Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  The opening paragraph of the novel at once establishes the poignant tone of the book, fluctuating between celebration and mourning. It begins as a kind of urban pastoral that quickly descends to the sorrowful.

  Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station … resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness.

  Though we travel mostly by plane, the narrator goes on, the spirit of the country is reflected in our railroads.

  You wake in a pullman bedroom at three A.M. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on a platform with a child in his arms. They are waving goodbye to some traveller, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying?

  The suggestions are somber, yet this is a novel that will end with the almost miraculous rescue of one of the principal characters from a madman bent on murder.

  In its barest outline, Bullet Park tells the story of three characters: Eliot Nailles, Paul Hammer, and Nailles’s son, Tony. In the first half of the novel, Tony succumbs to a deep sadness and is unable to rouse himself from bed. Neither conventional medicine nor quack doctors can cure his malaise. Finally he is restored to health by the Swami Rutuola, “a spiritual cheerleader” who reinvigorates him by persuading him to repeat cheers of place—“I am in a house by the sea”—and love and hope cheers—“Love, Love, Love …,” “Hope, Hope, Hope.…” In the second half of the book Tony faces another danger in the person of Hammer, who has been sent by his psychotic mother to commit a ritual murder that will arouse the modern world from a torpor induced by drugs and commercialism and rootlessness. At first Hammer plans to kill Nailles, who helps to peddle a mouthwash called Spang. Then he switches to Tony as his victim. In the end, aided by a message from the Swami, Nailles saves his son from Hammer’s attempt to immolate him in the chancel of Christ’s Church and so “awaken the world.”

  Casting this improbable plot into viable fictional form was not easy. Cheever began with the legend of William Tell in mind. He wanted to tell an uncomplicated story of a man’s love for his son, but it threatened to turn into an indictment of contemporary existence. In their restless rootlessness, his characters die in rapid transit. One woman has to get stoned before venturing onto the New Jersey Turnpike, where she perishes. A commuter, standing innocently on the station platform, is sucked under the New York-Chicago express as it comes helling through; one highly polished loafer is all that remains to signify his passing. And the action takes place in a suburb, Bullet Park, that is a slightly darker version of Proxmire Manor, which was a slightly darker version of Shady Hill.

  In his extensive notes for Bullet Park, Cheever revealed his distress about the lack of sensual imagery in the book. “Where are the smells, the lights, the noise, the music?” he asked. More intentionally, he omitted the coarser language of sexual intercourse, leaving it to others to write “about cocks and cunts and arseholes.” But he could not ignore obscene behavior and casual lust, which are as pervasive in Bullet Park as in The Wapshot Scandal. Eliot Nailles’s wife, Nellie, goes to an off-Broadway show one afternoon, where a man appears naked onstage and unselfconsciously scratches himself. On the way home, she witnesses an episode of love play between two homosexuals, and arrives back in Bullet Park shaken.

  The major technical problems Cheever faced in writing Bullet Park involved point of view, the novel’s ending, and the relationship between Hammer and Nailles. In effect, there are three narrative voices in the book. First of all, there is the basic storyteller, who reports the action reliably and straightforwardly. Second, there is the flat, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sinister sound of Hammer’s autobiographical journal: “a quiet stovelid on terror and rage,” John Gardner called it. Finally, there is an occasional comment from a narrator who stands above the action, rather like an anthropologist reporting (and sometimes making judgments) on the mores and customs of this late-twentieth-century civilization. At first Cheever planned to develop this third narrator more overtly. He would read about the murder attempt in the newspaper, and go on to interview Nailles and pore over Hammer’s papers. This device was abandoned, however. In the novel as it stands the observations of this narrator are made without apology or any explanation of who and where they come from.

  Ending the book proved difficult. From notes and editorial correspondence, it is possible to reconstruct four different approaches to a satisfactory finish. At first, Cheever speculated, Bullet Park might close with a man on a train, thinking about all the houses he had lived in. Next he proposed that the novel end with Nailles, tranquilized, floating down the tracks into Grand Central like Zeus upon a cloud and beaming “a vast and slightly absentminded smile at poverty, sickness, wealth, the beauty of strange women, the rain and the snow.” (This passage eventually appeared midway through the published novel.) Then he added one sentence as a finale: “Everything was as wonderful as it had been.”

  This conclusion struck Bob Gottlieb at Knopf as rather too abrupt. He did not want to presume as an “Editor,” he wrote Cheever, but felt the novel needed “a little more breathing space at the end.” Candida Donadio agreed, and Cheever offered three variations on the last paragraph. Instead of “Everything was as wonderful as it had been,” he suggested, the book could finish with a liturgical flair, by multiplying the “wonderfuls” and adding “world without end” or “forever and ever.”

  Still later he composed the final ending to Bullet Park:

  Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.

