The folded leaf by William Maxwell

THE FOLDED LEAF
William Maxwell
A critical paper by
George Downing

 

I was pleasantly surprised when I was given the assignment of doing the critical paper on The Folded Leaf.  I have long admired William Maxwell and over the years have read many of his short stories in The New Yorker.  In addition, The Folded Leaf, his best known and highly praised autobiographical novel, has long been on my list of books to be read.  I knew it was a coming-of-age story, one of my favorite genres of literature, and that it was set in the Midwest, where I, too, had spent my boyhood.  I also knew that it and other novels and stories by Maxwell have been elevated into the literary canon by their publication this year in the very prestigious Library of America series.

Well, unfortunately, despite my pleasant anticipation, I must confess that I found the novel itself disappointing.  I knew Maxwell’s literary style was one of nuance, understatement and subtlety, which is something I ordinarily prize in a writer, but in  The Folded Leaf  I found to my regret that these qualities had become so attenuated that they made the novel seem flat and bloodless.  Maxwell’s quiet and gentle style seemed to me to be wrong for this story of adolescence and young manhood.  True, there are many lovely passages which demonstrate Maxwell’s unerring eye for detail, as well as wonderfully evocative scenes of life in the Midwest; yet overall I found the tone of the novel too withdrawn and timid for the subject.

As we know, the novel revolves around the close friendship between two very different boys, Lymie Peters and Spud Latham.  Lymie, we are frequently reminded by the novel’s narrator, is a frail, unathletic boy who is obsessed by his physical failings.  Yet we are told that he is a very bright, sensitive boy who excels in all of his classes.  Although shy and introverted, he is not a social outcast and seems to fit in tolerably well with his classmates, joining in their activities.  Early in the story he is saved from drowning in the school’s pool by Spud, a new boy at the school who instantly becomes Lymie’s hero and best friend.

Spud is the exact opposite of Lymie:  a strapping and handsome athletic type who is afraid of nothing and is always ready for a fight.  Academics are not his strong suit; what he enjoys most are boxing bouts and other physical challenges.

Somehow these two opposite types become inseparable friends.  Spud senses that there is an aura of sadness about Lymie.  Lymie’s mother, with whom he had had a very close and loving relationship, died when he was just ten years old.  His father, a hard-drinking traveling salesman, has little in common with his bookish son.  They live in a cheap rundown apartment and silently eat their meals in a dismal local restaurant, barely communicating with one another.

Spud befriends Lymie because he senses Lymie’s sadness and need for friendship.  At the same time Spud realizes that they share a sense of loss and longing—Lymie for his deceased mother and a decent homelife and Spud for the kind of rugged outdoors life he had enjoyed in rural Wisconsin before his father moved the family to Chicago to take a job.  Spud seems out of place in the city and seems always to carry a chip on his shoulder.

Whatever the mutual attraction,  the boys become fast friends and go everywhere and do everything together.  Spud takes Lymie home to meet his family, and his kindly mother, concerned for the skinny boy, immediately extends an open invitation to Lymie to join them for dinner any time he chooses.  In effect, he is adopted by Spud’s family, and spends more time with them than with his own father.

As with all of Maxwell’s writing, the friendship between Lymie and Spud has autobiographical roots in Maxwell’s own youth and early adulthood.  In an interview with his biographer, Barbara Burkhardt,  Maxwell revealed that in high school he met a boy named Jack Skully, an athletic and ruggedly handsome young man whom he considered his first real friend.  They were a pair of opposites, with Maxwell being the mild mannered student at the head of the honor roll and Jack being a top school athlete who could take on any boy in sight.

As I am sure is true of all of you, the scenes and characters of  The Folded Leaf brought back a flood of memories of my own boyhood and adolescence:  playing pick-up ball games on vacant neighborhood lots; ice cream parlors and hamburger joints where we hung out with our friends, trading gossip and sometimes illicit cigarettes; summer afternoons lazing at the beach or sailing on the lake; and later, as we grew into adolescence, revelations about the mysteries of sex and romantic longings for girls who always seemed to be just out of reach.

