TIME WILL DARKEN IT- WILLIAM MAXWELL

Although on a minor scale , the tremendous subtlety of ‘‘Time will darken it’’ by William maxwell renders it thoughtful and understatedly wise. Set in elm street, draperville, illinois, the story begins with Austin king, a lawyer , inviting his relatives from the south, in mississippi to stay with him when his wife is pregnant with their second child. Martha king, having married Austin in a state of weariness engendered by vacillation between reluctant acceptance and defiance, feels discontented , accepting ungraciously the responsibility of the visit of the potters. Set in 1912 the novel offers gentle hints at wider post civil war reality . Mrs. potter retains the grace, patronage and racial superiority (in which benevolence and noblesse oblige stem from privilege) characteristic of historical internalization. Mr.potter consorts with Austin and draperville’s denizens to finalize a land deal in the south, seeking profit while adeptly getting people to invest in his ventures by deprecating references to the south’s need for development and modernity. For Nora potter, southern upbringing is a yoke, a staid, complacent straitened life with its customary grooves of social mores her intelligence balks at . Randolph potter ,bequeathed male self satisfaction, is vain about his beauty and solipsistic in seeking to create an orbit of attention around himself. Crisis supervenes when Nora falls in love with Austin and decides to stay back at draperville, and decides to study law at Austin’s office , eliciting innuendo and scurrilous rumours from the community. Working at a kindergarten started by the spinster sisters Alice and lucy beach Nora has an accident while trying to light a fire with kerosene. The novel ends with the potters going back to the south with nora and Austin and Martha establishing a provisional makeshift peace, with Martha’s growing cognizance of estrangement having sharpened during the trial of pregnancy and knowledge of Nora’s love for Austin.

Where maxwell shines is in the delicate piling up of detail. Austin , fundamentally decent, desiring to act with probity and good intentions miscalculates situations and acts erroneously. His sympathy and fellow feeling for Nora’s difference from her southern roots is misconstrued by nora, with youthful naivete, as a deeper undercurrent of commonality. Her protestations of love, compounded by youthful idealistic self abnegation and hapless avowal of feelings is met ineffectively by Austin’s seeking to act in accordance to a code of decency that misapplies its awareness of facts. When the draperville community becomes suspiciously censorious Austin confronts the withdrawal of clients from his practice but cannot plumb social sentiment. The minor characters in the novel have a complex life of their own. Mrs. Beach, living in genteel poverty, holds on to remnants of european acculturation and its totems as a sign of her familial uniqueness, gently domineering over Alice and lucy who succumb to her interludes of aggrieved invalidism and importunate demands for attentive solicitude . Miss Ewing, loyal secretary to Austin’s legal firm, cherishing memories of the redoubtable feted history of Austin’s father, becomes envious of Nora’s overtures and presence at the office to study law. Her repressive lonesomeness induces a breakdown of her competent self and she becomes the catalyst for disseminating slander about Austin and nora, barbs whose envenomed harshness deploys the habitual patterns of exaggeration and aspersion .Abbey, Austin and martha’s daughter, becomes the recipient of the thicket of adult secrets and conflicts , seen incompletely, often absorbed through eavesdropping or instinctive responsiveness to cues and feelings without grasping their import. Rachel, the african american servant at Austin and martha’s home , deals with a drunken, abusive husband and the reminder, through the potters , of the persistence of racism in the american consciousness, keenly felt even more by her artistic daughter Thelma . Mr. potter’s southern badinage and pragmatic worldliness conceals irregularity in his financial affairs which becomes noticeable to Austin while sorting out the deed to finalize details. Austin king’s inoffensiveness, taciturnity and moral irreproachability rests on tenuous foundations, subject to pressures inner and outer. The visit of the potters brings to the forefront both the intrusion of newer disorienting realities and the re emergence of hidden , overlain truths about self, relationality and community. Misperceiving the youthfulness of nora’s infatuation and the way febrile sensibility embellishes propinquity based on scanty facts , Austin perpetuates the conditions , albeit with noble intent, for nora’s love. Alternating between unfeasible optimism and a whipped up self renunciation knowing the reality Nora’s affinity with Austin is predicated on a temperamental simpatico that isn’t resilient enough to become authentic mutuality. This brief visit by the potters leads to all kinds of reckoning and as with life nothing is satisfactorily resolved. Martha, aware of the sharing of shards of temperament that comprised Austin and nora’s bond, has to coexist with the knowledge of what was incompatible between Austin and herself . The accretion of time is not so much temporal as it is gradations of metamorphosis , in which cause and effect follow an involuted tangent unconnected to moral rationalizations or fulsome emotions . Draperville, as a provincial community, has its fair share of meddlesomeness and spite. Unfounded rumors become rife, half baked surmises are disfigured into condemnatory impugning and covert and overt variations of ostracism become palpable towards Austin. But on the other side is the multi facetedness of the community itself. Elderly deaf Mr. Danforth and his wife marry out of a profound complementarity of natures based on affection sweetened by regard and protective care. Mary caroline is enchanted by Randolph but has to live with his inscrutability and lack of reciprocity . Old Mr. Ellis retains pernickety memories, with senescence bringing the odd instance of shrewd business divination alongside fading memory. The novel offers a composite portrait of draperville, enmeshed between tradition and modernity, the agrarian/property owning class and the educated cultured class , an old pioneering history cheek by jowl with modernity and change.

This lends a dolefulness to ‘‘Time will darken it’’ that makes it more than the sum of its parts. William maxwell writes with intelligence and astuteness about the tangled fibres of emotion, intellect, feeling and thought with which human motives are prone to dissimulation, falsification, self justification . It is Martha, paradoxically, whose clear sightedness has the clarity of truth telling, although it is a clarity whose compunction is disinterested because the actuality of the gulf between desire and reality is too stark to be countenanced . Time only brings reaffirmation of the helpless propelling towards marriage that Martha acceded to, not due to love but necessity, a necessity whose causality is unperceived by her but whose ramifications needs must be lived with. Nora’s disillusion is exacerbated by her accident as heightened emotionalism and the perfervid hyperbole of love meets unexceptionable reality. Much of nora’s love is flights of feeling that offer her a bulwark in braving convention and acting independently , even outfacing censure until the foolhardiness of it becomes inescapable. But most compelling of all is Austin whose intelligence and moral compass become subsumed under contingency and tested , revealing cracks in familial oases and interpersonal relationships that require the amalgam of intelligence and wisdom, percipience and concessions to muddled human landscapes of the heart - a knowing Austin lacks . This leaves him undecided , having to encounter a miasma of reaction and counter reaction unspooling from his original misapprehension and undiscriminatingly acting on it . He is vouchsafed a precarious happiness, but with an undetermined future. Battered by circumstances he finds a safe shore with Martha but for martha that is an encumbrance , hitherto borne painstakingly but now suffusing her with an irascibility commensurate with veracity, even if it is futile . Their rapprochement is careworn, benumbed by circumstances .