Backlisted - So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

Episode Date: November 28, 2016

Costa First Book nominee for My Name Is Leon, Kit de Waal joins John & Andy to discuss So Long, See You Tomorrow, the final novel by author and New Yorker literary editor William Maxwell.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)7'42 - You Took the Last Bus Home: The Poems of Brian Bilston13'57 - My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal21'14 - So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Conditions may apply. See in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. So, John, how's your week been? Well, I've had better weeks, Andy. I've spent most of it unable to move in any kind of meaningful way. Luckily, like locked-in syndrome, my eyes still work, so I've been able to read. But I have been afflicted by that most marvellous of 18th century, the malady of kings, the gout, which has struck me down. Well, what we should all pause and think is actually it's really painful.

My father-in-law suffers from gout and can barely move. But it serves him right for living like a Tudor. A third of all men. Well, I have to say, much as I love to... I mean, I look much like Falstaff, and I like to feel that I live with that kind of spirit. But in fact, it's a bit more prosaic. I mean, a number of people I know who suffer from gout

are thin as whippets and are fit as fiddles. It's a sort of genetic thing about your inability to process uric acid. And I suspect that, you know, there are probably deep other reasons for why we come down with these inflammatory illnesses like cancer. But it's not much fun. But it does mean, if you're feeling even... What have you been able to

do? Well, I can read, and I can write emails. So effectively, I exist just as much as anybody else. I get myself elected as president on that basis. Indeed, indeed. That's been another thing that last week has happened. The strange thing

about Gout, it's close fellow traveller is melancholy. Is it? Yeah, it does make you quite depressed. I don't know whether that's a function of pain generally, but I think it's... That's funny, because I've got that covered. I've got melancholy and you've got the gout. I've got melancholy. Well, it's also, it's a good preamble

because I think melancholy comes up a lot with the writer whose book we're going to be discussing in Backlisted. Great segue. Great segue. So, hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Once more, we're gathered around the kitchen table

in post-industrial Islington, the canal side office of our sponsors Unbound, the website that brings authors and readers together to create great books. I am John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller. I am the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Our 50 great books, open brackets, and two not-so-great ones, close brackets, save my life. And joining us today is the author Kit Duvall. After a 15-year career in the legal profession,

Kit's first novel, My Name Is Leon, was published earlier this year by Penguin. And as of yesterday, it's just been shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award. So a big and not at all patronising... Well done, you! Thank you! And thanks for coming.

How do you feel about being on an awards shortlist? I think it's great. I'm not one of those people that would ever say, oh no, it's beneath me, I don't believe in them. I'm just massively chuffed. I want the award, I want to win. Yes, excellent. You will crawl over broken glass.

I still think the greatest acceptance speech of all time was Antonia Byatt saying, I'm delighted because now it means I can buy that swimming pool for my house in France. Which I just thought, yes. Yes, enjoy. I mean, I thought a wonderful thing that Philippe Sainz did

giving his prize, the Bailey Gifford, to the refugee charity. But I thought a lot of rather pointless discussion about whether authors should or shouldn't give it. It's totally up to the author. I mean, I think he's a QC, right? And it's a brilliant book, by the way. Yeah. East West City.

But don't shame people into thinking I can't have this money and enjoy it and in some instances use it to pay my electricity bill. Or on fags and booze, frankly. I literally have got a story about this that I would so like to say out loud now,

but I can't. But if, as Danny Baker would say, if you press the red button now while listening, you'll be able to hear that story. So, John, digressing already brilliantly, the red button now while listening you'll be able to hear that story so uh and um so uh john digressing already brilliantly um the book that kit has chosen for us to talk about is um so long see you tomorrow by william maxwell and i just want to tell very quickly before we get on to the next bit how we came to be sitting around this table. So, Kit, you and I did a panel, didn't we, last month, up in Durham.

What was that panel about? It was about what makes a classic and what qualifies as a classic and are there any overlooked classics. So we were talking away for the... Not at all germane to this podcast. For the amusement and edification of an impressively sized audience. Yes. So we were talking away and we were talking about a novel called Stoner. Yes.

By John Williams. And we were, I'm not carrying this one alone, we were agreeing that although that is a very good book, it maybe isn't a classic. It's a good book. Yeah, it's a good book. It's a good book, maybe it isn't a classic. It's a good book. It's a good book. It's a good book.

Maybe it's not a classic. And Kit said, I'll tell you what is classic, though. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. Have you heard of that? Heard of it. Heard of it. I approached you afterwards and said,

I know a podcast you could come and appear on. Because, John, what is your connection with this book? Well, my connection is that I published it in the UK. I think it had actually been published by David Godwin in Secca in a hardback. Right. That was my... But it had done absolutely nothing and disappeared. And I was...

Literally, it's one of those stories I was at Frankfurt and had a meeting with the Andrew Wiley agency and didn't usually presage anything of interest and I was given a copy of All the Days and Nights

the stories of William Maxwell which had just been published by Knopf in the States. You know, the classic thing, you don't really realise. I had a vague notion that Maxwell had worked at the New Yorker, and I hadn't read So Long, See You Tomorrow. But I got a kind of care package of Maxwell books from various out-of-print editions from Wiley,

took them back and started to read them, and there was that thing of, this is just, I mean, an outrage. It's like discovering, you know, this almost never happens for a publisher, a truly great 20th century writer who isn't in print, and incredibly at that stage, who is still alive. Yes, we should say we're talking about the book was published in 1980, wasn't it? It was serialised in the New Yorker.

