Love, Bill

When the Evanston writer Cornelia Maude Spelman tried to unlock the mystery of her mother's melancholy, she turned to one of her parents' long-ago college pals—William Maxwell, the famed fiction editor of The New Yorker—and found a new friend

By Cornelia Maude Spelman

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Norman and Elizabeth at home in 1933

Although I visited Bill and Emmy in New York only a few more times, I wrote to him, sharing my thoughts and feelings about Mother and Pop and about my own life, sometimes sending along brief excerpts from Mother’s diaries or letters because I was trying to understand and write about what had happened to that girl he’d described as “vivid.”

With his perfect courtesy, he always replied. I wondered, later, if I’d ended up asking more of him than he’d bargained for when he’d invited us to tea. But he had written to me, “‘Only connect[,]’ Mr. Forster said, and this we have never failed to do,” and as an inscription in one of his books, “For Cornelia Spelman, whom I loved at first sight.”

His affection emboldened me to imagine him as the parent—both father and mother—I wished I’d had, and to turn to him at times for guidance. His two daughters, years after his death, when asked what he was like as a father, spoke of their disappointments. But as Emmy once said to me, during a visit, when I was telling them about my parents’ failings, “Sometimes people make great friends but not great parents.”

Bill was not only a link to Mother’s past, when she had been young and healthy, but, like her, he had experienced the death of a parent when he was a child. His mother had died in January 1919 of the Spanish influenza, when he was ten, and Mother’s father had died of a ruptured appendix in November 1918, when she was seven.

Bill had written about his mother’s death in several of his novels, and when in So Long, See You Tomorrow, he described what it had been like for him, it was as if he was speaking, too, for what Mother must have felt:

The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything. [. . .] Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. [. . .] I hadn’t gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.

When they were friends at the U. of I., Bill didn’t know that Mother, too, had lost a parent. They’d never talked about it. At that time, Mother seemed to be thriving. Bill, however, was not.

In his novel The Folded Leaf, the main character is a university student named Lymie whose mother’s death when he was a child has left him needing “more than the ordinary amount of love.”

Lymie becomes close friends with another student, the only close relationship he’s had since his mother died. But because of a misunderstanding, his friend turns against him. Lymie’s response is to swallow iodine and cut his throat and wrists.

I wrote Bill to ask if this had happened to him. He replied,

My novel is a mixture of autobiography and invention, but the three main characters and their relations to each other are all taken from life, and so are the details of the suicide attempt. I don’t know which is worse, clinical depression or a broken heart, but in my case it was the second. I didn’t so much wish that I was dead, as not want to go on living in a world where the truth (or what I thought was the truth) had no power to make itself believed. I also felt a conscious desire to go where my mother was and to be with her, being still enough of a child to believe, to half believe anyway, that this was possible.

I asked him what my parents had known of this. He replied,

I am sure that your father and mother knew that I had tried to commit suicide but how much else they knew I have no idea. I wore a turtle neck sweater, the only one on campus, until the scar had healed, so I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. My friends were very supporting, and never mentioned the suicide or asked any questions. When I still had bandages on my throat I went to a dance at the Theta house and the girls saw to it that I had a lovely time.

Though he survived, of course, he continued to suffer. He wrote me that in order to avoid being hurt again by his friend,

I walked about twenty-five feet away and made myself stop loving him. The price for this was that I couldn’t love anyone else for a long long time. I went into analysis because I felt that what was happening to me was what happens to a tree when you cut the center branch out.

Bill’s psychoanalyst in New York was Theodor Reik, who had been a student of Freud’s. During one of my visits with Bill, he told me about the session with Reik in which he had finally returned to his grief at his mother’s death. In So Long, See You Tomorrow, he’d written the same scene he had told me about:

After six months of lying on an analyst’s couch [. . .] 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 saw Bill for the last time in the late spring of 2000. I knew it would be the last. Illness had kept him going in and out of hospitals for months. Although I’d written ahead to ask if he would be well enough to see me, and phoned upon my arrival in New York, still, when I arrived at his door at the appointed time, it wasn’t his wife, Emmy, who opened it but a tall dignified woman, unknown to me—a housekeeper or nurse. Bill had spent the previous night in the hospital, but, she insisted, she would wake him.

I sat down on the sofa and looked around at this room where I’d sat on every visit, gazing out the clean windows. In a few moments I heard a raspy, “Cornelia!” and turned to see Bill, in his plaid flannel bathrobe, on the tall woman’s arm. Beaming at me, he raised both arms for an embrace.

At 91, he looked both ancient and very young. I thought of “Bunny,” the mother’s name for her beloved little boy, her “angel child” in his novel They Came Like Swallows.

We embraced and I helped him to the sofa. His breathing was rapid and shallow, like a puppy’s. I would have only a few minutes with him.

“I want to see you tell your mother’s story,” Bill whispered—he couldn’t speak in his old voice. “It seems it would even it out, somehow, for what happened to her.” I pressed his gnarly hand. I knew he would not be around long enough to know if I’d completed it.

“Bill,” I said, “I’ve been reading the books of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk.”

He nodded, whispering, “I know of him.”

“And thinking about how when we die we change form,” I said.

After a pause, Bill whispered, “If I could come back in another form, I think it would be as sunshine.” He smiled gently.

“Then, whenever I feel the sun on my face, I will think of you,” I told him. “You will always be with me, Bill. Because of all I have felt for you, and all I have learned from you.”

He smiled. “When you feel the sun, then, you’ll think of me?”

“Yes. I will.”

The tall woman came back into the room to return him to bed. We embraced, and as they walked slowly down the hall away from me, I let myself out the door.

* * *

One fall, several years before he died, Bill had written me, from their summer home in Yorkville Heights,

It’s a gray day, maybe rain tonight, and everywhere a feeling of one thing ending and another beginning. The last of the peaches, and at the vegetable stand all the flowers and baskets of tomatoes removed in order to make room for pumpkins and squashes of the genteel ornamental kind. In about ten days we will be moving back to the city and the cat can no longer ask to be let in and out sixty times a day.

Don’t—or at least I don’t think it is reasonable to—feel sad about the transitoriness of things. What you have had you will always have if you are a rememberer.

Love,
Bill

Photograph: Courtesy of Cornelia Maude Spelman