The Chateau by William Maxwell – #1961Club

Apparently, I bought The Chateau by William Maxwell back in 2009. Worse, I got it through the post, so I was clearly impatient to be getting into it – and I remember that I relatively quickly started it and read about 100 pages. At which point I stalled, and for many years there was a bookmark at the 100-page mark, taunting me.

Thank goodness for the 1961 Club. This was the first book I started for the challenge, and I went in with some trepidation. Although I remembered very little about the plot beyond the premise – a young American couple, Harold and Barbara, are visiting France shortly after the Second World War – I did remember that I found it very slow. Having now successfully got to the end, I haven’t changed my mind on that. The Chateau is slow – ponderously, intentionally, glacially slow – but in a way that, in the right mood, is an extraordinary experience.

Harold and Barbara set off with high hopes for their holiday. They anticipate romance, beauty, and the comradeship of a nation which has recently won a war with theirs. In the opening chapters, we follow their train journey through the country – drinking in the beauty, not yet disillusioned. It is strange that the woman whose chateau they are staying in hasn’t come to the station to meet them, but as they are taken in humbler transport across the countryside, they are beguiled by the prospect of their new, temporary home:

Before long they had a glimpse of the chateau, across the fields. The trees hid it from view. Then they turned in, between two gate posts, and drove up among curving cinder drive, and saw the house again, much closer now. It was of white limestone, with tall French windows and a steep slate roof. Across the front with a raised terrace with a low box hedge and a stone balustrade. To the right of the house there was an enormous Lebanon cedar, whose branches fell like dark green waves, and a high brick wall with ornamental iron gates. To their eyes, accustomed to foundation planting and wisteria or rose trellises, the facade looked a little bare and new. The truck went through the gate and into a courtyard and stopped. For a moment they were aware of much racket the engine made, and then M. Fleury turned the ignition off to save gasoline and after that it was the silence they heard. They sat waiting with their eyes on the house and finally a door burst open and a small, thin, black-haired woman came hurrying out. She stopped a few feet from the truck and noted bleakly to M. Fleury, who touched his beret but said nothing. We must look very strange sitting in the back of the truck with our luggage crammed in around us, Harold thought. But on the other hand, it was rather strange that there was no one at the station to meet them.

Mme Vienot is the woman and their hostess. They are her paying guests – the sort of visitors who are clearly needed to help with the ancient family’s dire financial state, but who have to go through a pretence of familiarity. It puts them in an awkward position. When the house doesn’t have all the provisions that the advertisement declared – hot water, bicycles to borrow – they cannot complain as they would in a hotel. They are, after all, guests of a sort.

Maxwell has crafted such real people. We feel the awkwardness of the mismatch between hope and actuality – and, more than that, their determination to find the best in the chateau. Harold is occasionally indignant; Barbara is occasionally conciliatory. And there is much to love, too. It is still beautiful, it is still France. True, nobody precisely explains the protocol (they are embarrassed to learn, from other guests, that they should have stayed longer after the meal in the evening) – and, true, Mme Vienot is curiously distant and unfriendly, and Americans are not as beloved as these two Americans had presupposed – but this doesn’t entirely spoil the delight they are taking in the adventure. They are young and in love and passionate, and this is not a novel about disillusionment. It is a gentle novel about a culture clash and the triumph of human nature to persist through it.

I found Harold and Barbara fascinating characters. We’re used to novels about two people falling in love, and perhaps used to portraits of slightly jaded or bitter married couples, but it is less usual to come across an established married couple who are still strongly moved by their mental and sensual love for each other. Maxwell’s writing is always beautiful on the sentence level, often subtly weaving in and out of metaphor in a way I find immensely satisfying.

Somebody who matches him, the curves and hollows of her nature fitting into all the curves and hollows of his nature as, in bed, her straight back and soft thighs fit inside the curve of his breast and belly and hips and bent legs. Somebody who looks enough like him that they are mistaken occasionally for brother and sister, and who keeps him warm at night, taking the place of the doll that he used to sleep with his arm around: Barbara Scully. Barbara S Rhodes, when she writes a check.

What helps the couple feel particularly vivid, though, is Maxwell’s humour. He is excellent at capturing a familiar sort of flippancy between two people who love each other – for instance, when Harold is manfully reading aloud from a history book, Barbara interrupts him with “Couldn’t you just read it to yourself and tell me about it afterward?” These lighter scenes were among my favourite, and leavened a novel that could have felt a bit too pensive without them.

They don’t spend the whole time in the chateau. Over their months in the country, they travel out to different cities, and Maxwell details their activities – the privations of post-war life, the nostalgia about a trip from Barbara’s childhood, detailed scenes of their attempts to get to grips with the value of things, availability of food, correct manners etc. Along the way, they can’t truly connect with the French people they meet – always, they are coming up against invisible walls. They aren’t rejected, and many people are amiable, but nor are they embraced.

Perhaps the most moving relationship is with a couple they meet. Harold thinks Eugene has the possibility to be a dear friend…

Eugene began to sing quietly, under his breath, and Harold rode a little closer to the other bicycle, listening. It was not an old song, judging by the words, but in the tune there was a slight echo of the thing that had moved him so, that day in Blois. When Eugene finished, Harold said: “What’s the name of the song you were singing?”

“It’s just a song,” Eugene said, with his his eyes on the road, and pure, glittering, personal dislike emanating from him like an aura.

The painful discovery that someone you like very much does not like you is one of the innumerable tricks the vaudeville magician has up his sleeve. Think of a card, any card: now you see it, now you don’t…

What a true tragedy, cutting more sharply than many more overblown tragedies. How relatable, how piercing. And how quintessentially Maxwell to slide effortlessly from a specific moment to a general truth, done with an elegance that really feels like he is seeing straight through his characters into the heart of the human condition. Perhaps more difficultly, he does the same for happiness:

They should never have left Beaulieu, but they did; after ten days, he went and got bus tickets, and she packed their suitcases, and he went downstairs and paid the bill, and early the next morning they stood in the road, waiting for the bus to Marseilles. It was impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.

What a beautiful paragraph. I’ve highlighted some of the disjoints in the characters’ experience – between what they hoped and what they experienced, between friendships and unexpected emnities – but there is also so much beauty, life and love in this novel. Maxwell is too subtle a writer to weigh the scales entirely on one side.

The Chateau is quite a long novel, and feels longer. As I said at the beginning, it luxuriates in its slowness. In the wrong mood, I was a little bored and wanted more action, less reflection. But in the right mood – and I was in the right mood almost the whole time I was reading it – I absolutely adored the novel. His exceptional writing, his understanding of people, and his generosity in developing characters make The Chateau something special.