That's right. And then it was published... You published it in 97. By the time our edition came out, the Harville edition came out, So Long, See You Tomorrow. So Long, See You Tomorrow was his last novel. The stories were published after that. Yeah.

So that's why this is going to be a slightly different episode of Backlisted. But like all episodes of Backlisted, I start off by saying to John, or he says to me... Well, I'm going to say to you, Andy, what have you been reading? Thanks. You think we're getting less awkward, isn't it?

It is going really well. We've been doing this for a year. Is it our 25th now? Yeah. Amazing, isn't it? So I've been reading a book that I'm going to state openly. It's published by Unbound. I have no connection to Unbound beyond the fact that I come and sit in their kitchen once a fortnight and we talk about books. But this is a book called You Took the last bus home the poems of brian

bilston and it's a brilliantly funny clever book of poetry by a man who's not really called brian bilston i believe who is known as twitter's poet laureate and i had been following him on twitter for a while and i would i'll just read you And I'll just read you the title poem first. It's called You Took the Last Bus Home. It goes, you took the last bus home. Don't know how you got it through the door. You're always doing amazing stuff. Like the time you caught that train.

Oh, wow. Right? So he's really funny. There's a sort of slightly John Hegley-ish thing going on, maybe a little bit of Stevie Smith. I know he really likes Stevie Smith, as we do here on Backlisted. And so I've been reading some of these poems with my son, my son who's 13,

and I read him one of these poems, and he guffaws with laughter, right? He genuinely... So we're reading them we're you know and we're enjoying reading them and then we got to a poem called refugees and i'm gonna read this poem and all i'm gonna say about this poem is we read it and at the end of it my son burst into spontaneous applause and took the book into school with him and got his teacher to read it out to the class.

So I'm just going to read this poem. It's called Refugees. And what you need to know is it has a note at the bottom that says, Now read from bottom to top. So here it is. They have no need of our help, so do not tell me these haggard faces could belong to you or me. Should life have dealt a different hand? We need to see them for who they really are. Chancers and scroungers, layabouts and loungers with bombs up their sleeves, cutthroats and thieves. They are not welcome here. We should make them go back to where they came from.

They cannot share our food, share our homes, share our countries. Instead, let us build a wall to keep them out. It is not okay to say these are people just like us. A place should only belong to those who are born there. Do not be so stupid to think that the world can be looked at another way. Now read from bottom to top. The world can be looked at another way. Do not be so stupid to think that a place should only belong to those who were born there. These are people just like us. It is not okay to say build a wall to keep them out. Instead, let us share our countries, share our homes, share our food.

They cannot go back to where they came from. We should make them welcome here. They are not cutthroats and thieves with bombs up their sleeves, layabouts and loungers, chancers and scroungers. We need to see them for who they really are, should life have dealt a different hand. These haggard faces could belong to you or me. Good grief. Isn't that brilliant? Have you heard that before?

No, it's fantastic. Isn't that incredible? Incredible. Incredible. Technically, brilliant. But also the reversal is so deeply satisfying as well because you're mounting a sense of outrage as you read the first poem. And then it completely...

Perfectly constructed. It really blew us away. We've been reading what is a very accomplished, funny, enjoyable book and then he just throws that down, and given the various events that have happened in the incredible year of 2016, one that we're all enjoying, let's not forget there's still nearly six weeks to go.

Who knows what could happen? Jesus. It's so great. William Trevor this week as well. William Trevor. I know. So it's called You Took the Last Bus Home, The Poems of Brianrian bilston i can't

imagine it wouldn't be a much welcome christmas present wouldn't you say john well it'd be churlish but yes i mean it's good it's so he's so creative and so creative on the page he's got a brilliant thing he does with uh excel spreadsheets manages to manage to find poetry in an excel spreadsheet what i love about him actually is his ability to go from the the kind of the silly which is like the first poem is you know they're catching the bus to something like refugees which is actually really i mean it's it's it's truly affecting and and i mean it expands again that sense of what poetry can do which i think if I was teaching poetry to a screen-based generation of young kids,

Brian Bilston would be a brilliant place to start because he just gives you that sense that words can do things that nothing else can. There's a really brilliant poem here called Life is an Inspirational Quote. Do you know that one? Every day is a second chance and each day a festering boil to lance paint the sky and make it yours i'll add this fun task to my long list of chores imagination is more important than knowledge yeah it helps me

pretend i made it through college and so on and so forth so these when he writes his poems on Twitter they're obviously within the restrictions of the form or else he one of two, one of three or else he does a little screenshot

but these aren't, are these new or are these collected from I think these are collected from Twitter and some new poems as well, right? There's some new stuff as well. I mean, it's a surprisingly... I was amazed. It's a surprisingly chunky book. And only...

£12.99. Tremendously good value. Value for money. For those Christmas... That tricky last-minute Christmas buy. I've actually been reading another book this week, which is the Costa First novel shortlisted My Name is Leon by the author Kip Duvall.

