From Will Blythe

Max Steele

  The very name: Max Steele. The name of a Fifties pulp hero, a private dick whose look alone can pistol-whip a man. And yet also suggestive of Maximillian, something European and cosmopolitan in that. And yet even further hidden within the hardboiled syllables of Max, there were the glimmerings of a more delicate sensibility embodied in the name Maxine, which may not have been his name and yet…. The two or three-sidedness of his name suited Max, as far as I can see. He seemed most at home with women. Every one of his classes included at least a couple of women smitten with Max, and Max with them. I was always coming across them in his office at Greenlaw, giggling about something.

   I never knew about what exactly. Max and I had a different sort of relationship. There was some sort of flirtation in it nonetheless. He used to tell me I reminded him of the son of a writer he knew in California. I think the guy had a drug problem.  I was too puzzled or proud to ask Max how all this related to me. He used to say, “Oh Will Blythe, why do you want to do this writing thing?” He said this with a twinkle in his eye and a bit of worn drama in his buttery Southern voice. As a warning, it was most inviting, suggestive of a mysterious cost that I could not wait to pay and that as a UNC sophomore, at the peak of his romanticism and swaddled in innocence like a baby, had no way of reckoning. Perhaps Max knew what awaited that sort of fellow.

   He read an apparently inscrutable story of mine in the Cellar Door and told me: “Even Picasso showed that he could draw before he started taking things apart in Cubism.” This remark haunted me for years, as Max’s observations tended to do.  I tried to groom the errant hairs of my stories with a little spit and probably mashed them into narratives at best competent rather than stories at the very least wilder and more expressive of the sense I had of things. Perhaps I should have seen in Max’s own fiction—the story about the young boy who runs off with the married woman, for instance—that the surreal could sometimes be expressed vividly when dressed in the everyday khaki of old-fashioned narrative.

    As we sat in his house on Mason Farm Road one day having some sort of conference (and watching the pet door between the divided sides of his house swing open to disgorge his son, crawling back and forth between separated parents—is this possible? Or have I dreamed this up?), Max told me that for several years, he’d been having a hard time writing. I was honored and frightened by this revelation. This was one of those moments when a hauntedness arose from beneath Max’s considerable twinkle. Then he read me a line from a story of his in progress that compared a woman’s immense bust to two Cub Scouts bivouacing inside a pup tent. I laughed and so did he and we both felt much better. I believe he published that story not long afterwards. So, as usual with Max, he leavened the gloom with a moment of hilarity. He had a gift for holding darkness and light in a winsome equipoise that I continue to think about to this day.

Photo of Max/Mimi/Oliver/Patrick by Alane Mason

Photos from Mimi Herman

From Mimi Herman

Memories of Max Steele

Mimi Herman

I spent a great deal of my free time in my junior and senior years at UNC curled up in Max’s office chair, sometimes talking with him, sometimes just sitting as he read student stories.  There was something about Max that always put me at ease at the same time that it put me on edge.  As this is also my definition for flirting, I would say that Max was a consummate flirt—not for any romantic gain, but simply for the pleasure of engaging with people.  We flirted for years after I returned to Chapel Hill, nothing untoward, but a great pleasure to me, and I think to him as well.  I was still trying to flirt with him when I went to see him in the hospital after his fall, hoping to bring him back to those of us who needed and loved him.

Max was also a great authority, having achieved that perfect vocal resonance which creates the ring of truth, regardless of whether there was any actual truth in the matter.  As I grew older, I discovered that he was right more often than he was wrong.  In fact, I can’t think of a single time he was wrong.

Here are some of Max’s truths:

1. Halves multiply on a page.  Whenever a writer describes a half of something, another half is sure to come along to join it in short order.  I’ve been looking for this again lately as I read, and I can hereby state that it’s true.
2. Students never tell where the money comes from in a story.  Their characters live in fabulous apartments, drive expensive cars, and seem to have no discernible source of income.  We need to know the source of the money to understand the characters.
3. The word “Fuck” is one of the most versatile words in the English language, as it can be used as exclamation, adjective, noun and verb, as in the following sentence: “Fuck, the fucking fuckers fucked it!”

Once, in class, when I was leaning back in my chair, Max gave us all a lesson in word choice.  “Is Mimi apt or liable to fall?” he asked.  Today, I’d say I was both apt and liable to fall for Max, as one of the people who has meant most in my life.  I’d say I always will be.

From David Rowell

Publish Post

From Alane Mason

Amidst the literary adulation of Max I thought it might be apt to remember how much he loved being practical, how he appreciated the proper understanding and use of money, how he loved to brag about being rich in his old age (was he, really?).... I just found this long email from him, below, his response to my writing him: "Dear Max,
Since you are the richest man I know maybe I can ask you this: where does one go for all around financial advice -- re: retirement plans, mutual funds, taxes, real estate, etc.?  I have been a good saver even out of my most paltry publishing salaries, but have done stupid things like kept savings accounts at 2.5% interest and not known that an employer's 401K has to be rolled over into another plan to avoid paying taxes on it, etc.  Now I think I should be making some good long range decisions about these matters.  Does one go to an accountant for this, and if so how do you make sure to find a good one?"

