VINTAGE CLASSICS
WILLIAM
MAXWELL
William Maxwell (1908–2000) was born in Illinois. He was the author of a distinguished body of work: six novels, three short story collections, an autobiographical memoir and a collection of literary essays and reviews. A New Yorker editor for 40 years, he helped to shape the prose and careers of John Updike, John Cheever, John O’Hara, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Eudora Welty. His novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow won the American Book Award, and in 1995 he received the PEN/Malamud Award.
WILLIAM MAXWELL
SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Ann
Patchett
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Copyright © William Maxwell, 1980 Introduction copyright © Ann Patchett 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published by the United States of America in the New Yorker and then in 1980 in volume form by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. First published in Great Britain by The Harvill Press in 1997 This edition published in Vintage Classics in 2025
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: The Pierre Matisse Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art: excerpt from a letter from Alberto Giacometti to Pierre Matisse, appearing in Alberto Giacometti, by Peter Selz, copyright © 1965 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, reprinted by permission of the Pierre Matisse Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art Warner Bros. Publication Inc: excerpt from ‘Heidelberg’, from The Prince of Pilson, by Frank Pixley and Gustave Luders, copyright © 1932 by Warner Bros., Inc. Copyright renewed by Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc., Miami, FL 33014
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ISBN 9780099560937
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Introduction
In a roundabout way, I came to this book through inheritance It was after my friend Lucy died that I received a very old hardback copy of the William Maxwell novel, They Came Like Swallows. It was not in good shape. Lucy loved to buy random books from people who sold them on the streets of Manhattan. She frequented library sales. Somehow it was decided, when her very few possessions were divided up, that this book should be sent to me. I have to say I wasn’t happy about it. A single book, which we had never talked about and I didn’t even know if she had read, was a poor match for my grief, and so I put it on my shelf and forgot about it. It was more than a year before I picked it up because I needed something to read on a plane. The story, simply and beautifully told, was of a boy whose mother dies in the great flu epidemic of 1918. He had never felt close to his father, nor to his older brother who loses his leg in a carriage accident. It is made very clear that without his mother, the bookish, sensitive boy called Bunny will remain permanently lost, stunned by his unabated sadness.
The descriptions of Bunny’s heartbreak and his general sense of unbalance in the world would have put me in mind of Lucy’s death even if the book had not belonged to her. I saw that this particular gift was more apt than I could have
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imagined. Maxwell had published They Came Like Swallows in 1937 when he was twenty-nine years old. I was so taken with it that I went directly from the airport to a bookstore to buy another Maxwell novel to read on the plane going home. The one I found was So Long, See You Tomorrow, which was published in 1980 when the author was seventy-two years old. It was, at least to start, the story of a boy whose life is hopelessly derailed by the death of his mother in the great flu epidemic, whose brother has lost a leg in a carriage accident, whose father is unreachable in his distance.
The author’s mother, the beautifully named Eva Blossom Blinn, did in fact die in the epidemic of 1918–19, when the author was ten years old. At the time they lived in Lincoln, Illinois, where both of the books are set. They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow are not the same book, but reading them back-to-back lends such an insight into the workings of the human mind that the experience felt equivalent to a dozen years in psychology courses or on an analyst’s couch. To watch Maxwell return so thoughtfully, so artfully, to that particular grief, is to be forced to ask yourself if any of us ever really move on from the definitive experiences of our lives.
Many years ago at a writers’ retreat I got to know a woman who was struggling with the novel she was working on. Her last book had been wildly successful, making her rich, famous, and completely unsure of herself. She told me the book she was writing now was too much like the one she had written before. ‘I think I only have one story,’ she confided sadly. Even though I was working on my third book at the time, it was the moment I realised that I, too, had only one story, and that most
people had only one story. It seemed very clear to me then that the key to making art was not in surrendering your story, but in surrendering your desire to fight it.
By no means did Maxwell include the specifics of his mother’s death in everything he wrote, but the spirit of her loss spread over the entirety of his work. The structure of the families he writes about are constantly being undermined by the unwanted changes that have befallen them. The continuous moral of these stories is that we never knew how good we had it until our happiness was taken away, or we carelessly threw it away. It is a very slender novel, but So Long, See You Tomorrow manages to include both of these complicated themes The second paragraph in the book’s opening page records a pistol shot, and by the fourth page we know both the victim and the murderer’s name. This is not a mystery novel, nor is it a tale that can be undone by an introduction. It would be the story of a love affair born out of boredom and its violent end, were it not for the fact that it is also the story of the death of the narrator’s mother from the flu in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1918.
These two plots – the mother’s death, the adulterous lovers – have only the most tangential connection to bind them: two boys from two different stories are briefly thrown together for a few unremarkable days of play while their worlds are being turned upside down. Each boy is at a different moment in the arc of his splintering loss. One has experienced the worst of it, while the other still has the worst ahead, but each has lost his happiness, permanently and through no fault of his own. It is this fleeting connection that carves out the book’s deepest sadness: that loss is loss as far as children are concerned There is no difference between an illness and an
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affair. Either way, home, which is a word that for Maxwell stands in for everything that was normal and safe and intimately known, is destroyed.
If you have the time, pick up a copy of They Came Like Swallows. It is not the masterwork that So Long, See You Tomorrow is, but it is a beautiful novel completely deserving of attention When read in tandem, the two books illuminate Maxwell’s genius. He doesn’t try to fight his story, and in some cases, doesn’t even try to cover it up. Instead he gives his life over to it, allowing himself an entire career to push deeper and deeper into what he knows for certain. So Long, See You Tomorrow is structured not like a novel, but like the inner workings of the human brain. There are no surprises, only a constant circling of facts, the question of how things might have gone differently, the familiar retreat into personal experience. The narrator puts himself into characters he has no connection to, imagines their days, imagines the dog, without apology or explanation. Why has he stepped into someone else’s life? Because this is how we try to make sense of the things we cannot possibly understand. It is an exercise in compassion. Having brushed up ever so lightly against another boy’s tragedy, he offers up the tragedy of his own life; not to the boy, as they confide nothing to one another, but to the reader, and to himself. How much of this is true and how much of it is fiction is of no importance whatsoever. The power of the novel, the truth of it, comes from its emotional imperative. In So Long, See You Tomorrow the narrator writes: ‘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 . . . 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.’
When thinking of a novel I would want to pass on to future generations, it stood to reason that I would see my favourite William Maxwell novel as the best inheritance. It comes from a place so deep inside the human soul that I cannot imagine a time when its wisdom would not feel fresh and applicable. Also, I’d rather lend my voice to a book that may otherwise be overlooked because of its quiet nature. In fact I believe some of the greatest truths I’ve read are held in these 153 pages.
Much of the energy of William Maxwell’s life was given over to other writers. He was the fiction editor of the New Yorker for more than forty years, and in that role he shaped some of the greatest short stories of his time. I would think the job had a profound impact on his own work as well, as this is a novel that seems as much the product of editing as of writing. It tells us nothing more than what we need to know, and then it stands back, trusting the intelligence of the reader to flesh out the rest. It explains the depth of our emotional involvement. Maxwell has, in essence, told us to bring our own sadness, our own stories, to the table and put them down, as he has done, beside the boys. The result is a mosaic of human emotion, a singular and spectacular work of art.
Ann Patchett, 2011
SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
