From The Elephant and the Kangaroo:
Before we deal with this, however, it seems necessary to make a few remarks about our hero’s character. He Was a childish man, in spite of his amoebae, and he was confiding, and he nearly always told the truth. This was out of laziness, as he had found that it was easier to be truthful and swindled, instead of going to the trouble of making up lies in order to swindle other people. Sometimes he grew ashamed of this laziness, about once a year, and tried to tell a few hard-working lies; but he told them so badly, with such a shifty look in his eye, that nobody believed them for a moment. This discouraged him. Fortunately, however, it did not matter how much he told the truth round Burkestown, because nobody in that locality ever told it, and consequently nobody believed it. Indeed, Mr. White’s truthfulness had the curious effect 'of making the aborigines consider that he was the most cunning liar they had ever met. Unaccustomed to hearing the truth in any form, they were baffled by his veracity, and came to fear him greatly in a bargain. For instance, if he were selling one of the pigs which he kept on the refuse of the garden, he might say to the buyer: “I am afraid that this pig is not so fat as he should be. You see, if you put your hand here between the shoulder blades, you can feel the backbone.” Far from lowering the price of the thin pig, this often had the effect of putting a couple of guineas on it: for the buyer immediately concluded that Mr. White had some intensely subtle reason for not selling, and became half mad to secure the prize.
Another feature of his character was that he was generally pursuing some theory or other, often dealing with archaeology or biology or history. For instance, he had a theory about warfare. He said that there were some 275,000 separate species in the animal kingdom, but that out of this huge number there were only a dozen or so which indulged in true war, i.e., which would band together in order to attack bands of their own species. The guilty dozen included H. sapiens, one termite, several ants, and possibly, though Mr. White was unsure of this, the domestic bee. If, said he, only twelve or so out of 275,000 will go to war, then obviously we can discover the true cause of warfare by looking for some Highest Common Factor which is found among the twelve, but not found among the 274,988 others. Eventually he had discovered that the H.C.F. was not Property nor several of the other things which had been suggested, but the making of a territorial claim. All twelve made a claim to territory other than the nest itself, and he could discover no pacific species which made such a claim. Also the few varieties of H. sapiens which did not make a territorial claim-the Lapps, Eskimos, and other true nomads-remained at peace. Mr. White said that the only thing necessary to abolish warfare was to abolish territory, i.e., to do away with artificial boundaries, nationalism, tariffs, and so on.
and
Brownie was sitting in a corner, eating the latest glue. She was an animal who suffered from crazes, like her master. They say that wise men grow to resemble the creatures they are interested in, and that Darwin ended by looking like an ape. This is true conversely, at any rate, for most animals grow to resemble the masters they are interested in, and Brownie was no exception. She had put up with so many snakes, falcons, goshawks, merlins, ravens, ants, goat meths, hedgehogs, and other assorted fauna collected by Mr. White that in the end she had taken to collecting herself. For instance, she was keen on week-old chickens. Every spring, when these came round, she attended all their meals. She also caught them in her month, without hurting them, and carried them into the dining room, where she liberated them under the table and watched them run. The hens, ever after, in adult life, fled upon the approach of Brownie. Another of her interests was the insect world. She spent a good deal of time catching flies, or taunting the bees in the hall. She was a student of wood-boring wasps, which she would watch on the workshop window sill all day long. She had been the proud owner of a wild baby rabbit, which she used to take to bed with her, in her master’s bed, and also of a young leveret. Neither of these had been much pleased at having to sleep with Brownie and Mr. White, and the rabbit particularly had often flown into a passion at the general perversity of the situation, and had bitten them both. People seem to think that wild rabbits are charming little balls of fluff, but [they are really very choleric animals, with no tolerance at all. Other pets kept by Brownie included ducks, turkeys, and an Orphan lamb. She was interested in the swallows on the tool cupboard, and devoted to hedgehogs, for which she had a special bark. She did not like puppies.
The craze for Nature Study, however, was not the only one she had. Mr. White possessed varied interests, and So did she. There was carpentry, for instance, which was perhaps the latest of his digressions. Poor Brownie could hardly saw or hammer, but at least she collected the spare pieces of wood, and kept them under the dining-room table. So far as gardening was concerned, she collected most of the root crops and tubers, which she also stored under the table. She had, besides, a rubber ball.
Her master was, a second-rate writer, and that was the way in which he earned such living as he had. It was the only occupation she was unable to share. When he sat at the typewriter, Brownie sat beside him and groaned continuously-perhaps she was doing her best to imitate the machine. When he wrote with a pencil, in an armchair, she sat on his lap and sighed, in order to be in it as much as possible.
