, working as a publisher. It's just, he writes really long, detailed letters to Frank O'Connor and he gets quite short letters back. But if you wanted how to help a writer be better, which is all you really want to do as an editor, there is no one. It's the best thing in the world I've ever read in that regard. It's just giving the advice.

But also it's that deep kind of trust. And he was, because he was three days a week at the New Yorker, four days a week. I mean, all he cared about in the end was writing. I mean, he lived it. It was his whole life. He went to bed famously at 10 o'clock every night. If you were out at a dinner party with Maxwell,

he'd leave at 9.45 so he could get up at six and be fresh in the morning to write. He says here, I'm going to give you this little quote, you know, what do all those writers have in common, those New York writers? He says, something that's characteristic of the writers who appear in The New Yorker is that the sentence is the unit by which the story advances, not the paragraph.

And the individual sentence, therefore, carries a great deal of weight and tends to be carefully constructed with no loose ends. And style becomes very important. Now, that is utterly brilliant, but is also, of course, completely applicable to this book, To So Long, See You Tomorrow. But often when I was reading it, Kit, I don't know if you found this, that you seem to cover vast distances in a single paragraph in terms of emotional distance. What you were being told about a character's emotional development had been thoroughly concentrated down into the correct number of sentences and then you moved on and I actually several times I had to

stop go back reread because I felt I was reading too fast definitely yes so much meat in there one of the um phrase uh paragraphs in here that i read maybe three times i've read the book a long time ago read reread it for this the paragraph where he talks about his father remarrying and he said he once saw a snake trying to swallow a frog and it was so repulsive and so terrible and he said that's what was happening and i I read it and I thought, it's grotesque. It's a grotesque image. And for him, that's what was happening. And I thought, oh, that's ugly and it's horrible. And as a boy, you know, he must have been frightened. I was frightened of that image as an adult. That paragraph, I kept thinking I just can't read on because that's awful. And I've got a little glimpse of what it was for him to see his place in that family usurped. That's how he felt about his father being remarried,

that he'd lost his tenuous position with his father. Yeah. He also strikes a really good example. You know the thing we were talking about, or there was the quote from him about how he was sitting at his desk and he thought about this event that had happened 50 years earlier. One gets the impression from this book and from the fact that he returns to the same events to describe them

from different perspectives that he's acutely aware of a phrase or an image that he may have seen or he may have heard somebody say, like the phrase, so long, see you tomorrow, in fact, that he then lodges in his head for reasons he can't understand, and the writing becomes a way of exploring why that should be yes you know and you were saying something about the phrase so long see you tomorrow being almost nothing right and yet it is everything is in it it's everything it's that it's that whole story within four words that it's it is about is about today and the future.

And it's also about something lost within that phrase because it's the end of a relationship. When he says that, even though he doesn't know it at the time, it's the end of a relationship and something that's going to, that moment is going to stay with him because it's the last communication he had. Shall I just read that passage in the book? Because you've got basically these two stories. They've got Cletus' story where his family,

something terrible is happening in his family. You know, his dad is obviously consorting with the neighbour's wife. You can feel that he's been separated. And then the narrator, who is kind of Maxwell, is obviously dealing with his mother's death. So this is the paragraph. When I was a child, I told my mother everything. After she died, I learned that it was better to keep some things to myself.

My father represented authority, which meant to me that he could not also represent understanding. And because there was an element of cruelty in my older brother's teasing, as of course there is in all teasing, I didn't trust him, although I perfectly well could have, about larger matters. Anyway, I didn't tell Cletus about my shipwreck as we sat looking down on the whole neighbourhood,

and he didn't tell me about his. When the look of the sky informed us that it was getting along towards suppertime, we climbed down and said, so long, and see you tomorrow, and went our separate ways in the dusk. And one evening, this casual parting turned out to be for the last time. We were separated by that pistol shot.

It's just so beautiful. You know what, it's really beautiful. It's so beautiful you know what it's really beautiful it's so beautiful it moves the story on but it's also that thing being able to dip down into into the what the two conflicting emotions coming together it's it it is it is a rare thing isn't it to have a book i think it does that sort of it does actually get better if you read it. Yes, it does. It can bear rereading. Well, I really found, like I say, I think this is the second time that I've read it and I read a couple

of other Maxwell's novels at John's suggestion. John, your favourite is Time Will Darken It, isn't it? I have to say yeah, it was, but I go back to see, you know, reading it was, but I'm going back to see. The thing is, reading it 20 years after I published it and being older,

I don't think I ever underestimated it, but I think once you've got more life under your belt, this book becomes more remarkable. In a way, what Ford said, because it's so compressed. I suppose having more appreciation, perhaps, of the technical difficulty of trying to compress a lifetime. And it's like that thing is, you know, from funny, they came like swallows in 1937, right at the beginning of his career, to the narrator.

