“The Most Sympathetic Reader You Can Imagine”: William Maxwell’s New Yorker and the Midcentury Short Story

William Maxwell is perhaps the most significant and least studied of midcentury American literary editors. This conjunction of literary impact and scholarly neglect tells us something about the constitutional reserve of editors. It also speaks of the challenge editorial practice poses to a literary criticism still largely invested in the aura of original authorship and in methods tied to the singular published text — in the very outcomes editorial labor seeks to produce and the growing field of editorial studies necessarily undermines. Betraying the editorial ethic, making visible what was intended to be invisible, can only be justified by what it reveals: a more accurate picture of how writing enters the world and reaches its readers.

As a case study in the uses of editorial power, Maxwell accentuates the contradictory qualities of his profession, having been at once uncommonly recessive and uncommonly influential. On the one hand, his importance is beyond question. Fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975, Maxwell possessed an unrivalled proximity to the emerging canon of midcentury short fiction in English. The stories of John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Shirley Hazzard, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O'Connor, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Eudora Welty all passed through Maxwell's hands on their way to publication in the country's most prestigious magazine. That this passage, by way of the editor's encouragement and approval, became such a well-walked path to the status of classic can hardly be coincidence. On the other hand, Maxwell's textual involvement in these works was rarely dramatic. A 1948 letter to O'Connor conveys his characteristic tone and tact: "I think that, in general, the editing and queries are fairly restrained, sensible and self-explanatory. But if there are spots where you feel that none of these adjectives applies, I hope you'll point them out."1 An editor with a light touch does not lend himself to easy description or precise measurement. Tributes to Maxwell deepen the mystery of his contribution. When he died in 2000, The New York Times declared that "as an editor he helped a generation's finest writers find their voices."2 The cliché elides what it also implies, the puzzle of this process and the smoothed-over complications of its product. Maxwell was the "most sympathetic reader you can imagine," in Welty's words, but the motions and effects of this sympathetic reading are buried in the stories themselves, interpretation folded back into composition.3 Where it stopped seems as important as where it led, since Maxwell taught his protégés "that the best editors know when to put their pencils down."4 Yet restraint, line by line, coexisted with clout, issue by issue, over the magazine's character — the prerogative of selection that set the perimeters of the field in which writing reached its public. Though Maxwell played a defining role in shaping the American short story, that role is peculiarly hard to define.

This article offers the first sustained, scholarly inquiry into Maxwell's editorial practice and his non-authorial authority. It examines, in turn, the affinity between Maxwell's editing and his own fiction; his working relationships with three of the midcentury's leading short story writers, John Updike, John Cheever, and Mavis Gallant; and the consequences of his retirement for the New Yorker's fiction department, whose subsequent renovation of personnel and standards shaped the internal struggle over Maxwell's magazine-published novella, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979). Maxwell's influence over the American short story — visible in the alterations, suggestions, and questions preserved in letters and on typescripts — can only be understood within the environment and ambit of his magazine, each instance of editing a negotiation with that institution's tradition which has the potential to alter, if ever so slightly, its existing order. One editor among several, Maxwell's selection and revision of texts took place against the backdrop of "the New Yorker story," that enduring stereotype which, while considerably oversimplified, nevertheless captures the magazine's penchant for conventionally realist stories chronicling the domestic lives of a white upper middle class — a demographic that, not coincidentally, overlapped with the editors themselves.5 Maxwell alternately heeded and bucked this aesthetic and social current, although he did little to disturb its racial homogeneity. The archival records of Updike's stories of Pennsylvania boyhood, of Cheever's increasingly experimental fiction, and of Gallant's Linnet Muir series reveal both the scope and the limits of the editor's sympathetic reading. I argue that Maxwell at once enforced and expanded the company line, reluctantly policing The New Yorker's more rigid notions of realism while drawing ever more wide-ranging autobiographical story sequences from a constellation of writers.

So what did Maxwell actually do? How did the editor enact these mediations between writer and public, text and institution? He read. He queried and suggested, accepted and rejected. Between composition and publication, he offered the intercession of a reader looking for what was possible in the text as well as what was actual. The editor may realize — in both senses of the term — the potential in a piece of writing, the latent clarity and style in a sentence, the hidden shape and direction in a story. Yet distortion may be as likely an outcome as realization, ruination the shadow of productive collaboration. Thus, this examination of the editor draws together, and deepens, a theory of creative reading and a theory of literary economy, the individual activity of mediation helping to structure and explain the social realm in which books and magazines circulate. Editing clarifies both how reading generates writing and how institutions, themselves made up of levels of readership, generate fields of production and reception. Matthew Philpotts has already set editorial activity within a Bourdieusian framework, examining "the interaction between the personal habitus of the editor and the institutional habitus of the journal."6 I differ in my emphasis on the editor's reading — a form of reading that becomes writing, linking the two ends of the literary exchange — and on what the study of this occupation not only draws from Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the literary field, but adds to it too.

