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.