I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights.  Recently I found myself in Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders.   I wasn’t recalling the words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I carry it as a latent memory.   There’s a semi-popular theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind, through no effort of my own.   Time Will Darken It, along with So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel.  In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing a rabbit. He writes:   “The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extensionh, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught is a net of narration. . . . . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.”     The finest writers of fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.

“The man who is both happy and an optimist is an imbecile.”  Happiness has always felt like the byproduct of life properly lived, not a goal unto itself. If I “behave” – live up to my own standards, not exaggerate my importance, pay minute attention to my conscience, respect others when they deserve it and occasionally when they don’t – I can settle for “happiness.” I define it not as bliss but as ease, a sort of momentary relaxation of vigilance. It doesn’t have a lot to do with getting my way and I can’t usually blame others when “unhappiness” creeps in.   The late Terry Teachout rather charmingly characterized himself (and H.L. Mencken, about whom he wrote a biography) as an “ebullient pessimist,” and I promptly adopted the description as my own, though I’m certainly less ebullient than Terry. In defiance of the customary understanding of “pessimist,” there was nothing gloomy or grim about him. He was a regular guy, fabulously learned, hard-working, seemingly undefeated by life’s inevitable troubles. His company was always energizing, even via the internet. My wife and I had lunch with him here in Houston in 2018, when he signed my copy of Pops, his biography of Louis Armstrong, “in honor of a special day.”   I’m skeptical of people who casually declare themselves “optimists.” I’m reminded of the character of Imlac in Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas:   “The state of a mind oppressed with a sudden calamity . . . is like that of the fabulous inhabitants of the new-created earth, who, when the first night came upon them, supposed that day would never return. When the clouds of sorrow gather over us, we see nothing beyond them, nor can imagine how they will be dispelled: yet a new day succeeded the night, and sorrow is never long without a dawn of ease. But they who restrain themselves from receiving comfort do as the savages would have done, had they put out their eyes when it was dark.   There is, in other words, something profoundly self-centered about optimism, a sense that if I don’t get my way I’ve been cheated. How unfair the world is. The sentence at the top was written by Jules Renard in his Journal on July 30, 1903. I think of Renard not as a doomsayer but a pragmatic, rough-and-tumble realist, with the sensibility of a farmer.     [The Renard passage is taken from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

“[T]here is a very widespread and comfortable belief that we are all of us born writers. Not long ago I heard that agile and mellifluous quodlibetarian, Dr. Joad, saying in answer to a questioner who wanted to write good letters, that anybody could write good letters: one had but to think out clearly what one wanted to say, and then set it down in the simplest terms.”  Even that is a challenge for some. Clarity in writing, of course, reflects clarity of thought. Muddled prose suggests muddled thinking. It also helps to have some sense of style. “Dr. Joad” is C.E.M. Joad, not a member of the Okie family in The Grapes of Wrath but a one-time English radio philosopher and celebrity. The author is Max Beerbohm in a lecture he delivered in 1943 on the odious writer and human being Lytton Strachey, whom he knew and about whom he has reservations. Here, Beerbohm continues on the subject of Joad and facile writing:   “And a few weeks later, when the writing of books was under discussion, he said that the writers who thought most about how they should write were the hardest to read; and again he seemed to think lucidity all-sufficing.”   What grabbed my attention was that exotic word quodlibetarian. As usual, Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary is plain and concise: “One who talks or disputes on any subject.” We know the type. The OED’s definition requires further explanation: “A person who discusses or engages in quodlibets; a writer of quodlibets.” That word is obsolete and dates from the fifteenth century in English: “An academic exercise within a university in which a master or bachelor would discuss questions on any subject; the written record of such an exercise.” In short, a know-it-all, in fact or by self-proclamation, and a species never endangered.   Beerbohm’s own prose in the Strachey lecture is splendid. Take this passage, which out-Joads Joad and out-Stracheys Strachey:   “It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey’s, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, electing and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There’s nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

An American children’s book published in 1908 reminded me of a metaphysical figment conjured by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is The Hole Book, written and illustrated by Peter Newell. A friend who collects vintage children’s books told me about it. The verse is serviceable doggerel, rhythmically regular enough to be memorized and recited by kids. The premise is simple and clever and the book would never be published today. Here are the opening verses:  “Tom Potts was fooling with a gun (Such follies should not be), When—bang! the pesky thing went off Most unexpectedly!   “Tom didn’t know ’twas loaded, and It scared him ’most to death— He tumbled flat upon the floor And fairly gasped for breath.   “The bullet smashed a fine French clock (The clock had just struck three), Then made a hole clean through the wall, As you can plainly see.”   We follow the path of the bullet through the remainder of the book as it passes through a boiler, a rope holding a swing, an aquarium, a Dutchman’s pipe, a sack of grain and a watermelon, among other things. Not a soul is wounded by the stray bullet. Newell is no poet but he’s a marvelous illustrator. My sons would have loved this book.   The professor who taught the eighteenth-century English novel and introduced me to Smollett and Sterne had a sense of humor that once would have been described as “bawdy.” She was enormously funny and insisted that literature is written to be enjoyed. It’s a lesson that has stuck with me for more than half a century. Something that came up in class reminded Donna of Sartre’s concept of “the hole.” She giggled through her brief explanation drawn from To Freedom Condemned: A Guide to His Philosophy (trans. Justus Streller, 1960):   “The hole is something which longs to be filled. The small child is drawn as if by magic to holes. He can not restrain himself from putting in his finger or his whole arm. He makes a symbolic sacrifice of his body to cause the void to disappear and a plenitude of being to exist. The fundamental tendency of human beings to stop up holes persists throughout life, symbolically and in reality,” and so forth in unapologetically Gallic silliness.