Bourdieu is so keen "to suspend the charismatic ideology of 'creation'" that throughout his work there is little sense of literature as something written and read, as opposed to marketed and prized, and none whatsoever of the editor's reading that anticipates reception and so reshapes composition.7 The publisher appears briefly to ensure "that the product of artistic fabrication will receive a consecration," but consecration apart, "the publisher or the dealer can only organize and rationalize the distribution of the work." That middlemen may also have a role in the making of the work does not arise as a possibility, nor does Bourdieu's "field of struggles" for prestige leave much space for the imaginative interactions of readers and texts, the interpretations that constitute "the second life of art."8 However, we can reintroduce a vital dimension of creativity to Bourdieu's sociology by recognizing "the whole set of agents" who comprise his field as mediators and their actions as mediations. Following John Guillory, moreover, we can understand mediation as a process that is fundamentally recreative, a simultaneous "distanciation" and "transmission" that draws texts into fresh contexts and thus alters them in the act of reception.9 This operation is what is creative about reading, and it is what the editor so usefully illuminates. The first reader is a prime agent of mediation, occupying the pressure point where aesthetic and commercial concerns merge — and from which further mediations flow. William Maxwell's career opens one window onto the workings of the editorial function in the twentieth century: on how its agents and their institutions stage-managed the literary culture at large, translating poetics into power, the shaping of texts into the shaping of tastes, drawing the borders of what was published and read.

1. An Editorial Aesthetic

By mapping the topography of Maxwell's influence, I will confront his undeserved academic neglect, both as a writer and as an editor. Despite being hailed as "our greatest domestic realist" by Christopher Carduff and admired in abundance by his fellow authors — "my favorite North American writer," Alice Munro told The Atlantic in 2001 — Maxwell has been the subject of only a single critical study.10 True to its subtitle, Barbara Burkhardt's William Maxwell: A Literary Life (2005) fills in the details of his two careers. In doing so, however, she holds them apart, passing over the possibility of a creative connection, or coherence, between the profession of reading and the vocation of writing. "His intense engagement with others' work," though it "slowed progress" on his own projects, is notable mainly for having placed Maxwell "at the center of a world-class-community of writers."11 How the two activities may have informed or even directly influenced each other remains unasked and unanswered. In the scattered essays, reminiscences, and histories of The New Yorker which comprise the additional critical discourse on Maxwell, this separation has become habitual. His office job is treated as a "parallel life," its intersections with the main business of writing largely ignored.12 Even John Updike, the other half of Maxwell's longest and sunniest working relationship, compresses "his unstinting editorial attention" to half a sentence when it comes time to consider the editor's own fiction, the fruit of those "four days of the week, [when] he stayed at home and wrote, reporting to the typewriter straight from breakfast."13 While the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in a minor Maxwell revival — several of his works are charged with the atmosphere of the Spanish Flu of 1918 — A. O. Scott's recent tribute perpetuates the pattern of discussing first the fiction and then mentioning, almost as an afterthought, the "honorable place in the history of American writing" reserved for Maxwell's editing.14

Curiously, the only scholar to place Maxwell's editing alongside his writing in mutual illumination does so as a severe critic of both. Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents (2015) charges Maxwell as an immoral actor, a writer who used his editorial position to project his own limited values, aesthetic and ethical, on American literature at large. Though Mendelson does not admire Maxwell's character, he appreciates his power and makes a trenchant, if abbreviated, attempt to chart its consequences. He begins by observing that "in the nineteen-forties and fifties a new style of novels and short stories — plotless, undramatic, quietly nuanced, faultlessly phrased — became dominant in American literary fiction."15 This presiding style, he adds, "was largely the work of one man, William Maxwell." Though his editorial touch may have been light on any given story, the cumulative effect was heavy enough to distort a literary culture: "No other writer in America had ever had anything like this kind of invisible imperial power, and it was made possible only by Maxwell's institutional status."16 Mendelson reasons by equations. Maxwell was "the gatekeeper who opened the pages of the magazine to writers whose style he approved"; therefore, he was responsible for the synthesis of style that the magazine blended and promoted.17 And since this periodical was America's most prominent arbiter of middlebrow taste, the New Yorker style became the nation's own literary base note.18 In similar fashion, Mendelson argues that the fatalism of Maxwell's own stories seeped into those of his writers, his "contempt for any ethical understanding of life" metastasizing through the body literate.19 But while Mendelson expands on his moral critique of Maxwell's writing, in matters of editing he merely asserts, offering no proof for the New Yorker's supposedly singular style or Maxwell's unique role in fostering it. Nothing in his account would indicate that Maxwell was one editor among many, an anchor of the magazine's fiction department but not its autocrat. Indeed — as Amy Reading argues in this issue — Maxwell's mentor Katharine White had perhaps the greatest claim to establishing the acceptable scale of notes New Yorker fiction writers could play. Without evidence of the editorial process in action, Mendelson's argument is as imprecise as it is tendentious.