It's something I never, never, the first time I've ever done that on this podcast, but I was reading it last week. And I can say, I'm going to look at you while I say this, it's absolutely brilliant. It is absolutely brilliant. It is absolutely brilliant, right? I heard you talk about it in the summer

and there were a couple of things I wanted to mention about it. The first thing is no spoilers but there is a scene that takes place in this book during the Notting Hill riots in what year? In 81. 1981.

In 1981, which reminded me, and anyone who listens to this podcast regularly or knows my work will know, I wouldn't say this lightly, it totally reminded me of Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes, which is my favourite book. Of all time.

Which has a scene in the Notting Hill raceites of the late 1950s. Okay. And just on the level of being able to read different approaches to a similar scene, you did great. And you don't even know the book. No, I don't. No idea. Which is fantastic.

So that's the first thing. The second thing was, I know when I saw you talking in the summer, you were talking about social workers. Yes. Second thing was, I know when I saw you talking in the summer, you were talking about social workers. Yes. And one of the things that My Name Is Leon does so brilliantly is deal with social workers as though they were human beings. Yes, absolutely. Could you say, was that something you really wanted to do in the book? What I wanted to do in the book was to be fair and to be true.

I mean, that was my overriding consideration when I wrote the book, that I wanted this to be not a book about blame. It's so easy to blame lots of people in the book because there's a crap mum, there's an alcoholic father, there's a really awful foster carer, and there are some dodgy social workers. When I say dodgy, from a 10-year-old boy's point of view, because they've taken him away from his mother. That's no spoiler. I wanted to be... I mean, I've worked with social workers for many, many years

and I've seen these people up against the cold face in the most difficult circumstances, having to remove children, having to go into the most terrible circumstances and remove children out of violent houses, drug dens and so forth doing their best and what we hear from social work what we hear from the press and what we hear about social workers is how bad they are because they're in the press when things go wrong

when they fail to act on a child and that child's killed or whatever 99.999 percent of the time they're doing fantastic work under the most difficult circumstances and i wanted that to be true in the book and for the adults to see in the book of course from a nine-year-old boy's point of view you're keeping me from my mom so i don't like you but actually the adults can read through that and say, what's the choice here? What is the choice that social workers have? I just thought it was so... In a way, it's a real indictment of, you know, we want these children to be looked after as best they can

while doing it for as little money as possible and demonising the people who do it. Yes. And your book just gives them such dignity and makes it clear it's such a tough thing to have to deal with, a situation that shouldn't even be happening, right? Yes, quite, exactly. They're not there because things are great.

Because when things are great in your life, you'll never see a social worker. It's when things start to break down, you're getting these people coming into your most private intimate life and making a judgment and sometimes taking your children or putting your grandmother in a care home or whatever it is they're coming in and doing the nasties from generally speaking people's points of view and certainly from the press point of view media point of view that's what we see of them them coming in and doing the nasty.

We never see when they come in and they do great, great things. And also, if you have an interest, as I do, in the confectionery of the early 1980s. Of course, yes. Kit has that covered as well. Absolutely. Did you have to research that? I did, actually. I had to eat quite a few

Curly Whirlies, Rolos, which aren't made anymore, actually. Rolos aren't made anymore. Rolos aren't made anymore. They're not made anymore. The last Rolo. It's already gone now. It's gone.

But I've lost two fillings to Curly Whirlies in the name of research. I did go to the website of Rantree. I feel another podcast entirely bursting out here. And I ate quite a bit, yeah, and it was lovely. They're only 10 pence. I had to find the melting point, actually. You know, gripped in a little boy's hand, what is the

melting point of the curly world? Yeah, did you? Found it. Brilliant! So when did you, to go back to So Long, See You Tomorrow then, when did you find this book? When did you first encounter it?

I think I read it in the 90s. I don't know, mid-90s. I can't remember. It would have... I mean, I picked everything on what it looked like. I mean, you know, I never... I didn't have any reference. I had... It's just like a bottle of wine to me.

You know, I literally go for the label. And I just saw it and thought, I don't know this. I haven't heard this. And the edition that I have here, which is the one published by Harville, published by John Mitchinson, in fact yes so this is he he made the decision to make this book look like this which is why you picked it up absolutely amazing it's beautiful and spare and it also is a perfect

that cover is a perfect reflection of what's inside yeah to me obviously you don't know that yeah you've read it but the it's perfect just the look of the book Shall I read the blurb on the back? I think we should definitely talk a little I think we should get straight into Maxwell because there's so much. Let's start with a blurb Yeah well I'll tell you what

My reading this week has been mostly William Maxwell That's it I'm afraid I'm just folding my after. I mean, it's much more interesting to hear. You've had a lot to deal with. Well, it's been great, I mean, on one level. Yeah, yeah.

And just, I've started, my name is Leon, and I saw Kit talk at the Penguin Sales Conference earlier this year, and was just so struck by the utter confidence and clarity with which you talked and the fact that you were prepared, which it sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but actually novels about social workers,

novels about the subjects that are still tragically rare. So rare, absolutely. And it's sort of madness if you think about the culture that we live in and what fiction can do. I mean, you're in a tiny little potted account. It's sort of madness if you think about the culture that we live in and what fiction can do. I mean, you're in a tiny little potted account. The thing that Andy and I bang out all the time,

the transforming quality of fiction, that it can change the way you think about it and enlarge your sympathy and empathy for other people and also get you... I mean, Maxwell, we'll come on to, is a really good example of an author that can do that for you. So I'm going to read this blurb in a minute, and I'm looking forward to reading it, because I reckon it was written by John Mitchinson.