The glue must have been due to the Ark. It was used in construction. Mr. White had been trying to boil it in a soup tin, because he had no gluepot, and she had discovered it, in the solid state, at the bottom. This was what she was eating. Being at the bottom, it was almost out of reach of her tongue. However, she had bitten dents in the tin all round, and she could reach some of the glue, and it made her froth at the mouth.
and
For that matter, what is the good of doing anything with the Irish, who won’t even try water divining? What are they? Just a rag bag of every defeated nation since the dawn of prehistory, driven into this accursed rain cloud of an island as the last refuge for incapacity; They think that the sunlight puts fires out and the moon changes the weather and God knows what else. I suppose they think that the moon is a kind of phosphorescent balloon which gets gradually blown up and deflated. They have no idea of the earth’s shadow or of geography or of anything else. The only good thing 15 that they murder one another at a great rate. How many murders did we have last month? There was the man who threw his wife into a well with a turkey, and the man who chopped up his brother and buried him in a bog, and the man who decapitated his grandmother with a hatchet, and... .and . . Always pointless, too, and so badly done. The whole island is strewn with blunt instruments which the murderer has forgotten to conceal. Professional assassins, all over the world, are Irishmen or Italians. Chicago, everywhere. I suppose they’ll murder me before they’ve finished. For the sake of a cigarette card or something. It’s lucky Mikey is timid. He’d be afraid to make a had shot the first time, and get hurt himself. Not that he dislikes me. It would be a sudden whim, as usual. . . .
What’s the good of struggling with it all? It isn’t only the O’Callaghans, it’s the whole island. You might as well try to reform the Alps. And why reform them, anyway? Why transplant human life at all, in this ridiculous Ark? Why not leave it to be exterminated?
Why live, thought Mr. White, for that matter; I’m sure‘ I don t know why we take such trouble to do so. It’s all rheumatism, and filling up forms.
Mikey was waiting for him, tongue-tied with longing, doubt, modesty or apprehension
and
...however, there came an alteration in the relations between the builders.
The trouble between Mr. White and Pat Geraghty was that the one was of Alpine while the other was of Mediterranean race. Geraghty, although insane to a scarcely noticeable extent, was in other respects a normal aborigine of Cashelmor. He had spent‘his life in the environs of Burkestown. All his, neighbors had always been either thieves or Swindlers or assassins. He, and they, believed, ‘with the O’Callaghans, that the moon’s changes ‘changed the" weather; that sunlight extinguished fires; that' the best cure for whooping cough lay in passing the sufferer under the belly of a donkey; that there was a real and tangible fire in Hell, where Mr. White would be roasted, without being consumed. by a benevolent deity, for the rest of eternity; that it would rain if a curlew were heard; that Purgatory, where he himself would go, was also a place of actual fire, but not eternal; that “frost brings rain”---a not unnatural belief, when one reflects that, in winter, if it is not dry and
frosty it is pretty well sure to be wet and rainy; that wag. tails were birds of death, like the chaladrius; that three candles in one room would bring a death before the end of the year; that women must not cut men’s hair; that there was a “stray sod” near Burkestown and that, if the traveler stepped on it, he would lose his way for the rest of the night unless he had the presence of mind to turn his waist coat back to front; that a weasel should be spat upon when met; that the banshee sounded a little like an amorous cat; and that Ireland was the land of Saints and Scholars, whose saintly and scholarly activities had only been handicapped by the barbarous interference of English cannibals like Mr. White. All these things, and a great many more, were believed by Pat as simply as it is believed in other places that the milkman will call in the morning. Since scarcely any of them were believed by his master, there was, of course, a barrier between them.
It was not so. much what Geraghty believed, however, as what he was accustomed to understand by his environment, that caused the trouble. So far as his experience went, the main objective of human beings was to take advantage of one another. In recognizing this, indeed, he and his neighbors offered perhaps their best claim to possessing greater perspicuity than their oppressors across the water.
He was now, for external reasons, beginning to worry bout being employed by a venomous Englishman.
and
Mrs. O’Callaghan put on the clothes which she wore when she went to Dublin. These were not showy, owing to a habit which she had acquired of never putting on a new dress until two years after she had bought it. Horace recommends the author to wait seven years before publishing, and it seems an excellent rule for clothes as well as for books; but not so good a rule when extended to food and fresh vegetables, as it was, to some extent, by Mrs. O‘Callaghan. She would often purchase a pound ~of cheese Cashelmor, only to find that it had gone moldy before it
reached the table six weeks later. She was a conservative. Mr. White reminded her to put on the fur coat, a wedding present from her father. Mikey polished his boots, as he was made to do on Saturday nights because of Mass on Sundays, and painfully put ‘ on one of the clean collars which were always dirty before they were fixed. He also shaved.
and
Think of all those tricks of shabby gentility with which she used to madden me. When she was giving breakfast to Father Byrne, after a Station, she used to lean forward whenever the old lobster spoke, crooking her little finger as she held the teacup, and cry, “Is that a fac?” She thought _ it was genteel. In 1900 or so, when she was a girl, perhaps it was genteel. Think of that young virgin in her father’s boorish farm, uneducated, put upon, aflutter with dreams of dukes perhaps and of the wide world stretched before her; think of her simple arts, her hopes to better herself, her innocent and pondering attempts to learn gentility. Somebody in the hearing of that child, somebody who ' seemed to her to be the height of fashion, had crooked the
finger, had said, “Is‘that a fac?” She had stored it up. She had given it, her little accomplishment, like a dog’s poor trick, to Father Byrne.‘ She had been proud of it, and a trifle nervous in case it might not quite be up to date. But of course she had been forced to put that fear away from her. She had had nothing else to substitute.
