To counterbalance the effects of reading several books about the political economy of Gilded Age America, my bedtime companion last week was William Maxwell’s essay collection The Outermost Dream. First released in 1989, the collection gathers book reviews largely published in the New Yorker, where Maxwell served as fiction editor for forty years. Maxwell was, of course, himself an accomplished novelist and short-story writer (two volumes collecting this work were published last year by the Library of America). But the strongest impression I gathered from The Outermost Dream is one of an editor’s sensibility: ego suppression and attention to the delicate arrangement of material. Written with sympathy for and out of curiosity about his subjects—he avoided writing about fiction, choosing instead to discuss memoirs, correspondence, diaries, and biographies—Maxwell’s essays judiciously arrange for the reader the salient, character-summarizing facts of remarkable lives. They don’t skimp on qualitative judgment, especially when the work under consideration is a biography. But Maxwell’s powers of distillation and his ability to communicate his enthusiasm subliminally, as it were, are remarkable.
It turns out that I couldn’t entirely leave behind the second half of the nineteenth century: My favorite piece in The Outermost Dream is the first, a review of Kilvert’s Diary, edited by William Plomer and first published in 1940. (Maxwell’s review, I believe, dates from the early ’60s, when the diary was reprinted.) Reverend Francis Kilvert, previously unknown to me, was a rural curate who worked and traveled, during the 1860s and ’70s, in villages dotting the rural marshes along the border of England and Wales. His diary was published fifty years after his death, and near the outset of the review Maxwell devises a wonderful mechanism for communicating to readers the “lost” world Kilvert inhabited: collapsing reflections and impressions recorded across multiple years into a plausible “week” in Kilvert’s life. Here is how this section of Maxwell’s review begins:
Kilvert boarded comfortably with a Mrs. Chaloner, whose house was directly across the road from the village pub, and his life in Clyro went by in, roughly speaking, this fashion:
On Sunday he preached, when and where he was needed—at Clyro Church in the morning, at this or that nearby village chapel in the afternoon. He paid sick calls on elderly parishioners and read to them from the Bible. He dined rather often at the vicarage. And he seldom had time on Sunday to write in his diary.
On Monday he went to the school, where, as he taught the children reading, he was struck by the appearance of Gypsy Lizzie (“the dark soft curls parting back from the pure white transparent brow, the exquisite little mouth and pearly tiny teeth, the pure straight delicate features, the long dark fringes and white eyelids that droop over and curtain her eyes when they are cast down or bent upon her book”). In the afternoon he drove, with Mr. and Mrs. Venables, to the Hardwick Bazaar for the Home Missions. Or, the weather being particularly beautiful and there being no invitations, he walked to Broad Meadow to see old David Price, who was in bed and weaker than when he saw him last, and poor Captain Brown, who was “lying on a sofa covered up with a rug and suffering a good deal. But he was very bright and lively and grew animated and indignant in discussing the wrongs of the Navy, the misdoings of the present Government . . . .”
Having introduced the technique, Maxwell pushes it a little further, switching rapidly from season to season and year to year:
On Saturday (now it is February) he goes out early into the dim, dark morning. The air is warm, sweet, and fragrant. There is a promise of rain, and the garden trees are all in a charm with the singing of birds. An iron east wind; bitter, piercing cold (it is now a different February). He walks to Hay and buys galoshes, calls at the Castle, and while he is there, the four Miss Llanthomases come in. He hears of Mary Bevans misadventures in going to the Hereford Hunt Ball…
Here Maxwell deftly imparts the sense of routine that structures most lives, imparts odd details about Kilvert (the peculiarly attentive description of the young girl), and gives us a sense, through the extended quotations, of how Kilvert wrote about his own life. Most of the essays in this collection do their work as imperceptibly as this one. In addition to the essay on Kilvert, I especially recommend the ones on Isak Dinesen, Andrei Amalrik, Louise Bogan, E. B. and Katharine S. White, and Colette.