The novelist and the editor are bound by method more than moral inadequacy. The keynote of the editor's fiction, the pattern of his creative process, is revision, the Latin root of which means "to pay another visit."20 Maxwell's writing returns again and again to the scene and tragedy of his childhood: his mother's sudden death from the Spanish Flu and his subsequent exile from Lincoln, Illinois. Each fictional flight back aims to recapture this lost world. In his Paris Review interview, he defines his artistic impulse as "the need to put things back the way they were before."21 But to revisit is also to disturb, and Maxwell alters the account as he adds to it, using different points of view and shifting narrative structures to draw new discoveries out of the same piece of the past. Although Maxwell's first novel, Bright Center of Heaven (1934), does not touch on his mother's death — and he described his fifth, the French-set The Château (1961), as a means of "not coming home" — They Came Like Swallows (1937), The Folded Leaf (1945), Time Will Darken It (1948), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) all do come home, as does his family history, Ancestors (1971). Toward the end of his life, with no more novels to write, Maxwell turned to first-person stories describing people he had known in his childhood, collecting them in Billie Dyer and Other Stories (1992). Thus his writing advanced by a twofold process of rearrangement. At the level of the page, Maxwell cut and pasted. "If a good sentence occurs in an otherwise boring paragraph, I cut it out, rubber-cement it to a sheet of typewriter paper, and put it in a folder," he told the Paris Review, adding that "sometimes I try that sentence in ten different places until finally it finds the place where it will stay."22 To examine the typescripts in the William Maxwell Papers is to encounter sheet after sheet made up of pasted segments, many now beginning to come unstuck. This is the paper trail of an editorial impulse, although one that he would learn to restrain when working with other writers. Between his own books, however, the habit of moving pieces around and finding new connections did not diminish; the micro-revision of sentences extended to the macro-revision of narrative. The progression from novel to novel is more akin to a circling. Maxwell himself saw his perpetual subject with undeceived eyes, acknowledging that at the age of 25, "I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life were already at my disposal."23 What he made of this material — and Maxwell's phrase illuminates the special attention given to family houses in all his fiction — is "the Natural History of home."

One scene, of a father and son walking together in grief, recurs in each book that deals directly with the wound that split open Maxwell's life. Repetition is a measure of his artistic fidelity, variation the expression of his artistic development. Maxwell moves forward by going back, his creation a form of recreation. Towards the end of They Came Like Swallows, the father of the Maxwell-like family finds himself circling his wife's coffin,

mak[ing] the circuit from the library out into the front hall, then through the living-room, which was filled with flowers, and into the library again. He would have preferred to walk alone, but [his son] Robert stood waiting at the foot of the stairs and James did not have the heart to refuse him.24

In the more straightforwardly autobiographical mode of Ancestors, Maxwell reveals that "my father walked the floor with his hand on my shoulder, and spoke hopefully about the future, but his face was the color of ashes."25 Maxwell's next novel, The Folded Leaf, contains an echo of this scene, father and son visiting the grave of their dead wife and mother in "the small town [where] they had once lived . . . they made this journey every year."26 The characters' return to Lincoln, the circling of their feet and lives around this symbol of loss, mirrors Maxwell's own creative process. His last novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow, surveys the same territory as Swallows and, despite the later work's slim size, expands it. Twice, the narrator of So Long recalls his father moving through the house. Near the beginning, he "would walk from the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather's clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room . . . his face was the color of ashes."27 The route resembles that in Swallows; the phrase "color of ashes" comes straight from Ancestors. Moreover, the end of the novel contains a return-within-the-return:

After six months of lying on an analyst's couch — this, too, was a long time ago — I relived that nightly pacing, with my arm around my father's waist. From the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather's clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room. From the library into the dining room, where my mother lay in her coffin.28

To his analyst, "I meant to say I couldn't bear it, but what came out of my mouth was 'I can't bear it.'" The sentence that takes us from and to the living room offers, word for word and comma for comma, the precise phrasing of the earlier account. It may seem a circular sentence for a circular novel, leaving us back at the beginning. But two departures break new ground, bringing us directly to the absence at the heart of this revisionary activity — "together we stood looking down at her" — and drawing past pain into the present tense, from "I couldn't bear it" to "'I can't bear it.'" Revision, after all, is "an act whose creativity is founded in its discrepancies," making of Maxwell's Lincoln a constantly expanding house, its inhabitants widening from the single family in Swallows to the town characters who live again in Billie Dyer.29

