The book (my suggestion for the group) is told in the restrained, straightforward though sometimes wry style that is often the mode of The New Yorker of which Maxwell was for many years an editor, and which in fact seemed to me somewhat conventional, if not old-fashioned, others in our group agreeing. However, its structure is anything but straightforward.
I began the discussion by saying that when I first read this novel, I found it oddly disjointed, and there were immediate murmurs of assent. I had first begun reading it on a train journey to France with two disruptive changes, not picking it up again until my similarly interrupted return journey almost a week later, getting about two-thirds of the way through. Another problem I mentioned later in the meeting was that I had kept getting mixed up between the characters and having to look back to be reminded, and others in the group said that they had too. Wondering, once I got home from my trip, if the problem was the circumstances under which I had been reading the book, I began it again, reading it right through in two sittings. This time I found it a more satisfying read and ultimately very moving, and liked it very much. However, everyone else at the group meeting, having read the book only once, received my praise with dubious silence, and Ann immediately said that she felt it was not one book but two separate stories. Doug quickly and strongly agreed with her, and was echoed by others, and I’m interested now to examine the book to see why we received this impression, why my subsequent re-read gave me a different experience, and why it has received such praise elsewhere.
The book opens with a chapter titled ‘A Pistol Shot’, in which the author reports, in a factual, objective register, the 1921 murder of a local farmer, Lloyd Wilson, presenting the facts as they emerged in the subsequent inquest. Shot as he sat milking his cows, he was found slumped across the nearby stall by one of the young sons with whom he lived alone along with a housekeeper. The chapter ends with a fact which the ‘the Lincoln Courier-Herald hesitated several days before printing’: that the murdered man’s ear had been razored off and taken away (the ear, as the author implies, being in Freudian terms an erogenous symbol). The protagonist-author is peripheral in this first chapter, mentioned in the opening as having at the time only heard of the gravel pit from where people heard the shot, since he was forbidden as a child to go there, and commenting, in a direct authorial address to the reader, about the non-likelihood of violence at that time in that area, the author’s home town of Lincoln, Illinois.
The second chapter begins on a more personal note as the author states that he doubts that he would have remembered ‘for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I had never laid eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn’t been the father of someone I knew, and (2) I hadn’t later done something I was ashamed of afterward.’ Thus he purposefully establishes a connection between the murder and himself. However, this connection remains theoretical since formally, in terms of the structure of the novel, he then immediately breaks that connection – or at least breaks away from it - by writing: ‘Before I can go into all that, I have to take up another subject’, and does indeed appear to change the subject entirely.
The title of this second chapter, ‘The Period of Mourning’ had led me to expect the mourning to be connected with the murder, but what follows instead is a lengthy section focussing on the author’s childhood tragedy of losing his mother when he was ten years old. Deeply traumatised, he clings bodily to his grieving and pacing father, a distant father who can offer him no comfort; sadly he watches first a housekeeper and then a new stepmother take his mother’s place; and then there is the final disruption and loss of a family move from the house where all his memories of his mother lie. His father is building a new house, and in the evenings the boy author visits the half-built house alone, a house (symbolically) without a roof, and plays there, climbing on the beams and wandering through rooms without walls. After a while another boy, Cletus Smith, turns up, and they play together. They don’t talk; the thirteen-year-old protagonist-author doesn’t tell Cletus about what the calls his ‘shipwreck’, and Cletus tell the author nothing about himself. The author tells us that they always parted with that phrase, ‘So long, see you tomorrow’ and then, finally, after making that connection with the book’s title, imparts to us: ‘The only person who had any reason [to murder Lloyd Wilson] was Clarence Smith, Cletus’s father’.
Now, it seems, the two stories – that of the author’s boyhood loneliness and grief and that of the murder – have finally dovetailed, but this is after a diversion of some 30 pages, and
once again the focus immediately shifts, as if veering away once more from the connection. We are back now exclusively with the murder, and the narration adopts once again a more distanced narrative tone as the author writes of his latter-day researches of the incident through the archives of the local newspaper. We learn about the sheriff’s immediate investigations at the scene of the murder, and of unconfirmed witness reports, the author commenting that he ended up with many unanswered questions. However, we do learn that Cletus’s mother and father had divorced, that his father had given up his lease on his farm and, in an extremely depressed state of mind, moved in with his parents in town, and that Cletus also came to town with his mother to live with an aunt. We learn a fact that did not emerge at the divorce hearing, that some months before, the wife of LLoyd Wilson, the murdered man, had left him to live with relatives in town, taking their daughters but leaving their sons with Lloyd, and that he had been ruined by being forced to settle on her most of his money. Above all, we understand that although the two neighbouring farmers, Smith and Wilson, had once been inseparable friends, an affair between Lloyd Wilson and Smith’s wife (Cletus’s mother) had ended in the murder of Wilson by Smith. Finally, we learn that the body of Smith, Cletus’s father, had been found in the gravel pit with the incriminating murder weapon and the still-bloody razor. ‘Not wanting to live’, he had shot himself in the head. All of this information is delivered somewhat piecemeal, and in a non-linear order – and in that cool, objective mode - which is perhaps why I, and others in the group, found it hard to keep a handle on who was who and which married couple was which. Finally, right at the end of the chapter, we do at last come back to Cletus and the author’s boyhood connection with him. Cletus, it turns out, was asked to identify his father’s gun, and the author muses: ‘Between the time that Cletus and I climbed down from the scaffolding and went our separate ways and the moment he was confronted with the broken gun … he must have crossed over the line into maturity.’
