Customer Reviews

My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
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I gave this rather slight book four stars partly because I was so ecstatic to find it. As a tremendous fan of William Maxwell, it was a treat to be able to learn a little more about him. Wilkinson is a graceful writer, and talented in his own right, but I found myself skipping the parts about his life in my eagerness to get to more about Maxwell. Wilkinson mentions in passing that this book should not serve as a biography of Maxwell, and it's not one. However, I do hope such a biography is forthcoming. I also hope that this book might spark renewed interest in Maxwell's work, which in my opinion is overlooked and under-appreciated.

"When I was twenty-four I decided that I would try to become a writer," [p7] writes Alec Wilkinson in the opening pages of My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell. Young Wilkinson was then introduced to one of the legends of 20th Century American literature, William Maxwell, who would become like a second father to him.
Maxwell (1908-2000) was both a brilliant novelist (his 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows is considered a modern American masterpiece) and a legendary fiction editor. At The New Yorker magazine, Maxwell helped shape a generation of writers by editing such luminaries as J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov. When Salinger finished the manuscript of The Catcher in the Rye, the first person he showed it to was William Maxwell. [p93] Wilkinson learned Maxwell's lessons well: he would himself become an award-winning novelist and, for the last twenty years, has worked as a writer for The New Yorker.
My Mentor is an engaging literary memoir in three parts about three men: Alec Wilkinson, Wilkinson's father, and Maxwell. Part One is mainly about Maxwell's early life and development as a writer. Throughout, Alec Wilkinson's adoration for his mentor is unabashed. He is to be commended for using Maxwell's own autobiographical writing to tell the story of how his mentor became both a man and a writer. By using Maxwell's own writing, Wilkinson gives us a clear sense of just how accomplished a writer Maxwell truly was.

Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois; his young life changed forever when he was ten years old and his mother died. This traumatic childhood event would shape much of Maxwell's later writing. During the Great Depression, Maxwell moved to New York City where he was hired to work at The New Yorker, then under the editorship of Harold Ross.
Maxwell would spend four decades at The New Yorker, editing other writers' work while spending his spare time on his own fiction. Maxwell befriended Kirk Wilkinson, Alec's dad, after the two met while waiting for a commuter train. Kirk Wilkinson was brusque and outgoing; Maxwell was sensitive and introspective. Their friendship was a marriage of opposites.
The two men, both of whom worked for magazines in New York, drove together to the train station each morning. "Maxwell's dependence on my father," writes Wilkinson, "was practical, and my father's dependence on Maxwell was emotional. He knew no one else like Maxwell-so receptive, so kind, so quick to respond to gestures of friendship." [p6]
It was through his father that Alec Wilkinson found his "second father," William Maxwell: "Because I was afraid of my own father," writes Wilkinson, "I was drawn to someone who was his opposite." [p108] Maxwell served as Wilkinson's writing coach and closest confidante: "Maxwell was privy to every decision of any consequence that I made during the last twenty-five years," Wilkinson notes. [p168] Maxwell taught young Wilkinson about writing, about living, and eventually, about dying with dignity.
Through Maxwell, as described in Part Two of My Mentor, Wilkinson learned the art and craft of writing. They "worked side by side for fifteen years." [p87] Maxwell would read Wilkinson's prose, explain how it might be improved, and then might take out scissors and cut and paste the whole manuscript, rearranging the sentences in order to improve the whole. Wilkinson learned the all-important lessons of simplicity and economy and rhythm. If My Mentor is any evidence, Wilkinson was a stellar pupil. The book is elegantly written; the prose is both accessible and often quite beautiful.
With Maxwell's help, Wilkinson wrote and published his first book about the year he spent as a policeman on Cape Cod. It's a subject that Wilkinson writes lovingly about in the early pages of My Mentor. He was admittedly a lousy cop, smashing up his police cruiser on more than one occasion, but he adored the work and the camaraderie with the other policemen.
The third and final part of My Mentor is about Maxwell's death in 2000, at age 91. Wilkinson visits his mentor's deathbed: "He was extremely thin and frail, and I knew he must be dying, but all I felt was the happiness of being with him." [p150] Maxwell then, in a fitting end to their relationship, reveals how proud he is of Wilkinson.
My Mentor is a marvelous book about a marvelous, transcendent friendship between an old man and a young man. Maxwell's kindness comes across on every page, as does his wisdom. Those unfamiliar with Maxwell's impressive opus will, after reading Wilkinson's loving account, likely find themselves seeking out the master's sadly-neglected fiction. Maxwell was clearly a great man, as well as one of this nation's great writers and editors. Alec Wilkinson was fortunate indeed in his choice of a mentor.

I have been a fan of William Maxwell's beautifully crafted fiction for many years, and after reading Wilkinson's eloquent tribute to a father-figure who helped him become a writer I definitely want to search out the Maxwell books I haven't yet read. Wilkinson quotes liberally from Maxwell's novels, stories, essays and private papers, with the permission of Maxwell's daughters. Wilkinson himself is no slouch as a writer. Indeed, the early chapters of the book often had me chuckling, as Alec describes one of his first jobs as a summer cop in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Things turn largely serious, however, as he meditates on the reasons he was drawn to Maxwell as a young boy. The primary reason was a distant, difficult relationship with his own father, who was himself a close friend of Maxwell's. What this affectionate tribute leaves you with, more than anything else, is a sense of what a kind and decent man William Maxwell was, a man who always had time for a much younger man trying to find his voice as a writer. This mentor-student relationship was to flower into a genuine friendship over the years, despite the generational age difference. Wilkinson's descriptions of the final days of both Bill and Emmy Maxwell are extremely moving, but Maxwell even softens this transition for his protege, telling him "I don't think we'll stop talking just because I'm dead." This is a comment I can understand, because as anyone who has ever lost a dear friend or relative will tell you, the conversations do go on, at least inside your head. And often these "internal conversations" are more satisfying and direct than any you ever had with that person when he or she was still alive. I guess my only complaint with this book was that I wished there were more. But I guess I'll find more by reading those other books - by both Maxwell and Wilkinson. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

With this memoir chronicling his apprenticeship and friendship with his father's best friend (who also happens to be THE NEW YORKER'S greatest fiction editor), Alec Wilkinson moved me to tears. The first two thirds of the book give us the story of Wilkinson's decades-spanning friendship with William Maxwell, peppered with anecdotes about Maxwell's own life. The final third covers in excruciating detail a single week that began with the death of Maxwell's wife, and ended with the death of Maxwell himself.

This is the most elegantly, powerfully written book I've read in years. Every word and every sentence flows, every paragraph hits its mark. Wilkinson's voice is so calm, so warm, so fatherly that at moments you may actually experience the slightest pangs of that affection that he felt for his mentor. And perhaps it's because I read it on a plane after sitting in a hospital room and watching a loved one die in front of me, but I needed to put the book down every several paragraphs in the final third.

In a world saturated with books that offer advice on writing, Wilkinson's book about his own writing coach takes an approach few others are likely capable of: Just tell a story, and tell it well enough that people who want to learn the craft can glean from it. I would consider this a must-read, not for aspiring writers, but for anyone who loves the power of a good story well-told.

Ashamedly, I had never heard of William Maxwell

& somehow , in "surfing "

came across " A William Maxwell Portrait "..

( a little gem of salutes from various authors who knew him )

Altho, have yet to read his own books

I was CAPTIVATED by the man & the heartfelt correspondences to various authors ( which are also , delightedly in print,

This is another "petite" jewel of a book

written in tribute to him.

HEARTILLY reccomended !!