So Long is itself only partly the story of Maxwell's childhood bereavement. That first, familiar tale is woven in and out of a second. The narrator, looking back on his childhood, finds himself moved to write about a different loss suffered by a different boy: his playmate Cletus Smith, whose father murders a man and then dies by suicide. Both boys suffer shipwrecks and then disappear from each other's lives. Years later, the narrator sees and ignores Cletus in the hallway of a Chicago high school. So Long is "a roundabout, futile way of making amends," an attempt at restitution across time that is nevertheless shaped by cleavages, not least by the shift from memoir to fiction that cuts across the middle of the novel.30 Having relied that far on newspaper reports and his own memories, the narrator declares that he will continue Cletus's story by inventing what he cannot know: "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."31 This requires a "mixture of truth and fiction," and to begin with, "I need to invent a dog" — Cletus's dog Trixie, the vivid depiction of whose inner life would become a source of discord between Maxwell and his own New Yorker editors, Roger Angell and William Shawn, when they prepared the work for publication across two issues of the magazine in 1979. But this feat of fiction ends on the understanding that its kind of restitution can never be enough. The narrator's final phrase, praying that Cletus was ultimately "undestroyed by what was not his doing," offers only a double negative.32 So Long is about sundered lives and how writing may almost repair the broken pieces; it is about the possibilities and the failures of revision, of trying to get things right in writing. This tension within revision expands into the creative dynamic between writers and editors.

2. Three New Yorker Writers

Almost without exception, Maxwell's writers sing their gratitude to his editing, to his talent for motivation and his refusal to impose his own solutions, instead guiding "you into the reaction that comes most naturally to yourself."33 The praise does not necessarily clarify the process by which the short stories in question were received, altered, and published. An editor who feels "that it is not the work of an editor to teach writers how to write" leaves the true nature of his activity in some doubt.34 Authors who declare, like Mavis Gallant, that they "owe him everything" but also that "he made no attempt to influence his writers" tend only to repeat the riddle.35 Edward Mendelson raises an eyebrow at this "cult" of the editor's admirers and at the adjective "'saintly,'" which "recurs in everything written about Maxwell and his work."36 Indeed, the writer who provides the most detailed testimony of a working relationship with Maxwell, John Updike, scribbled at the bottom of a letter on August 29th, 1958, "P.S.: You're a living saint."37 The partial exception to the chorus of praise is another John — Cheever — for whom Maxwell's coaxing was not always positive and productive. Together, their dealings with The New Yorker provide a more complex portrait of their first reader than either hagiography or Mendelson's hatchet job. The letters, queries, and typescripts in the New Yorker records, as well as in various authorial archives, reveal two pronounced tendencies: Maxwell's particular gift for encouraging autobiographical fiction — the New Yorker genre of "reminiscence" reached its apex under his watch — and his productively mixed feelings about maintaining the magazine's strictures on acceptable social geography and acceptably realist style. These individual impulses are bound up with the imperatives of a corporate entity, the levels of whose complex editorial machinery only occasionally become visible in the author-editor exchanges. By mediating between those levels, at times complying and at others resisting, Maxwell made his mark on the magazine and, through the magazine, on the midcentury short story — an influence which can be measured by the consequences of his retirement, on the fiction department in general and Gallant in particular.

Two instances of editorial mediation early in Maxwell's career illustrate both Harold Ross-era restrictions on the magazine's fictional landscape and the editor's embryonic efforts to broaden its range. In one letter to Peter Taylor, Maxwell is the advocate of the magazine with the writer; in another message about Eudora Welty, he is champion of the writer to the magazine. In the foreground he filters the New Yorker's tenets through to authors; in the background he defends authorial practice to the editorial hierarchy. Negotiating between the two, Maxwell manages to move both by degrees. In 1943, rejecting Taylor, Maxwell is plain about the problem: "The story belongs to a world that is essentially remote from New York City. The editors have in their minds an imaginary map of Manhattan which includes, strangely, all of Connecticut and Long Island, Florida, New Jersey, Hollywood, and wherever New Yorkers go."38 This finite topography accompanies a circumscribed conception of realism, one that privileges clarity and linear chronology over more complex narrative structures. On December 13th, 1946, Maxwell pleads with fellow editor Gus Lobrano on behalf of the multiple Southern perspectives of Welty's "The Whole World Knows":

The piece violates every canon of this magazine and it's absolutely first rate fiction with wonderful things all through it which raise it, for me, above anything we've run in years . . . there must surely come a time with any magazine when the usual editorial canons have to be laid aside in favor of a work of the highest quality.39

Anticipating Mendelson's criticisms, Maxwell warns that "the cult of clarity and literalness pushed to its logical conclusions (where we are rapidly pushing it) will end eventually in a kind of monotonous, mediocre, factory-made fiction that is completely divorced from life." His appeal failed. Many years later, the retired Maxwell recalls and combines these twin constraints in a letter to John Updike:

