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.

                                                                                   

  

More notes from Doris

I planned to open my brief comments at the graveside service, by
recalling a very early meeting with Max, whom I barely knew.  In
front of the old Chapel Hill Post office, we had encountered each
other, both clutching letters in hand.  Max said breathlessly that
he'd just heard from a movie studio about maybe filming his book.
("Debby.")  I gasped back, "So have I!" though since mine was a
story collection, I should have harbored some doubts. "It's from
Columbia Pictures!"  Max said.  I answered, "So is mine."  He said
his was signed by Jerry Wald.  I held out my letter; he held out his.
Except for the address and salutation, they were identical.

Before others arrived for the service in Chapel Hill Cemetery, I
walked around, feeling a mixture of nervousness and sorrow.  The
waiting grave was covered in a sheet of fake grass.  Unbeknownst to
me, though it was normal size, Max's ashes therein were in his much
smaller army trunk.  I stepped on the edge of the covering and dropped
one-legged straight down into the grave beside it. I knew he'd be
laughing somewhere, and so was I -- climbing out in a muddied black
dress, but not laughing when it was time for the eulogy.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Melanie: I probably have somewhere the brief words I spoke at the service, if needed. I assume you have from Diana the whole story of
the He's Not Here bar, and that stone in the graveyard.  Assuming
you do, the following could be a p.s. to that:


  My husband died in July of 2007 and soon afterward I drove to
Siler City to order a tombstone from Chatham Monument Company. The
very courteous, even solemn, husband/wife team wrote down my preference
in plain style, the words that were to appear.  I wrote a deposit
check and, finishing, asked if he might remember a friend of mine who
had bought from him an unusual small gravestone that said HE'S NOT
HERE.  Solemnity disappeared.  Expanding smiles.  "Steele? Fellow
named Steele?"  He could not hold back his laughter; the wife giggled
first but then out-laughed him.  "Funniest man I ever met," she said
and he added, "Not that we get much humor in this business."  When
they faced each other, the memory of doing business with Max had them
laughing so hard that they were gasping.  They could no longer carry
on conversation in such near hysteria.  It turned out they were holding
other small gravestones for friends that Max said would be joining him
in a kind of Westminster Poet's Corner -- he had one set aside for
Charleen Whisnant Swansea, as I recall.

Tree or Rock?

I remember a tree in the middle of Max's place, and Doris does too, but she sent the following...


Diana reminded me that Max's apt on Mason Farm Road did NOT have a tree
in the middle of it, but a boulder, surrounded by a sand pit.  I don't
know what I was drinking at the time.  I DO remember that my first taste
of saki came in Max's apartment when he lived under Bennett & Blocksidge. He had made it himself. WOW.

From Lawrence Naumoff

From Lawrence Naumoff           

I suppose I was one of Max’s first “finds,” because I was there the first semester he came to Carolina, in 1967 maybe, or 1968, and I was a junior who’d been put into the Honors class that he, along with Doris Betts and Jessie Rehder taught together.  There were six or seven students and the three teachers.

            Jessie Rehder had brought him here, then she died the next semester.  He sort of took over the program after that. 

I was afraid of him, afraid to even talk to him, but I’d been good friends with the past writer-in-residence, Leon Rooke(became a famous Canadian writer, and in the U.S, one of Gordon Lish’s writers), and he and Max were old friends, so pretty soon we were there.

He liked my writing, but he liked that I could work on cars just as much, as he had, over the early years I knew him, a succession of junk that needed working on all the time, first a string of very used, slant-six 60s Plymouth Valiant’s and then the newer but very used, models.

One of the happiest times we had, until he gloried in, and made me feel like a million when my first novel was published, was when he’d bought a junked Valiant in a Durham ghetto junk yard, and we drove over in my pickup with my tools.  We dismantled the car, and took the parts, every single piece, except the engine head and block.  We took the doors, the trunk lid, the seats, the visors, windshield wipers, back bumper, air cleaner, radiator, on and on.  The whole time, he was looking around at the group of men who had gathered to watch us strip and haul away the parts, and was saying, Naumoff, they’re going to kill us, they really are, they’re going to kill us on the way out.