How desperately cruel life is, thought Mr. White: Life and Time. They take everything, take the soft-petaled maiden and the fashions she pondered. Fashion and’ slang are awful in their pathos. There are spinsters knocking about nowadays, I suppose, who cry girlishly that such and such a thing is “some stunt” and who would like to describe themselves as 'flappers.” In twenty years the Wrens of today will be saying “browned off” with the same cracked ring. Human beings run about like sheep, copying one another, talking the latest idiom, wearing the latest hat. And Time comes stealthily to rob them, till idiom and hat are both ridiculous, leaving nothing in the little squirrel hoard of graces.
It is not the Irish, he thought, it is the climate. It is not the fault of the race. The Irish are not lazy, not backward, not dirty, not superstitious, not cunning, not dishonest. They are as nice as anybody else. It is not them. It is the air.
It is that bloody Atlantic, said Mr. White, looking angrily in the direction of Mullingar: that’s what does for us. It is those millions of square miles of water vapor pouring in from the southwest, supersaturated, bulging, colored, and weighted like lead. It is like living under a pile of wet cushions: They force us to our hands and knees. Between us and America there is nothing to discharge them. We have to bear the whole of it. We are the outpost, the bulwark which saves England from the like oppression. By the time the air reaches England, it has been sieved, milked, lightened, by the protecting highlands of the Gael. So of course they sit there, bright and breezy, and little wonder if they rule the world. But to talk about the Irish being oppressed by the Saxon in the east is nonsense-not at all, it is by the Atlantic in the west. Why, even champagne will hardly fizz here: one might as well be living down a coal mine. ‘
l believe, he continued doubtfully, that champagne does not fizz in coal mines; but, if you take it to the top of a mountain, where the air is lighter, it fizzes so much that the whole bottle turns to froth. That is what happens if you take an Irishman away from his native hell. Here, in the oppression of the clouds, he is just a flattened Hamilton, a squashed Wellesley, or a burdened Shaw. Drop him across the channel, and immediately he boils over like a firework display. He invents quaternions or conquers Napoleon or writes St. Joan. And the same thing happens the Other way round. Leave him in England, and Swift is the master of ministers, the friend of princes, the cynosure of wit. Drag him away to the atmospheric pressure of the County Meath, and he is only a nasty-minded, complaining parson at Laracor, and finally he goes dotty altogether, and no wonder.
What a pity it is that people will go in for racial criticism. The whole thing is perfectly simple. All human beings everywhere are more or less horrible, but they have different fashions of being it, in different places. Consequently, one notices the horribleness of foreigners without noticing one’s own-which they notice-just because it is different.
Saturday, July 22, 2017
Monday, July 03, 2017
The Wapshot Chronicle
“Writer’s epistolary style (Leander wrote) formed in tradition of Lord Timothy Dexter, who put all punctuation marks, prepositions, adverts, articles, etc., at the end of communication and urged reader to distribute same as he saw fit. West Farm. Autumn day. 3 p.m. Nice sailing breeze from NW quarter. Golden light. Glittering riffle on water. Hornets on ceiling. An old house. Roofs of St. Botolphs in the distance. Old river-bottom burg today. Family prominent there once. Name memorialized in many things in vicinity; lakes, roads, hills even. Wapshot Avenue now back street in honkytonk beach resort further south. Smell of hot dogs, popcorn, also salt air and grinding music from old merry-go-round calliope. Matchwood cottages for rent by day, week or season. Such a street named after forebear who rode spar in Java sea for three days kicking at sharks with bare feet."
and
"We're going to England in ten days," Pancras said.
"I'll miss you," Coverly said.
"You're coming," Pancras said. "I've arranged the whole thing."
Coverly turned to his companion and they exchanged a look of such sorrow that he thought he might never recover. It was a look that he had recoiled from here and there—the doctor in Travertine, a bartender in Washington, a priest on a night boat, a clerk in a shop—that exacerbating look of sexual sorrow between men; sorrow and the perverse wish to flee—to piss in the Lowestoft soup tureen, write a vile word on the back of the barn and run away to sea with a dirty, dirty sailor—to flee, not from the laws and customs of the world but from its force and vitality.
and
"We're going to England in ten days," Pancras said.
"I'll miss you," Coverly said.
"You're coming," Pancras said. "I've arranged the whole thing."
Coverly turned to his companion and they exchanged a look of such sorrow that he thought he might never recover. It was a look that he had recoiled from here and there—the doctor in Travertine, a bartender in Washington, a priest on a night boat, a clerk in a shop—that exacerbating look of sexual sorrow between men; sorrow and the perverse wish to flee—to piss in the Lowestoft soup tureen, write a vile word on the back of the barn and run away to sea with a dirty, dirty sailor—to flee, not from the laws and customs of the world but from its force and vitality.
