Remembering William Maxwell

believed that love could be offered with an open hand. At a memorial for the poet Robert Fitzgerald, his oldest friend, he approached a man who had also been close to Fitzgerald. He knew the man slightly, and he said to him, feel that Robert has bequeathed us to each other. And in return got a blank look. In my mind's eye I can see Maxwell searching the man's face. Nothing, he thinks, and turns away. Maxwell had grown accustomed to indifference. His wife, Emily, felt that his deep humility came from having borne again and again the disappointment of his writing's not being as widely embraced as he had hoped it would be. His attachment to his mother when he was a little boy was such that when she left the room, some intuition informed him, and if she wasn't back soon he would pick himself up and go looking for her. When she died, of influenza during the epidemic of 1918, while Maxwell was ten, he gave up any belief in a God who protected human happiness. No sensible person can fail to be astonished by Creation, he thought, but the idea of an old man watching over individual lives, a being who judged, kept track, and intervened, who favored one person over another, a figure from a story such a version had no meaning for him. His view was less sentimental: terrible things can happen at any moment, the universe is brute and mechanical, no agency protects the innocent, and it is unwise not to be prepared. Life continues even in the face of the unthinkable, one step after another, until eventually we reach the end. The point was to conduct oneself with dignity and courage, to be diligent in pursuit of the highest purposes, to find and nurture love, and to live while one has the chance. What happened at