All the Days and Nights
WILLIAM MAXWELL’S
ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS
“Sweet and tough-minded at once, Maxwell’s stories possess unusual emotional density.… His beautifully chosen details fold out to encompass whole worlds.… One more brilliant testimony to William Maxwell’s eloquence, grace and wit.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Written with exquisite restraint, the work illustrates the rare sensitivity, telling detail and bare, graceful prose that have become Maxwell’s hallmarks. Authentic and spare, the stories balance the tension between life’s exhilaration and haunting sadness.… [Maxwell’s stories] reveal the depth of his insights, the wisdom of his gentle yet certain artistic command.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Conclusive evidence that Maxwell stands at the pinnacle of American letters.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fiction that … honors the physical world with verisimilitude, human experience with emotional fidelity and the English language with consummate craft.… These collected stories are testament to [Maxwell’s] frequent, quietly startling success.”
—Wall Street Journal
“No one else currently writing can capture as [Maxwell] does a sense of life in the balance, of a moment appreciated.… Maxwell, dealing in very ordinary days and nights, makes them luminous.… The beauty of some sentences is like a stab of light.”
—Chicago Tribune
Billie Dyer and Other Stories
(1992)
The Outermost Dream
(1989)
So Long, See You Tomorrow
(1980)
Over by the River and Other Stories
(1977)
Ancestors
(1971)
The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales
(1966)
The Château
(1961)
Stories
(1956)
(
WITH JEAN STAFFORD, JOHN CHEEVER, AND DANIEL FUCHS
)
Time Will Darken It
(1948)
The Heavenly Tenants
(1946)
The Folded Leaf
(1945)
They Came Like Swallows
(1937)
Bright Center of Heaven
(1934)
WILLIAM MAXWELLALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS
William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at
The New Yorker
. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for his novel
So Long, See You Tomorrow
, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
First Vintage International Edition, November 1995
Copyright © 1965, 1986, 1992, 1994 by William Maxwell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.
“A Game of Chess” (signed Gifford Brown) and “What He Was Like” were originally published in
The New Yorker
; “A fable begotten of an echo of a line of verse by W B. Yeats” was originally published in
Antaeus
; “The Lily-White Boys” was originally published in
The Paris Review
; “A mean and spiteful toad” and “The pessimistic fortune-teller” were originally published in
Story
under the titles “Alice” and “The Fortune-teller.” Improvisations 1, 12, and 21 were originally published in a volume of five tales privately printed in honor of the author’s eightieth birthday.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Maxwell, William.
All the days and nights : the collected stories of William Maxwell. p. cm.
1. City and town life—Illinois—Fiction. 2. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Americans—Travel—France—Fiction.
4. Family—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 1. Title.
PS
3525.
A
9464
A
79 1995
813′.54—dc20 94-27509
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5014-9
Author photograph © Dorothy Alexander
v3.1
For my one and only
T
HE
four-masted schooner lay at anchor in Gravesend Bay, not far from Coney Island. It belonged to J. P. Morgan, and I persuaded a man with a rowboat to take me out to it. In my coat pocket was a letter of introduction to the captain. The year was 1933, and I was twenty-five. I had started to become an English professor and changed my mind, and I had written a novel, as yet unpublished. I meant to go to sea, so that I would have something to write about. And because I was under the impression, gathered from the dust-jacket copy of various best-sellers, that it was something a writer did before he settled down and devoted his life to writing. While the captain was reading my letter I looked around. The crew consisted of one sailor, chipping rust, with a police dog at his side. It turned out that the schooner had been there for four years because Mr. Morgan couldn’t afford to use it. The captain was tired of doing nothing and was expecting a replacement the next day and was therefore not in a position to take me on. He had no idea when the beautiful tall-masted ship would leave its berth. And I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life-size characters — affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black — that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered. The Natural History of home: the suede glove on the front-hall table, the unfinished game of solitaire, the oriole’s nest suspended from the tip of the outermost branch of the elm tree, dandelions in the grass. All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story or sustain the complicated cross-weaving of longer fiction.