Material : Brendan Kerr
In the coming pages – and for the bulk of the book – Maxwell unabashedly builds upon the bare scaffoldings of memory and research, now relying solely on his imagination in order to reconstruct a full and rich narrative of the events that preceded Walker’s murder and Smith’s suicide. The imagination is the last tool with which he can make amends.
Except through the intervention of chance, the one possibility of my making some connection with [Cletus] seems to lie not in the present but in the past – in my trying to reconstruct the testimony he was never called upon to give. The unsupported word of a witness who was not present except in imagination would not be acceptable in a court of law, but, as has been demonstrated over and over, the sworn testimony of the witness who was present is not trustworthy either. If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick with the facts if there were any.
Maxwell reveals his narrative anecdotally, conjuring the image of a deck of cards whose faces hold not suits, numbers and queens, but scenes from the story in question. He makes no bones about the fact that this is invention, allwoing himself the freedom to narrate from points-of-view closely attached to a dozen different characters, including a dog.
Both for Maxwell and for the Cletus Smith he imagines in the pages of the novel the idea of a house – that most sturdy marker of family stability and simple belonging in a place – becomes a talismanic symbol of childhood worlds that can never be recovered. The set piece from which the book derives its title takes place on the site where the Maxwell family was building a new house: there Cletus simply turned up one day, and the two boys fell into the kind of reflexive camaraderie natural to boys from damaged domestic circumstances. "I never asked Cletus if there wasn't something he'd rather be doing, because he was always willing to do what I wanted to do. It occurs to me now that he was not very different than an imaginary playmate." Yet soon enough, Cletus vanished in the wake of his family's final collapse, and Maxwell grew up and migrated East, ending up as a longtime fiction editor of the New Yorker. When he returns to Lincoln, he gravitates to his first family home "as if it was a sexual temptation." Of course, after changing hands several times it all looks wrong to Maxwell now – he remains in thrall as ever to the lie of the past. He dreams of houses his family didn't live in and intuits that his birth mother is inside them, alive and well. And he imagines an open-air palace where he can meet Cletus Smith and nod once more in recognition, a place "where what is done can be undone."
The book, and Maxwell’s oeuvre as a whole, is full of lush descriptions of the things of houses and the manner in which people, especially children, interact with those things. The designs on a cabinet’s brass knobs are pressed into the flesh of thumbs. Scratchy wool blankets are sniffed. Space is carefully laid out and moved through: hall, library, living room, dining room, kitchen. The novel’s painful story of adultery, grief and murder moves in and out of these houses like the odors of cooking, like the humidity of rain over midwestern fields rolling heavy on foul breezes and leaving traces of moisture on upholstry and varnish. Ultimately, after the crimes have been commited and the horrible machinations of justice struggle to conceal them, to make the world once again habitable for the innocent, Maxwell imagines Cletus’s dispossession from his chlidhood home, and in that way reconnects with him:
Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen – the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washday, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down for supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-backed copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away, too, while you are at it.
Take away the pitcher and the bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn, too – the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the open door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was? He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.
In the devastating anger of this passage we recognize why Maxwell feels such an intense need to appease his memory of Cletus. Cletus’s loss has come to represent his own loss – the mother who died too young. Maxwell feels lifelong sympathy for the loss of Cletus’s house, its furniture and smells, because it represents the immediate unfamiliarity that fell upon Maxwell’s own home upon the death of his mother. Like the prisoners in Giacometti’s sculpture, Maxwell is unable to escape an unfinished house.
So, the cult of authenticity says, the memoir has really been about Maxwell all along, and the reconstruction of tragic events in the Smith and Walker families was simply a means to work through issues that were too painful to address directly. This, they cry, is selfishness, cowardice.
They are absolutely, 180 degrees turned around and off base. Maxwell’s work here, and the work of all genuine, hard-wrestled fiction, is breathtakingly generous and brave.
I have a friend who grew up on a farm in Kentucky until, at a very young age, her family moved with her to a treel-lined suburban street in small-town Pennsylvania. When I read the above-quoted passage about Cletus’s home being torn from him, I was moved to tears by thoughts of my friend enduring similar deprivation. Later, I put the question to myself: how would I go about writing the scene of my friend’s departure? How much generous, brave love would it take to reconstruct the events preceding her move, to know the furniture her family owned, the smell of the entryway, the noises of the animals, the tenors of the voices, where they kept their phone books, the fabric of the small tent on her bed that her mother zipped her inside each night, what was written in what writing on the recipe cards, where the dog slept when it rained? It would take more brave, generous love than most of us ever possess, but not more than we, as fiction writers, should aspire to. In Maxwell’s own words (from his novel The Folded Leaf), loving our characters means that
We are duty-bound go through all of their possessions, to feel their curtains and to look for the tradename on the bottom of their best dinner plates and stand before their pictures (especially the one they were compelled to paint themselves, which is not a good painting but seems better if you stay long enough to know the country in more than one kind of light) and lift the lids off their cigarette boxes and sniff their pipe tobacco and open, one by one, their closet doors. We should test the sharpness and shape of their scissors. We may play their radio and try, with our fingernails, to open the locked door of their liquor cabinet. We may even read any letters that they have been careless enough to leave lying around. Through all of these things, through the attic and the cellar and the tool shed we must go searching until we find the people who live here or used to live here but now are in London or Acupulco or Galesburg, Illinois. Or who now are dead.
This is the demand we should remember for our work, not because it is redemptive, but because it is possible and right. In the case of So Long, See You Tomorrow, it is through just this sort of work that Maxwell manages to align his suffering with Cletus’s. By doing this he accomplishes the very thing he couldn’t do a lifetime ago: he turns in the school corridor and walks silently and lovingly alongside his suffering friend.
Brendan Kerr comes to Pittsburgh via Elkins, West Virginia and Brooklyn, New York. He is currently working on revision of his novel, The Uses of Talent. He lives in Polish Hill.