Shortly after that day, he asked me to be godfather to one of his sons, which I accepted, but, and I guess I didn’t know what it meant or how to do it, never did do anything like maybe a traditional godfather would do.  Even the word sounds so archaic now.  Do people still have them?

Max, being Max, had two seriously remarkable sides to him---one, the thrilling, worldly, talent, astonishingly intellectual and Paris influenced writer who inspired all of us, and was happy to do so, warm and generous truly wonderful---and the other, one of the most confusingly mean people I’d ever known.  If you didn’t know him as well as I, you didn’t know this.  When he fell out with someone, it was over.  He could put somebody down so hard it was nearly impossible to ever get back up.  He could and would tell a racist or ethnic joke that was so shocking I would have nothing, absolutely nothing to say, I would just stare at him, for which he got some kind of delight at being such a shock to me. Also, when it came to things and money, it was there, as well. 

I was an estate sale and about to buy a blue Chinese carpet(oriental in design) from the late 19^th century, and he happened to be there, and I asked him if it was a good carpet, and worth the money.  He said(I was young, then), you’re a fool to ask me, because if I wanted it, I’d tell you no, and if I didn’t want it, I’d tell you it was, just to teach you not to ask someone a question like that.  (I bought it without his advice,

and years later, broke and waiting for FSG to decide not to buy my third book, Taller Women, I sold it and lived off it.)

A few years earlier(I was even younger, right?), he sold me one of his Valiant’s(we were best friends!) on a Friday, and on Saturday, I took it on a trip, and the radiator boiled over in about 50 miles, and I had to sit for an hour, and then could drive another 20 miles, sit an hour, drive another 20, and so on, until I could get to where I was going and get it fixed, if I could find a mechanic open.

When I got back I called him and in an excited way(like, man, you wouldn’t believe what happened on the trip), and told him, and he said, Naumoff, I wondered how long it would take you to find out. 

I knew him well, and I know things I wouldn’t tell, and he knew things about me he wouldn’t tell.  We got together for breakfast for years, off and on, and I’d report on my latest trouble(I was in a lot of it then), and he’d smile(you can see the smile, right?), and laugh. The worse it got, the more he enjoyed it, and then he’d tell me a story about someone in Paris who got in the same kind of trouble, and in the telling, lift me out of my hell and into the Paris literary world, and he’d tell it with such psychoanalytical brilliance, in such a way that by the end of the story, I’d have learned more about why I did it, and why she did that, and how it came about, learned more than I would have in a year with a psychiatrist.  Truly the most helpful while being hilariously entertaining conversations I have had.

He inspired me to want to write.  His prose was elegant and smart.  Knowing him sustained me and sustained my writing for years.  I miss him.  I have thought about him every week since he fell down those stairs, broke his neck, lay there moaning and calling for help until a neighbor found him, and wished I could have had years and years more talking to him. I held him in awe, no matter what, and to this day, no one has inspired me and been as unique and curious and thrilling to know, as he was. 

 Naumoff

            

From Doris Betts - Memorial Service

    Max was a mere acquaintance on a day in the 1950’s when we met by accident in front of the old Post Office on Franklin Street, each of us  clutching a letter.  Max said: “They might want my book for a movie!”  and I broke in happily, “How about that! Me, too!”  We stared at each other.  Asked Max, “Is yours from Columbia Pictures?”  I nodded.“Is it signed by Jerry Wald?”  I held my letter alongside his.  They were identical form letters except for the name of the addressee.

         For one poised moment we could either have laughed or cried; but it was Max who laughed first, and we stood there roaring like fools at ourselves.

         His talent for laughter – to tease, to reduce tension, to deflate pomposity with rapier wit, is legendary; and this week   the Chapel Hill air has been swarming with examples and anecdotes. 

