An Interview with William Maxwell

AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM MAXWELL William Maxwell William Maxwell is the author of six novels and five collections of short fiction, most recently AU The Days and Nights: The Collected Stories, published in 1994. His 1980 novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, won the American Book Award. He is also the author of a family history, Ancestors. Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois where he lived until the age of 14, when his family moved to Chicago. After graduating from the University of Illinois and a brief stint in graduate school, Maxwell went to New York to seek his fortune as a writer. He was hired by The New Yorker in 1936, where he spent the next 40 years as a fiction editor and occasional essay reviewer. The writers he edited include J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John O'Hara, Harold Brodkey, and Delmore Schwartz. This interview was conducted by Kay Bonetti in November 1995 in New York City for the American Audio Prose Library, which has recordings of readings by and interviews with 131 contemporary writers. For a free catalog of AAPL listings, write PO Box 842, Columbia, MO 65205, or call 800-447-2275. A second part of this interview will appear in the next issue of The Missouri Review. An Interview with William Maxwell/Kay Bonetti Interviewer: Could we start by getting on the record some of the detaUs of your chronology and your Ufe? You were born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois? Maxwell: Lincoln was a smaU town of twelve thousand people. My mother's father was a judge. My father's father was a lawyer. Behind them on both sides were country people. My father's father died just as he was beginning to make a career for himself, but my father's youth was rather poverty stricken. So he was always careful about money aU his Ufe, and preparing for a rainy day that never came. The pattern of our famUy Ufe was that he came home on Friday afternoon and left Tuesday morning, and traveled the road with a heavy suitcase fuU of printed forms, which he used when he was visiting local insurance agents. My mother and father, insofar as I'm able to say, were very much in love with each other. When he came home on Friday afternoons we were always waiting on the front porch—he was embraced with affection when he came home. We Uved in a big old house with rooms that were hard to heat. I have a vivid memory of my father in October stuffing toUet paper in the cracks around the windows to try to save fuel. His salary when I was a Uttle boy was three thousand doUars a year. On that he kept a carriage horse, and we Uved Ui this extremely comfortable house, in a comfortable way. He put half of it away and bought a farm with it. I don't know how this was done. My mother must have been cooperative, though. She was not frugal like his famtiy, but she was careful. My brother lost his leg when he was five years old, when I was only a baby. My mother's sister came by the house one day Ui a horse and carriage and stopped in front on her way to do an errand of some kind and my mother came out to talk to her. My older brother asked my aunt ii he could go with her, and she The Missouri Review · 81 said no, but he began to climb up the wheel to get in with her anyway and she didn't see it. When she finished the conversation and flicked the whip, his leg stipped down into the wheel and was broken. What happened is that the famUy doctor was a drug addict. In those days they dispensed their own drugs, so he had access to morphine or whatever. It was a simple fracture that anybody could have set and that would have been the end of it. But he didn't set the leg at aU and gangrene set in and they had to cut it off. Interviewer: This is a secret that...