Ross and Katharine [White] had strange ideas of what the magazine couldn't print. No stories about the Jewish problem or homosexuals. No dirty language. No sexual explicitness. In his mind Ross had a map of where New Yorkers went: The metropolitan area and Long Island, Bermuda, Florida, and California, Europe. They didn't take stories set in the Middle West, or in the past.40

In the very next paragraph, Maxwell returns to the trouble of publishing Welty and his "page-long impassioned appeal for the story," to which "Ross added one sentence: Maxwell can't make me arty." At least "[William] Shawn was much more open to new kinds of fiction. And seldom failed to approve of something I thought the magazine should take." The transition from Ross to Shawn in 1952, from one editor-in-chief to another, allowed certain house habits to loosen. So too did Maxwell's progress within the 43rd Street headquarters. Through seniority and an expanding circle of writers, he gained the power to alter as well as implement editorial policy. He did eventually publish Welty in The New Yorker.

John Updike's partnership with his primary editor was "long, unusually fruitful, and nearly frictionless."41 Their dealings illustrate the matter and manner of Maxwell's creative involvement. Its central function was recognition, the simultaneous apprehension of authorial intention and artistic shortcoming; its success rested on the ability to convey criticism while galvanizing productive revision. In his account of working with Maxwell, Updike pays tribute to both "a friend to excellence in literature" and "the caretaker of my livelihood."42 These two aspects of editorial action, the literary and the commercial, blend together under the banner of reading. Maxwell's presence in the creative process anticipated and clarified the broader literary exchange, giving "the ideal reader a living face" and making "writing well seem infinitely worthwhile, and yet tangible."43 One letter from Maxwell, written on May 7th, 1958, displays the qualities of encouragement, protectiveness, and astute critical appraisal that invigorated the young Updike. Responding to the 26-year-old author's worries about being lumped in with other New Yorker writers — recently dismissed en masse "under the heading of shallow sophistication" by Maxwell Geismar — the editor offers insight both personal and artistic. First, he articulates Updike's half-formed anxiety, asking "Could it be that Maxwell Geismer [sic] has merely given expression to certain fears you already have? Fears that do not apply to Salinger and Fitzgerald but your own work in relation to this magazine and its editors?"44 Then he delivers a rebuttal, offering reassurance and stimulus in equal measure. "I don't find your work shallow," he declares, citing a passage from Turgenev.

"Believe me, he finds satisfaction in himself alone; the life that surrounds him provides him with the contents of his works; he is its concentrated reflection . . ." That's what you are right now, old boy, and that's what I hope you will continue to be, and it's not shallow for the simple reason that life itself is not shallow.

In 1958, Maxwell was criticizing the critics to come, claiming and recasting the ground on which Updike would be most consistently attacked in future decades: the charge of self-absorption, exemplified by David Foster Wallace's claim that "no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist's terrain better than John Updike," and the somewhat conflicting accusation that he surrendered his artistic identity to a magazine, as in Jeffrey Meyers's insistence that "the outpourings of John Updike . . . exemplify all the faults of the New Yorker."45 Maxwell points out that influence flows in two directions, and that "it is a slightly different magazine because you are now published in it." Little wonder that many years later, in 1992, Updike would reread Maxwell's old notes and observe "What a torrent of encouragement and loving advice and undeserved flattery over the years! Where would I be without it?"46

While Maxwell's major recommendations were not frequent — his queries largely involved more minor points of logic, clarity, and punctuation — he sometimes discerned a different shape within a draft or perceived the literary potential of unwritten material. For instance, Updike recalls Maxwell hearing "a story about my elementary-school days," recognizing "'that's a short story' and I wrote it up."47 This story, "The Alligators" (1958), exemplifies Maxwell's minimal editorial alteration and maximal editorial impact. Its suggestion, encouragement, and acceptance set Updike firmly on the path of mining his Pennsylvania past, a rich vein that resulted in the Olinger stories. Updike revisited his hometown of Shillington, under the guise of Olinger, again and again for Maxwell and The New Yorker. When he published the stories as a book in 1964, Updike wrote that if "I had to pick a few to represent me, they would be, I suppose, for reasons only partially personal, these."48 The editor's initial spark of interest, subsequently sustained, encouraged in another writer a pattern of return that echoed and surpassed his own. Though Updike's style was radically different and his territory far wider, he too displayed a marked tendency to "recursiveness," as William Deresiewicz observes: "we return, in Updike, to better depart, depart to better return — like all adults in coming home."49 Though Maxwell delivered "the preliminary editing of 'The Alligators'" with the reassurance that "it isn't drastic—just questions of style (magazine) and style (literary)," the effect of his approval was deeply felt.50 "Nothing could I have been gladder to hear than your impression that the Alligators read like one long poem. Flattery or not, I am excited to an insomniac pitch and ready to disgorge the whole mass of Pennsylvania," Updike declared.51 An editor's recognition can turn the creative tap on (just as an editor's apathy can turn it off again). Christopher Carduff, who edited the Library of America editions of both Maxwell and Updike's work, agreed with me that one of Maxwell's editorial signatures had been to encourage writers "to explore autobiographical stories, to get closer and closer to their lived experience."52 In doing so, the editor expanded the prominence of an already-recognizable New Yorker genre. A 1961 market research report in The New Yorker's business records identifies "reminiscence" as both a staple and a weakness, arguing that "'reminiscence,' like coasting downhill, tends to depend on past performance and to have limited future interest."53 If autobiographical sequences survived and thrived until Maxwell's retirement, therefore, they did so in spite of commercial pressure and because of concerted editorial support.

