I love quotes about pain, how wonderful it is to be young, one's parents, and about being a fool.

I love quotes about pain, how wonderful it is to be young, one's parents, and about being a fool.

Those mentionables and other snippets from the good novel, Time Will Darken It (1948) by William Maxwell, are what I'm posting on this rainy Sunday afternoon in Santa Monica.

It's been about 20 years since I first read William Maxwell.  That's when I read  The Folded Leaf (published in 1945).  That book went straight to the heart for me, and I wished I'd read it when I was in high school.  But I didn't.  Time Will Darken It is a thoroughly sympathetic and engaging novel.  While reading it, authors and their connections to Maxwell began to pop up.  It was crazy.  I began to find William Maxwell's link to another author I just finished, Mavis Gallant, whose Paris Stories I couldn't get enough of.

He was her editor at "The New Yorker" magazine.  I then I found out that John O'Hara, John Cheever, John Updike, Frank O'Connor, were all Maxwell's authors at that beloved magazine for decades.  My god, I thought, he's everywhere.

Eudora Welty said that "...his sensitive prose is the good and careful tool of an artist who is always doing exactly what he means to do.  [Time Will Darken It is a]...careful, meditative examination of unfolding relationships among people of several sorts and ages...the story's quiet and accumulating power a dark and disturbing beauty that has some of its roots, at least, in fine restraint."  

The book opens one fine evening in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1912.

(from page 350 of the David R. Godine edition, 1983; a misfortune involving fire has occurred)--

"Pain is movement, the waves of the sea rising, receding; waiting is the shore they break upon, the shore that changes, in-time, but never noticeably.  The will that waits and endures is not the same will that makes it possible for people to get out of bed in the morning or to choose between this necktie, this silk scarf, and that.  It is something you never asked for and that never asked for you.  You have it and live.  You lose it and give up the ghost."

Earlier in the book, from p. 120--

"The house next door is never the sanctuary it at first appears to be. If you reach the stage where you are permitted to enter without knocking, you are also expected to come oftener and to penetrate farther and in the end share, along with the permanent inhabitants, the weight of the roof tree."

"...their musical selections and their behavior (especially when they grabbed up their clarinets and trumpets, shoved their chairs in a double line, and indulged in a mock sleigh-ride) were light-hearted and long remembered.  The grey-haired members of the audience, guardians of a gentle Calvinistic era and with fixed ideas of what entertainment was appropriate to a day of worship, sat shocked and disapproving.  The rest applauded wildly, reminded of something they had almost forgotten or known only in snatches--of how wonderful it is to be young."
(p.152)

There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents.  Death, about which so much mystery is made, is perhaps no mystery at all.  But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and character guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of a smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher. (p. 222)


After a significant tragedy, a fire, takes place toward the end of the novel...--

"The knowledge that you have been a fool hurts just as much, is just as hard to admit to yourself if you are young as when you are old.  Every error that people make is repeated over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum...if they know what they are doing and cannot help themselves.    There is not only a second chance, there are a thousand second chances to speak up, to act bravely for once, to face the fact that must sooner or later be faced.  Windows that have been nailed shut for years are suddenly pried open, letting air in, letting love in, and hope.  (p.348)

Williams Keepers Maxwell, Jr. 1908-2000