At Carolina he taught a famous course on humor with a syllabus that ranged from the  barroom belly laugh to exploring  the psychology thatcould sharpen  a witty remark on the thick skin of an opponent.  In person and in his fiction, Max often cast himself as the first person butt of the joke – as in that  story widely used  in high school texts, where a boy on his first date makes the mistake of washing  down Alka Seltzer with great gulps of Coca-Cola.  In much of his fiction a child or a childlike narrator learns that Life and sometimes Death  will always have the last laugh.

         Born in 1922, he used his Greenville, S.C. memories in fiction that could make readers laugh AND cry – Tears, for example, are shed reading  his compassionate but unsentimental  prize novel DEBBY – there follow  3 masterful story

collctions plus  recent new work that  has charmed a wide audience in the Washington Post.

The Mother in one of his stories, who like Max set a high value on manners and civility, would only attend  funerals for people she  had known for more than 20 years – many of us here tonight would qualify.  And

Max, too, nurtured and cherished those  friendships that ripened over  seven and eight decades.

A UNC graduate and Air Force veteran who also studied painting and French Literature in Paris, Max  helped found the Paris Review; always championed the short story asthe most artistic form of fiction and thus gave support to STORY magazine; taught at Bennington and Squaw Valley; received honorary degrees from Belmont Abbey andFurman University;  and during  22 years as director transformed

Carolina’s handful of occasional writing course into the finest undergraduate creative writing program in the country.  Fellow writers and wannabe writers crowded hisGreenlaw office with its big W.C. Fields poster; at his parties they tasted the saki he had fermented himself, broke the bread he baked in coffee cans, and talked about literature n the room that had a live tree growing in its  center and later in his Banbury apartment. Recently the  University called him back from retirement to excite and inspire a new generation of student  writers  

         For all the laughter that he engendered and led he was the most serious and dependable  help in trouble – rushing, by instinct to find Jessie Rehder dead in her chair,driving so many miles for so many weekends to comfort his sister’s terminal illness, encouraging the writing careers of others, rejoicing in the accomplishments of his

 students.  A superb teacher, he taught the rest of us on staff how to teach writing and, like

Miss Effie in “The Cat & the Coffeedrinkers,” his lessons were graceful and subtle. Perhaps he would have written even more fine stories if he had given  less generously of his time and energy to others. A few years back he considered formalizing his ethic by choosing a church, but when certain  pews rang with condemnation of gay people, he never went back.

         Academia gave him spiritual sons and daughters, but his pride in them was only exceeded by his admiration and love for his family.  He married Diana Whittinghill in 1960; she is the mother of his sons Kevin, now of Seattle; and Oliver, and he was

devoted to Oliver’s wife Margaret and two grandchildren Charlotte, 7, and Miles 11, all of whom

live in Amherst, Mass.

         It is fitting that they, and we, are saying farewell to Max in this place near the graves of Paul Green and Prof Koch, the two men he first came to Chapel Hill to study with, and especially near the resting place of his best friend, Robert Kirkpatrick, in whose memory  Max  spoke so well not long ago. 

         Another of his loyal affection went to  fellow writer Alice Adams, whose ashes  he brought cross country home  to this spot in  her native Chapel Hill.  Thinking ahead, Max had  his own name carved on a stone in readiness.  Naturally visitors who stroll this ground and spotted it would cry ,  “Max?  Is he dead?” and naturally these alarmed queries reached him, so he installed a granite footstone which read: HE’S NOT HERE.         Someone suggested that since there was a well known bar uptown called “He’s not Here” perhaps copyright infringement might be involved.

Of course Max  knew better but he loved the mischief of extending the story, so he phoned the manager to ask if he minded.  The man said: “I guess not, as long

as you don’t sell alcohol  in the cemetery.”  To which Max replied , “Well, I can’t promise that.”

He’s still not here, but he still IS here – in our memories, in our hearts.

