The Writer as Illusionist by William Maxwell

The Writer As Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work

By William Maxwell

Edited by Alec Wilkinson

Godine Nonpareils 2024

Among the many previously collected and previously published items in The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work, editor Alec Wilkinson has included the text of the speech, “The Writer as Illusionist,” that Maxwell gave at Smith College in 1955, when Maxwell had been fiction editor at the New Yorker for 20 years. The choice made here by Wilkinson, who wrote a memoir about his own relationship with Maxwell back in 2002, to use the title of that speech as the title of this latest edition in the superb “Nonpareils” line from Godine at least inadvertently positions the speech as a kind of vade mecum of Maxwell’s writing philosophy. 

And it works fairly well in that role. The speech has been characterized by more than one writer as having been eagerly received – plenty of pencils feverishly taking notes – and it does indeed include a couple of good lines about writing and one forensically accurate insight into Maxwell himself as a writer. When he mentions that writers really have “no enemy but interruption,” all writers will nod in grim agreement, for instance. And when he draws the comparison foreshadowed by his speech’s title, some polite smiles will turn strained. “The writer has everything in common with the vaudeville magician except this: The writer must be taken in by his own tricks,” he asserts. “Otherwise, the audience will begin to yawn and snicker.” 

The strain will arise from an utterly unavoidable fact: never in his long, long career as an editor and writer, not once, not even for a hopeful moment, was William Maxwell ever taken in by any writer’s tricks, very much including his own. Day after day, year after year, he sat at his desk in his sunny New Yorker office and gently, insistently submitted every word of every piece that came before him to DNA analysis, paternity testing, a full tax audit, and an FBI background check. Moreso even than his legendary New Yorker boss William Shawn, Maxwell systematically dispelled writerly illusion. He had not even a single molecule of vaudeville anywhere in him. 

It’s in that same Smith College speech that Maxwell mentions the concentration of a writer’s talent and sideways indicts his own fiction. “If the writer’s attention wanders for a second or two, his characters stand and wait politely for it to return to them,” he writes. “If it doesn’t return fairly soon, their feelings are hurt and they refuse to say what is on their minds or in their hearts.”  Even the most polite reader will see a tossed-off notion like this and think this describes some pretty weak-tea pro-forma fiction. And if they want to see such weak-tea pro-forma fiction spooled out at length, they need only consult the two Library of America volumes of this author’s fiction. 

Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois in 1908 and lost his beloved mother to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. In 1936 he joined the staff of the New Yorker under the direction of the great Katharine White. He wrote pieces for the magazine, wrote “Talk of the Town” bits, and gradually developed loving and supportive relationships with a stable of prominent writers like John Cheever, JD Salinger, Frank O’Connor, Eudora Welty, John O’Hara, Shirley Hazzard, and many others. Virtually all of these and many other writers attested to the same thing about Maxwell the editor: that he never argued, never bullied, but always made their work better – or at least more perfectly aligned with the New Yorker. 

This kind of praise was almost always short on specifics, and in the few instances where specifics were supplied, they weren’t exactly flattering. Both Brendan Gill and John Updike, for instance, went out of their way to describe editorial disputes with Maxwell in which they thought he was wrong and they went on to seem to be vindicated by the judgement of literary history. 

There are no such Oedipal ripples in The Writer as Illusionist. Wilkinson is entirely, almost guilelessly affectionate to the memory of an author and mentor he clearly loved (“I had thought that the way I knew him was the way that he always was,” goes one of many passages that will work, for good or ill, to make the reader forget that Wilkinson himself is now in his 70s. “I don’t know why I clung to such an innocent notion, but I did”). There are letters here, previously unpublished extracts from private journals, a great swath of prefaces and notes and such, and, greatest delight of all, a long and quietly brilliant piece Maxwell wrote about Robert Louis Stevenson for the New Yorker, a thing that hasn’t been reprinted in 30 years and easily revives the wish that Maxwell had written an entire book about this favorite author of his.

Even when he was in his 30s, William Maxwell struck everybody who met him as an old man, and it’s now been a quarter of a century since he died at the redundant-seeming age of 91. And despite that Library of America mausoleum, it’s sadly difficult to imagine such a person as “a William Maxwell completist.” But any such as still draw breath (Gramercy Park? Carroll Gardens? A few sentimental takers back in Lincoln?) will give a faint, polite cheer at the appearance of this volume.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News