William Maxwell, So long, See you tomorrow

A few pages from the end of So long, See you tomorrow by William Maxwell, he, the teller of the tale, says in parentheses that it is time to let go all of these people; and yet he finds it difficult. It almost seems, he says, that the witness cannot excused until they are through testifying.

I don't usually like to be reminded of the storyteller's relationship to the characters, all the twists and wry turns of characters with a life of their own, as people like to say. But it is William Maxwell through his characters that you know at the end. The story he has unwrapped of a small town murder in the midwest of America about a hundred years ago, betrays his own vulnerabilities as much as theirs.

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 asking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

I read the whole book yesterday, having decided in the morning that was what I'd do with this unseasonably cold day, I'd light the stove and read all of a short book as the north wind blew. I last read So long, See you tomorrow in February 2015, a rough, grubby season it seems, with tadpoles starting to move about in the pond.

When I got home from school I did what I had always done, which was to read, curled up in the window seat in the library or lying flat on my back on the floor with my feet in a chair, in the darkest corner I could find. The house was full of places to read that fitted me like a glove, and I read the same books over and over.

Seven Types of Deprivation could be the subtitle. Seven Types of Refuge.

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 set-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the open 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.