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.