William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It (1948) is a quite
haunting tragedy of manners and relationships. Set in the small town of
Draperville, Illinois in 1912, this literary novel mainly concerns the lawyer
Austin King, his wife Martha and their daughter Abbey.
Maxwell employs the
omniscient point of view, understandably, as he is depicting several denizens
in this small township, and entering into many of their heads. It’s a slow,
measured narrative, words and phrases clearly considered over months if not
years, certainly not rushed out in a few weeks or months; he probably allowed
the characters to gestate and conduct their monologues in his mind over time.
Austin King has reluctantly
invited the family of foster ‘cousins’ from Mississippi to stay in his house,
against his wife’s wishes. They have never met the Potter family, but Austin
feels he must do the right thing. He is plagued by that condition, and is
hostage to always wanting peace. With the first paragraphs we appreciate the
tension between the married couple. This is not the first time they’ve been at
loggerheads.
There are several instances
where Maxwell gives us an authorial aside (and a number of these asides are
surreal, observations made by furniture and such like!); not from any
particular character’s viewpoint: ‘It was not his failure entirely. Women are
never ready to let go of love at the point where men are satisfied and able to
turn to something else. It is a fault of timing that affects the whole human
race. There is no telling how much harm it has caused.’ (p12) This is a telling
conclusion to a chapter, excellent foreshadowing of harm to come.
Mrs Potter’s first appearance
is colourful and described with amusing wit: ‘… so small, so slight, here dress
so elaborately embroidered and beaded, her hair so intricately held in place by
pins and rhinestone-studded combs that she seemed, though alive, to be hardly
flesh and blood but more like a middle-aged fairy.’ (p14)
Maxwell is good at conveying
mood, too. ‘… and the clock threatened once more to take possession of the
room.’ An awkward silence fell between them and the clock’s ticking again
intruded. Another example: ‘The front stairs creaked, but not from any human
footstep. The sunlight relinquished its hold on the corner of an oriental rug
in the study in order to warm the leg of a chair. A fly settled on the kitchen
ceiling. In the living room a single white wheel-shaped phlox blossom hung for
a long time and then dropped to the table without making a sound.’ (p71)
Time will darken most things,
perhaps; or fade them, if left out in daylight. Take this description, for
example: ‘The rooms were large and opened one out of another, and the cherry
woodwork, from decades of furniture polish, had taken on the gleam of dark red
marble.’ (p1`59). Good visualisation, indeed; you can almost smell the age, and
the polish, of course.
Austin’s father was ‘the
nearest the town of Draperville had come to producing a great man.’
Unfortunately for Austin, he was forever in the dead man’s shadow, but
acquiesced, rather than ruffle feathers and change things.
There’s a clever piece of
flashback employed, too. When Martha spends time unpicking the sewing of her
dress, an expressed favourite of her husband’s, she unpicks her courtship with
Austin and her running away from him when he first proposed. ‘Although so much
time and effort have gone into denying it, the truth of the matter is that
women are human, susceptible to physical excitement and the moon.’ (p75) She
yearned for a man ‘who would give her the sense of danger, a man who would look
at her and make everything go dim around her’ (p73). But finally she settled
for staid upstanding Austin.
While the township gives the
appearance of being genteel, it isn’t. Another aside tells us ‘The world
(including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young
have to take their chances…’ (p53)
To the local townspeople, the
Potters seem almost exotic, and before long Mr Potter is inveigling certain
prominent folk into investing in his cotton business. Their daughter Nora is
besotted with Austin and declares her love for him, and instead of telling her
not to be foolish, he does nothing save allow her to stay behind with
neighbours when the rest of the family return south. The neighbours have their
own fascination, whether that’s deaf Dr Danforth who feels cut off because of
his affliction and then finds companionship and marriage unexpectedly, or the
middle-aged spinster sisters Alice and Lucy Beach, dominated by their mother,
or Austin’s senior partner, the relatively idle pompous Mr Holby, or the
rumour-mongering card club ladies, or the Kings’ Negro maid and cook, Rachel,
who suffered domestic violence.
Slowly, inexorably, a crisis
approaches as Martha’s pregnancy comes to term, as a disastrous accident
occurs, and as a possible suicide looms.
The world and characters
created linger long after the last page has been absorbed.
A highly regarded author,
Maxwell was a famous fiction editor of the New
Yorker from 1936 to 1975. He wrote six novels and a great many short
stories. He died in 2000, aged 91.
Minor editing comments
Surprisingly, even an
accomplished editor and writer such as Maxwell uses the dubious phrase ‘His
eyes rested uneasily on the design…’ (p2) Nowadays, we try to avoid eyes doing
these surreal things. His gaze rested uneasily, perhaps. Later, ‘Austin’s eyes
wandered to the clock…’ (p10). Minor quibbles; in this latter scene we’re easily
caught up in the strained relationship, only lightened by the appearance of
little Abbey.
‘On the mantelshelf there was
a brass clock with the works visible through panes of thick bevelled glass, and
several family photographs.’ (p159). Perhaps it would read better thus: ‘On the
mantelshelf there were several family photographs and a brass clock with the
works visible through panes of thick bevelled glass.’
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