It probably almost certainly was. Great, okay. We'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills.

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and so deep that boys under 16 were forbidden by their parents to swim there. I knew it only by hearsay. It had no bottom, people said, I knew it only by hearsay it had no bottom, people said and because I was very much interested in the idea that if you dug a hole straight down anywhere and kept on digging it would come out in China

I took this to be a literal statement of fact one winter morning, shortly before daybreak three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot or, they agreed it could have been a car backfiring. Within a few seconds it had grown light. No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it and they didn't see anyone walking on the road.

The sound was not a car backfiring. A tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed and what they heard was the gun that killed him it's so good isn't it i mean it's so spelt i'm just gonna i've got a quote from maxwell here about the beginning of the book uh this is from his paris review interview have you got it we've both been oh yeah it's an amazing interview. He says, originally, the first sentence of So Long, See You Tomorrow was, very few families escape disasters of one kind or another. When the New Yorker bought it, the editors were troubled by the fact that for the first 20 pages, it read like reminiscence.

A good many readers don't enjoy that sort of thing, and over the years, the New Yorker had been blamed for publishing too much of it. Very dry, Maxwell, isn't it? Unbelievable. Actually, if writers don't put down what they remember, all sorts of beautiful and moving experiences simply go down the drain forever. In any case, the New Yorker was afraid that readers, seeing also that it was very long,

would stop reading before they discovered that it was really about a murder. So I moved things around a bit at the beginning. Because that phrase does appear. The phrase that he was going to start with, that does appear in the book. But we should say that William Maxwell, the fact that you need to know about William Maxwell

is not merely that he was a novelist, he wrote half a dozen novels we're going to talk about in a minute. He was also the fiction editor at the New Yorker magazine for 40 years in an era of the great where he was the editor of We'll come on to it

but the person that we're talking about today is a craftsman in the best possible sense. Craft craftsman of stories sentences both those things um and talk about sentences as well yeah and um so but let me just read the blurb then on the back of this copy of so long see you tomorrow so you john mitchell wrote this i got the quote from richard ford as well did you do you want me to read that as well okay so what no don't read it well you can if you want it's all right says richard ford

he says something more in depth that so Ford says for writers of my generation William Maxwell's So Long See You Tomorrow is the book that made us all think we needed to write a short novel and magically since Mr Maxwell's book is so magically deft at being profound that we could do it but my god what a model to take on easier to bottle the wind it possesses that daunting quality impossible to emulate it makes greatness seem simple wow that's pretty good that's what i call a puff quote yeah right and then so and then you wrote right you you following following richard full follow that here he comes two families deep in rural illinois had shared much and then too much with jealousy leading

finally to sudden death a tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers the narrator whose mother died young and Cletus Smith a troubled farm boy is shattered it is Cletus's father who has committed the murder and now the son retreats wholly from public view and the stares of the morbidly fascinated. The narrator never exchanges another word with Cletus, but many years later he sees him in the bustling corridor of a Chicago high school. They pass without a word. Fifty years on, still haunted by guilt that he has failed in a fundamental act of compassion and friendship, the narrator tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he vividly conjures up

two families, two failed marriages and the farm tragedy that led Clarence Smith to murder his neighbour. Again, you know, I receive no payment for saying this, but that's really good. That's really good. I thank you.

Well, it does address one of the things you have to address with this book is there's no point in spoiler alerts because you already know within the first few pages you know that somebody's been killed and you know who the murderer is that's one of the things I love most about

the book I think is that it is a mystery it is a kind of a thriller but it's it's attempting to put together the the to unpack the reasons that the motives the emotions that fed into this kind of act i should just add i've got another little quote here which is very relevant to the to what you're just saying what we were just talking about where the parish review interviewer says how do you know when it's time to write another novel? Is it some sort of instinctual act, like the impulse that impels birds to migrate?

And Maxwell says, I expect to live forever, and therefore I never get worried about what I ought to be writing or about anything undone. In the case of So Long, See You Tomorrow, I was sitting at my desk, and something made me think of that boy I had failed to speak to. And thinking of him, I winced. And I saw myself wincing and I thought, that's very odd.

Indeed, that after all these years you should have a response so acute. Maybe that's worth investigating. And so that's what I set out to do. Now, having read more Maxwell in the last month or so, I had read this before, I think, but I realised, Kit and I, we were saying, weren't we, that he, what does he do? He sort of, he's constantly circling round.

Yeah, he worries at this thing. He picks at it. He picks at it. It's like a scab. It's barely healed and he keeps picking it up and seeing, is the wound still there? Yes, the wound is still there. But at decade-long intervals, right,

the different novels often return to very thinly veiled autobiography and the stories as well for things that had happened. I mean, John, you know about this, things that happened to him in his childhood. Well, I think maybe we should do this. Should we do the biography, give everybody a bit more? He was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois.

It's important to say that Lincoln, Illinois is four-fifths of his output of stories. He wrote lots of stories. He wrote six novels. He wrote a memoir. He wrote a couple of children's books. He's published a couple of correspondences. Frank O'Connor, wonderfully titled.

My favourite title of any book ever, The Happiness of Getting It Down Right, which is both as a writer and as an editor. His mother died in 1918 when he was 10 years old, which is the key, the absolute key to Maxwell's life. He was... So, to some extent, his work is always going to be about his childhood.