May we join our memories in a moment of silence.

         

From Doris Betts

One thing I've often quoted that Max opened a first class with.  He
noted that at one time writers learned their craft by writing for the
pulp magazines, which have all disappeared.  And the shallow, formulaic
melodramas they favored have now moved onto daytime soap operas.  The
students leaned forward.  "So you've been freed," he said seriously.
They waited. "You've been freed to write about the good, the true, and
the beautiful."

Final Draft, by David Rowell

Final Draft

When a former student begins editing his creative writing professor, it gives them both a new story to tell

By David Rowell
Sunday, November 6, 2005

By the time I took his class, Max Steele, as director, had built the University of North Carolina's creative writing department into one of the country's finest undergraduate programs. But it was his reputation as a teacher that drew me to his course. Max was a poker-face comic, and he spoke to our class of would-be writers in a careful, halting rhythm, which gave him an oddly intimidating air. He also was a bit of a mystery. He had published his first novel, Debby, at 26, and it had won the prestigious Harper Prize in 1950. But he never published another novel. In 1968, he published a collection of short stories, some of which had appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Harper's. But both books were long out of print. When we students talked about Max, understanding so little about the complex nature of adult life, we sometimes wondered why he simply hadn't written more.

Max helped us to look at literature with a writer's eye, to both appreciate and aspire for language in our writing that was precise and true. Once, a female classmate wrote a story from the point of view of a young man who, across from an apartment building, saw a naked woman for the first time. Max pointed out that he could tell it was written by a woman because she had not fully described the narrator's awe of the beautiful nakedness. How full were the woman's breasts? Max wondered out loud. How did they move? On the verge of giggling, we all nodded in agreement.

I felt particularly encouraged by Max's comments about my stories and by his gentle criticism, and by the end of the semester, I let myself believe that he held out some hope that I might become a writer. For many years after college, I spent my nights writing and sending out story after story, but I had little to show for my efforts. By then, I'd become thoroughly versed in Max's own stories. Not long after our class was over, he'd published a collection called The Hat of My Mother, and I was forever rereading it for inspiration. Max was a brilliant writer, often mining the disappointments and complexities of childhood and the disillusion of faded love (he and his wife had divorced, and quite a few of his stories dealt with the pain and anger of separation). As much as I thought about Max, I didn't stay in touch with him. I felt like I had let him down, that I hadn't, in the end, learned what he had tried to teach me.

Ten years after graduation, I got a job as an editor at a literary magazine called DoubleTake, and it was then that I worked up the nerve to get back in touch with Max. I sent him a photograph I had come across, in the hope that it might inspire him to write a short story for the magazine. In a week's time, he sent back a short gem that had all the hallmarks of his work: heartbreak, a character's haunting memories, but also some element of hopefulness. I knew that he was happy with it, and pleased for it to appear in a magazine that was read in New York literary circles. It wasn't that he had stopped writing

entirely, but when people spoke of Max's writing, it was usually about the short stories he had written so long ago.

In the years after, I published four more pieces by Max -- this time non-fiction -- in this magazine's pages, giving him a new audience of a million potential readers. He wrote about the time when, as a boy and frightened of his mother, he trapped her on the roof of his family's house; he wrote of trying to escape the difficulties of the first Christmas after his divorce by traveling to Ecuador, where the sight of a small boy brought back a painful childhood memory. He was 80 years old at this point, but his writing was as clear-eyed and poignant as ever. When his pieces were published, he heard from old students and proud colleagues eager to congratulate him, as well as new and appreciative readers. After one of the pieces appeared, he wrote, "David, it would be hard to tell you how you have opened the doors to the literary world for me after my twenty years of self-exile."

I would always be Max's student in a way, but a new dynamic had developed between us: Just as he had encouraged me as a student, I was now encouraging him as a writer, turning to him again and again. And, in exchange, he had given me his trust.