John Cheever's more scattered comments about Maxwell color Updike's assessment with shades of antagonism and disappointment. Maxwell's exercise of power — the ability to reject — emerges more clearly in Cheever's account, and less benevolently. The editor is not only a creative enabler, but a sometime obstacle too. In weighing Cheever's remarks, we must distinguish between unjustified paranoia and a justified frustration that the author's outlet of choice, The New Yorker, was often at odds with his more experimental impulses. Though "Cheever would always esteem Maxwell's literary advice, and was properly grateful for the man's support in almost every department of life," failures of mutual understanding shadowed the successes and sometimes gave way to hostility.54 Following a party at which he fell from a first-story window and "just missed being impaled on an iron-spiked fence," Cheever mistakenly "went to his grave believing he'd been pushed by his great friend and New Yorker editor."55 Working the story into his journals, he declared "there's this chap named Marples who keeps saying that he loves me and then he tries to kill me."56 Years later, Cheever repeated this formulation to Allan Gurganus:

Bill, after forty years, remains indecipherable. I thought I once understood him. It seemed that he was a man who mistook power for love . . . I once shouted at him: "You may have invented Salinger and [Harold] Brodkey but you didn't invent me." . . . He loves me and would love to see me dead.57

Yet weeks earlier, Cheever had conveyed one of Gurganus's manuscripts to Maxwell, describing him as "the best editor on the scene."58 The bipolarity of their relationship suggests a source of conflict that the surface record of Maxwell's largely unobtrusive editing cannot in itself explain. Cheever's assertion that Maxwell "invented" Salinger and Brodkey betrays a darker understanding and fear of Maxwell's influence — however exaggerated. The curious description of the editor as "a man who mistook power for love" cuts to the heart of editorial tension, its clash of egos and aesthetics, the suspicion that support may shade into control.

Maxwell's readerly recognition could fall short with Cheever, failing to follow the writer fully where he wanted to go. As Cheever became more unorthodox, as his realism "mined the element of the fantastic," he came into conflict with the magazine's ingrained commitment "to a literary ethos of naturalism, plausibility, and the emotional identification of reader with character."59 An unusually marked-up typescript of the classic story "The Country Husband" (1954) offers an unusually clear display of a writer being reined in. Cheever "was so exalted" upon finishing the story "that he drove [it] at once to Maxwell's house in Yorktown Heights"; Maxwell "would always remember his own sense of 'rapture'" on reading it; and Jonathan Franzen identifies "The Country Husband" as one of the key works in which Cheever "was laying down the template for 'the New Yorker story,'" with its "core-cultural suite of images of the fifties." Yet the magazine's penciled-over pages show significant alterations, all tending to replace Cheever's more poetic flights, or excesses, with plainer speech.60 A selection of the words and phrases exchanged for more common ones, or simply cut, include: "febrile [overheated]"; "clement [mild]"; "home-ing [commuting] train"; "by a misjudgement of force [accidentally]"; "lying in [on] her lair [bed]"; "the triestesse [dismal feeling]"; "puts down her silver [knife and fork]"; "afterglow [sunset]"; "the archness of his look made him seem heraldic"; "the deepest water [part] of some [submerged] memory"; "snowdeep mountain [deep in snow]"; "snowdeep[-covered] mountain"; "that world that threatens the province of enlightenment."61 A lusher lyricism is kept in check, bringing the language of the story more in line with its protagonist, the simultaneously constrained and dreamy Francis Weed.

