Book Reviews                                                             

William Maxwell, Billie Dyer and Other Stories. New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Pp. 117. $18 (cloth).

Last summer, while driving home to Springfield from our vacation in Michigan, my husband and I took turns reading William Maxwell's Billie Dyer and Other Stories aloud. As we crossed the Illinois border and headed south, it occurred to me that the flat, familiar cornfields surrounding us, the stark symmetry of uninterrupted soil and sky, created a fitting atmosphere for reading Maxwell. For, while the author has lived in New York for more than 50 years, at age 84 he continues to capture the central Illinois of his childhood with a spare style that reflects the unadorned, subtle beauty of the prairiescape.

Maxwell was born in 1908 in Lincoln, and, following his mother's death during the 1918 influenza epidemic, he moved to Chicago with his newly remarried father and family. In his own words, the loss of his mother "made a novelist" of him, and much of his fiction recaptures emotions surrounding this early tragedy. Maxwell graduated from the University of Illinois in 1930, and his first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, appeared in 1934. Two years later he began his 40-year career at The New Yorker, first as a member of the art department and later as a fiction editor working with such writers as John Updike and Eudora Welty. The magazine has continued to publish Maxwell's stories long after his retirement (his latest piece, "What He Was Like," appeared in December 1992), and Billie Dyer collects a number of these into a volume that preserves the past, questions memory and reveals human experience through an inquisitive, tender mind.

Billie Dyer serves equally well as an introduction for the newcomer and as a treasured collection for a reader who has saved these stories from the pages of The New Yorker through the years. Characters from his early novels return, yet Maxwell brings new insights to their lives through the wise, gentle voice familiar to readers of So Long, See You Tomorrow, his 1980 award-winning novel. As in So Long, Maxwell blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, often exploring the haunting questions that the past poses in the present.

In "The Front and the Back Parts of the House," Maxwell as narrator makes a rare visit to his Middle Western hometown and is snubbed by Hattie Dyer, the dearly loved housekeeper he remembers from childhood. He wonders: "If I had acted differently, I asked myself later — if I had been less concerned with my own feelings and allowed room for hers, if I had put out my hand instead of trying to embrace her, would the truce between the front and the back parts of the house have held?"

Not only does Maxwell strive to achieve a personal understanding of his past, but in the title work he also seeks to correct a public, historical oversight. He tells the story of Dr. Billie Dyer, Hattie's brother, the first African-American doctor from Lincoln, who is named one of the Ten Most Distinguished Men during the community's centennial celebration, yet is overlooked in a Logan County history. The story weaves actual excerpts from the physician's diary with scenes Maxwell creates. "For things that are not known — at least not anymore — and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination," Maxwell writes. "This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood." Readers can be thankful for the unknown, for when the author allows his fictional self to fill in where the "facts" leave off, his power, wisdom and humanity as a writer are best revealed.

For, while the author has lived in New York for more than 50 years, at age 84 he continues to capture the central Illinois of his childhood with a spare style that reflects the unadorned beauty of the prairiescape

"Love," the shortest story in the collection, provides a fine example of how Maxwell preserves the past without sentimentality. A portrait of Maxwell's beloved fifth-grade teacher who dies of tuberculosis, the story ends with a reflection characteristic of the author's understated, yet powerful approach: "I know, the way I sometimes know what is in wrapped packages, that the elderly woman . . . who took care of Miss Brown during her last illness went to the cemetery regularly and poured the rancid water out of the tin receptacle that was sunk below the level of the grass at the foot of her grave, and filled it with fresh water from a nearby faucet and arranged the flowers she had brought in such a way as to please the eye of the living and the closed eyes of the dead."

The quiet restraint, the telling image and the superb craftsmanship of this passage suggest a writer who does more than chronicle small-town, Midwestern life in the early decades of this century. With intelligence and deceptive simplicity, Maxwell lays bare the tragedies, joys and truths of broad human experience. Still, Illinois seems the natural setting in which to read and appreciate Maxwell's work. Perhaps we can understand Maxwell's world instinctively — we who live in, and travel the roads of, the place he calls his "imagination's home." *

Barbara Burkhardt is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and is working on a critical biography of William Maxwell as her dissertation project. She has taught American literature at the University of Illinois and Sangamon State University.

March 1993/Illinois Issues/31