Saturday, July 01, 2017
Cheever
by Blake Bailey
The Depression came early to New England, and by the mid-twenties the shoe industry was all but dead. This, of course, was not openly discussed in the Cheever household, though John could tell his father was becoming dispirited. He overheard the man say to a neighbor, while raking the driveway, that he was prepared to die. As Cheever would later tell it, Frederick had sold out of the shoe business (whether that meant the manufacturing firm of “Whittredge and Cheever” or some lesser concern is, again, a mystery) and gone into an investment partnership with another fellow, alternately named “Mr. Forsyth” and “Harry Dobson” in Cheever’s journal. One day, while playing his four holes of morning golf, Frederick espied what appeared to be a coat hanging from a tree near the fairway; naturally, this proved to be none other than Forsyth or Dobson, hanged. After that, Frederick gave up golf and began crying at the breakfast table: “He’d say good morning to me and then look out the window and say something about the weather and then his face would break . . . and he’d start making noises like a winded runner. Fortunately, he was married to a resourceful woman, who saved the family from certain ruin by opening a gift shop in downtown Quincy. In fact, it was becoming more and more common at the time for middle-class women to go into business for themselves-what with
canned foods and labor-saving devices that lessened the drudgery of housekeeping-~and certainly this came all the more easily to an Old feminist like Mary Liley Cheever. Indeed, one might even venture to say that as a gift-shop proprietress she’d found her niche: genial and motherly, she was able to strike an instant rapport with most customers, who came to regard the Mary Cheever Gift Shoppe as the place to go for something a little better than the usual dime-store bric-a-brac. It was true that Mrs. Cheever could be a bit pushy at times. As she herself confided, a little ruefully, the harder she tried to “match the purchase to the person,” the more determined the person became to buy what she or he had picked out in the first place.
John was aghast that his mother had gone into trade: After this he was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role, but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely, ‘ls there something I can do for you?’ ” Nor was it simply the doorsteps and china dogs and doilies that she foisted on a public consisting mostly of her former peers, but the very furniture out from under her family’s backs. “You can’t sell this,” John would remonstrate, “it doesn’t belong to you.” To which the woman would sensibly reply, “Well, do you have $100?” She even sold his own bed (and decades later, at a Sutton Place party, Cheever bumped into an old Quincy acquaintance who informed him that she herself had bought one of the family beds). It wasn’t long before his mother’s almost demonic élan began to bear fruit. In 1929, she opened a second store, the Little Shop Around the Corner, purveying dresses and accessories reflecting “the same exclusiveness and beauty which is already evident in her gift shoppe,” as the Quincy Patriot Ledger reported. Mrs. Cheever relished her success, such as it was, and became every inch the plucky, hard’ boiled businesswoman: “She routed thieving gypsies,” her son recalled, “brained an armed robber with a candlestick and cracked jokes with the salesmen.”
The vulgarity of it all was an “abysmal humiliation” to Cheever, whose innate sense of alienation was burden enough. Nor did he ever quite recover from “the trauma, the earthquake,” of his family’s awful decline. Anything smacking of gift-shop knickknackery would alway repulse him to the point of illness.
and
When Faulkner won the Nobel in 1949, Cheever showed he could still channel what Papa might say If he were to write a letter for the occasion to the New York Times: “I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. . . . The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, bur they don’t give prizes for it. There is the kind of shooting that you get in the Abruzzi in the May snows and underwater shooting and the kind of lonely shooting that you have when you take your sights in a pocket-mirror and bring down a grizzley [sic] over your left shoulder but they don’t give prizes for that kind of shooting. Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. Herman Melville did that kind of shooting but they never got any prizes.”
and
Mary didn't lose time flexing her linguistic muscles with Cheever. “The folly of a fool,” she once murmured-in French-when her impoverished boyfriend waxed ecstatic over a New Yorker sale. Both seemed a little ambivalent in the beginning. What Cheever remembered about their first date was that his future wife had arrived three hours late; what she remembered was the taste of Scotch (she’d never tried it before) and boredom. Cheever was holding forth about life at Yaddo, which might have struck the idealistic young woman as a bit frivolous, at least as Cheever told it. “I didn’t want to hear about the love affairs of Leonard Ehrlich and so on,” she later remarked.
and
Cheever offered his services as reader and scribe to some of the illiterate Southerners, whose letters (both written and received) were a lifelong source of delight. One man solemnly dictated a request for special leave so he could witness his brother’s execution (“the first electrocution in the family”); a spurned young woman wrote-and Cheever read aloud-“ ‘Don’t you remember what you done to me on the floor? Didn’t you mean it?’ . . .” In general Cheever preferred the company of regular guys-illiterate, Southern, or otherwise-whose weekend high jinks in Augusta tended to attract the notice of military police. Every weekend the city swarmed with soldiers, and Cheever was loath to miss the whole Hogarthian spectacle-the teeming juke joints and even the relatively staid places where locals tried to show their GI guests some Southern hospitality: “[VVe] went to a dance at the Eagle Club, Eyrie number seven, believe it or not,” Cheever reported. “I danced for about one minute with a southern beauty of about eleven who was uneasy about dancing with a Yankee.”
and
“To the extent that in the writing world any material-sketch, article, newspaper report, fiction--is called a story, john Cheever’s book . . . may be called a collection of stories”; such stories, however, were little more than “moments or moods caught in the lives of his characters, pointed in quality, but inconclusive in effect.” Cheever’s tone of remote pessimism was also condemned, as if he were regarding his characters with the same haughty nonchalance that Eustace Tilley fixes on that butterfly. In the New York Times Book Review, VVilliam DuBois stressed the author’s connection with the magazine by way of explaining the “peculiar epicene detachment, and facile despair” of the stories. Such charges were not unwarranted: for the past eight years, ever since Cowley’s advice that he shorten his work, Cheever had been training himself to write the sort of muted, elliptical “casual” that went over at The New Yorker, rarely allowing himself the luxury of longer, more ambitious stories. Reviewer Weldon Kees emphasized the difference: though Cheever’s New Yorker stories (“among the best that have appeared there recently”) were similar to the point of tedium-at least when “read one after another”-the long, anomalous “Of Love: A Testimony” gave a glimpse of what Cheever was “capable of doing when he has room enough in which to work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects.”