I mean, he's still dealing with this. Still wrestling with this. Well, I found, I have to say, I read They Came Like Swallows, which I'd never read before. And that totally blew me away. I mean, I love So Long, See You Tomorrow, but They Came Like Swallows, precisely because I just read So Long, See You Tomorrow, but they came like swallows precisely because I just read So Long See You Tomorrow to then go back 40 years and see a younger man's account of some of the same events from three different perspectives, that of him, his brother and his father. I read it and thought, why isn't this? This is an incredible to think this was written in 1937 as well it's so

um modern actually you know what's so interesting kit what you were saying about so long see you tomorrow is you would read it and say it seems elegant from any time well you go back 40 years he's writing something that actually feels could have been written in the last 20 years it's extraordinary and also picking up on a point you just said, technically, and I, you know, I did a creative writing master's and also I teach on them. And one of the things you say over and over in creative writing, stick to the point of view, stick to a point of view.

So long see you tomorrow, it's probably got 20 points of view. It's got a dog, aren't you? Yeah, the dog. The housekeeper. The housekeeper's, you know, neighbours, what they think of the housekeeper. The barber, obviously the main players. Everyone's got a point of view and nothing is lost with that.

So there's that, there's the technical facility. I'd also like to, the thing that I was most, I found most extraordinary in this book, and which I'd like to ask you both about, is there's a point. I assume it was near the end of the serialization. It was serialized in two parts in The New Yorker. And this is on page 56. He does a very audacious thing.

So he's been talking about the events, and we are led to assume that we've been reading memoir or highly autobiographical fiction. He says, I don't know where he is. It isn't at all likely that we will run into each other somewhere or that we would recognize each other if we did. He could even be dead. Except through the intervention of chance, the one possibility of my making some connection with him seems to lie not in the present but in the past, in my trying to reconstruct the testimony

that he was never called upon to give. The unsupported word of a witness who was not present except in imagination would not be acceptable in a court of law, but, as it has been demonstrated over and over, the sworn testimony of the witness who was present is not trustworthy either. 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 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's not the ace 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. So good. Now, I think that is absolutely extraordinary, because what he's doing in his own quiet way is saying to you, here you go. You thought you were reading a novel, maybe. You weren't. I'm about to write a novel. And what I found so interesting in this book is in a sense it's a

novel within a novel or a novel within a memoir I thought it was going to be I don't know what I thought it was going to be the first time I read it I think I just thought it was going to be a story about Illinois or something but the fact that it's actually like all my favorite books it's a book about books it's a book about writing and a book about what you need to do when you write to create a mixture between reminiscence yes and lying yes in a greater cause right he says that in the book he says you know we all lie all the time as soon as you go back great and try and say this is what happened you're lying because It's the meeting with, you know, he has this image of the house that's being constructed.

It's all about houses for Maxwell. I mean, one of the things about his childhood, when his mother dies, he moves to the house that he grew up in. It's called the Wunderkammer, the Wunderkammer, the house of wonders. And he loses all that. And then he's moved to another house where nothing is in the right place. It's just that maybe it's just that great little thing

that he said about his mother which is really important because it is the spirit that when she died, the shine went out of everything and stayed out for a long, long while. I couldn't really manage without her, so I managed this in the realm of the unconscious to incorporate her personality into my own I have friends who think they are fond of me but really they are fond of my mother oh that's why I say I find myself I'm in the very few books that make me

that the precision with which he dissects also the great thing about Maxwell, which for me is a great thing, he doesn't say it's all right. He doesn't say it's all right. He does not say that you will get better. He does not say that. Be positive. Be cheerful. It'll all be set out well. No, he says some things happen that are so terrible

that we never recover. And the end where, at the end of this book, where he says he went to his therapist and he says, I couldn't bear it. And he leaves the therapist's office and we're down the street crying. My brother could. I couldn't.

Other people could have. I couldn't. It's one of the great, for me, it's one of the great moments in modern medicine. But I do like the way that he said that New York is one of the very few cities where you can just walk down the road crying. Crying, and it's okay.

