By Connie Nardini
To go through the door of memory, you must shrink like Alice in Wonderland; the door is tall and slotted – some light seems to filter in through the cracks. Because you can only see partly, can memory of what happened in your childhood be trusted?
William Maxwell says in his 1980 American Book Award-winning novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, “In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.” Even so, his narrator tries to again become the small boy whose world could not return to the normality of tomorrow after being visited by violence and death.
The narrator, whom I’ll call William (because he is unnamed in the novel), first meets death in rural 1920s Illinois when his mother dies while giving birth to his younger brother when he was 10 years old. He goes through the first door then: “I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune that anyone else, and that I had inadvertently walked through a door I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. Actually, it was the other way around; I hadn’t gone anywhere and nothing was changed, as far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.”
He comes to another door when his father decides to remarry: “What I was looking at was a snake in the act of swallowing a frog that was too large and wouldn’t go down . . . it wasn’t enough for me, or for my older and younger brother and me, to slip through that door to the way things used to be, when the time came; my mother would expect us to bring my father with us. And if he was married to another woman, how could we?”
All these doors soon become part of a new house that his father is building for his new family. William starts to meet a classmate there, Cletus Smith, to climb the beams and rafters of this house where the walls and floors are thin air that only the imagination can fill in. This house becomes a kind of home for both of them; Cletus has also suffered family loss – his parents are divorced over his mother’s adulterous affair with another man, Lloyd Wilson. “We played together in that unfinished house day after day, risking our necks and breathing in the rancid odor of sawdust and shavings and fresh-cut timber.” After the last time the two boys part – “so long, see you tomorrow” – Lloyd Wilson is found shot to death with his ear cut off and Cletus’ father is missing.
As an adult, William describes a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti called “Palace at 4 a.m.“; he sees it at the Museum of Modern Art while living and working in New York City. “It is made of wood, with no solid walls, only this uprights and horizontal beams . . . ” Giacometti describes making this sculpture because of dreams he had in which he built this house over sand over and kept seeing his dead mother in it. Cletus Smith and William are separated from their house by a pistol shot, but it remains in their dreams.
The long slope of further disasters engulf both boys in ways both predictable and unpredictable; William Maxwell’s prose limns their lives with unshadowed lines. The powerlessness of childhood and the untrustworthiness of adults etch these lines with no room for pity or regret. Security from evil is as fragile as the matchstick beams of the Giacometti scupture.
Have you ever visited the neighborhood of your growing-up and found too may things missing? Maxwell, who wrote this misplaced masterpiece when he was 70 after having a long career as the fiction editor of The New Yorker, tries to fill in the missing pieces. He builds a house . . .
. . . Made of moonbeams and starlight,
Whose lovely stairs and halls can lead
To another now.
–
Previously in Connie’s Corner:
* “Heavier Than Air.” Nona Caspers creates a tapestry of small towns and chronicles the lives of people living there who have a hard time coming down to earth.
* “Pale Fire.” Nabokov creates a novel that doesn’t seem to have coherent plot but a story that contains a do-it-yourself kit.
* “Out Stealing Horses.” A coming-of-age story that reveals a father’s secret life during wartime.
* “An American In Iceland.” Answering the riddle: how many Icelanders does it take to change a light bulb?
* “The Physics of the Dalai Lama.” How Buddhism squares with quantum mechanics.
* “Finn.” Some kind of monster.
* “The Master Bedroom.” Betrayal, revelation, metaphor, and a swan in a dirty sheet.
Posted on February 2, 2009