Time Will Darken It
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Authors: William Maxwell
William Maxwell
“He has a magic way with words.… Among the past half-century’s few unmistakably great novelists.”
—Village Voice
“Maxwell’s [fiction] honors the physical world with verisimilitude, human experience with emotional fidelity and the English language with consummate craft.”
—Wall Street Journal
“No comparison does Maxwell justice.… [In] his fictional worlds we often encounter an intimacy so intense it literally gives us goose bumps.”
—
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“He holds an almost legendary place in the American literary world.”
—
Newsday
“Maxwell has so cool and sharp an eye … a wise observer of ordinary human behavior … a writer of impeccable English prose.”
—
Washington Post Book World
“Mr. Maxwell writes with such clear-eyed sympathy for his characters that the reader is constantly made aware of the larger redemptive patterns that subsume their individual problems.”
—
The New York Times
“Maxwell is one of our finest writers … and like all great writers he deals in truth: an uncompromising vision of the way we are and why.”
—
Houston Chronicle
“One of American literature’s best-kept secrets.”
—New York
magazine
“Mr. Maxwell’s work is thoroughly balanced, gentle and humane.… His powers of description are remarkable.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Rare sensitivity, telling detail and bare, graceful prose.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“No one else currently writing can capture as Maxwell does a sense of life in the balance, of a moment appreciated.… The beauty of some sentences is like a stab of light.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Maxwell is a novelist intrigued by the nuances of social form and a strongly visual writer fascinated by the way things look and feel.… His work [has grown] into an act of the imagination that can encompass a world of time and thought beyond the immediacy of recollection. By transfiguring the past in the crucible of art, he has held it in trust for the future.”
—
New Republic
“His characters are so well drawn you want to know more and more about them. His writing is simple and direct, poignant without being sentimental.”
—
Houston Post
Time Will Darken It
William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen, his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard, he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at
The New Yorker
. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for
So Long, See You Tomorrow
, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
William Maxwell
All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories
(1995)
Billie Dyer and Other Stories
(1992)
The Outermost Dream
(1989)
So Long, See You Tomorrow
(1980)
Over by the River and Other Stories
(1977)
Ancestors
(1971)
The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales
(1966)
The Château
(1961)
Stories
(1956)
(with Jean Stafford, John Cheever, and Daniel Fuchs)
Time Will Darken It
(1948)
The Heavenly Tenants
(1946)
The Folded Leaf
(1945)
They Came Like Swallows
(1937)
Bright Center of Heaven
(1934)
Copyright © 1948 by William Maxwell
Copyright renewed 1976 by William Maxwell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Harper and Brothers, New York, in 1948.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maxwell, William,
Time will darken it / by William Maxwell.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49195-4
I. Title.
PS3525.A9464T55 1997
813′.54—dc20 96-25027
The quotation from Francisco Pacheco, translated by Marco Treves, is reprinted from
Artists on Art
by permission of Pantheon Books Inc.
Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1
for my wife
The order observed in painting a landscape—once the canvas has been prepared—is as follows: First, one draws it, dividing it into three or four distances or planes. In the foremost, where one places the figure or saint, one draws the largest trees and rocks, proportionate to the scale of the figure. In the second, smaller trees and houses are drawn; in the third yet smaller, and in the fourth, where the mountain ridges meet the sky, one ends with the greatest diminution of all.
The drawing is followed by the blocking out or laying in of colours, which some painters are in the habit of doing in black and white, although I deem it better to execute it directly in colour in order that the smalt may result brighter. If you temper the necessary quantity of pigment—or even more—with linseed or walnut oil and add enough white, you shall produce a bright tint. It must not be dark; on the contrary, it must be rather on the light side because time will darken it.…
Once the sky, which is the upper half of the canvas, is done, you proceed to paint the ground, beginning with the mountains bordering on the sky. They will be painted with the lightest smalt-and-white tints, which will be somewhat darker than the horizon, because the ground is always darker than the sky, especially if the sun is on that side. These mountains will have their lights and darks, because it is the custom to put in the lower part—after finishing—some towns and small trees.…
As you get nearer the foreground, the trees and houses shall be painted larger, and if desired they may rise above the horizon.… In this part it is customary to use a practical method in putting in the details, mingling a few dry leaves among the green ones.… And it is very praiseworthy to make the grass on the ground look natural, for this section is nearest the observer.
—F
RANCISCO
P
ACHECO
(1564–1654)
The quotation from Francisco Pacheco, translated by Marco Treves, is reprinted from
Artists on Art
by permission of Pantheon Books Inc
.
