[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 14 (Thursday, February 1, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S863-S864]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         AUTHOR WILLIAM MAXWELL HONORED WITH PEN-MALAMUD AWARD

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, just over a half century ago, as 
a young sailor, Harry Hall, also in the Navy at that time, sent me a 
copy of ``The Folded Leaf,'' a novel by William Maxwell. It may have 
been the first novel I ever read seriously, or at least the first that 
seemed seriously addressed to my own experience as a young man. 
Whatever, it has remained with me ever since, not least the lines from 
Tennyson,

       Lo! In the middle of the wood,
       The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud

  I am happy to report that William Maxwell has just received the PEN-
Malamud Award. It was given to him at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a 
mere two blocks from the Capitol, and I know the Senate would wish to 
join in congratulations.
  William Maxwell spent nearly 40 years as a staff writer and fiction 
editor at the New Yorker. ``Talk of the Town'' celebrated his award. 
Mr. President, I ask that this article be printed in the Record 
following my remarks.
  The article follows:

         [From the New Yorker, Dec. 25, 1995 and Jan. 1, 1996]

                            Maxwell's Smarts

       ``The lights are so bright I can't see your faces,'' 
     William Maxwell said, stepping up to the podium at the Folger 
     Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C. ``Being here makes 
     me think of ghosts,'' he went on. ``I had a dear friend who 
     spent many days and weeks here, researching to write a book 
     on Shakespeare. And I had another who worked in the library 
     for a time. I hope they are both present tonight.'' He was 
     standing on the stage of the Folger theatre, an antique-
     feeling space with high galleries, square columns, and a 
     wood-and-plaster Elizabethan stage house, all of which give 
     it a ponderous elegance. The occasion was the eighth annual 
     PEN/Malamud Award reading, and Maxwell was being honored, 
     along with Stuart Dybek, for excellence in the practice of 
     the short story. A large, warmly appreciative audience was 
     present, including Maxwell's wife, Emily; members of Bernard 
     Malamud's family, and the writers Charles Baxter, Nicholas 
     Delbanco, Alan Cheuse, Maxine Clair, Michael Collier, 
     Patricia Browning Griffith, Howard Norman, Susan Richards 
     Shreve, William Warner, and Mary Helen Washington.
       A few minutes earlier, Dybek had spoken of how privileged 
     he felt to be on the same stage with William Maxwell. He then 
     honored the elder writer in the best way one writer can honor 
     another: by being terribly good. He read a densely lyrical 
     and dramatic story called ``We Didn't.'' It charmed the house 
     and made everyone glad of the short story, this superior form 
     of entertainment.
       And now Maxwell was standing on the podium. Well into his 
     eighties, with the slightest hesitation in his movements, he 
     still seemed wonderfully calm, a man spending a little time 
     with friends. He wore a dark suit and looked very trim; 
     his dark eyes were animated with the same humor and 
     interest one finds in his stories. As a staff writer and 
     fiction editor at The New Yorker for nearly forty years, 
     Maxwell worked with such writers as John Cheever, Eudora 
     Welty, and Mavis Gallant. Meanwhile, he wrote stories and 
     novels that are as good as or better than those of just 
     about anyone else: ``Over by the River,'' for instance, 
     and the short novel ``So Long, See You Tomorrow,'' which 
     is set in his native Illinois and, like so much of his 
     work, evokes the simple grandeur of life in a small 
     Midwestern community in the recent past.
       Now, opening the bound galleys of his recently published 
     collected stories, ``All the Days and Nights,'' Maxwell 
     looked into the brightness again and said, ``I'm going to 
     read a story called `The French Scarecrow.' '' There was a 
     murmur of recognition from the crowd. Very gracefully and 
     somehow confidingly, he began to read. He read softly, 
     pausing--without seeming to monitor the sound--for the 
     laughs. His precise, elegant, and quietly humorous study of 
     unease was a perfect complement of the electricity of the 
     Dybek story.
       When Maxwell finished and the applause died down, Janna 
     Malamud Smith was introduced. In the name of her father, she 
     presented the award to both writers, and then everyone 
     adjourned to the Great Hall for wine and finger food. The 
     wine tasted as though it had been aged in a stone jar, but 
     nobody seemed to mind. Maxwell and Dybek signed their books 
     and answered questions 

[[Page S864]]
     amid a general feeling of well-being and affection. If the ghosts of 
     Maxwell's friends were somewhere in the sculptured brown 
     lines of the Folger theatre and Great Hall, then they must 
     certainly have been travelling in the company of Bernard 
     Malamud, for the spirit of that marvelous writer of stories 
     was invoked by every facet of the evening.

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