One week in August, I came into the office planning to call Max and see if we could get a new piece in the works. Before I had the chance, I received an e-mail from his son Oliver, which said in the subject field: Regarding Max Steele. I knew instinctively what the message was going to tell me. Max had died earlier that week.

Sitting there at my desk, my grief fanned out along several tracks. I had lost a profound mentor, a friend and a writer whom I thought the world of. I mourned for the stories he'd never write. And I was aware of this, too: I had run out of time to publish my own book and be able to thank him in the acknowledgments. I had, though, learned enough from Max so that I could, so many years later, be an editor -- his editor. And, between the two scenarios, that was simply the better story.

David Rowell is an editor for the Magazine.

From Clyde Edgerton

Max sent me a note after the publication of my first novel (1985) and asked if I'd like to join him for lunch.  He was one of my favorite writers--and had been very influential when years earlier I'd heard him speak in to a group of aspiring writers.  In that session he answered the question, "What's most important in writing stories?"  His answer was something along these lines: "Keep it simple and clear."  I was expecting something far more "sophisticated" and his answer has always stayed with me.  Anyway, we had lunch and he said kind words about my novel and offered technical advice (one on redundancy and one about avoiding parenthesis in fiction).  After that we walked across campus and talked more about writing fiction.  Max went way out of his way to be supportive and kind actions have and will always have a positive effect on my roles as teacher and writer.

From Bland Simpson

When Max Steele first hired me to teach Creative Writing at Carolina, it was to fill in for a semester during which Marianne Gingher had taken a leave.  I asked him if he had particular advice for me, and he thought sagely for a bit before saying:  "Yes -- use the textbook that Marianne's already ordered, because it's in at the bookstore."  I said that I would do that, then asked if he had more general advice about teaching these two courses (Introduction to Fiction Writing and Intermediate Fiction Writing).  Again he thought for a spell, then smiled and gave a backhanded wave and said:  "It'll come to you."

*****

From Daphne Athas

I'm so glad you're doing a book on or about Max, and I want to
be of help.  When it comes to anecdotes I'm a dodo, Unneat.  I'd
probably have to be prompted as in an improv comedy.  Since I knew Max
for so long --  He always used to say 'she's my oldest friend,' and
then he went and fell down his  stairs, damn him.  I was in Greece at
the time and Bland called to tell me of this.  I had busted my knee
tripping over his oriental rug a few months before he did his Mother
Goose Jack and Jill, when he ordered me upstairs to get his PayPal
card out of some pair of pants of his which was on his bedroom floor
-- he was on the telephone trying to get me some cheap computer part
over eBay and thought he had struck gold, and as I didn't have that
credit card along, he was going to pay and I'd pay him back, so I was
trying to hurry, but I was leary of those stairs, took them slow and
speeded up when I got down to the living room  because I have
arthritis of the hips, and he was back to me at his roll top desk with
his high-backed chair and didn't see me drop out of sight.  I neither
squeaked, hollered, nor said anything, and when he called to make me
get there quicker, I said I'm coming, and he couldn't understand where
my voice was coming from.  It sounded like a ventriloquist.  He knew
it was hurt pretty bad, but it was a Sunday so after I crammed my leg
into his big old Saab we went around to Walk In Dr. places.  They said
it was fractured.  He was trying to avoid the Hospital.  I totally
concurred.  But there he was stuck with me to the late hours at
Memorial Hosp while we waited.  It was a fracture which made me a bit
late to get to Greece that summer.  After that he kept worrying about
me falling down all the time.  I think his mind was on Falling Down so
much in the general  that he did it instead of me.  And it really
seemed predictable. If you keep thinking of it, it becomes a phrase in
music.  You have to obey it.  And so Bland called me in Greece to tell
me, and I was furious with him.  For one whole week I kept making up
these sentences and hearing him say he always said, like put downs
and other witticisms, which  closed conversations to full stop.  I
thought of the Solomon Grundy Poem, because he achieved death over no
more than a weekend.  I carped at him for doing himself in by keeping
the phrase Falling Down, Follow After as in Jack and Jill and the
pail. And then I resurrected what you do on Monday, Tues. and so on
through the week, till you got to the end of it whe Solomon Grundy was
dead.   You idiot! I kept telling him. I talked to him while looking
out of my hotel window on the Mediterranean.

