The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, March 23, 2026

Byblos: You probably have not heard of William Maxwell, or at least not heard much of him. He was a writer of novels and short stories, especially in the 1950s to the 1990s (he lived to be 92, he died in 2000). He was a fiction editor at The New Yorker, where the writers he edited included John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, John O’Hara and Eudora Welty. His novels include They Came Like Swallows, which breaks my heart at the mere evocation of the title (it is an autobiographical novel drawn from losing his mother to the 1918-19 flu), written in 1937, and The Chateau, about an American couple honeymooning (I think) in France. I thought he lost his way in that one; it meanders a bit, its wonderful parts not amounting to anything like its title. I have not read So Long, See You Tomorrow, not yet, but I have read the majority of his stories and remember reading one, back when I was a reporter in West Virginia in the early 90s (and Maxwell’s late 80s) and would drop in on classrooms to read to kids, to a class, then asking the kids to write him a quick note about what they’d heard. I sent him the bunch, and he wrote a letter as kind and touching as are his stories. I think I knew that I would elicit a response with those kids’ letters, so I was really using them to get at Maxwell, but I realized that only lately, not back then–and in that sense was the prototypical Maxwell character. I do think that he is in most regards a superior fiction writer–superior to Updike, who masked with bulk and metaphors what he lacked in substance, subtlety and grace toward his characters, whom (you tend to feel) are as pawns to his preens. Anyway, a few days ago I read Maxwell’s short story, “The Man in the Moon,” another autobiographical one, this one about his Uncle Ted, a semi-tragic character who could not get out from his grandfather’s and misfortune’s derision–his grandfather the judge, in whose courthouse Ted would end up being the elevator man, after losing an arm in a freak car accident he did not cause. Three passages knocked me over. Here’s the first, as the narrator reflects on his own age: “The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.” The second: “Whether this is an actual memory or an attempt on the part of my mind to adjust the past to my feelings about it I am not altogether sure. The very words ‘the past’ suggest lowered window shades and a withdrawal from brightness of any kind. Orpheus in the Underworld.” The third is the final line, after the death of Uncle Ted’s wife, years after he died young of course: “She was buried beside Ted, in the Blinn family plot. My grandfather’s headstone is no higher than the sod it is embedded in, and therefore casts no shadow over the grave of his son.”

Without their noticing it, they had changed the direction of their walking, and it now brought them straight toward the coffin. They stepped up to it, together, and it was not as James had expected. He did not break down, with Robert beside him. He stood looking at Elizabeth’s hands, which were folded irrevocably about a bunch of purple violets. He had not known that anything could be so white as they were-and so intensely quiet now with the life, with the identifying soul, gone out of them.

–From William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937).

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