A fiction of 1918 informs our reality of COVID-19
I knew a few months ago that I would reread William Maxwell’s spare, haunting novel “They Came Like Swallows.” But I put it off.
I got to it recently while on furlough (a nice way of saying my professional plug was pulled temporarily out of its socket.)
The first time I read Maxwell’s book, years ago, it was difficult to deal with. That is, difficult in the beautifully painful way great fiction can heighten our understanding of reality.
The novel takes place in 1918, as World War I is coming to a close and the deadly influenza epidemic of those difficult days is sweeping the world and the nation.
It is the story of a single family living in a small town in Illinois. The Morisons of the novel could be any of the 120,000 plus American families tragically impacted by COVID-19.
There is a father and mother, James and his pregnant wife, Elizabeth, along with their 13-year-old son Robert and 8-year-old son known as “Bunny.”
There are other relatives and unofficial family members. But the novel is told in three parts, first from the perspective of Bunny. Then Robert. Then James.
They are good people, average people, caught up in a catastrophe, one that at first seems far away but then rolls over them like a tidal wave, leaving them to deal with the consequences.
The author, William Maxwell, who died in 2000, was a boy during the 1918 influenza epidemic. The virus killed his mother.
He knows his subject. He lived it. He also is one of America’s most underrated – or at least underappreciated – novelists. Maxwell writes with such quiet confidence, precision and grace that it seems less like reading and more like having the words on the page whispered in your ear.
What we are living through now, the Morisons of “They Came Like Swallows” lived through then.
We forget sometimes, when looking at the big picture, that the worldwide coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is not one story, but hundreds of thousands of individual tragedies.
We dwell on the numbers because it is through the numbers, the data, we gain some understanding of how things are going and where we’re headed. We list the new cases. The number of hospitalizations. The number of deaths.
We try, in the media, to tell some of the individual stories, to highlight the lives of those impacted by the illness. But it is impossible to tell them all. There are too many. And each story runs much deeper than we are able to describe. In the end, not only are there more stories than we can document, but more than we can cope with, mentally and emotionally.
So, during my latest weeklong professional quarantine, my hiatus from commenting on the news, I left behind the real world for a fiction published in 1937 about events from 100 years ago.
It is not the story of millions of influenza victims, but a way of understanding all of those victims through the eyes of one small family impacted by a single, devastating tragedy. Journalism is good for getting facts. There are times, however, when a work of imagination can augment those facts with something even more important: Truth.