Cheever's "The Swimmer" (1964) represents a turning point in two senses. On the one hand, it is "a story in which traditional realism is thoroughly transcended."62 Ned Merrill passes from an ordinary, well-lubricated, suburban Sunday gathering "through a string of swimming pools, a quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country," swimming home to strangely reduced circumstances, an elastic sense of time, and a terrifyingly empty house.63 On the other hand, this story and the author's demands to be paid more for it precipitated a drastic curtailment of his career with The New Yorker. Susan Cheever notes that "in the eighteen years after The New Yorker published 'The Swimmer,' only seven Cheever stories appeared in the magazine (almost a hundred had appeared in the eighteen years before that)."64 The typescript exhibits only the slightest of changes, yet thereafter he wrote less and was rejected more. Maxwell admits as much to the author's daughter, taking the somewhat self-exculpatory view that

His stories collided with the New Yorker idea of fiction . . . Character as a confining force got less and less strong in his work. He extricated himself from ordinary realism . . . He tried things that we felt just weren't possible . . . It turned out that anything was possible.65

Cheever's rejections punctuate two longer trajectories: the author's descent into alcoholism and the slow march of editorial climate change, which moved too slowly for him. The New Yorker was an environment in which certain forms of fiction thrived and others withered. Its equilibrium shifted gradually under Maxwell's pressure, before his retirement precipitated the simultaneous flourishing of one trend which he had quietly nurtured — a fitfully increasing tolerance for more radical narrative forms — and the downfall of another, with "reminiscence" discouraged as too reminiscent itself of the ancien magazine.

Near the end of Maxwell's career at The New Yorker, Mavis Gallant undertook her own fictional homecoming, the autobiographical sequence of Linnet Muir stories set during her Montreal childhood. Gallant had been an author long abroad: resident in Paris, domiciled at The New Yorker, and little read in her native Canada, where her stories of the varieties of European exile had not procured a Canadian publisher. Yet from 1975, the year of Maxwell's retirement, to 1977, when a revamped fiction department began to exert itself, five Linnet stories appeared in swift succession. More were promised, but the sequence was left strangely unfinished — a stoppage bitterly lamented by the author but unexamined by her critics.66 What happened is that Gallant lost her editorial sponsor at the magazine. Without Maxwell, "I would not have come to Europe and I would never have lived as I lived . . . what I wrote was everything to me, and Bill was on the other end of that thread."67 In 1975, however, the magazine instituted a mandatory retirement age of 65, forcing three fiction editors to leave and drawing new blood into the editorial hierarchy.68 For Gallant, the Linnet stories and their stunting marked the transition from Maxwell to the young Daniel Menaker, making palpable the changes in The New Yorker's personnel, standards, and output.

Gallant's rejections over the course of her first two decades with The New Yorker reflect the magazine's limits as well as the stories' faults. The works that did not find favor were at times too Canadian in setting and frequently too keen to subvert the magazine's preference for strictly linear chronology. Her acceptances, in contrast, map the gradual but steady expansion of those perimeters. Though Maxwell repeatedly chided Gallant for "shuttling back and forth, instead of sticking to chronology," he also defended her against another New Yorker editor who complained about a Gallant "ending [being] left so far in the air," declaring that "the older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out."69 The editor's ideas about fiction were not static but responsive to his reading. Near the end of his life, in 1996, Maxwell went back over his former author's work and wrote to apologize "for my failing to appreciate" — and accept — Gallant's most radical story, "The Pegnitz Junction" (1973), in which time and voice are disorientingly fluid.70 "I think I was also somewhat blinkered by New Yorker attitudes," Maxwell acknowledged, before adding that "in any case, there has been a change in fiction, in what it is possible to do in fiction, which your writing has partly brought about." In fact, the change had been taking place over the course of his tenure. Gallant's early rejections prefigure the material that eventually found its published form in Linnet Muir: a concentration on Montreal, on the circumstances of Gallant's childhood, on chronologies that are more scrambled than straightforward.71

Yet the editing of the Linnet Muir stories reveals a pattern of creative return and institutional rejection that echoes and illuminates the subject of the stories themselves. They represent a homecoming, but their fate also repeats the dismissal — Linnet's banishment from Montreal — that the stories constantly circle. Despite his previous concerns with linearity, Maxwell fast-tracked these stories in which the echoing, discontinuous accumulations of memory disrupt time's arrow. Then he handed Gallant and the series over to Menaker, whose editing of "The Doctor" (1977) injected uncertainty into the hitherto smooth process of publication, the magazine's cluelessness over the most basic of Montreal facts, "whether this family was French or English-speaking," leaving Gallant "deeply depressed."72 And "The Doctor" was the last Linnet story The New Yorker would accept. The next two were immediately turned down, and for the same reason: they seemed "to be too nearly pure reminiscence," the style most closely associated with Maxwell.73 Rejecting the second story, and presenting himself as the pained messenger of a united editorial front, Menaker expands on the point: "in the fifties and sixties and into the seventies, this magazine published a lot of reminiscences — so many that their number may help to explain why the fiction department here and Shawn have a now nearly insurmountable resistance to the genre."74 Editorial support withdrawn, "it was as if a double door into that Montreal of the forties had gone, and I couldn't see through them any more."75 Gallant would never again mine that autobiographical seam. In a battle between the old and the new, with the younger editors keen to expand the social and aesthetic palette of the magazine, they set themselves against one of The New Yorker's defining genres.76 The intersection of organizational intrigue and aesthetic argument stands revealed at the point of rejection. Gallant, whose non-linear experiments in narrative were at times too radical for the pre-1975 New Yorker, found her autobiographical fiction too conventional for the post-1975 magazine. Maxwell's New Yorker created the conditions for its passing.