And this book, the last novel, is certainly about that. He moves to Chicago. Nothing... I'll come on a little bit to talk more about his mother's death. Mo moves to Chicago, nothing, I'll come on a little bit to talk about more about his mother's death. Moves to Chicago, he goes to University of Illinois, goes to Harvard, ends up teaching creative writing, and then finds himself at the New Yorker in 1936. He's published one novel at that point, Bright Center of Heaven. At the New Yorker he becomes fiction editor for 40 years

shall I just give you some of the names here so William Maxwell was the variously at various points the editor of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike Sylvia Townsend Warner J.D. Salinger John Cheever

Elizabeth Taylor, Frank O'Connor, Mavis Gallant, Shirley Hazard, of course, Eudora Welty, and so on and so forth. Eudora Welty described him as... She said, if you're a writer of fiction, he was HQ, he was headquarters. So Maxwell had this... Salinger, I didn't know this until I started to research for the... Salinger drove out to the Maxwell's country home

and read to them, over the course of one long afternoon, the entire first manuscript of Catcher in the Rye. That is how highly in regard Maxwell was held as an editor. And I mean it's very very hard to find anything that he was kind of one of those human beings. He lived a

maybe say a little bit, he was very lonely. I mean he had a very lonely and I think after his mother died he suffered absolutely terribly and you can feel the suffering for that is in the book. He married late. He married Emily, or Emmy, as he always referred to her, as the most beautiful woman he'd ever met.

They had two daughters. His first daughter was born when he was 46. He had the happy family life. Again, the great subject of Maxwell's fiction is family, home. He once said he was trying to write a natural history of home. And I think it's one of the things we've kind of always got to talk about with Maxwell is why is he not better known? For somebody who was, you know, he gets this reputation of being a writer's writer,

and he is that for sure. But he is also, I think he is a amazing storyteller we we i must um before we move off this i must add the um have you got that quote john about sentences about sentences in the new yorker yeah so all those writers we were just talking about, every writer requires, like writers do, requires different editorial input. So Salinger wants to read to Maxwell. Elizabeth Taylor, there's letters between Elizabeth Taylor and Maxwell which are wonderful in terms of their...

He was incredibly nurturing to her. But equally, he's asked about um chiva what did you do for chiva you know that quote he says i don't know what service i provided for chiva except to be delighted with his work right he also had this thing is he he was he learned very early on that the editing was it was you know you did as little as possible i think when he there's a wonderful story um which you know you did as little as possible i think when he there's a wonderful story um which you've probably got as well where one of the one of his predecessors well i think it's probably um it was probably um how ross himself you know said that you did you did you teach at

any point maxwell you know and of course he had taught creative writing he said the point is not the point is as an editor is not to teach other people how to write and it's one of those one of the reasons I love the happiness of getting it down right working as a publisher it's just he writes really long detailed letters to Frank O'Connor

and he gets quite short letters back but if you wanted how to help a writer be better which is all you wanted how to help how to help a writer be better which is all you really want to do as an editor there is no one, it's the best thing in the world I've ever read in that regard

it's just giving the advice but also it's that deep kind of trust and he was because he was three days a week at the New Yorker four days a week I mean all he cared about in the end was writing New Yorker, four days a week. I mean, all he cared about in the end was writing. I mean, he lived it. It was his whole life. He went to bed famously at 10 o'clock every night. If you were out at a dinner party with Maxwell, he'd leave

at 9.45 so he could get up at six and be fresh in the morning to write. He says here, I'm going to give you this little quote. You know, what do all those writers have in common, those New Yorker writers? He says, something that's characteristic of the writers who appear in the New Yorker is that the sentence is the unit by which the story advances, not the paragraph. And the individual sentence, therefore,

carries a great deal of weight and tends to be carefully constructed with no loose ends, and style becomes very important. Wow. Now, that is utterly brilliant, but is also, of course, completely applicable to this book, To So Long, See You Tomorrow. But often when I was reading it, Kit, I don't know if you found this,

that you seem to cover vast distances in a single paragraph in terms of emotional distance. What you were being told about a character's emotional development had been thoroughly concentrated down into the correct number of sentences. Totally.

And then you moved on. And I actually, several several times i had to stop go back reread because i felt i was reading too fast definitely yes there's so much meat in there one of the um phrase uh paragraphs in here that i read maybe three times i mean i've read the book a long time ago read reread it for this the paragraph where he talks about his father remarrying and he said he once saw a snake trying to swallow a frog and it was so repulsive and so terrible and he said that's what was happening and i read it and i thought it's grotesque it's a grotesque image and for him that's what was happening and i thought oh that's ugly and it's horrible. And as a boy, you know, he must have been frightened.

I was frightened of that image as an adult. And I stopped, you know, I couldn't get past that paragraph. I kept thinking, I just can't read on because that's awful. And I've got a little glimpse of what it was for him to see his place in that family usurped. That's how he felt about his father being remarried, that he'd lost his tenuous position with his father. He also strikes a really good example.

