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These letters record a friendship that proceeded, unmarred, for 40 years. It began as a simple transaction; in 1938 Sylvia Townsend Warner, as a dare, submitted a short story to the New Yorker. Her editor was William Maxwell. They proved sympathetic to each other, so sympathetic, in fact, that 150 stories followed, and, more important, 1,300 letters, in which it is possible to distinguish real love, albeit of a rare and disembodied variety.
Their circumstances could not have been more different. Sylvia Townsend Warner, an immensely popular writer, now diminished by the fate that awaits all once popular writers, lived in Dorset with her female companion Valentine Ackland, while Maxwell was a contentedly married man with two children. In time they were to visit one another, but the essence of their close association is contained in their letters, exuberant and expansive on her side, serious and attentive on his. As the association progressed they became extraordinarily intimate, so much so that each was familiar with the other’s cast of characters. In many ways they were indispensable to each other. As Warner was to write, ‘Do you know, I don’t believe I could write at all if it were not that I had you for a reader. I might toy with ideas but I wouldn’t write them down.’ Write them down she did, and he responded with full-hearted appreciation and the kind of praise that all writers crave. It is clear that this was a meeting of true minds, despite the fact that it was Maxwell’s task to edit other writers of the calibre of John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, J. D. Salinger, Mavis Gallant, and Vladimir Nabokov, all of whom graced the pages of the New Yorker in those legendary days.
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