Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell, The Element of Lavishness

frazzled time-pockets & turned-off scoreboards

“And both children have had their hair cut, which always has the effect of putting them in quotation marks for a few days.”

The trouble with trying to pick out a sentence from The Element of Lavishness is that you keep falling into rereading it, and pretty soon the whole morning is gone. Calling the book (which gathers choice bits from four decades of correspondence between William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner) my favorite collection of literary letters has a bit of a this-is-the-best-Bolivian-restaurant-I’ve-ever-been-to feeling about it. Books of literary letters nearly always bog down in tedious writerly logistics (Has that royalty check come through?) or dismayingly pedestrian air-kisses (Wishing you a very merry Christmas from the whole Carver family). The Element of Lavishness has none of that. It is one of my favorite books.

Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker for decades, in addition to being a terrific and somewhat starchy novelist in his own right. Sylvia Townsend Warner — a British writer of enormous charm and eccentricity — was one of his most beloved contributor/supplicants. This gives their correspondence a bracing tautness — you never know when the chatty pages about ravenous woodchucks and freak weather events will be interrupted by some pained and courtly formulation like:

And now, lest you forget that the relationship between editor and writer can be as wearing as anything in the Old Testament, I have to tell you that the decision is against “The Finches of Abracadabra.”

But these astringencies are rare. Much more frequent is praise so effusive that you feel almost indecent being in the room:

If you had not loved to please, you would never, I think, have evolved that prose style that has given me an unbroken line of pleasure extending back for thirty years.

But you don’t read this book for the flurries of mutual admiration and affection, as lovely as they are. You read it for the joy of watching two athletes in their primes — one polished and stately; one chaotic and improvisational — hitting the bejesus out of the ball.

Here’s Warner, on witnessing an eclipse:

And while I was watching, I had a rush of astronomy to the head, and realised that the round shadow on the sun was not a shadow, but the moon. There was the sun, here was me, and that was the moon between us. For a few seconds I felt myself an inhabitant of the solar system — a delightful and enlarging sensation. I daresay Thoreau felt like that all the time.

And Maxwell on a conversation with his young daughter:

At the breakfast table she implored me to tell her — just tell her — which came first, the chicken or the egg. And when I began with single-celled animals and parthenogenesis and lizards that became birds, she was frantic. Just tell me, she begged, which came first, the chicken or the egg. So I began again with the single cell and she quite properly burst into tears. All in the world she was asking for was St. Anselm, and she got Darwin and Huxley.

Because these are letters — casual, intimate, written with only half a mind toward publication — we are positioned not in the grandstands, from which we take mastery more or less for granted, but rather on the court itself. Maxwell and Warner are playing with the same humble tools that we have — the scribbled-on legal pad, the pocket of frazzled time between dinner and bed — and this is what they can do with them.

And part of what enables them to play so freely — and this is what makes letters and journals such a joy, when they’re good — is that the scoreboard is off. None of these turns of phrase really count, in terms of their literary reputations — nothing they say will blemish their novels, those sacred and fussed-over books that each of them talk about like long illnesses to which they keep mysteriously succumbing.

So they are free to write things like this, from a letter that Maxwell sent Warner in the fall of 1958:

And both children have had their hair cut, which always has the effect of putting them in quotation marks for a few days.

Quotation marks! This image has a rightness — the sense in which a child’s fresh haircut briefly transforms them into a subtly artificial and over-enunciated version of themselves — that is so true and elusive and odd that it might not have survived the sober stare of Literary Posterity. But it is just the kind of stray and sprightly observation that will, I’m convinced, still be with me on my readerly deathbed, long after the majestic monologues and anthologized marvels have departed. That, we think, is how our minds worked in our best moments; that is how intuitively and spontaneously we sometimes swung. In this decades-old sentence, scratched on some long-gone kitchen pad, the ball whizzes close enough to touch our heads.