But it reminds me, actually, there's a more recent novel that was published a couple of years ago called All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Taves, a Canadian writer called Miriam Taves. Which is, and this book is, I mean, they're written in a very different way, but they are, Maxwell is writing something which has come to be known as, it seems to me, auto fiction. It's this thing where you use memoir and you change what you want to try and reach a greater truth. And in Miriam Tave's book, it's a novel about someone

whose sister has suffered from long-term depression and who is constantly trying to do away with herself and succeeds. And it turns out that Miriam Taves had very similar familial circumstances to deal with. The brilliance of the book, as with the brilliance of the book as is the brilliance of maxwell that john was just talking about and this sounds loveyish but it is what i mean is it's bravery yes to confront the raw bedrock the emotional trauma and find the strength to go back to your desk day after day after day to turn it into something else so it isn't you just writing and then this happened to me and I felt

sad it's transmuting it into this other thing I'm so full of admiration for people who can do that it's a lovely line I think from that interview and uh where he says as i get older they ask him you know what have you learned as i get older i put more trust in what happened which has a profound meaning if you can get at it but what you invent is important too flober said that whatever you invent is true even though you may not understand what the truth of it is. Wow. Wow. Totally profound.

Isn't that, that's, you know, people say, why fiction? Why, because actually, and I love the idea that the fiction is, what you invent is true, but you just don't know. Yes. And that's the great thing. It's for other people in a way to complete that. Well, it does help you um reading things like this about confronting tiny moments where you've done something wrong you know you tiny moments i mean he's confronting walking past a guy not saying anything we've all done tiny tiny things that no one else knows about

but we feel shit about yeah and he's confronting that and saying in this tiny moment something shifted for me and i'm going to go back and i'm going to try and put it right by writing about him okay have you got that bit to read this is again what you're talking about is that so long see you tomorrow thing that thing of one minute you're here and the next you're not one minute you're one thing and then yes you're not yes you have a friendship in a phrase the friendship is ended and you only know far long after the event that that was it have you got a bit there sure the the bit i want to read is the way that maxwell deconstructs what it is to be who we are and talking about cl Cletus, he says about boys, he's speaking about 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 wash day, 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 keep him busy from time to time until they sit down for supper. Take away the early morning mist, the sound of crows quarrelling 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 back copy of Tom Swift and his flying machine. Take that away too while you're 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 to 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.

It's beyond genius. It's a deconstruction of a life. I know, I've got to say, we're all welling up here. That actually is incredible. That's an incredible bit of writing. But the knowledge is, the thing that he does that's so brilliant is how can i put this he the prose is often very quiet yes very straightforward you know that will have been preceded by something far easier to handle and then he suddenly makes these gear changes into to these tiny set pieces. Yes. As if to say, I have found a riff. Yes.

I am going to build on it. Yes. Polish it, make it perfect. I love it. Just a tiny sentence, just exactly that gear change. So you've got Clarence in court, which is hopeless. He can't make any sense of it, and he's adjudged to be cruel, and that's why the wife has left him.

And then there's this paragraph that said, nobody said in court that Clarence Smith was pierced to the heart by his wife's failure to love him and it wouldn't have made any difference if they had. I know. God. Because that's not the question. That's not the court case.

So, John, you were saying something about, I just want to, before we run out of time. So you knew Maxwell at the end of his life and his wife, Emily. Yeah. Emily. And I met them. I went and had tea with them in their wonderful apartment.

They died, didn't they, within days of one another. So I wanted to read. We did Shirley Hazard's The Great Fire on Backlisted a while ago. And of course, Shirley Hazard knew William Maxwell very well, was one of his writers at the New Yorker. I just want to read, there's a very touching essay by her in the collection called We need silence to find out what we think about maxwell i just want to read you this john you were saying that read you know when it came down to it maxwell lived for books and for reading and shirley hazard says in his last extraordinary year of life while emily maxwell was slowly dying with a grace, a philosophy, and I would say a

beauty that remains indescribable, Bill Maxwell re-read War and Peace. His solace and pleasure in the book were an event in those rooms. He said, it is so comforting. We rejoiced together over certain scenes, not discussing or dissecting them, but paying simply the tribute of our delight. He would speak of these episodes, shedding his silent tears, not in grief, but for the grandeur of common humanity. Bill was steadily eating less, and when the book became too heavy for him to hold, a friend came each afternoon and read it for him. Five days before Emmy's death, the Maxwells, in wheelchairs, went to the Chardin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Two days before Emmy's death and ten days before his own, Bill finished reading Tolstoy's novel. The events encompassed in that last month