As for Struthers Burt, in hindsight he seems prophetic, though it’s hard to figure how he could have made such extravagant claims on the basis of The Way Some People Live. “Unless I am very much mistaken,” he declared, “when this war is over, John Cheever . . . will become one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist.” Far from finding the stories trivial, Burt applauded their revelation of the “universal importance of the outwardly unimportant,” and thought the author’s apparent pessimism was in fact a laud~ able grasp of human ambiguity (“a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life”). Like other reviewers, Burt noted a certain monotony in Cheever’s New Yorker fiction and cautioned the author lest his “especial style” harden into an affectation: “Otherwise the world is his.”
Cheever took both praise and blame with a grain of salt-remark ably so for a first-time author. He was amused by DuBois’s crack about his “facile despair,” seeing the justice of that and other complaints. As he wrote Mary, “[A]ll in all-even though they don’t like me-the reviewers seem to be very diligent and earnest people, anxious to help a gloomy young writer onto the right path, and to safeguard the investment of their readers.
and
By the end of 1947, Cheever still hadn’t produced a manuscript, though he claimed a longish one existed, and finally Linscott suggested he write an outline, at least, to give the salesmen something to Work with. Cheever reluctantly obliged, though he doubted he could convey what was best about the novel-the actual writing-and so took pains to play this up in the outline, which itself is quite cleverly written:
The writing, or the surface of the book, which has concerned me a good deal, seems to me clear and reliable. I speak of the writing since it seems very important to me . . . that it should appear decorous and beautiful and I sometimes think of the story as having the polish, the sentimental charms of a greeting card with an obscene message. . . .
The story centers on a family; the Fields. Aaron, Sarah and their two sons, Tom and Eben. There is much of a country that I love in this book-much scenery, much rain, many semi-colons-for these are bewildered children in a beautiful garden.
The story begins in 1936 and has in it’s opening the appearance of something to be read in bed on a rainy night in an old house. . . .
Sarah Field . . . is stout, she has yielded her beauty without a struggle, she has attended a White House reception, dreamt of carnal relations with Padarewski and two bibles have come apart in her hands. . . .
and
. It might have seemed a good sign that he was inter« viewed for Harvey Breit’s column in the New York Times Book Review, but after their lunch together Cheever fretted in his journal that he’d behaved in an “unstable” and “indiscreet” manner. On the contrary, he’d come across as a “tough-minded short-story advocate” (so Breit wrote), who considered the novel an “artificial” and “anachronistic” form-mot an entirely disinterested apologia, under the circumstances, though actually Cheever’s aesthetic ideas had changed very little over the years, reflecting his View of modern life as fragmented and nomadic: “The short story is determined by moving around from place to place, by the interrupted event. The vigorous nineteenth-century novel is based on parish life and lack of communications. . . . I’ve always noticed that just as people are about to tell you the secret they’re transferred to another city. The way people drop out of sight. Really drop! ”
In that same issue of the Book Review (May 10, 1953) was James Kelly’s critique of The Enormous Radio, which was everything Cheever might have hoped for (if he hadn’t been so morbidly insecure at the time). Kelly described the stories as “miraculous expressions of life among the middle-class have-not-enoughs,” though he added (as did other critics) that the stories were less impressive when read one after another, as the reader discovered a certain sameness of theme and setting. “But not one can be called insignificant or shoddy or inadequately observed,” Kelly concluded. “No American writer in business today is more on top of his genre than Mr. Cheever.” William Peden, writing in the Saturday Review, was also enthusiastic: “John Cheever shows an absolute genius for taking the usual and transforming it into the significant. . . . [He] is one of the most undervalued American short story Writers.”
What Cheever was apt to notice most in Peden’s review, however, Was an incidental remark that his stories were “less spectacular” (albeit more likely to “improve with rereading”) than those of J. D. Salinger, Whose Nine Stories was published around the same time to ecstatic acclaim. Indeed, a comparison of the two books was the basis of one of the most wounding reviews of Cheever’s career-all the worse given that the reviewer, Arthur Mizener, had become one of the nation’s most prominent critics after the recent success of his pioneering Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise. Appearing in The New Republic, Mizener's review was framed as an assessment of the New Yorker story. Salinger exemplified the good sort of NY writer, Cheever was the bad. An empty craftsman.
and
Cheever loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl.” Cheever was pitiless in judging female beauty--“You were either a dish or a drudge,’ his wife repeatedly insisted-and when the young Susan failed a measure up, he was bewildered and sorry for all concerned. He’d wanted a “frail daughter,” after all, a “wraith” with long blond hair who drove a sports car and went by the kicky name of Susie. In any event they did call her Susie, but to Cheever’s mind the name didn’t jibe with the hoyden who chewed with her mouth open and said all the wrong things (“How long does it take to hang a man?”): “The tragic instant’ -Cheever wrote, during a bad patch when his daughter was all of eight- “when a parent loses faith with his child.”