Then of course there was that great encounter with Chester Milosz and Max's comment, "When real estate brokers get together, they talk about art and literature.  When artists and writers get together, all they talk about is money..."  I trust Mimi or Daphne has told you the fuller version....

Alane

-----Original Message-----
From: Max Steele <steele@email.unc.edu>
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 1994 1:50 PM
To: Alane Mason
Subject: Re: real estate

Alane, I was taught never to give anyone financial advice.  I can tell
you though that talk to accountants is expensive.  I have learned more
and been better organized since opening an account at Dean Witter I could
have learned any other way.  It is free.  They keep all your records in
one portfolio, send you a monthly report, and a year-end report which is
all you need for your tax 1040 completion.  You simply encode each check
and there it is at the end of the year.  Things taxable, things not.
However, one must be careful: they tend to suggest their own offerings of
stocks and mutual funds and so I tend to steer clear of Dean Witter
investments, one or two I have, but usually not.  I also let them keep my
retirement account in my portfolio.  I found it a boon to have monthly
amounts sent from my paycheck to them in addition to my IRA. Term life
insurance was a great investment in that I have it in an irrevocable
trust so that it can go to my children tax free.  I am glad I have a
living trust which includes a power-of-attorney paper to someone you
trust, and a living will so that money will not be squandered on hopeless
medical interventions which would allow doctors to torture me to death.
In short, I think it wise to have:
     1.  an account at some brokerage house which will keep your records
in great order:  Dean Witter or Fidelity, for instance.
     2.  a living (revokable trust) which will include a living will, a
power of attorney document, a trustee who can immediately write checks
and manage your affairs in case you don't quite dodge a NYC taxi, and
will allow someone to avoid taking your estate through a costly probate,
and avoid having the courts appoint you a guardian in case you go mad
editing.  The living trust should include also a final will. There are
companies now who draw these up for a flat fee which is half the price of
the ones drawn up by individual lawyers. I can get you the name of such a
company.  Their papers are done by lawyers who are specialists and I feel
sure will hold up in any court.
    3. The living will must comply with state laws and the papers for NC
living wills are now five or more pages long.  I got mine from the
Hemlock Society and I think you can phone a local chapter and get copies
for NY.
    4. Investigate buying an annuity in addition to life insurance and
IRA.In buying insurance or annuities, I have found it best to go to an
insurance broker who does not represent any company but who shops around
for you and finds you the best company and policy for your needs. One of
the best bargains I have found is a million dollar policy for my
properties and cars:  it kicks in after my regular policy covers the
first $100,000 and goes up to a million for about $150 a year. It is
mainly for people who file a liability claim against you.
    5. Choose rich parents.
    6. Marry rich
    7. Remember kind old professors in your will.
    8. Have a clause in your will which says that anyone who challenges
the will immediately forfeits any right to financial gain from the
estate.
    9. Consider publishing a book which makes all the above both urgent
and simple.
   10. Email Max if you need any of the above explained.

from John Rowell

MAX STEELE/AWP Presentation

John Rowell

Max Steele was my first creative writing teacher, at the University of North Carolina.  You had to submit a story to be considered for his workshop, and so I wrote one.  Clearly guided by the old principle of “write what you know,” I, a nineteen-year-old, white, middle-class North Carolina boy who had never much been out of the home state, fired off a lengthy tale about a seventy-year-old African-American jazz singer in Harlem dying of tuberculosis and alcoholism who was trying to hold it together to play one last gig in a seedy nightclub. I gave him lines of dialogue that incorporated, for no apparent reason, scat singing phrases, so that he would say things like, “Doctor, I know I’m dying, shudalee be bop, shu bop, shu bop.”   I was very excited about how edgy and adult I felt my story was, and I knew Professor Max Steele, whose creative writing class, I had been told, was the class that all serious writers were dying to get into, would feel the same way when he read it.   So I typed it up and took it to his office, thinking I would just drop it in an envelope outside the door, but the door was open and he was there.  My first impression of Max, white-haired and sitting hunched in his office chair, was that he was grandfatherly—which seemed comforting—and he took my story and looked it over in silence while I stood waiting in the doorframe.  After a minute or two, still staring at my pages and not looking at me, he said, “Why do you want to be a writer, John Rowell?”   Now my impression was that he was not kindly and grandfather-like, but gruff and stern and critical.  I had absolutely no good answer to his question; I simply stood frozen in the doorframe.  “I just…wanted to be in your class,” I said, finally.

