They Came Like Swallows (1937) By William Maxwell

In 1937 William Maxwell penned a book about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic mostly as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy named Bunny, and his twelve-year-old brother Robert. The story was set in small town central Illinois, where Maxwell grew up. The book, They Came Like Swallows, is short at 124 pages, but captures a hugely significant story. The title is inspired by William Butler Yeats’s classic poem Coole Park because it encapsulates the boys’ mother so perfectly.

                They came like swallows and like swallows went,

                And yet a woman’s powerful character

                Could keep a swallow to its first intent,

                And half a dozen in formation there,

                That seemed to wheel upon a compass point,

                Found certainty upon the dreaming air.

I read this book several years ago, although beautifully written, I basically cast it off as “ancient history” and forgot about it. Today, it re-reads as “current events.”  The course of the Spanish Influenza ran from 1918 through 1919, killing an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans, 5-times the death toll of US soldiers who died in World War I, which ran concurrently.

Today (April 24, 2020) just over a century later -- and only 3 months into the Covid-19 pandemic – 2.8 million people have been diagnosed worldwide, with 202,000 having died.  In the U.S. 52,234 people have already died.  After the first wave of infections, if history repeats, a second wave of the pandemic will occur, and absent a vaccine, will be far more deadly.

The effectiveness of Maxwell’s book is that he did not write to shock the reader with statistics, he wrote about one family, in one small Midwestern town. 

Of pointed significance in the book is that some of the actions used in 1918 to effectively slow the epidemic are being used again today, and meeting the same resistance, such as school closings.  When Bunny becomes ill, his mother’s lament is “If I’d only taken Bunny out of school when the epidemic first started.”  When Robert is told that he can’t leave the yard, his response “What good was having school closed?  What good was all the time in the world? So long as he had to stay in his own yard, what good was anything.”  The rumors spreading through town then was that the influenza was sent to the U.S. by German submarines.  Today, it is the Chinese.  And ministers, ordered not to hold public services, then like now, complaining about religion being more important that some disease, and God will protect them.

Recommendation:  Absolutely.