You know the thing we were talking about, or there was the quote from him about how he was sitting at his desk and he thought about this event that had happened 50 years earlier. One gets the impression from this book and from the fact that he returns to the same events to describe them from different perspectives that he's incredibly acutely aware of a phrase or an image that he may have seen or he may have heard somebody say, like the phrase, so long, see you tomorrow, in fact,

that he then lodges in his head for reasons he can't understand and the writing becomes a way of exploring why that should be. Yes. And you were saying something about the phrase, so long, see you tomorrow tomorrow being almost nothing, right? And yet everything is in it. It's everything. It's that whole story within four words that it is about today and the future. And it's also about something lost within that phrase because it's the end of a relationship when he says that.

Even though he doesn't know it at the time, it's the end of a relationship and something that's going to that moment is going to stay with him because it's the last communication he had shall i just read that little passage yes because it's it that you've got because you've got these basically these two stories they've got cletus's story where his family's something terrible is happening in his family you know his his dad is um he's obviously consorting with the neighbor's wife and you just you can feel that he's having to he's been separated and then the narrator who is kind of Maxwell is obviously dealing with his mother's death so this is this is the paragraph when I was a child I told my mother everything after she died I learned that it was better to keep some things to myself. My father represented authority, which meant to me that he could not also represent understanding.

And because there was an element of cruelty in my older brother's teasing, as, of course, there is in all teasing, I didn't trust him, although I perfectly well could have, about larger matters. teasing, I didn't trust him, although I perfectly well could have about larger matters. Anyway, I didn't tell Cletus about my shipwreck, as we sat looking down on the whole neighbourhood, and he didn't tell me about his. When the look of the sky informed us that it was getting along towards suppertime, we climbed down and said, so long, and see you tomorrow, and went our separate ways in the dusk. And one evening, this casual parting turned out to be for the last time. We were separated by that pistol shot.

It's just so beautiful. You know what, it's really beautiful, isn't it? It's so beautiful. It moves the story on, but it's also that thing of being able to dip down into the two conflicting emotions coming together it's a rare thing isn't it to have a book I think it does that sort of

it does actually get better if you read it it can bear re-reading I really found like I say I think this is the second time that I've read it and I read a couple of other of Maxwell's novels at second time that I'd read it and I read a couple of other of Maxwell's novels at

John's suggestion. John, your favourite is Time Will Darken It, isn't it? I have to say, yeah, it was, but I came back to see, you know, reading it 20 years after I published it and being older, I do,

I mean, I don't think i ever underestimated it but i think once you've got more life under your belt this book becomes more remarkable because for the pure in a way what what ford said because it's it's so compressed and i suppose having more appreciation perhaps of the of the technical difficulty of trying to compress a lifetime. And it's like that thing is, you know, from Bunny in They Came Like Swallows in 1937, right at the beginning of his career, to the narrator and so on. I mean, he's still dealing with this.

Still wrestling with it. Well, I found, I have to say, I read They Came Like Swallows, which I'd never read before, and that totally blew me away. I mean, I love So Long, See You Tomorrow, but They Came Like Swallows, precisely because I'd just read So Long, See You Tomorrow, to then go back 40 years

and see a younger man's account of some of the same events from three different perspectives that of him, his brother and his father. I read it and thought why isn't this an incredible to think this was written in 1937 as well it's so

modern actually you know what's so interesting Kit what you were saying about So long see you tomorrow is you would read it and say it seems elegant from any time well you go back 40 years he's writing something that actually feels could have been written in the last 20 years it's extraordinary and also picking up on a point you just said technically and i you know i did a creative writing masters and also i teach on them and one of the things you say over and over in creative writing, stick to the point of view, stick to a point of view.

So long as they see you tomorrow, it's probably got 20 points of view. It's got a dog, aren't you? Yeah, the dog. The housekeeper. The housekeeper's neighbours, what they think of the housekeeper. The barber, obviously the main players, everyone's got a point of view, and nothing is lost by that.

So there's the technical facility. I'd also like to... The thing that I found most extraordinary in this book, and which I'd like to ask you both about, is there's a point... I assume it was near the end of the serialization it was serialized in two parts in the new yorker and this is on page 56 he does a very uh audacious thing so he's been talking about the events and we are led to assume that we've been reading memoir

or, you know, highly autobiographical fiction. He says, I don't know where he is. It isn't at all likely that we will run into each other somewhere or that we would recognise each other if we did. He could even be dead. Except through the intervention of chance,

the one possibility of my making some connection with him seems to lie not in the present but in the past in my trying to reconstruct the testimony that he was never called upon to give the unsupported word of a witness who was not present except in imagination would not be acceptable in a court of law but as it has been demonstrated over and over, the sworn testimony of the witness who was present is not trustworthy either. If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts, if there were any. The reader will also have to do a certain amount of imagining. He must imagine a deck of cards spread out face down on a table

and then he must turn one over, only it's not the eight of hearts or the jack of diamonds, but a perfectly ordinary quarter of an hour out of Cletus's past life. But first, I need to invent a dog. So good. Now, I think that is absolutely extraordinary because what he's doing in his own quiet way

is saying to you, here you go, you thought you were reading a novel maybe. You weren't. I'm about to write a novel. And what I found so interesting in this book is in a sense it's a novel within a novel or a novel within a memoir. I thought it was going to be,

