bright center of heaven

Bright Center of Heaven by William Maxwell (Harper & Brothers, 1934)

Maxwell “suppressed” his first novel, published in 1934,  by not allowing it to be reprinted in his lifetime.  (It was included with his other early novels in the Library of America two-volume set of his work published in 2008, eight years after his death).

Bright Center of Heaven is not a good book.  It chronicles a mid-summer day in a sort of improbable mix of guest house/artist colony/farm in Wisconsin run by the widowed Mrs. West and inhabited by Thorn and Whitey, her two sons; Aunt Amelia, her sister-in-law; an actress; a painter; a pianist;  a “reformed” schoolteacher; a German cook; and a (perhaps) Norwegian elderly farmhand.  Into this mix Mrs. West invites Jefferson Carter, a Harvard-educate “Negro”, a public speaker, and a “leader of his race.”  Also, the actress, who is in love with the ex-schoolteacher, thinks she might be pregnant.  Maxwell deals bravely but ineptly with both of the developments, and most of this book is confused and unconvincing.  It is not the beautiful assured performance of his subsequent novels, although there are a few glimmers of what’s to come: an animation of rooms and furniture (a la the short story “The Lily-White Boys”) and a sympathetic and appealing portrait of adolescent boys (a la The Folded Leaf). The issues of race are no doubt rendered sensitively for the time in which the book is set and was written, but now give the book an unpleasant and troubling veneer.

One of the reasons Maxwell suppressed the book was that he felt it was too obviously influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf”s To The Lighthouse, but I don’t think there is more than a very superficial trace of either of these books.  A curiosity.