of their lives, the tenderness quietly exchanged among the friends who visited them were entirely consonant with the qualities of that departing pair, unforgettable, unforgotten. Phil Maxwell said that he didn't fear death, that he would miss reading novels. Oh, gosh. We're going to leave you weeping on this one. There's a lovely other art of Emmy died, this week, his last week. He said, I feel like

the locusts who leave their skin behind and fly up the trees. He has. There are some moving deaths. This is one that very much reminds me of Blake dying. He said that all of the stuff he learned in Sunday school was true. It was very surprising

to him. The last thing he was expecting. He said that his understanding was something wonderful. Life is not just pointless, not just about abandonment. Something lifts you up, he said. He asked the people around him to sing, including the daughter he had discouraged from an opera career. Singing is the only thing worth doing, he told her. Just love that idea it's like Blake

Blake's wife dying saying Blake died saying do you know what he has written on his gravestone the work is the message oh wow fantastic I'd also like to say just quickly

I also read those novels. I also read some of the short stories, and we have a little running joke on that I'm backlisted about. Don't read the novels. Read the stories. Read the journals. The stories, I have to say, are absolutely remarkable. You know, he didn't write a novel between 1961, I think that's right, which is The Chateau,ateau is it yes the Chateau in 1961 and then

this book in 1979 1980 but he wrote a story called Over by the River do you know that story of course so it's published in 1974 it's 40 pages long it took him 10 years to write. So it's like the missing novel, but it's absolutely incredible. But I was saying to Kit, if you asked me to tell you what it was about, beyond me saying to you, well, it's about a family in Manhattan, I would struggle, and yet it felt like pure writing. Do you understand what I mean? And yet it felt like pure writing. Yes.

Do you understand what I mean? Just as though he had found this collection of moments and of impressions and had woven them together to create a decade's worth of life in 40 pages. It's totally extraordinary. And several people recommended me other. Lee Randall recommended that I read a story called The Thistles in Sweden. It's a beautiful story. That's an amazing, amazing story. So this has been one of those back lists.

They're, of course, listeners. They're always fun. But the pleasure of choosing one book and then other things coming out of that book with this particular episode. Well, he was so graceful. That was the thing. It was probably my most, my happiest literary memory ever was meeting him and his wife.

They were so thrilled that the book was being published, that all his books were being, because we were doing the whole backlist. He had a great, obviously, great love of Europe and English publishing. And it was, the impeccable manners. And it was, you know, we had tea together and we talked. And I corresponded a little after he died in 2000.

But if you're interested in writing, if you're interested in literature, if you're interested in story, if you're interested in the nuts and bolts, he's great. But there's something about So Long, See You Tomorrow tomorrow there's something about that life with a the memory that the reality of his mother's death that he spends his whole life dealing with he does at one point so i think i this is it with my mother by the way i don't i don't think sure i think i've done this one today also you were going to mention what you ancestors which is not ancestors which you didn't manage to bring back into print did you no it's the one that we didn't do ancestors which i don't know where i put it it was it's this is

family history about that and it's it's it's just remarkable i mean it's remarkable if you could imagine a book of of family history goes going back to his scottish relatives but moving it's also a dialogue with living relatives and when was that published that was published in the 1977 i think okay so that's like the book that he's writing in the gap between the novels. Yeah, and he's writing stories, endlessly writing stories. I would also recommend his essays on other writers, which are Outermost Dream. Which is called?

The Outermost Dream, which is published by Graywolf. Outermost Dream, yeah. And also, everybody, often on Backlister, we try and lob you books that aren't in print or are difficult to come by. You could walk into a bookshop, I like to think, and pick up a copy of So Long, See You Tomorrow. Let's hope.

And three or four hours later, you'll have read it and you'll be enriched for doing so, right? Unfortunately, we're going to have to stop, much as I'd love to talk about Backstop forever. Thanks to Kit, and particularly for reading such beautiful passages from the book. To our producer, Matt Hall, once again, and thanks to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, at BacklistedPod, BacklistedPod on, what is it, facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod,

and on the page on the Unbound site, which is unbound.com forward slash backlisted. If you use iTunes to listen to Backlisted, we'd be pathetically grateful if you could rate us or even just leave us a review. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. So long. See you next time.