“They were completely unable to cope with me,” said Susan Cheever, after some fifty years of blessed retrospect. The main issue, as her parents always saw it, was her weight-if only she looked right, everything else would follow-and in a way that was true, since they harassed her
so relentlessly on the subject that her behavior was mostly a matter of reprisal. They put her on diets, made her eat Ayds candies to cut her appetite, and kept up a constant running commentary on what she ate at dinner. Every so often, too, they’d invite her grossly obese pediatrician to the house so he could deliver a stern lecture to the little girl on the evils of overeating. Deprived of snacks and the like, Susan took to stealing food (and therefore eating many times what she would have eaten normally): she hollowed out cakes they were saving for company (leaving a “veneer of icing on top”); she rooted around in drawers, closets, and desks, searching for hidden chocolate and whatever else he could find. “They had no privacy,” she said. “I read everything in the house, I was in every secret compartment of every desk, I became like a little criminal. I was lying, I was cheating, I was stealing. Their cruelty about my weight was not one-way. We were in a dance of death on that subject.” Many years later, after Cheever had stopped drinking, he often assuaged his melancholy by gorging on cheese and crackers: “And I remember, as a father, how ruefully I separated my daughter from her crackers and cheese when all she sought, by stuffing herself, was to understand her place in the world.”
At the time he didn’t see it that way; rather he regarded himself as a loving, well-meaning, long-suffering father who was simply trying to talk his only daughter out of being fat, whereas she in turn responded with unsavory remarks and ties such as banging her head against the wall and constantly sucking her thumb. She wasn’t doing well in school either, and finally (at age eleven) they sent her to a psychiatrist in White Plains named Dr. Sobel. Apparently the man didn’t see what all the fuss was about-certainly the girl was intelligent enough (“She has a Cadillac motor in there,” he observed). The parents were another matter: Dr. Sobel remarked that Mary was a “passive” personality, which (he opined) was why Cheever had married her, whereupon the affronted husband rose from his chair and stood protectively beside his wife. In his own version of the meeting, however, Cheever tended to omit that detail, informing Susan that what Sobel had really said (furtively taking him aside) was: “Be careful. If anyone looked at me the way your Wife looked at your daughter, I’d suck my thumb too!”
Then as later, Cheever had his own way of seeing things, or at least of telling them.
The Depression came early to New England, and by the mid-twenties the shoe industry was all but dead. This, of course, was not openly discussed in the Cheever household, though John could tell his father was becoming dispirited. He overheard the man say to a neighbor, while raking the driveway, that he was prepared to die. As Cheever would later tell it, Frederick had sold out of the shoe business (whether that meant the manufacturing firm of “Whittredge and Cheever” or some lesser concern is, again, a mystery) and gone into an investment partnership with another fellow, alternately named “Mr. Forsyth” and “Harry Dobson” in Cheever’s journal. One day, while playing his four holes of morning golf, Frederick espied what appeared to be a coat hanging from a tree near the fairway; naturally, this proved to be none other than Forsyth or Dobson, hanged. After that, Frederick gave up golf and began crying at the breakfast table: “He’d say good morning to me and then look out the window and say something about the weather and then his face would break . . . and he’d start making noises like a winded runner. Fortunately, he was married to a resourceful woman, who saved the family from certain ruin by opening a gift shop in downtown Quincy. In fact, it was becoming more and more common at the time for middle-class women to go into business for themselves-what with
canned foods and labor-saving devices that lessened the drudgery of housekeeping-~and certainly this came all the more easily to an Old feminist like Mary Liley Cheever. Indeed, one might even venture to say that as a gift-shop proprietress she’d found her niche: genial and motherly, she was able to strike an instant rapport with most customers, who came to regard the Mary Cheever Gift Shoppe as the place to go for something a little better than the usual dime-store bric-a-brac. It was true that Mrs. Cheever could be a bit pushy at times. As she herself confided, a little ruefully, the harder she tried to “match the purchase to the person,” the more determined the person became to buy what she or he had picked out in the first place.
John was aghast that his mother had gone into trade: After this he was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role, but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely, ‘ls there something I can do for you?’ ” Nor was it simply the doorsteps and china dogs and doilies that she foisted on a public consisting mostly of her former peers, but the very furniture out from under her family’s backs. “You can’t sell this,” John would remonstrate, “it doesn’t belong to you.” To which the woman would sensibly reply, “Well, do you have $100?” She even sold his own bed (and decades later, at a Sutton Place party, Cheever bumped into an old Quincy acquaintance who informed him that she herself had bought one of the family beds). It wasn’t long before his mother’s almost demonic élan began to bear fruit. In 1929, she opened a second store, the Little Shop Around the Corner, purveying dresses and accessories reflecting “the same exclusiveness and beauty which is already evident in her gift shoppe,” as the Quincy Patriot Ledger reported. Mrs. Cheever relished her success, such as it was, and became every inch the plucky, hard’ boiled businesswoman: “She routed thieving gypsies,” her son recalled, “brained an armed robber with a candlestick and cracked jokes with the salesmen.”