I don't know what I thought it was going to be the first time I read it. I think I just thought it was going to be I don't know what I thought it was going to be the first time I read it I think I just thought it was going to be a story about Illinois or something but the fact that it's actually like all my favourite books it's a book about books it's a book about writing and a book about what you need to do when you write

to create a mixture between reminiscence and lying in a greater cause he says that in the book he says you know we all lie all the time as soon as you go back and try and say this is what happened you're lying because it's the meeting with um you know he has this image of the house that's being constructed it's all about houses with maxwell i mean one of the the things about his childhood when his mother dies he'd get moves to the house that he grew up in it's all about houses with Maxwell I mean one of the things about his childhood when his mother dies

he moves to the house that he grew up in it was called the Wunderkammer the Wunderkammer, the house of wonders and he loses all that and then he's moved to another house where nothing is in the right place, it's just that maybe it's just that great little thing that he

said about his mother which is really important because it is the spirit that when she died, the shine went out of everything and stayed out for a long, long while. I couldn't really manage without her, so I managed, this in the realm of the unconscious, to incorporate her personality into my own. I have friends who think they are fond of me,

but really they are fond of my mother. Oh, gosh. That's why I say I find myself, I mean, there are very few books that make me, the precision with which he dissects. Also, the great thing about Maxwell, which for me is a great thing, he doesn't say it's all right.

No. He doesn't say it's all right. He does not say that you will get better. No. He does not say that be positive. No. He does not say that be positive. Be cheerful. It'll all turn out well. No, he says some things happen that are so terrible

that we never recover. And the end where at the end of this book where he says he went to his therapist and he says I couldn't vary and he leaves the therapist office and we're down the street crying. My brother could. Other people couldn't. I couldn't. For me it he leaves the therapist's office and weeps down the street crying. My brother could. I couldn't. Other people could have. I couldn't.

It's one of the great, for me, it's one of the great moments in modern literature. But I do like the way that he said that New York is one of the very few cities where you can just walk down the road crying. Crying, and it's okay. But it reminds me, actually, there's a more recent novel that was published a couple of years ago called All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Taves, a Canadian writer called

Miriam Taves which is and this book is written in a very different way but they are Maxwell is writing something which has come to be known as it seems to me auto-fiction, it's this thing where you

use memoir and you change what you want to try and reach a greater truth and in Miriam Taves book it's a novel about someone whose sister has suffered from long term depression and who is constantly trying to

do away with herself and succeeds and it turns out that Miriam taves had very similar um familial circumstances to deal with the brilliance of the book as is the brilliance of maxwell that john was just talking about and this sounds loveyish but it is what i mean is it's bravery yes to confront the raw bedrock the emotional trauma and find the strength to go back to your desk day after day after day to turn it into something else so it isn isn't you just writing, and then this happened to me and I felt sad. It's transmuting it into this other thing.

I'm so full of admiration for people who can do that. There's a lovely line, I think, from that interview where he says, as I get older, they ask him, you know, what have you learned? As I get older, I put more trust in what happened, which has a profound meaning if you can get at it. But what you invent is important too. Flaubert said that whatever you invent is true,

even though you may not understand what the truth of it is. Wow. Totally profound. Isn't that... People say, why fiction? Because actually... I love the idea that the fiction is, what you invent is true, but you just don't know. Yes.

And that's the great thing. It's for other people in a way to complete that. Well, it does help you, reading things like this, about confronting tiny moments where you've done something wrong. You know, tiny moments. I mean, he's confronting walking past a guy and not saying anything. We've all done tiny, tiny things that no-one else knows about but we feel shit about.

And he's confronting that and saying, in this tiny moment, something's shifted for me and I'm going to go back and I'm going to try and put it right by writing about him. Kit, have you got that bit to read? This is, again, what you're talking about, is that so long see you tomorrow thing? That thing of one minute you're here and the next you're not.

One minute you're one thing and then you're not. Yes. You have a friendship. In a phrase, the friendship is ended and you only know far long after the event that that was it. Have you got a bit there? Sure. The bit I want to read is the way that Maxwell deconstructs what it is to be who we are.

And talking about Cletus, he says, about boys he's speaking about, whether they are part of home or home is 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 wash day, of wool drying on 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 keep him busy from time to time until they sit down for supper. Take away the chores that keep him busy from time to time until they sit down for supper. Take away the early morning mist, the sound of crows quarrelling 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're at it. Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them Swift and his flying machine. Take that away too while you're 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 ploughed 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. It's beyond genius. It's a deconstruction of a life. I know, I deconstruction of i know we're all welling up here

that actually is incorrect that's an incredible bit of writing but the knowledge is the thing that he does that's so brilliant is how can i put this he the prose is often very quiet yes very straightforward you know that will have been preceded by something far easier to handle. And then he suddenly makes these gear changes into these tiny set pieces. Yes. As if to say, I have found a riff. I am going to build on it, polish it, make it perfect. I love it.

Just a tiny sentence, just exactly that gear change. So you've got Clarence in court, which is hopeless, and he can't make any sense of it, and he's adjudged to be cruel, and that's why the wife has left him. And then there's this paragraph, it said, nobody said in court that Clarence Smith was pierced to the heart by his wife's failure to love him,

and it wouldn't have made any difference if they had. I know. God. Because that's not the question. That's not the court case. So John, you were saying something about, I just want to before we run out of time.