.... For he was lucky, having Fallen on Friday and died on
Monday without even breaking his neck.  It was just bad for everybody
who loved him.

Melanie's Notes about Max

Before I came to UNC, someone told me about Max Steele, and somehow I knew that he was going to be my mentor.  At age eighteen, on my best stationary, I wrote him a note informing him.

a)  That he was Great.

b)  That I was going to be a Great American Writer.

c)  That we should get together.

I may or may not have included a poem.

Thereafter, he avoided me as if I were a speeding car swerving down the wrong side of the road.  Semester after semester, I failed to get a seat in his class.  The notes I left on his door went from strident to pesky to morose, and remained unanswered.  Finally, as I was taping up my last letter, announcing my decision to part with him forever, he opened the door.  He was so big in that tiny, cramped office, and his voice was huge and wonderful--- a preacher’s voice, but without the bitterness.  I told him I was going to run away.  (for various reasons, my maturity had stalled out at age 14.) He said, “Don’t do that,” and signed me up for his class, adding that if I thought I was going to be a Great American Writer, I would never write a thing.  I vowed never to think that again, and we were on.

I always wanted to write a book with Max, and he was hip on the idea sometimes; when email first came out, he thought we should do it as a series of emails.  He liked email because it kept letters short; he said if  you write more than a page, you’re writing to yourself.

Max Steel, said that people can’t absorb the negative in writing.  They just don’t see it.  If you describe a character by saying, “He was not handsome,” everyone will find him handsome.

Max used to say something like, “You tell all the lies that get to the truth,” or something like that, but whenever I repeated it back to him, he would say, “That’s not what I said.  Why don’t you listen!” 

He said you can park anywhere you want in the rain because people don’t go out in the rain to check meters.

He lived in a house divided, and it stood.

The last thing he told me, a short time before he died, was that he was tired.  I had sent him some funky dialogue, and he said he didn’t understand the language.  He said that he was old --- and tired.  Later I learned that he had fallen, broken his hip, and died a few days later of heart failure in the hospital.  Still, I pictured him with that gold necklace he told me about once; he said he carried a tiny vial of poison in it, and that when it came time to die, he would take his own life.  It was very beautiful, he said, the 18 karat gold chain and the crystal vial.

From Rick Moody

My only story about Max is one I've told many times. He was reading once at Bennington when I taught there in the low res MFA program. As usual, I was sitting in the back, next to Amy Hempel. (Too many readings! Can't bear to sit in the front and be on display all the time!) I knew some of Max's work, and I was eager to hear him, but, unfortunately, I was too far back, and anyway his accent was so beautiful that I was spending all my time listening to the melody and not to the words. Like he was an alto saxophone or something. About this time, there were a lot of discussions going on around Bennington on the subject of the "short short story" or the "flash fiction" or the "prose poem," and about the differences and/or points of conjunction between these various iterations of that modality. I had never really written in this form, but I decided I was going to try while I was there for the residency by just writing one sentence a day of some "short short." Problem was: I had no ideas. (I've always felt that content was overrated anyhow.) Somewhere in there, while muttering to Hempel and listening to the sax solo and thinking about short shorts, I heard Max read the sentence "Then the boys entered the house." In the years since I have often tried to imitate the contortions and extra syllables that he visited upon those words--with his beautiful accent. I thought it was a singular and limpid sentence and assuredly the most comely of those I actually heard that night, so I borrowed Hempel's pen, wrote it on my palm, and then changed it slightly for the beginning of my short, entitled "Boys," int he process making, I think, the best piece of short fiction I ever wrote. All because of Max.

Rick.