At this point, though, Cletus disappeared from the author’s life, the author as a boy assuming that his mother kept him away from school and they then moved away: ‘It was as if his father had shot and killed him too.’ Formally echoing this – and thus once again structurally breaking the connection - Cletus now disappears once more from the narration of the novel as the author describes life after the move into the newly built house, once again portraying his boyhood loneliness and continuing grief for his mother. At length his father is offered a promotion that requires a move to Chicago and the boy’s adjustment to a new life in a much bigger town and school. Finally, again at the very end of the chapter, we come upon Cletus again. Walking along the corridor of his huge Chicago school, the author meets Cletus coming in the opposite direction, and is so overwhelmed that he fails to speak to him, a moment that has haunted and shamed him for the rest of his life. This chapter is titled ‘In the School Corridor’, but it has taken the whole chapter for the author to get to that moment, and the substance of the chapter has been focussed entirely elsewhere. At the beginning of the second chapter the author has written: ‘This memoir – if that’s the right name for it – is a roundabout, futile way of making amends.’ But it is as if he is psychologically incapable of addressing the matter directly, but must approach it always from a distance and indeed in a roundabout way.
And sure enough, although we seem now to have reached the crux of the novel, the next chapter, titled ‘The Emotion of Ownership’ immediately swings away from it as the author describes his own boyhood outings in his father’s horse and carriage, and discusses his father’s ownership of a farm he rarely visits and the general matter of tenant farming in the area. It becomes only slowly clear that the chapter is after all spooling towards Lloyd Wilson and Clarence Smith who are indeed tenant farmers, farming land owned by others in town, and thus, at last again to Cletus.
‘If I knew where Cletus Smith is right at this minute,’ the author writes now, “I would go and explain.’ He goes on:
…the one possibility of my making some connection with him seems to lie not in the present but in the past – in my trying to reconstruct the testimony he was never called upon to give.
In other words, he will make up for his failure to make an act of sympathy with an act of empathy, and imagine what the whole episode of the marriage breakup and murder was like for Cletus.
Earlier, commenting on the unanswered questions in the newspaper reports he has asked: ‘For example, from whom did Cletus’s mother learn about the murder? And how soon…?’ And in fact what he now imagines is the story not just from Cletus’s viewpoint but from those of all involved.
This was the part of the novel that on my second reading I found extremely moving. It seemed to me indeed a magnificent act of empathy, a demonstration of acute insight into the workings of the human heart – and even that of the dog (which the author readily admits he has invented), as it experiences the breakup of the human lives around it. I was moved to drenching tears by the description of Cletus’s loss as he has to leave the farm (which I have to say echoes my own childhood experience):
Take away the cow barn… the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? … He may as well start life over again as some other boy instead.
It is as if once the author gives himself up to fiction, the book takes off onto an entirely different emotional level, the elements of the section gelling, and that it is perhaps this section that has garnered the book such praise. However, the book does fall overall into two distinct parts, the earlier strictly autobiographical part, and the later fictionalised part which concentrates solely on the story of the murder, a bifurcated structure that exacerbates the lack of connection between the two major strands of story we found within the earlier part.
I have to say however that although on my first reading I did get some way into the second part, I wasn’t moved then in the same way, and continued to have to remind myself which character was which. On my second reading I was of course more familiar with the characters and wasn’t hampered in the same way and was thus more easily able to immerse myself in the story. In addition, I think I was able to read into it the connections the author had intended, but which the structure frustrated on my first reading. Margeret, though, said that she too had been moved almost to tears at times, and Ann, putting her hand on her heart, agreed about the dog, though she later commented that there was more stress on the dog, and more empathy shown towards it, than to the children involved. It is also true that although the experience of Cletus in the fictionalised section is (to me) extremely moving, more narrative space is given to the adults in their love triangle – another authorial/structural evasion, possibly.
However, Doug said roundly that he did not find the fictionalised section moving at all. Right at the start of it the author says:
If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it.
Doug was that reader. I had read the section as fiction, but Doug said that once the author had announced it as speculation, he simply could not commit himself to it or take it seriously. He did indeed find much of it unconvincing. He could not accept that two men with such a close friendship could become such sudden enemies. He didn’t feel that it would have been possible in that close community for people to conduct a secret adulterous affair. He found other aspects of the novel unconvincing, too: he didn’t buy that anyone could have had such a lifelong shame about a boyhood friend when their connection had obviously lasted for only a few days. None of these objections seemed realistic to me, or to Clare, a counsellor, and they seemed uncharacteristic of Doug, who is usually an empathic reader. Apart from which, the whole thing is based on a true story, and of course the author had confessed in a public interview that he suffered that lifelong shame. My first thought was that the author had made a mistaken choice in confessing the autobiographical nature of the book within the text and thus casting doubt on his speculations, rather than writing the whole book as fiction. And while it might be obvious on a theoretical level that the author’s own tragedy would link him emotionally with the similarly grieving Cletus, it seems to me that the structure, by constantly separating the two stories and dropping focus away from Cletus, militates against the idea that the author’s life was haunted by the thought of him – ie the novels fails formally to embody that emotional hangup. I think too that the prose, with its measured tone and years-long distanced view, fails to allow the reader to share it in the way that a more immediate and interior style might.
All in all, the book got a thumbs-down from the group, though Clare said that after our discussion she wanted to read it again, and someone noted its power in prompting a long subsequent discussion about the impact of our parents on our lives.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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