3. Levels of Readership

When Robert Gottlieb arrived at the magazine in 1987, finally putting an end to the long reign of William Shawn, he discovered "a system so complicated, so obsessive, and so brilliant that after I got over being both confused and dazzled by it, I really did fall in love with it."77 The sheer complexity of the New Yorker's editorial machinery in the mid-to-late twentieth century resists easy description, but it consisted of "levels and levels of readership," embedding such eminent figures as Maxwell and Shawn in a system that simultaneously supported and regulated their power, producing and eventually integrating at least six proofs of every single piece. In giving Maxwell both the credit and the blame for New Yorker fiction, Mendelson echoes the critics who previously attributed the magazine's style to Shawn.78 Both conclusions are simplistic as well as mutually contradictory, reducing an institution to an individual and acts of negotiation to mere diktat. One instance of the editor being edited, the then-retired Maxwell submitting So Long, See You Tomorrow to his former colleagues in 1979, recapitulates the protracted struggles over reminiscence and experiment that characterized his tenure at the magazine. The surviving query sheets illustrate both the creative and destructive potential of editing, the manner in which an editor's reading mediates between institutional tradition and the individual talent, at once changing the writing and being changed in turn.

So Long underwent one major alteration during the editorial process and was spared a second.79 At the outset, Maxwell was required to sacrifice his original beginning because "the editors were troubled by the fact that for the first twenty pages it read like reminiscence . . . So I moved things around a bit at the beginning."80 However, this rearrangement — placing the murder first — exploded the strictly chronological sequence of the narrative. As Burkhardt observes, the revised novel, by "shifting freely between the late teens, early twenties, and mid-seventies," brings "the past and present, the narrator's youth and old age" into "coexist[ence] on one plane."81 This editorial intervention released much that was only latent in the draft text, making the revisionary force of Maxwell's narrative apparent in its actual structure. When Shawn delivered his thirty-three queries on the second part of So Long, however, the harmful capacity of unsympathetic editing emerged into plain view. The entrance of the dog Trixie, feeling, thinking, and even dreaming, became a bone of contention that the editor-in-chief could not drop; the issue was again realism, the question of what could be believably portrayed in fiction. "Well, I regret this, because it makes everything else far less believable," Shawn wrote, his exasperated comments piling up. "This goes farther than a Lassie picture."82 Menaker's memoir recounts the "stir [caused] in the Fiction Department" and the consensus that "the thinking dog [was] a mistake."83 But to Shawn's outburst that "there's no warrant in reality for any of this, is there?" Maxwell's pencil offered a firm, five-word riposte: "Yes — for all of it." In the face of a full-court editorial press, he kept his dog, the self-aware shift into fiction that Trixie heralds, and his ever-widening understanding of what realism could allow. The magazine sought to have its own way; the writer accepted on one front, unlocking the potential in his own text, and resisted on another, altering, if only by degrees, the content of The New Yorker and the expectations of its public.

William Maxwell is one of American fiction's most influential readers. That he is known mainly, if not widely, as a novelist is testament to the power of his writing and the invisibility of his second profession. A midcentury canon emerged from the New Yorker stories he curated for nearly forty years, one which reflected his established affinity for reminiscence and his growing appetite for narrative experiment. His retirement underscored these trends by reversing their relative prominence in the magazine's pages, his successors clamping down on the first tendency while accelerating the second. But does Maxwell's canon — almost completely white and so dominant in its day — still command readerly attention or writerly influence? A. O. Scott suggests that most of his authors' "names perhaps now ring bells as faint as Maxwell's."84 Updike and Cheever are lionized no longer, while Gallant remains a writer with a modest if illustrious readership.85 Maxwell unquestionably expanded the range of regional, Anglophone, and female voices accepted and amplified by the New Yorker, but Ved Mehta was the only writer of color in his circle.86 The dating of literature is, however, both inevitable and exaggerated; Maxwell's writers retain a core of readers that may one day swell again. What has dated more dramatically is the position once held by Maxwell himself, the literary editor at that occupation's midcentury meridian of power. Retrospectives of editorial New York, like this one, explore an infrastructure of professional readership, of publishers and periodicals, whose long decline shows no sign of abating. The question they cannot help but raise is what professional and institutional shape the editorial function will take next.

---

Ben Fried is a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. His essays on writer-editor relationships and twentieth-century literatures in English can be found in African American Review, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives, and Mapping World Anglophone Studies (Routledge). He received his PhD from Cornell University and is working on his first book project, The Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993.

---

Banner Image: Berenice Abbott, Chanin Building, New York (about 1935), Getty Museum Open Content Program

References