Insight Into a 40-Year Literary Friendship Through the Mail

This is the story of a 40-year friendship conducted largely through the mail. William Maxwell was a 29-year-old editor at the New Yorker magazine when, in 1938, he first wrote to Sylvia Townsend Warner who, at 44, was a well-established poet, novelist and storyteller. (Her debut novel, “Lolly Willowes” (1926), about a spinster who discovers her vocation as a witch, had the good fortune to be chosen as its first-ever selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club.) “Infinitely charmed” were the words Maxwell would use more than half a century later to describe how he felt about her writing, and clearly he felt the same way about the lady herself. As their highly literary, deeply affectionate letters testify, the feeling was mutual.

Maxwell was Warner’s principal editor at the New Yorker, which for more than four decades published about 150 of her stories. He was also a writer himself, and Warner would read each new book of his with as much delight as he read her work. On several occasions, they met in person, when Warner visited America, and when Maxwell and his wife, Emily, visited Warner and her lover, Valentine Ackland, at their home in England. But letters were their mainstay.

In these epistles, we overhear two writers discussing their craft: the joy of what Warner calls “that rapturous, that truly creative state of mind of not . . . positively understanding what you [are] up to” and the problems encountered along the way (“I know that trouble with too many characters,” she commiserates. “I went out of my mind with ‘The Flint Anchor,’ trying to make them all grow old simultaneously; and I had to kill off two bishops in ‘The Corner.’ ”) They discuss favorite composers, artists and authors (Mozart, Schubert, Chagall, Bonnard, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Hardy, Proust, Butler and Elinor Wylie, to name a few), and share their enthusiasm for new discoveries, such as Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1968), a novel whose graphic violence and sex held no terror for the septuagenarian Warner. “Lord, what a book!” she exclaimed. “If I could have my way, I’d make it compulsory reading . . . like Marx’s ‘Capital.’ ”

As editor, Maxwell often acted as tactful intermediary between Warner and the magazine’s guiding spirit, Harold Ross, and after Ross’ death in 1951, his successor, William Shawn. Warner was sometimes dismayed by Shawn’s prudish responses to her stories. But sometimes, on learning the precise reasons for his objections, she realized that some were quite useful. Warner also appreciated the fine distinction Maxwell drew between didactic fiction with an explicit “moral purpose,” which both he and she disdained, and fiction with an implicit “moral tone” like that of Jane Austen, Henry James and other writers they sought to emulate.

And literature was only one of countless things the two friends discussed. They would set down the details of a day’s happenings, exchange advice about how to treat a cold, describe a trip, a concert, clouds, the antics of Maxwell’s children or Warner’s cats, all in the most engaging manner imaginable. No subject was too silly: “Using the toilet seat,” Warner wrote, “is the first step towards literature. I learned to read off the Bromo carton--’succeeded after long experiment in combining the curative properties of Bromo-chloratum’--when you’ve cleared that fence, the world is before you.”

As for larger events, Maxwell’s accounts of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1965 Northeastern power blackout vividly evoke the numb terror of the one and the strange exhilaration of the other. It is instructive to be reminded, from his letters in particular, of how intensely some people felt about the 1952 presidential election. Not everyone liked Ike. Maxwell not only loathed him, but loved Stevenson. “It was like a traumatic shock,” he wrote Nov. 5, after Ike’s victory. “But hatred has been helpful. I got very drunk last night and used abusive language to a number of Republican ladies and one or two gentlemen.” One can only imagine how Maxwell might have reacted to our most recent election, had he not died earlier last year.

Drawing upon more than 1,300 letters, Michael Steinman offers a wonderfully colorful sampling, intelligently arranged and annotated. His admiration and affection for these writers are as evident as theirs for each other.