BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Precious Love Letters of a Sort Between Writer and Editor : THE HAPPINESS OF GETTING IT DOWN RIGHT: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell, 1945-1966 Edited by Michael Steinman; Alfred A. Knopf $26, 368 pages

The widow of Michael O’Donovan, the Irish short-story master known to his readers as Frank O’Connor, recalls how William Maxwell, his New Yorker editor, used to come to Brooklyn Heights to go over his manuscripts.

“Such a pleasure it was to listen to them--Bill’s voice quiet, soft, almost hesitant--Michael’s deep, strong, more insistent,” Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy writes.

“Michael never failed to marvel at Bill’s skill as an editor--the way changing a word here or rearranging a phrase there would make the meaning which Michael intended clear. I never heard a cross word. Michael might say, ‘Well, blast you anyway, Mr. Maxwell,’ but he said it as to a magician who had not only pulled the rabbit out of the hat but then put the hat back on the rabbit.

“They would work away amiably, then fold up the proofs, Michael would pocket the pencils, and they’d smile and say, ‘Another masterpiece,’ or ‘If we do say so ourselves . . . ‘ or even ‘Poor Chekhov.’ After that I’d give them lunch and we’d sit around in dreamy contentment talking, talking and watching lights go on in Manhattan across the river.”

Those were the exulting years: the 1950s, when as many as six O’Connor pieces a year would make it over into what was then the story writer’s Promised Land. Years of pain followed: between 1960 and O’Connor’s death in 1966 the New Yorker used only four stories, with another four published posthumously.

Michael Steinman has elicited and put together a collection of letters and recollections that capture memorably, in some ways uniquely, both the exhilaration and the agony of a writer’s and editor’s trek together across the years.

The uniqueness comes from two things. One is that not only was Maxwell a great editor but he was, and is, a master of expository prose. His sentences are windows of such clear glass that what is seen through them--an editor’s elucidations, a friend’s evocations--is so unimpeded as to seem intensified. The other thing is the love that the two men bore each other--Maxwell was also a master of friendship--and the pain they inescapably inflicted upon each other.

Maxwell, tender, sensitive and infinitely ambitious for the work of a man he considered a near-genius, was steel in rejecting what he believed the New Yorker could not use. O’Connor, bluff Irish artist as he seemed to be, had no defenses at all when in his last years his ability to suit the magazine failed, along with his health. “Bill doesn’t love me any more,” he told Harriet near the end.

But the love failed not at all, and it gives both special light and special tragedy to these enchanting letters. It is the artist’s tragedy, memorably described by the Irish writer George Russell as the hen’s cackle after producing an egg: “Oh God, Oh God, now there will be no more eggs.” With an editor as close to a writer as Maxwell was to O’Connor, the lament is also the farmer’s--who for his part knows that sooner or later the hen will be right, and there will be no more such hens.

The letters are a rich account of a lifelong friendship, not only between the two men but between the two couples. Harriet, who was a student of O’Connor’s at Harvard, was in awe of the older Emily Maxwell until the evening she watched her make dessert: “A dollop of this, a spoonful of that, layer after layer. When it was nearly finished she tasted it, made a face, and poured the whole thing down the sink. And without even giving me a chance to taste it.” No wonder Harriet and Maxwell both loved her. They loved O’Connor, and that was his kind of blithe, irreverent gesture.

The writer’s side of the correspondence is briefer than the editor’s: funny, theatrical, affectionate and, in the last years, nearly successful in masking anguish over his diminishing powers. Only once, he challenges Maxwell over a rejected story that went on to be successful elsewhere. To which Maxwell, whose letters are precious illustrations of what editors can be, explains what they can’t be, there at the frontier between the author’s art and the readers’ lives.

Editors are not infallible, he writes. Instead: “A species of medium, with closed eyes and open mouths, looking like the village idiot, they wait for judgment to come from somewhere outside.”