[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 101 (Tuesday, September 5, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7998-S7999]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            WILLIAM MAXWELL

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, William Maxwell has left us. As 
he once put it, an afternoon nap into eternity. Wilborn Hampton, in his 
wonderful obituary in The New York Times, ends with Bill wondering what 
he would do there where there was nothing to read!
  His list of books ends with the Autobiographies of William Butler 
Yeats. It would be appropriate to add Yeats' account of a contemporary: 
``He was blessed, and had the power to bless.''
  He was surely such to this senior Senator. I was a ragamuffin of a 
lad some fifty-sixty years ago. He suggested to me that I might one day 
write for The New Yorker. I took the compliment with as much credence 
as if he had said I might one day play for the Yankees. But then, many 
years later, I did write for The New Yorker. He had the power to bless.
  I ask that a copy of Wilborn Hampton's obituary from the August 1st 
edition of The New York Times be printed in the Record.

[[Page S7999]]

        [From The New York Times Obituaries, Tues. Aug. 1, 2000]

         William Maxwell, 91, Author and Legendary Editor, Dies

                          (By Wilborn Hampton)

       William Maxwell, a small-town boy from Illinois who edited 
     some of the century's literary lions in 40 years at The New 
     Yorker while also writing novels and short stories that 
     secured his own place in American letters, died yesterday at 
     his home in Manhattan. He was 91.
       John Updike, whose early stories for The New Yorker were 
     edited by Mr. Maxwell, said in an interview several years 
     ago: ``They don't make too many Bill Maxwells. A good editor 
     is one who encourages a writer to write his best, and that 
     was Bill.''
       ``A lot of nice touches in my stories belong to Bill 
     Maxwell,'' Mr. Updike said. ``And I've taken credit for them 
     all.''
       In addition to Mr. Updike, Mr. Maxwell, in his career as a 
     fiction editor at The New Yorker, worked with writers like 
     John Cheever, John O'Hara, J.D. Salinger, Shirley Hazzard, 
     Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, Harold 
     Brodkey, Mavis Gallant, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Frank 
     O'Connor.
       Polishing their manuscripts exerted an influence on his own 
     writing, which included six novels, three collections of 
     short stories, a memoir (``Ancestors,'' 1971), a volume of 
     essays and fantasies for children. ``I came, as a result of 
     being an editor, to look for whatever was unnecessary in my 
     own writing,'' he said in a 1995 interview. ``After 40 years, 
     what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath 
     of life.''
       William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was born in Lincoln, Ill., on 
     August 16, 1908, one of three sons of William Keepers 
     Maxwell, an insurance executive, and the former Eva Blossom 
     Blinn. When he was 10, his mother died in the influenza 
     epidemic of 1918-19, a shattering experience that he would 
     revisit in ``They Came Like Swallows'' (1937), his second 
     novel and the one that established him as a writer. His 14 
     years in Lincoln (sometimes called Draperville or Logan in 
     his books), would provide, as Mr. Maxwell later put it, 
     ``three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of 
     my writing life.''
       Lincoln was a postcard Midwestern town with tree-shaded 
     streets and a courthouse square where an annual carnival was 
     held and people paraded on patriotic holidays. In 1992 Mr. 
     Maxwell wrote a reminiscence (in ``Billy Dyer and Other 
     Stories'') of the ``many marvels'' of Lincoln:
       ``No house, inside or out, was like any other house, and 
     neither were the people who lived in them. Incandescent 
     carbon lamps, suspended high over the intersections, lighted 
     the way home. The streets were paved with brick, and elm 
     trees met over them to provide a canopy of shade. There were 
     hanging baskets of ferns and geraniums, sometimes with 
     American flags, suspended from porch ceilings. The big 
     beautiful white horses in the firehouse had to be exercised, 
     and so on my way to school now and then I got to see the fire 
     engine when nobody's house was on fire.''
       After Mr. Maxwell's mother died, he went to live with an 
     aunt and uncle in Bloomington, Ill., which, compared with 
     Lincoln, was a metropolis and ``where something was always 
     going on, even if it was only the cat having kittens.''
       From his earliest years, he loved reading. As David 
     Streitfeld put it in an article in The Washington Post, 
     ``Maxwell requires printed matter the way other people need 
     oxygen.'' Mr. Maxwell said ``Treasure Island'' was the first 
     work of literature he ever read. ``At the last page, I turned 
     back to the beginning,'' he said. ``I didn't stop until I had 
     read it five times. I've been that way ever since.''
       Mr. Maxwell's father eventually remarried and moved to 
     Chicago, taking his family with him. Mr. Maxwell earned a 
     bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and a 
     master's at Harvard and taught in Illinois for two years. As 
     a youth he wanted to be a poet, but realized early that he 
     did not have that gift and so started writing stories. He had 
     published one novel, ``Bright Center of Heaven'' (1934), and 
     had a second in his typewriter when he moved to New York with 
     the $200 advance and applied for a job at The New Yorker.
       There was a vacancy in the art department, and Mr. Maxwell 
     was hired at $35 a week to fill it. ``I sat in on meetings 
     and then told artists what changes were wanted,'' he said. He 
     eventually moved to the fiction department, where he worked 
     with Katharine White, with whom he formed a lifelong 
     friendship, though one that was always circumscribed by their 
     professional status. Long after both retired, they still 
