So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

This is not turning out as I planned. But as my brother says, "life is what happens when you're making other plans." I had planned on keeping up with the summer reading journal that I had assigned my students, writing once a week about what I am reading. Now I am doing what perhaps some of my students are doing: writing all the entries at the end of summer. There were about eleven weeks in our summer vacation, which is pretty long. I don't think I will make all eleven entries before school starts in about ten days. That is not a positive attitude. If I am going to catch-up, then I will have to make one entry each day between then and now and on one day, make two entries. Let's see if I can do it.

This first book I read this summer was So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, who was the fiction editor at the New Yorker between 1969 and 1972. I wonder which writers he chose to publish during that time period? This book was generously given to me by a parent of one of my beloved students. First the parent e-mailed me to see if I had heard of the book. She was reading it with her book group and was enthusiastic about it. Then the book showed up in my mailbox at school one day. 

I've always wanted to keep up a pleasure reading habit during the school year, but it is difficult when every night I am preparing for class the next day by reviewing what my students are reading or I am reading student writing. The time simply isn't there. Unless I make the time. And that is what I started to do with this book. I put aside everything else, on my day off, or before bed, and read it, maybe just a few pages at a time. It was slow going at first and the book took a beating: First a water bottle tipped over on it in the seat well of our car, soaking the pages. Then I dropped it when I dozed off in the bathtub. So the the spine and pages of this slim paperback are now warped by water and sun.

 Nevertheless, I persisted (now I can't say that without thinking of Elizabeth Warren). I found Maxwell's writing mesmerizing and mysterious. He writes sentences like this:

"What strange and unlikely things are washed up on the shore of time" (16)

I don't need to put such a short quote up there, separated from the rest of the paragraph (according to MLA format) but I want to draw attention to it. "What strange and unlikely things..." These "things" are memories. Maxwell's narrator creates an image of himself wandering along the shore next to the ocean of his memories. He is obviously far along in his life to have memories "washed up on the shore of time." He compares memories to the destroyed and dessicated flotsam and jetsam of the ocean: random, enigmatic, of unknown origin.

Throughout the narration, the narrator doubts and second-guesses his memory:

"I very much doubt I would have remembered for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never had lain eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn't been the father of somebody I knew, and (2) I hadn't later on done something I was ashamed of afterward." (6)

Early on, the narrator introduces and emphasizes his own faulty subjectivity into the very narrative he is constructing. He doubts he would have remembered. The story is about a tenant farmer who he had "never lain eyes on." Then he introduces the narrator own personal connection: he knew the son of the murdered man; he was ashamed of something he did afterward. His connection to the story is personal and emotional.

Despite this element of ambiguity and doubt, Maxwell creates variety and surprises the remember with powerful declaratory statements that establish a wizened tone:

"The reason life is so strange is that people have no choice..." (21)

The narrator has been alive for long enough to have developed a theory about why life is strange. Again, Maxwell establishes this idea that remembering one's own life is something like solving a mystery, that our own lived experiences, through the perspective of decades, can become strange and unknown. And, he adds, this is all because "people have no choice..." Beneath what appears random is an undiscovered logic, a set of circumstances depriving individuals of choice, and thus pre-determining their actions. Maxwell draws readers into a montage of seemingly random memories by stating that there is an underlying system of facts that causes events to unfold as they do. This is a belief about life: that there is a reason for everything that happens. The human experience is the attempt to interpret life by attaching causes to effects, to use the word "because," to ask the question, "why?" I think that question is at the core of this book. The narrator is asking himself why certain things happened in and around the periphery of his life. He can't even answer these questions himself.

In the third chapter, "The New House," Maxwell creates a powerful metaphor for the narrator's search for the underlying causes of events, by having the narrator recall wandering around, exploring, and playing on the scaffolding and frame of a house under construction that he will soon live in:

"And I had an agreeable feeling, as I went from one room to the next by walking through a wall instead of a doorway, or looked up and saw blue sky through the rafters, that I had found a way to get around the way things were." (25)

Able to walk through walls and look through what will soon be the ceiling, the narrator has "an agreeable feeling... that [he] had found a way to get around the way things were." This recalls Plato's allegory of the cave: the idea that life as we perceive it is simply an illusion: the walls and windows all obscure the frame that lies beneath it. In the same way, effects somehow, through time, obscure their very causes. Everything disappears in the sand of time, the fog of memory. And this narrator, heroically, is searching through the sand and fog.

Writing this, something about this story now stands out to me as remarkably privileged. How nice it is to say, "oh life is such a mystery, how did it get this way?" Many people know exactly how their lives got to be the way they are: through slavery and genocide. But even in these cases, there is so much unknown in the details: everybody has mysteries in their past; memories they can't explain. But the idea of pursuing minutiae seems like a luxury when others must struggle to simply survive.

Maxwell's narrator continues to remind us of the falability of memory with passages like this:

"I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience." (27)

Maxwell keeps the reader engaged by giving the reader very little to hang on to and lots of reasons to doubt the narrator. All we know is that the narrator remembers this image. That is all there is: memories. So ephemeral is life. This is a timeless theme in literature and the human experience: Geoffrey Chaucer made the same observation in the end of Troilus and Cressida "[t]his world, that passeth sone as floures faire." All life is passing before our eyes. The very world we know is only as temporary as Spring flowers. Now there's a cosmic perspective: To God or a higher consciousness, our world, and solar system are appearing and disappearing in an instant. How much nicer it is to be small and petty, to be human, concerned with material things, to be ignorant, believing that all of this will last forever?

Maxwell's narrator is so honest that he lets us in on his human fallability, just as the characters in So Long, See You Tomorrow also fail morally, giving in to their human passions and appetites, ultimately destroying themselves and (nearly) everyone else around them, regardless of the bonds of love or marriage. Throughout the narrative, Maxwell makes us aware of the fact that we are reading, that we are imagining the story, telling us, "[t]he reader will also have to do a certain amount of imagining." (56) However, rather than causing the reader's belief in the narrative to evaporate, these statements make the reader more aware of their participation in the construction of the narrative with the writer, that writing and reading are a give-and-take between writer and reader, and that not only is the writer giving that story to the reader, but that the reader is also giving to the writer by believing in or imagining the story at all. Therefore, when Maxwell writes the following:

"The water in the China pitcher comes from the cistern and is rainwater and rust-colored. He fills the bowl and the water immediately turns cloudy from the soap and dirt on his hands." (66)

We are made doubly aware that all these rich details are constructed by the writer, and that the image in our mind is a gift.