WHAT THERE IS TO SAY WE HAVE SAID, a long, lively friendship in letters

WHAT THERE IS TO SAY WE HAVE SAID: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell
Suzanne Marrs, ed.
Mariner Books non-affiliate Amazon link
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For over fifty years, Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of our most admired writers, penned letters to each other. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, moments of despair and hilarity. Living half a continent apart, their friendship was nourished and maintained by their correspondence.

What There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell’s editorial relationships—both in his capacity as New Yorker editor and in their collegial back-andforth on their work. It’s also a chronicle of the literary world of the time; read talk of James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, and many more. It is a treasure trove of reading recommendations.

Here, Suzanne Marrs—Welty’s biographer and friend—offers an unprecedented window into two intertwined lives. Through careful collection of more than 300 letters as well as her own insightful introductions, she has created a record of a remarkable friendship and a lyrical homage to the forgotten art of letter writing.

My Review: You already know who Eudora Welty is or you wouldn't've clicked on the review. I assume most of my readers know who William Maxwell is as well, since his fame hasn't precisely been shrinking. You'll realize, since the correspondents are monadnocks of American literature, that this book was a Must-Have-or-Expire purchase. Lucky me, I had then (2011) a lovely man in my life who knew me well and gifted the book to me.

No one who loved the mid-century American literary scene could've known the deep and abiding affection Welty, a nominally single woman, and Maxwell, a thoroughly married man, carried for each other. In that time, perhaps even more than this one, men and women were not friends unless there were benefits, in the public's mind at least. The fact that Maxwell was The New Yorker editor whose staunch championing of Welty's work would've added to the cynical public's certainty that there must've been somethin' goin' on. Nothing could've been further from the truth: Maxwell, in a letter to Welty, says he stopped reading a letter in a famous couple's correspondence because it contained an intimate endearment as a salutation!

Not the sort of man to sexually harass his woman friend.

But think of the work these two giants did, together...his editorial eye made her work much better, as she readily acknowledged; he felt her talent was matchless and merely benefited from burnishing...and in their own rights. I can insert a list of delicious works by both, a long, long list, for you to romp through, but those things are never complete even when both authors are dead. My tastes have changed, your tastes aren't necessarily much like mine. Suffice it to say, for today, you should go read my reviews of So Long, See You Tomorrow among Maxwell's ouevre, and One Writer's Beginnings among Welty's. They're not even small samples, it's true, but there are reasons to read these two revealing, personal narratives in conjunction with this collection of letters.

The course of a long friendship contains many bends and twists. Marrs doesn't comment extensively on Welty's seeming reticence about her long-time lover, married man Kenneth Millar, beyond noting it; I expect it was starchy Maxwell destroying "compromising" things if it existed at all. In honesty, I expect it was more likely the result of a natural reticence, a reserve, that these immensely and intensely creative people maintained in their ordinary lives. What isn't said can't be regretted with anything like the bitterness of blurting too much. A surprise to me was the long breaks between the mention of one or another's creative projects' progress. I was half-expecting a white-hot exchange of intensely felt writerly frustrations! Instead, it's the quotidian...what Mother did, what Brookie said...that they reserved for each other's eyes. It is far more intimate than mere sex. It is Love.

That is the shocking truth of this book. These two people loved each other. They cared deeply about each other, knew the foibles and failings each self-reproached, and supported supported supported until the shadows passed. Can there be a more perfect way to have a friend? A more fortunate discovery than this kind of friend?

I can't excerpt enough from any letter to make you feel the deep and abiding caring each carried for the other. I can tell you that the collection's title, which seems a bit overstated and awkward on first reading, is the only possible title for the work. It is verbatim from a letter, late in the writers' lives, sent by Maxwell to Welty. She has apologized for her long-delayed response to him. He says, "Dearest Eudora, what there is to say we have said, in one way or another.”

If ever in your life you have a friend to whom you can say, or write such a thing, or from whom you can expect it, you are a lucky person indeed.

Author Marrs has also written Eudora Welty: A Biography, which I possess but have not yet read...after all, I need a retirement project as much as people who work do!...and fully expect to enjoy as much as I did this delightful work.

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW: one of the most poignant novella titles I've ever read

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
WILLIAM MAXWELL
Vintage International
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.

Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who had the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

My Review: What a beautiful but sad book.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

So speaks out narrator as he sets out to recreate the end of his childhood. The last gasping breath of an unhappy lad's, I think innocence is too light-hearted a term for it, ignorance of the full measure of unhappiness that others can bear in addition to himself, even if he waits a half-century to get to the meat of the pain:

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.

His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.

Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

"Cletus" brought to life as an Einsteinian thought experiment, a boy whose remembered existence is defined by a murder committed or a suicide perpetrated or both. Or neither?

But let me say this. My confusion about this issue is paralleled by the narrator's confusion about his own place, his very existence in the world of this little prairie farming town. His father isn't much for feelings, and he's a "sissy" and an artistic child...except for music, the art form his father loves and he knowingly resists learning as his only somewhat outward act of rebellion.

As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have?

What strikes me as hilarious, in a not-funny-at-all way, is:

We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have grown sensitive and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

Well now, this novella having a publication date of 1980, all I can think is that Maxwell intended this as sly humor. Or else he was deaf and blind.

Sly humor it is.

And it's of a piece with the Maxwellian phrases that abound in this book. It's always so tempting to rush to the Goodreads quotes page and add...almost every line he writes. Retyping the entire book being, then, a real temptation, I add no quotes to the ones already found there. I rely on the mathematical certainty that all of us together are smarter than any one of us individually. Let the hive mind decide which of these sentences are crucial, which best illuminate Maxwell's writerly chops as well as his storyteller's acumen.

But the title of this review gives me away. I want to add something to the quotes page. I can't, though, because even I the "oh-so-what-about-spoilers" King-Emperor feel the last two pages of the story can't be excerpted without making the point of reading the book evaporate.

It is damned near heartbreaking, what those pages say and what it means. I was perfectly glad to read this book, and rate it close to four stars. Then the ending hit me with Negan's baseball bat.

Maxwell wrote a good little story and a perfect ending. That deserves recognition. Read it, please, it won't take long and it will give you something beautiful in return.