The vulgarity of it all was an “abysmal humiliation” to Cheever, whose innate sense of alienation was burden enough. Nor did he ever quite recover from “the trauma, the earthquake,” of his family’s awful decline. Anything smacking of gift-shop knickknackery would alway repulse him to the point of illness.
and
When Faulkner won the Nobel in 1949, Cheever showed he could still channel what Papa might say If he were to write a letter for the occasion to the New York Times: “I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. . . . The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, bur they don’t give prizes for it. There is the kind of shooting that you get in the Abruzzi in the May snows and underwater shooting and the kind of lonely shooting that you have when you take your sights in a pocket-mirror and bring down a grizzley [sic] over your left shoulder but they don’t give prizes for that kind of shooting. Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. Herman Melville did that kind of shooting but they never got any prizes.”
and
Mary didn't lose time flexing her linguistic muscles with Cheever. “The folly of a fool,” she once murmured-in French-when her impoverished boyfriend waxed ecstatic over a New Yorker sale. Both seemed a little ambivalent in the beginning. What Cheever remembered about their first date was that his future wife had arrived three hours late; what she remembered was the taste of Scotch (she’d never tried it before) and boredom. Cheever was holding forth about life at Yaddo, which might have struck the idealistic young woman as a bit frivolous, at least as Cheever told it. “I didn’t want to hear about the love affairs of Leonard Ehrlich and so on,” she later remarked.
and
Cheever offered his services as reader and scribe to some of the illiterate Southerners, whose letters (both written and received) were a lifelong source of delight. One man solemnly dictated a request for special leave so he could witness his brother’s execution (“the first electrocution in the family”); a spurned young woman wrote-and Cheever read aloud-“ ‘Don’t you remember what you done to me on the floor? Didn’t you mean it?’ . . .” In general Cheever preferred the company of regular guys-illiterate, Southern, or otherwise-whose weekend high jinks in Augusta tended to attract the notice of military police. Every weekend the city swarmed with soldiers, and Cheever was loath to miss the whole Hogarthian spectacle-the teeming juke joints and even the relatively staid places where locals tried to show their GI guests some Southern hospitality: “[VVe] went to a dance at the Eagle Club, Eyrie number seven, believe it or not,” Cheever reported. “I danced for about one minute with a southern beauty of about eleven who was uneasy about dancing with a Yankee.”
and
“To the extent that in the writing world any material-sketch, article, newspaper report, fiction--is called a story, john Cheever’s book . . . may be called a collection of stories”; such stories, however, were little more than “moments or moods caught in the lives of his characters, pointed in quality, but inconclusive in effect.” Cheever’s tone of remote pessimism was also condemned, as if he were regarding his characters with the same haughty nonchalance that Eustace Tilley fixes on that butterfly. In the New York Times Book Review, VVilliam DuBois stressed the author’s connection with the magazine by way of explaining the “peculiar epicene detachment, and facile despair” of the stories. Such charges were not unwarranted: for the past eight years, ever since Cowley’s advice that he shorten his work, Cheever had been training himself to write the sort of muted, elliptical “casual” that went over at The New Yorker, rarely allowing himself the luxury of longer, more ambitious stories. Reviewer Weldon Kees emphasized the difference: though Cheever’s New Yorker stories (“among the best that have appeared there recently”) were similar to the point of tedium-at least when “read one after another”-the long, anomalous “Of Love: A Testimony” gave a glimpse of what Cheever was “capable of doing when he has room enough in which to work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects.”
As for Struthers Burt, in hindsight he seems prophetic, though it’s hard to figure how he could have made such extravagant claims on the basis of The Way Some People Live. “Unless I am very much mistaken,” he declared, “when this war is over, John Cheever . . . will become one of the most distinguished writers, not only as a short story writer but as a novelist.” Far from finding the stories trivial, Burt applauded their revelation of the “universal importance of the outwardly unimportant,” and thought the author’s apparent pessimism was in fact a laud~ able grasp of human ambiguity (“a deep feeling for the perversities and contradictions, the worth and unexpected dignity of life”). Like other reviewers, Burt noted a certain monotony in Cheever’s New Yorker fiction and cautioned the author lest his “especial style” harden into an affectation: “Otherwise the world is his.”
Cheever took both praise and blame with a grain of salt-remark ably so for a first-time author. He was amused by DuBois’s crack about his “facile despair,” seeing the justice of that and other complaints. As he wrote Mary, “[A]ll in all-even though they don’t like me-the reviewers seem to be very diligent and earnest people, anxious to help a gloomy young writer onto the right path, and to safeguard the investment of their readers.
and
By the end of 1947, Cheever still hadn’t produced a manuscript, though he claimed a longish one existed, and finally Linscott suggested he write an outline, at least, to give the salesmen something to Work with. Cheever reluctantly obliged, though he doubted he could convey what was best about the novel-the actual writing-and so took pains to play this up in the outline, which itself is quite cleverly written:
The writing, or the surface of the book, which has concerned me a good deal, seems to me clear and reliable. I speak of the writing since it seems very important to me . . . that it should appear decorous and beautiful and I sometimes think of the story as having the polish, the sentimental charms of a greeting card with an obscene message. . . .
The story centers on a family; the Fields. Aaron, Sarah and their two sons, Tom and Eben. There is much of a country that I love in this book-much scenery, much rain, many semi-colons-for these are bewildered children in a beautiful garden.
The story begins in 1936 and has in it’s opening the appearance of something to be read in bed on a rainy night in an old house. . . .
