They Came Like Swallows

I read William Maxwell's novel about the 1918 flu pandemic, They Came Like Swallows, in March 2020. I had bought it many months ago -- who knew it would become so germane? The experience it portrays has a lot in common with what we have experienced these past two years -- the sense of suspended time and reality, the sense of waiting for who knows what.The novel is a tapestry woven of many threads, always portrayed implicitly:* the mundaneness, and the mystery, of families* the love and comfort a mother can bestow simply by being there* the pressure and unease a father can impose simply by being there* the fury and frustration a sibling can incite simply by being there* the superficial mundaneness, and the deep meaningfulness, of conversation* the inability of children to clearly distinguish between waking and sleeping, between experiencing and dreaming, between seeing and imagining -- an inability that makes all aspects of life (nature, events, households, furniture, families, relationships) both uniquely rich and uniquely frightening* the paradox that life is full of things that children do not intellectually understand but that they deeply intuit -- for example, birth and death, good and evil, love, adult dynamics, and sexuality* most important, the nobleness of dogs -- particularly old dogs:"John was very old and decrepit. In winter he got rheumatism in his legs and had to be carried in and out of the house. Half his days were spent in looking for bones that he had long since dug up. And often he thumped his tail fondly when there was nobody there."As always, Maxwell's writing is bejeweled with sentences of such simplicity, clarity, and beauty as to take your breath away:"A sound (what, he did not know) struck the surface of his sleep and sank like a stone.""Outside, branches of the linden tree rose and fell in the wind, rose and fell. And November leaves came down.""With no more leaves to fall, the trees stood out in bare essential form, forgotten during the summer and now remembered.""The sky hung down, dark and heavy upon the trees.""When his mother read to him, her voice fell softly from above. It turned with the flames. Like the flames, it was full of shadows.""His mother smiled at him foolishly from the bank. And it seemed to him that she was smiling at the sky also, and at the creek, and at the yellow leaves which came down, sometimes by the dozen, and sailed in under the bank and out again."This book is a master work by a gentle magician.

A 1937 book in which Maxwell again reworks his own early life into fictional form. Yet again the early 20th century Illinois small-town setting made me think of Bradbury, especially novels like Dandelion Wine . Maxwell's approach is less lyrically poetic (though still beautifully crafted prose, every bit as good as Bradbury's) and not overtly fantastical, though there's a magic realist aspect to how 8-year-old Bunny Morison sees the world as a blend of imagination and reality. Ultimately it amounts to a more coherent and deeper story than Bradbury usually tells, though.

William Maxwell est de ces auteurs qui a une élégance naturelle de l’écriture, un style fluide et simple ou chaque mot est à sa place et en appelle un autre tout aussi normalement. Dans ce beau roman d’enfance qui se situe aux environs de 1918, il fait appel à des souvenirs épars, parfois doux et chauds comme des cocons lorsqu’il parle de sa mère ou parfois très douloureux ; on sent poindre une grande tendresse et une certaine douleur de ce passé révolu dont l’auteur conserve encore les cicatrices. Un roman simple et magnifique, largement autobiographique qui m’a fait découvrir un bel écrivain. Ce livre en appellera certainement d’autres.

Somehow, I had gotten to the ripe old age of ___ without ever having read William Maxwell. More fool me. The good news is that I started reading him with "They Came Like Swallows," and I was enchanted from the first page. He is a pure, pure writer, with the lines and paragraphs dropping like fruits from a tree. Read it.

Forty-three years separate THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS (written in 1937) and "So Long, See You Tomorrow" (1980), which is probably William Maxwell's most-read and highly regarded novel. But it would be understandable were a reader to think they had been written much closer in time to one another. They both involve a small-town family in Illinois in which the mother dies from influenza during the pandemic of 1918. And they have much the same tender, somber, elegiac quality. Moreover, both are exquisitely crafted. I was deeply moved by "So Long, See You Tomorrow". I am also moved by THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS.The novel takes place in November and December 1918. The story consists of three parts, each of which is told from the perspective of a different male of the Morison family -- first eight-year-old Bunny, a hyper-sensitive lad; then thirteen-year-old Robert, a more active "all-American" boy, who carries on with hardly a trace of handicap even though he lost one leg above the knee in a childhood accident; and last, the father James. All three accounts center on Elizabeth, mother of Bunny and Robert, wife of James, and the emotional and psychological lodestone of the family. But Elizabeth dies, shortly after having given birth to a baby boy, and it seems as though the family will disintegrate with grief. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, love and family ties begin to assert themselves and the novel ends with a few rays of hope.As with "So Long, See You Tomorrow", there is an autobiographical foundation to THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS. William Maxwell was born in small-town Illinois, and in 1918 his mother died of influenza after giving birth to a younger brother. At the center of "So Long, See You Tomorrow" is the boy left behind (presumably, William Maxwell). At the center of THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS is the woman who died (a portrait of Maxwell's mother?).The title is borrowed from "Coole Park, 1929", a poem by William Butler Yeats. Maxwell uses an excerpt from that poem as the epigraph for the novel. The epigraph begins, "They came like swallows", and the fourth and fifth lines read: "And half a dozen in formation there, / That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point". Surely Elizabeth Morison is that compass-point.