My recollections of these times are filled with youthful exuberance and laughter, merciless teasing and joking, and the usual mischief-making and banter that kids engage in.  Yet, of course, all was not fun and laughter;  along the way we all suffered the so-called “400 blows” of growing up—the confusions and the hurts and the unfulfilled longings that make that time in life so challenging for everyone.

I wish Maxwell had put more of this kind of youthful exuberance into his novel.  Though he describes with careful observation the various activities that Lymie and Spud and their friends take part in, there often seems to me to be a timidity and a kind of reticence in his accounts.  For one thing, the few verbal exchanges that Maxwell lets us in on are often so anodyne that one wonders why he bothers to recount them at all.  Adolescent boys are nothing if not boisterous and noisy, but little of this comes through in the novel.  Spud, in particular, is to me a disappointingly-drawn character .  Even though he is an indispensable figure in the development of the story, he is so taciturn and uncommunicative that we get to know very little about him—other than, of course, that he is a fine physical specimen and enjoys boxing.  He and Lymie seldom talk to one another in any kind of heartfelt or meaningful way, and Maxwell seems to purposely avoid such exchanges.  That is not how I remember my best friends from my boyhood.  We talked about anything and everything, and we certainly didn’t pull any punches with one another.  Why, I wonder, did Maxwell feel so constrained in his telling of Lymie’s and Spud’s story?

On a more positive note, to Maxwell’s credit we learn much more about Lymie, who is obviously based on Maxwell himself.  With Lymie, we find our way into his head and his heart through the pipedreams and reveries which he indulges in as his defense against what he sometimes feels is a hostile world.  These reveries are among the most sensitive and beautifully written passages in the novel and show Maxwell’s subtle psychological gifts at their best.  Interestingly, we are told by Burkhardt that Maxwell’s inspiration for many of these passages came from the psychoanalysis which he was then undergoing with the famous Freudian analyst, Theodore Reik.  Maxwell felt that his analysis had sufficiently unlocked his inhibitions that he could write about the most personal and private thoughts of his characters.

Sometimes these reveries are light and amusing, as when Lymie (who, like Maxwell, never learned to throw a ball) imagines that he is drafted into a neighborhood baseball game as a substitute pitcher and immediately strikes out three batters in a row.  On other occasions, the memories are of a darker and sadder nature, as when, standing with his father looking at his mother’s grave, he tries without success to remember her face and how she looked.  Expressing Lymie’s unhappiness, the narrator tells us “[He] had tried too many times to remember it and it was gone.  It wouldn’t come back anymore.”  

At the opening of  Chapter 16, just after Spud has invited Lymie to come to his house for dinner, the novel’s narrator tells us why Lymie both idolizes and resents his friend Spud:
“To know the world’s injustice requires only a small amount of experience.  To accept it without bitterness or envy you need almost the sum total of human wisdom, which Lymie Peters at fifteen did not have.  He couldn’t help noticing that the scales of fortune tipped considerably in Spud’s favor, and resenting it.  But what gnawed at him most was that Spud should be, besides, a natural athlete, the personification of the daydream he himself most frequently indulged in.”

The narrator goes on to describe Lymie’s escapist fantasy life with a father who has stopped drinking, has taken a good job, and has moved the family into a big new house with a housekeeper to look after things and make Lymie his favorite dessert..

A recent review of  The Folded Leaf by the Gale Literary Group comments as follows on these psychological musings of Lymie and the narrator:
“The narration of  The Folded Leaf is distinguished by multiple shifts of point of view as well as addresses to the reader—leisurely commentaries reminiscent of nineteenth century Russian novels.  As if its emotional content would overflow traditional narrative, the novel includes more than a dozen meditative digressions, reveries on travel, death, [Spring] . . .or musings on what characters have done or will do.  Thirty years after the publication of the novel, Maxwell said that these discursive passages were merely attempts to keep [the story] from being linear, but they are as meaningful as the events they accompany.”

In her positive review of the novel at the time of its publication, Diana Trilling commented that the psychological and philosophical digressions of the novel allowed Maxwell the freedom “to comment on his [characters’] fates in his own person, so that we have the advantage of his intellect as well as of his creativity.”  She referred to the novel as an “important social document” that exhibited Maxwell’s “remarkable, if quiet, gift for observation.”

