What if you only have one story to tell?

William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, reviewed

“Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.”

Some books remind you why you indulge in the pleasure of reading. So Long, See You Tomorrow just did that for me. It’s a quiet and underrated modern classic that demands to be read, and read again. I’m so glad I found it, or perhaps it found me.

William Maxwell’s novella is a slim volume – just 153 pages in length – but proof that greatness can be concise. Ostensibly simple prose can speak to the very depths of the soul. Unembellished writing can be jaw-dropping. Subtlety can be profound.

In the farmlands of Illinois, two boys’ lives collide over a few unremarkable days spent in each other’s company. Both face unimaginable tragedies in their lives, finding themselves in the throes of grief. For our narrator, the worst has already happened. For the other boy, Cletus Smith, the worst is yet to come. This isn’t a mystery novel; we’re told what happens at the very beginning: Cletus’ father, Clarence, kills his best friend. Years earlier, our narrator’s own life was derailed by the death of his mother in the flu epidemic of 1918.

“I didn’t tell Cletus about my shipwreck [...] and he didn’t tell me about his” notes the narrator, and yet they are united in their quiet devastation. Each boy has had joy ripped from his life, through no fault of his own, and must now navigate a new reality, untethered from what he has always known.

Upon researching the author’s literary legacy, I found that this was a consistent theme in his writing.

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Literature is the great confidant for authors, and was the chosen medium in which William Maxwell addressed his own immense grief. In both So Long, See You Tomorrow and another of his works, They Come Like Swallows, a mother falls victim to the flu epidemic. You may be able to guess that this was how the author’s own mother, Eva Blossom Blin, sadly passed.

Ann Patchett, in her introduction to the novel, notes how Maxwell “doesn’t try to fight his story [...] instead he gives his life over to it, allowing himself an entire career to push deeper and deeper into what he knows for certain.” The page becomes a playground for the writer in deep pain; a landscape to unleash one’s grievances and let them roam free. They do not need to be neatly defined or contained; they can twist and curl like smoke.

Even in his novels which don’t directly involve a mother dying from flu, there are consistencies: something unforeseen throws the family dynamic off kilter, and they realise they didn’t truly appreciate bliss until it was gone. So, when an author has a preoccupation to this extent, could they be criticised for only having one story to tell? Ann Patchett rejects this claim in Maxwell’s defence, concluding, “It seemed very clear to me that the key to making art was not in surrendering your story, but in surrendering your desire to fight it.”

There’s a lesson here for all budding writers: Perhaps giving ourselves the time and space to ruminate is the greatest liberation we can grant ourselves. Perhaps our story can be told across many volumes of work, as we push ourselves closer and closer to the truth. Or, perhaps, the truth is an impermanent, changing thing. What may have been true in one novel may not be true by the time we write another. Perhaps our work is a way of documenting the way truth develops and alters as we grow and mature, as time passes. And the ephemerality of truth is the greatest truth of all.

Maxwell himself notes precisely this in So Long, See You Tomorrow:

“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.”

I underlined the hell out of that one. Maybe the only universal truth is the unreliability of truth itself. As Maxwell explains, every act of storytelling betrays the truth in some way. The writers’ job is to continue challenging their own notion of what the truth is, and so it is a great pleasure to keep digging deeper and deeper towards that in each piece you craft.

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So Long, See You Tomorrow does that precious thing great novels do: they feel perennial and modern despite being written long ago. First published almost 50 years ago, and set a further 50 years before that, the emotions are raw, honest, and evergreen.

Maxwell speaks about love: “Plato’s idea that lovers were originally one person, the two parts having become separated and desiring to be joined, is as good an explanation as any for what cannot in the mind of an outsider ever be convincingly accounted for.” There is an affair born out of boredom and jealousy that ruptures the lives of these two families, explored in exquisite detail.

But he also speaks with as much delicacy about friendship. Clarence Smith and Lloyd Wilson have neighbouring farms, and their relationship is a distinctively masculine one: “After twelve years he found it hard to believe there had ever been a time when he and Clarence weren’t friends. At night, in the immense darkness, the only light he could see came from the Smiths’ house.” And yet, once an irreparable chasm emerges between them, this light goes from being a comfort to an agitation. Once it marked the closeness of the homes, a reassurance of life and love amongst the darkness, but later it feels like an intrusion: “at night the lighted windows of one another’s houses, once a comfort, only made them uneasy, since it was a reminder of all the things that were not the way they used to be.”

Often male friendship is defined more by actions than words – when one of the men tries to articulate the importance of their intimacy, he breaks off in embarrassment, “because anything he might say seemed so much less than he felt.” Our narrator, a generation later, believes that Cletus Smith would have “no recollection of the moment that has troubled me all these years.” When a friendship ends that was never defined, it can feel like something that never existed in the first place. Pain leaves scars, but sweetness leaves no souvenir.

The importance of the latter (more juvenile) male friendship is contained in the novel’s title – the echo of the last words the boys said to one another lingers over every page: “So long” and “See you tomorrow.” It’s not exactly a confession of affection to rival Wentworth’s love letter in Persuasion, but a small commitment. It is the promise that this moment meant something, and that it would be nice if it happened again. The tragedy is that it doesn’t, and the boys never confide in one another. Their respective shipwrecks are suffered in silence.

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Ultimately, this is an epic story of resilience and human frailty, told in just 153 excellent pages. Maxwell meanders through life’s melancholy, and mourns the transcience of existence.

I’ll leave you with his beautiful description of the inevitable fate that awaits us all: speaking of the death of his characters, and his faith in heaven, he notes,

“Above the transparent dome they live and work under there is another even grander where they will reside in mansions waiting to receive them when they are done with farming forever.”

Breath-taking.

5 out of 5 stars

So long, see you tomorrow,

Jack

Art by Lizzy Stewart