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So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979)

The Grandfather Judd was the WASPiest man you could ever hope to meet. He was so proper you almost never saw him out of a suit. Even at the beach he wore a two-piece. The man used garters to hold up his socks. He never swore in his life, didn't drink, didn't smoke, worked Saturdays and kept sabbath on Sundays. And, as one would anticipate, was emotionally reserved. You never doubted his love, but you couldn't expect it to be demonstrative.

There was a component of this reserve though that I never really understood until the past year: survivor guilt. He lost his two brothers in the Great Influenza, From what I understand, in one instance he came home from school not even realizing a brother was ill and he had already passed. He, of course, would never talk about this, but it did seem to scar him permanently.

The beloved long-time New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, was two years younger than Grandpa and he lost his mother in the epidemic when he was ten years old, a loss which, likewise, haunted him his whole life. In this semi-autobiographical short novel, his survivor guilt is somewhat displaced, but he very much tries to re-establish the childhood world, in Lincoln, IL, that his loss ended:

I felt the need to put things back the way they were before. I couldn’t do it literally, but I could put it in the pages of a book. And so I did. I put the people back, I put the places back. Often I put her back.

The narrator of the story loses his mother in the same way and suffers the same sort of shock:

[I] couldn’t understand how it had happened to us. It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn’t be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else...

Rather than dwelling on this specific circumstance though, most of the narrative concerns a violent tragedy that befalls two other local families. Two tenant farmers--Clarence Smith and Lloyd Wilson--are best friends and constantly help each other out until Wilson falls obsessively in love with Smith's wife. Their affair and the breaking of his family provokes Smith to murder Wilson and then himself when he is being hunted by authorities. The surviving Smiths flee town and their shame, including the narrator's friend Cletus. I say friend, but that overstates the case. Indeed, in the telling of their story the narrator imagines much of what Cletus must have seen and known, because they weren't truly close. In fact, a not small portion of the tale is told from the perspective of a barnyard dog, just one of the ways that the author suggests how dubious our actual memories are.

This brings us to the narrator's personal guilt. His family too moves--to Chicago--and one day in the high school hall he sees Cletus, but he fails to speak with him. He imagines that this must have hurt Cletus and that it can only have been interpreted as a shunning. Decades later, it is his own shame at this perceived betrayal that drives him back to Lincoln to try and reconstruct the past.

Mr. Maxwell writes beautifully, in the pared down prose one would hope for from a professional editor. His passion for a time and a particular place in the past are matched only by the guilt that so clearly consumes him. That this guilt has been oriented towards an imagined slight instead of to his literal survival of the pandemic is understandable enough. For all our revival of Camus's Plague and Boccaccio's Decameron this past year, this is perhaps the most timely read of the Covid era.

(Reviewed:02-Jun-21)

Grade: (A-)

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So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979)

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