'Alive and Vivid'

“I believe that it behooves the living, for our own sake, to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .” That’s William Maxwell in 1980 when he received the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, given every five years for the most distinguished novel published during that period. For once, they got it right. Maxwell was honored for So Long, See You Tomorrow, his finest novel, published when he was seventy-eight. Here is the remainder of his sentence, so typical of Maxwell’s graciousness: “. . . and so I would remind you now of Louise Bogan, or her ravishing formal poetry and her literary criticism, so free from intellectual display and so on target. Because of her encouragement at a critical period of my life I stopped being a full-time editor and went back to writing novels and I therefore have her to thank for the fact that I am standing where I am this minute.” Bogan had died a decade earlier, on February 4, 1970, at age seventy-two.…