     wrote letters that began, ``Dear Mrs. White,'' and ``Dear Mr. 
     Maxwell.''
       One day during World War II he interviewed a young woman 
     who had applied for a job as poetry editor at The New Yorker. 
     The magazine did not have a separate poetry editor in those 
     days, and Mr. Maxwell had been doubling in that capacity. 
     ``She was very attractive,'' he would succinctly explain 
     later, ``and I pursued the matter.''
       The woman did not get the job, but on May 17, 1945. Emily 
     Gilman Noyes and Mr. Maxwell were married. The couple had two 
     daughters, Kate Maxwell and Brookie Maxwell, both of whom 
     live in Manhattan. Mrs. Maxwell died on July 23, in 
     Manhattan. Besides his daughters, Mr. Maxwell is survived by 
     a grandson and a brother, Robert Blinn Maxwell, of Oxnard, 
     Calif.
       Mr. Maxwell's last book was ``All the Days and Nights,'' a 
     collection of stories of fables. In a radio interview he said 
     he began the book ``because my wife liked to have me tell her 
     stories when we were in bed in the dark before falling 
     asleep.''
       As an editor, Mr. Maxwell was known for his tact in dealing 
     with authors with reputations for being headstrong. He didn't 
     always succeed. Brendan Gill wrote in his memoir, ``Here at 
     The New Yorker,'' that Mr. Maxwell once took the train to 
     Ossining, N.Y., to tell John Cheever that the magazine was 
     rejecting one of his stories. Cheever became furious, not so 
     much at the rejection, but that his courtly editor felt it 
     necessary to come tell him in person.
       On another occasion, Mr. Maxwell again boarded a train, 
     this time to go read three new stories by John O'Hara in the 
     presence of the author. It was a command performance and he 
     was nervous. The first two stories he read were not 
     acceptable to The New Yorker, and Mr. Maxwell started reading 
     the third with trepidation. Fortunately, the third turned out 
     to be ``Imagine Kissing Pete,'' one of O'Hara's best.
       Some of Cheever's later stories caused consternation at The 
     New Yorker because of the erotic content. When William Shawn, 
     then the editor, objected to a reference to lust, ``I was 
     beside myself,'' Mr. Maxwell said, ``It seems very old-
     fashioned now, but then it was unacceptable, and there was 
     nothing I could do about it.''
       When John Updike has his own editorial battles at The New 
     Yorker, he said he always found an ally in Mr. Maxwell. 
     ``There was always a lot of fiddling, and a lot of the 
     fiddles came from Shawn. And Bill would assist me in ignoring 
     them.''
       Sometimes it was the editor who benefited from the advice 
     of the writter. Mr. Maxwell has been working for eight years 
     on a novel that was eventually titled ``The Chateau'' (1961), 
     which he has set in France rather than in the familiar 
     territory of the American Midwest. But it was not coming 
     together. He showed the manuscript to Frank O'Connor, who 
     read it and advised him that there were, in fact, two novels 
     there. ``My relief was immense,'' Mr. Maxwell said, ``because 
     it is a lot easier to make two novels into one than it is to 
     make one out of nothing whatever. So I went ahead and 
     finished the book.''
       The letters of Frank O'Connor and Mr. Maxwell from 1945 to 
     1996, the year of O'Connor's death, were published in 1968 
     under the title ``The Happiness of Getting It Down Right.'' 
     O'Connor, a prolific contributor to The New Yorker, 
     revised endlessly, and after his death left 17 versions of 
     one story that the magazine had eventually rejected.
       Mr. Maxwell's lack of celebrity never disturbed him. ``Why 
     should I let best-seller lists spoil a happy life?'' he said.
       Among his novels are ``Time Will Darken It'' (1948) and 
     ``So Long, See You Tomorrow'' (1980). His story collections 
     included ``The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other 
     Tales'' (1966), ``Over by the River, and Other Stories'' 
     (1977) and ``Billy Dyer and Other Stories'' (1992). A 
     collection of essays was published as ``The Outermost Dream'' 
     in 1989.
       The 1995 Alfred A. Knopf published a collection of his 
     stories under the title ``All the Days and Nights,'' and Mr. 
     Maxwell gained some long overdue public recognition. Jonathan 
     Yardley, writing in The Washington Post, said the volume 
     showed that ``Maxwell has maintained not merely a high level 
     of consistency but has, if anything, become over the years a 
     deeper and more complex writer.''
       His honors included the American Book Award, the Brandeis 
     Creative Arts Medal and the William Dean Howells Medal of the 
     American Academy of Arts and Letters. (He was elected to the 
     academy in 1963.)
       In March 1997 Mr. Maxwell wrote an article for The New York 
     Times Magazine in which he talked about his life as a writer 
     and the experiences of age:
       ``Out of the corner of my eye I see my 90th birthday 
     approaching. I don't yet need a cane, but I have a feeling 
     that my table manners have deteriorated. My posture is what 
     you'd expect of someone addicted to sitting in front of a 
     typewriter.
       ``Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the 
     unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am 
     drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an 
     afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not 
     something to be concerned about,'' he continued. ``What 
     spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when 
     people are dead, they don't read books. This I find 
     unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no 
     Keats, no Rilke.
       ``Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread 
     every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane 
     Austen and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, 
     until I arrive at the `Autobiographies' of William Butler 
     Yeats.''

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