Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

(Guest post by Debra Spark)

This will be a celebration of a writer I love that begins with what I am weary of: narratives in which other people are the problem. This is because I am weary of people who cast others as the problem, when that very tendency is the problem. If we cannot see the harm we have done, as well as the harm that has been done to us, we cannot see. As a writer and as a person, I’m interested in what seems truer: shame, self-analysis, owning your own crap.

This mini-rant leads me to one of my favorite books, William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. The author-narrator are one and the same in this book, and the only person Maxwell really blames is himself, and this even though the story concerns a murder.

I have read So Long (and recommended it) countless times. In fact, just yesterday, I ran into an undergraduate student to whom I had recommended this book, and he said, “I read that book. I loved it. Now my mother’s reading it.” Does she like it?

Yes, she does.

It’s a book with a sizeable fan club.

Lines from So Long, See You Tomorrow float through my mind at odd moments, as with this sentence, in which Maxwell describes items lost when he moves from one childhood home to another: “If they hadn’t disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, as Ortega y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.”

Maxwell summarizes his book’s subject and his purpose in writing at the start of the second chapter:

I very much doubt that I would have remembered for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never laid eyes on if 1) the murderer hadn’t been the father of somebody I knew, and 2) I hadn’t later on done something I was ashamed of afterward. This memoir—if that’s the right name for it—is a roundabout, futile way of making amends.

Maxwell grew up in small town Iowa, but much later he ends up in Chicago. One day, while at school, he walks by this old friend—the son of the murderer—and does not stop to say hello. Part of it is pure shock. He does not expect to see the boy in the new school, but he never rectifies his error, never finds and talks to the boy. So he slights someone he should not have slighted. In admitting his failure, Maxwell moves his narrative beyond his own emotional pain. He’s not satisfied with simply saying, “I’m wounded,” though he is wounded, and the wound is at the emotional core of the book. Instead, he uses a larger story to spotlight the all-too-human response to failures, hurts, and losses.

Because his book tells the backstory of the murder, the plot is quite compelling, as a crime story that also involves a love affair is bound to be. The book has an emotional narrative that needs the dramatic plot but stands apart from that plot, something I particularly appreciate as I tried to do the same in my most recent novel, Discipline. My novel is about an art crime, though it is emotionally driven by a troubled mother-teen relationship.

Here is the mother in my novel after two tussles with her son over screen time that have had disastrous results:

She was a good parent 95 percent of the time. Still, what did that matter? The evil that men do lives after them; the good is often interred with their bones. Everyone made mistakes, as her favorite philosopher, Big Bird, said. True, not mistakes that made a teen want to hurt himself. It seemed impossible, but there it was: She was the third-person enemy in that most challenging of first-person games, Getting Through Adolescence Without Cracking Up.

The emotional narrative in So Long, See You Tomorrow concerns Maxwell’s mother, who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, two days after she gave birth to her second son. “After that,” Maxwell writes, “there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened and the shine went out of everything.”

Maxwell grew up in a time and place when processing emotions was hard, particularly for men, and certainly for Maxwell’s own father. What Maxwell does remember, though, of the days after his mother’s death and before the burial, is pacing the ground floor with his arm around his father, who is as shattered as his son.

So Long, See You Tomorrow cleverly uses the overriding metaphor of a house to shape the text, both because of Maxwell’s feeling about his childhood home and because he and the murderer’s son form their friendship by exploring a house under construction. Maxwell also references a Giacometti sculpture of a house and Giacometti’s writing about that sculpture, relating its creation to a dream and a love affair where things were constantly being knocked apart and being built over the course of a passionate night, a dream that is haunting in no small part because (as Maxwell writes much later in the book), in the dream, “What is done can be undone.”

Maxwell grew up to be the author of many books and a quite renowned editor at The New Yorker. In the penultimate paragraph of So Long, Maxwell writes:

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. Together we stood looking down at her. I meant to say to the fatherly man who was not my father, the elderly Viennese, another exile, with thick glasses and a Germanic accent, I meant to say I couldn’t bear it, but what came out of my mouth was, “I can’t bear it.” This statement was followed by a flood of tears such as I hadn’t ever known before, not even in my childhood. I got up from the leather couch and, I somehow knew, with his permission left his office and the building and walked down Sixth Avenue to my office. New York city is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.

I love this paragraph for the precision and beauty of the memory but mostly for the many moments of compassion shoehorned into this description—the analyst not only understanding that Maxwell needed to leave, but Maxwell understanding he was granted that understanding, and those New Yorkers! For years, I probably imagined that the line referred to their hard-heartedness, but I no longer interpret it that way. I read it as the New Yorkers offering Maxwell the space he needed in the moment. And not because they didn’t care, but because they got it. Without knowing any of the particulars—the very particulars that the book provides—they got it.

author photo: Nicole Wolf

Debra Spark's fifth novel, Discipline, was published in 2024.  She is also  the author of a book of short stories and two essay collections about fiction writing. She has edited and co-edited two anthologies, the most recent of which was Breaking Bread, a collection of food essays to raise money for a Maine hunger non-profit. More info here: www.debraspark.com.