So you knew Maxwell at the end of his life and his wife, Emily. I met them. I went and had tea with them in their wonderful apartment. They died, didn't they, within days of one another. So I still want to read. We did Shirley Hazard's The Great Fire on Backlisted a while ago. And, of course, Shirley Hazards knew William Maxwell very well

was one of his writers at the New Yorker and I just want to read, there's a very touching essay by her in the collection called We Need Silence to find out what we think about Maxwell, I just want to read you this John you were saying that

when it came down to it Maxwell lived for books and for reading. And Shirley Hazard says, In his last extraordinary year of life, while Emily Maxwell was slowly dying with a grace, a philosophy, and I would say a beauty that remains indescribable, Bill Maxwell re-read War and Peace. His solace and pleasure in the book were an event in those rooms. He said, it is so comforting. We rejoiced together over certain scenes, not discussing or dissecting them, but paying simply the tribute of our delight. He would speak of

these episodes shedding his silent tears, not in grief, but for the grandeur of common humanity. Bill was steadily eating less, and when the book became too heavy for him to hold, a friend came each afternoon and read it for him. Five days before Emmy's death, the Maxwells, in wheelchairs, went to the Chardin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Two days before Emmy's death and ten days before his own,

Bill finished reading Tolstoy's novel. The events encompassed in that last month of their lives, the tenderness quietly exchanged among the friends who visited them, were entirely consonant with the qualities of that departing pair, unforgettable, unforgotten. Bill Maxwell said that he didn't fear death, but that he would miss reading novels. Oh, gosh.

We're going to leave you weeping on this one. There's a lovely other, after Emmy died, there's a week, right, his last week. He said, I feel like the locusts who leave their skin behind and fly up the trees. He has, this is, there are some moving deaths. This is one that very much reminds me of Blake dying. He said that all of the stuff he learned in Sunday school was true.

It was very surprising to him. The last thing he was expecting, he said that his understanding was something wonderful. Life is not just pointless, not just about abandonment. Something lifts you up, he said. He asked the people around him to sing, including the daughter he had discouraged from an opera career.

Singing, singing is the only thing worth doing, he told her. I just love that idea. He said, it's like Blake, you know, Blake's wife dying saying, you know, Blake died sick. Do you know what he has?

I bet you do. Do you know what he has written on his gravestone? Actually, no, I don't. The work is the message. Oh, wow. Fantastic. I'd also like to say just quickly, so I've read those two novels.

I've also read some of the short stories, and we have a little running joke on that. I'm backlisted about don't read the novels. Read the stories. Read the journals. The stories, I have to say, are absolutely remarkable. You know, he didn't write a novel between 1961, I think that's right, which is The Chateau, is it?

Yes, The Chateau in 1961. And then this book in 1979, 1980. But he wrote a story called Over by the River. Do you know that story? Of course. So it's published in 1974. It's 40 pages long. It took him 10 years to write.

So it's like the missing novel, but it's absolutely incredible. But I was saying to Kit, if you asked me to tell you what it was about, beyond me saying to you, well, it's about a family in Manhattan, I would struggle, and yet it felt like pure writing. Yes. Do you understand what I mean? Just as though he had found this collection of moments and of impressions and had woven them together to create a decade's worth of life in 40 pages.

Totally extraordinary. And several people recommended me other... Lee Randall recommended that I read a story called The Thistles in Sweden. It's a beautiful story. That's an amazing, amazing story. So this has been one of those back lists. They're, of course, listeners.

They're always fun. But the pleasure of choosing one book and then other things coming out of that book with this particular episode. Well, he was so graceful. That was the thing. It was probably my happiest literary memory ever. It was meeting him and his wife.

They were so thrilled that the book was being published that all his books were being written because we were doing the whole backlist. He had a great love of Europe and English publishing. The impeccable manners. We had tea together and we talked. I corresponded a little after he died in 2000. But if you're interested in writing, if you're interested in literature,

if you're interested in story, if you're interested in the nuts and bolts, he's great. But there's something about So Long, See You Tomorrow, there's something about that life with the memory, the reality of his mother's death that he spends his whole life dealing with. He does at one point say, I think this is it with my mother, by the way. I don't think

she will. I think I've done this one to death. Also, you were going to mention, weren't you, ancestors, which is not ancestors, which you didn't manage to bring back into print, did you? No, it's the one that we didn't do, ancestors, which I don't know where I put it. This is family history. And it's just remarkable. I mean, it just remarkable. If you could imagine a book of family history going back to his Scottish relatives. It's also a dialogue with living relatives. And when was that published?

That was published in 1977, I think. Okay, so that's like the book that he's writing in the gap between the novels. Yeah, and he's writing stories, endlessly writing stories. I would also recommend his essays on other writers, which are Outermost Dream. Which is called?

The Outermost Dream, which is published by Graywolf. Outermost Dream, yeah. And also, everybody, often on Backlisted, we try and lob you books that aren't in print or are difficult to come by. You could walk into a bookshop, I like to think,

and pick up a copy of So Long, See You Tomorrow. Let's hope. And three or four hours later, you'll have read it and you'll walk into a bookshop, I like to think, and pick up a copy of So Long, See You Tomorrow. Let's hope. And three or four hours later you'll have read it and you'll be enriched for doing so, right? Unfortunately we're going to have to stop much as I'd love to talk about Max Scott forever. Thanks to Kit for and particularly for breeding such beautiful

passages from the book. To our producer Matt Hall, once again, and thanks to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod. BacklistedPod on, what is it, Facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod. And on the page on the Unbound site,

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