“Come back tomorrow after I’ve read your story,” he said.

The next day I showed up to his office; again there was the open door, again he sat hunched in his chair, reading.  He turned in my direction, and said, “Yes, yes. Come in.  Now which story was yours?” He began shuffling through a mountain of white, type-written pages on his desk.  Those pages, I understood, represented the work of all the other students who were trying to get into the class, though I was quite sure none of them had written a story as bold or as edgy as mine.

“It’s about a black singer?  Who’s dying?”  I said.

“Oh, yes, that one,” he said. “I did read that.  It was terrible, it was just terrible.”  

Once again, I stood frozen in his doorframe, paralyzed by something he had said, to which I had no idea how to respond.  And I don’t need to tell you all how I felt because almost all of you have been there—it was, essentially, my first writer’s rejection notice.  And after letting me shuffle from foot to foot, embarrassed, humiliated, with what I’m sure was a red face and injured eyes—there was a most momentous silence—he fixed me with his wise, squinting eyes and said, “But I let you into the class anyway.” 

And so Max proved to be both grandfatherly and gruff, which is a pretty great combination in a writing teacher, especially your first one.  Max taught us how to read a story with the writer’s eye, he taught us how to speak and write critically about a work of fiction; he taught us workshop dictums like “Don’t ever ask a fiction writer if his story is autobiographical.”  And he was not afraid to tell you—in front of the entire workshop—that what you had written “was not a story.”  I heard that about my own work several times, and rightly so.  He made me realize that you could fill pages with descriptions of places and things, you could create fascinating people and set them to talking, you could even have them saying interesting things to one another, but if you hadn’t told a story, if you hadn’t found the story in all those words, it wasn’t worth your time, or his, or anybody else’s.  And he was right, yet how hard that seemingly obvious concept was to grasp.

 One day, towards the end of the semester Max pulled me aside after class and pointed out that in every story I had written that fall, there was an absent father character. I stared at him blankly, the same way I had stared at him when he had asked me a few months earlier why I wanted to be a writer. 

This time I didn’t just stand there in silence, though, I had a real genuine verbal response.   I said, “Uh…”. 

He proceeded to tell me that the reason I was writing absent father stories was because what I really wanted to write was not an absent father story at all, but a story about a boy whose father was very much in the picture, whatever that turned out to mean, and that I was too afraid to write it.  He said I was avoiding writing that story by always having the father character be absent.  At the time, I didn’t really understand what he was talking about—why would I be afraid to write a story about a boy and his father?—but  for years afterwards, I remembered his words, every time I sat down to write. 

I wrote many more absent father stories.

Finally, one day, I wrote a story about a boy and his father—it was painful to do, and it was a sad story, but it was a breakthrough, and I knew it.  My first instinct was to send it to Max, to ask him if I had finally written what he had told me I had avoided writing for so long.  But I didn’t; I doubted he would remember telling me that, anyway, and I had not really kept in touch with him, despite how much I still felt his presence and heard his words every time I tried to get a piece of writing to turn out all right—to make sure it was something he would not look at and say, “But it’s not a story.”  . 

When my short story collection came out, my publisher sent me down to Chapel Hill to do a reading.  The student bookstore happened to be right across from the building where I had first met Max, and where we had had workshop that year.  The book store, incidentally, was the place where I had once stood in line to purchase text books as a frightened and homesick eighteen-year-old freshman, and now I was standing there as someone who had a book of his own.  It was one of those experiences where you can’t quite bridge the gap of time, events and your own personal history in your mind; here I was standing in front of a large poster of my book jacket, about to give a reading for an audience, and a few yards across the way, I was still nineteen years old and still standing in the doorframe of Max Steele’s office trying to come up with an answer to his question of why I wanted to be a writer.  Maybe the answer was still the one I gave to him that day twenty years before:  “I just wanted to be in your class.”

Now of course I had invited Max to my reading, but hadn’t heard back from him, and I had been told by friends in the area that he probably wouldn’t come, and not to take it personally, that he almost never went to readings, not even those of former students.  But just as I was about to be introduced, I looked up and saw him walking in through the door, slowly.  He looked a bit older than he had all those years ago, and he was using a cane, but it was Max, and he was there.  So I read my story about the father and son, which was the title story of the collection, and out of the corner of my eye I could see and hear Max in the second row, listening, making an occasional odd utterance and laughing from time to time.

After the reading, he made his way up to me, a copy of the book I had sent him in his hand.

“Well, John Rowell,” he said, in those same gruff and grandfatherly tones I had first heard twenty years earlier.  And at that moment I was so afraid—still the student, always still the student—that he was going to ask me why I wanted to be a writer.  “Well, John Rowell.  You did it. It’s a story.  But it’s not your best story.  There’s another one, about a boy and his mother…”

Thank you, Max; I still just want to be in your class.