Sarah Field . . . is stout, she has yielded her beauty without a struggle, she has attended a White House reception, dreamt of carnal relations with Padarewski and two bibles have come apart in her hands. . . .
and
. It might have seemed a good sign that he was inter« viewed for Harvey Breit’s column in the New York Times Book Review, but after their lunch together Cheever fretted in his journal that he’d behaved in an “unstable” and “indiscreet” manner. On the contrary, he’d come across as a “tough-minded short-story advocate” (so Breit wrote), who considered the novel an “artificial” and “anachronistic” form-mot an entirely disinterested apologia, under the circumstances, though actually Cheever’s aesthetic ideas had changed very little over the years, reflecting his View of modern life as fragmented and nomadic: “The short story is determined by moving around from place to place, by the interrupted event. The vigorous nineteenth-century novel is based on parish life and lack of communications. . . . I’ve always noticed that just as people are about to tell you the secret they’re transferred to another city. The way people drop out of sight. Really drop! ”
In that same issue of the Book Review (May 10, 1953) was James Kelly’s critique of The Enormous Radio, which was everything Cheever might have hoped for (if he hadn’t been so morbidly insecure at the time). Kelly described the stories as “miraculous expressions of life among the middle-class have-not-enoughs,” though he added (as did other critics) that the stories were less impressive when read one after another, as the reader discovered a certain sameness of theme and setting. “But not one can be called insignificant or shoddy or inadequately observed,” Kelly concluded. “No American writer in business today is more on top of his genre than Mr. Cheever.” William Peden, writing in the Saturday Review, was also enthusiastic: “John Cheever shows an absolute genius for taking the usual and transforming it into the significant. . . . [He] is one of the most undervalued American short story Writers.”
What Cheever was apt to notice most in Peden’s review, however, Was an incidental remark that his stories were “less spectacular” (albeit more likely to “improve with rereading”) than those of J. D. Salinger, Whose Nine Stories was published around the same time to ecstatic acclaim. Indeed, a comparison of the two books was the basis of one of the most wounding reviews of Cheever’s career-all the worse given that the reviewer, Arthur Mizener, had become one of the nation’s most prominent critics after the recent success of his pioneering Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise. Appearing in The New Republic, Mizener's review was framed as an assessment of the New Yorker story. Salinger exemplified the good sort of NY writer, Cheever was the bad. An empty craftsman.
and
Cheever loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown. He was dismayed by his oldest child, for one thing, as she continued to “overthrow his preconceptions” by remaining, as he put it, “a fat importunate girl.” Cheever was pitiless in judging female beauty--“You were either a dish or a drudge,’ his wife repeatedly insisted-and when the young Susan failed a measure up, he was bewildered and sorry for all concerned. He’d wanted a “frail daughter,” after all, a “wraith” with long blond hair who drove a sports car and went by the kicky name of Susie. In any event they did call her Susie, but to Cheever’s mind the name didn’t jibe with the hoyden who chewed with her mouth open and said all the wrong things (“How long does it take to hang a man?”): “The tragic instant’ -Cheever wrote, during a bad patch when his daughter was all of eight- “when a parent loses faith with his child.”
“They were completely unable to cope with me,” said Susan Cheever, after some fifty years of blessed retrospect. The main issue, as her parents always saw it, was her weight-if only she looked right, everything else would follow-and in a way that was true, since they harassed her
so relentlessly on the subject that her behavior was mostly a matter of reprisal. They put her on diets, made her eat Ayds candies to cut her appetite, and kept up a constant running commentary on what she ate at dinner. Every so often, too, they’d invite her grossly obese pediatrician to the house so he could deliver a stern lecture to the little girl on the evils of overeating. Deprived of snacks and the like, Susan took to stealing food (and therefore eating many times what she would have eaten normally): she hollowed out cakes they were saving for company (leaving a “veneer of icing on top”); she rooted around in drawers, closets, and desks, searching for hidden chocolate and whatever else he could find. “They had no privacy,” she said. “I read everything in the house, I was in every secret compartment of every desk, I became like a little criminal. I was lying, I was cheating, I was stealing. Their cruelty about my weight was not one-way. We were in a dance of death on that subject.” Many years later, after Cheever had stopped drinking, he often assuaged his melancholy by gorging on cheese and crackers: “And I remember, as a father, how ruefully I separated my daughter from her crackers and cheese when all she sought, by stuffing herself, was to understand her place in the world.”
At the time he didn’t see it that way; rather he regarded himself as a loving, well-meaning, long-suffering father who was simply trying to talk his only daughter out of being fat, whereas she in turn responded with unsavory remarks and ties such as banging her head against the wall and constantly sucking her thumb. She wasn’t doing well in school either, and finally (at age eleven) they sent her to a psychiatrist in White Plains named Dr. Sobel. Apparently the man didn’t see what all the fuss was about-certainly the girl was intelligent enough (“She has a Cadillac motor in there,” he observed). The parents were another matter: Dr. Sobel remarked that Mary was a “passive” personality, which (he opined) was why Cheever had married her, whereupon the affronted husband rose from his chair and stood protectively beside his wife. In his own version of the meeting, however, Cheever tended to omit that detail, informing Susan that what Sobel had really said (furtively taking him aside) was: “Be careful. If anyone looked at me the way your Wife looked at your daughter, I’d suck my thumb too!”
Then as later, Cheever had his own way of seeing things, or at least of telling them.
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