As William Maxwell approached 90 years of age, his interior life changed. “These days, it’s more that I’m rowing around on an ocean of experience,” he said, “and the ocean is memory. Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about the past, and it’s as if I’ve put on the record player, and there’s no way stop it. It’s a form of reliving, and I can’t stop reliving it.”

Maxwell’s words appear in the book, My Mentor, published this year by his much younger friend, Alec Wilkinson. This modest volume celebrates the life of a man who was famous in New York’s literary world, enough so that his obit made the front page of the New York Times. Novelist, essayist, and editor, William Maxwell worked for much of his career at the New Yorker magazine where he was highly regarded as a judge of good writing.

My Mentor emerges as a combination of short biography – – Boswellian in rich anecdote and sayings of the master –  –   and the record of an unusual friendship. It has a worshipful tone about it that, despite its secular content, reminds me of the life-of-saint literature I used to read in my younger days. What especially interests me about the book, however, is its wealth of gerontological detail . Wilkinson first met his mentor when Maxwell was 68, and remained close to him until his death at age 91, giving him  the opportunity to observe close-up how it was to grow old.

Other people receive some attention in the book too, notably Wilkinson’s father and Maxwell’s wife. The latter, Emily Maxwell, was reputed to be one of the most beautiful of women and retained much of this beauty throughout her long life. The marriage between her and Maxwell was also beautiful, echoed in the statement she wrote on the small box she gave him  on his 90th birthday: “Each day I am as glad to see you as I am to see the sun rise in the morning and the moon cross the sky at night.”

Wilkinson first met Maxwell through his father who was one of the editor’s  best friends. The relationship between Wilkinson and his father lacked the untroubled intimacy that the writer would have liked. Knowing Maxwell as he did, the author found it difficult to understand how his mentor could have found his father so charming and amiable.

In words that evoke something of my feelings about my own father, Wilkinson writes: “What I ended up feeling toward my father is sadness for the relationship I wish we had had. We had failed to make some fundamental connection when we should have, and after that, nothing that should have happened between a father and his child had gone right.”

Back to Maxwell’s late life psyche: “In old age experience is prismatic,” he explained. “It’s as if you’re holding your life in your hands, turning it this way and that, and what you see are the sides of a prism. It’s half recollection and half a visual re-enactment of moments from the past, whereas when you’re younger, you’re simply living the experience.”

Toward the end of his life Maxwell gradually lost his facility for sustained literary effort. One explanation the author gives for this falling off was this: “He seemed to have lost touch with the place where stories and novels come from.”   

To all appearances he accepted his slowing down quite gracefully, and yet some indications suggest otherwise. As Wilkinson remembers it, “He sometimes said that when people asked him what he was writing, even though he knew they only meant to be polite, he wanted to pick up something and throw it at them.”

But Maxwell did consistently exhibit the kind of benevolence that characterizes the later life of many people. Both he and his wife took pains to serve the needs of other people even when things could not have been so easy for themselves. Of this charming couple Wilkinson observes: “What was so admirable to me about the manner in which they conducted their lives –  – the courtesy to others, the care for other people’s difficulties, and their belief that we should do what we can to help each other.”

Maxwell did not profess any religious faith but had a spiritual view of the world. About his view of death, Wilkinson writes: “He said you never lose people you love when they die, because you incorporate parts of their personalities into your own as a means of keeping them alive.” But somewhat in contradiction he also said about two old literary friends who had passed on: “I will never again love an old man. They die on you.”

Wilkinson spent much time with his mentor during Maxwell’s own final days. What he writes about Maxwell serves as a kind of eulogy: “His great dignity, so natural and unforced, so courageous, never faltering when his death was near. His being so present in his mind. His compassion. His sympathy. His great capacity for friendship.”

Richard Griffin