Returning to the storyline of the novel, the scene shifts from Lymie’s and Spud’s high school experiences to their moving on together to the state university.  Here the plot thickens with the introduction of a pretty and bright co-ed named Sally Forbes, a professor’s daughter who is one the boys’ classmates.  Soon Spud has begun dating her and, according to one of  Spud’s boarding house roommates, has fallen hard for her.  But notwithstanding Spud’s budding romance with Sally, Lymie remains constantly in the picture, going everywhere with them.  As the narrator puts it:
“It didn’t seem to bother Spud or Sally that Lymie was with them a great deal of the time.  They felt that in a way he was responsible for their happiness and out of gratitude they included him in it.  He accepted the role of the faithful friend, the devoted unselfish intermediary.”

As we know, that is not quite how things turned out.  Lymie himself falls in love with Sally.  In a surprising storytelling twist, Maxwell telegraphs this fact to us as yet unsuspecting readers when Lymie goes to visit the home of his literature professor.  There Lymie is introduced to the professor’s mother, a blunt and formidable old lady who, without missing a beat, blurts out to Lymie:  “You’re in love with [Sally], aren’t you?”  Not only that but she tells him he should make haste in marrying the girl and, by the way, should make his career as either a poet or a literature professor.

Although Maxwell himself has given us no prior hint that Lymie is smitten by Sally—suggesting only that they are just good friends—we sense that the old lady has indeed been perspicacious and that Lymie is indeed in love with Sally, though his feelings remain confused and inchoate.

Here again Maxwell’s approach is almost maddeningly oblique and opaque.  Why couldn’t he have let us know more directly about Lymie’s feelings for Sally?  Instead, this most critical emotional point of the story—the eternal love triangle—is buried among Maxwell’s lengthy descriptions of such extraneous matters as Spud’s prize fighting bouts and the various goings on at Spud’s fraternity house and Lymie’s off-campus rooming house.

It is at the latter venue that, many pages later, Lymie is told by his roommate Reinhart that he should watch out for Spud because Spud hates him:  “He’s jealous of you.  He’s so jealous of you he can’t stand the sight of you.  He comes over to the house sometimes when you’re at the library and he sits in my room and talks for an hour at a time about how much he hates you.”

Stunned by this news, Lymie seeks out Spud and denies that he’s in love with Sally and says that Sally’s not in love with him.  Spud only smiles mysteriously at this revelation, showing no other reaction.  But we sense that he doesn’t believe Lymie’s denials and remains jealous and angry about the situation.  As one reviewer has put it:  “Both boys have feelings they don’t understand and cannot articulate either to themselves or each other.”  As the scene between them ends, Lymie says to Spud:  “Please listen to me . . . because if you don’t you’ll be very sorry.”

The scene of the novel next abruptly shifts to a hospital room, where Lymie is recovering from a suicide attempt—an attempt brought on by his despair over his relationship with Spud and his bitterness over their last meeting.

As I was reading this suicide scene I thought to myself that it was a bit over the top, a bit melodramatic, given the circumstances leading up to it.  I did not think that Lymie had been depicted as being in such despair over the situation with Spud that he would resort to suicide.  Imagine my chagrin, then, when I read in Burkhardt’s biography that this episode, too, was autobiographical.  Maxwell himself had attempted suicide in his sophomore year at college in his despair over a romantic triangle that had developed among his friend, Jack Scully [i.e., Spud], a girl named Margaret Guild [i.e., Sally] and himself.  Fortunately, like Lymie, Maxwell himself survived the suicide attempt and went on to lead a long and happy life, married to the same woman for fifty-five years.

Near the end of the novel there is a beautiful passage on Lymie’s suicide attempt that I assume must also reflect Maxwell’s feelings on his own failed suicide attempt.  I think the passage provides a fitting end to this paper:
“The truth is that Lymie had never wanted to die, never at any time.  The truth is nothing like as simple or as straight forward a thing as Lymie believed it to be.  It masquerades in inversions and paradoxes, is easier to get at in a lie than in an honest statement.  If pursued, the truth withdraws, puts on one false face after another, and finally goes underground, where it can only be got at in the complex, agonizing absurdity of dreams.”