  That Nailles still needs his daily drugging to ride the train to work undermines the celebratory note, the fourth “wonderful” counteracts the triadic resonance of the original three, and the religious references to “world without end” and “forever and ever” have been stripped away. As a consequence, the novel ends in an ambiguity that invites contradictory interpretations. Did Cheever intend these lines to be taken as “an affirmation out of ashes” or as bitter irony? In his Time cover story of 1964, he insisted that he wanted his fiction “to bring glad tidings to someone.” Yet he could not bring himself, at the finish of Bullet Park, to declare those tidings unambiguously. He was torn, as his novel was divided, between the contrary instincts to praise the wonder of the natural creation and to deplore the chaos that humankind has wreaked upon it.

  The world of Bullet Park is spiritually arid. Though Nailles goes to his knees once a week in gratitude for “the thighs of Nellie and his love for his son,” most religious observances have become a sham and their rituals debased. Attending church with Nailles is the recent convert Mrs. Trencham, who practices “competitive churchmanship.” She utters her amens well in advance of the rest of the congregation, surpasses everyone in the grace of her genuflections and the perfection of her credo and confession, and when challenged throws in “a few signs of the cross as a proof of the superiority of her devotions.” The diocesan bishop recommends that churchgoers turn on their windshield wipers to signify their belief in the life to come. Blessed by an evangelist in London, Hammer feels “completely cleansed and forgiven” and ready for whatever purpose life may hold for him, including symbolic murder. When Hammer arrives in Bullet Park, the mercenary Father Ransome sizes him up as “good for at least five hundred a year.”

  Cheever doubted the validity of his own faith at this time. He hadn’t taken communion for a long time, but now he did. Death was on his mind. Basically, his was a religion of nature. He took a lyrical delight in the natural creation, and invested his favored characters with a similar sensitivity. “Give me back the mountains,” Tony says as depression overtakes him. His father, also keenly attuned to nature, loves to see the leaves blowing through the headlights. “I mean th
ey’re just dead leaves, no good for anything, but I love to see them blowing through the light.” When Nailles comes home one night, the rain lets up and he can distinguish the different sounds that the wind makes as it fills up different trees: “maple, birch, tulip and oak.” What good is this knowledge? he thinks, and with Cheever answers the question: “Someone has to observe the world.” In this process of observation, natural objects become holier than relics, manifesting the sacred. Which came first, Bullet Park asks, “Jesus the carpenter or the smell of new wood?” As Dana Gioia expressed it, Cheever “was less a Christian than a Deist, but one who felt most comfortable worshipping with familiar liturgy in a traditional church.” In his own Episcopal churchgoing, he went to the short early-morning Mass and avoided the sermon. The world outdoors awaited him.

  The trickiest puzzle Cheever had to solve in writing Bullet Park was that of the relationship between Hammer and Nailles. It was one thing to see them as symbiotic, bound together by “the mysterious power of nomenclature.” It was another to make that bond convincing and credible. In undertaking that task, he used his brother, Fred, and “the division in my own spirit,” yet for a long time he had trouble seeing the men whole.

  On the surface, they are very different men indeed. Nailles is an ordinary man with no superior qualities, not heroic or brilliant yet capable of love and blessed with the capacity to admire the creation. Content with his lot, he naively tries to live in a state of prelapsarian innocence and to protect his family from all harm. He wishes his love were “like some limitless discharge of a clear, amber fluid that would surround them, cover them, preserve them and leave them insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic.” But he cannot so shield them. Pain and suffering penetrate the cocoon.

  If Nailles would be the rational preserver of family and community, Hammer represents the obsessed and deranged destroyer. A bastard with a madwoman for a mother, he is a wanderer, forever in quest of a house with a yellow room that will somehow, he hopes, relieve him of the cafard that travels with him. His wife, Marietta, is a harridan who abuses and emasculates him. Hate rules his existence as love dominates that of Nailles. In his notes, Cheever also sketched out their sexual distinctions. Nailles takes a healthy pleasure in lovemaking. Hammer, on the other hand, repeatedly insists on his masculinity, yet the word “impotence” can make him flinch.

  Despite these distinctions, Hammer and Nailles share certain crucial similarities. Hammer’s persistent depression, for instance, is paralleled by Nailles’s sudden phobia about trains and by Tony’s irrational sadness. Far more striking is their joint propensity to violence. On four different occasions, Nailles contemplates murdering someone. Once the intended victim is his beloved son, Tony, the boy Hammer chooses as his victim. Another time Nailles is visited by murderous feelings toward Hammer when he suggests that Nailles shoot his old hunting dog. The implication in the novel is that the impulse toward murder shelters deep in the recesses of ordinary people. “Have you ever committed a murder?” the generalizing narrator asks the readers of Bullet Park. “Have you ever known the homicide’s sublime feeling of rightness?”

  Whether Cheever fashioned his characters that way or not—and he insisted that he did not—Hammer and Nailles emerge as two sides of the same person, as fragments of a single divided psyche. Furthermore, both of these figures, and Tony Nailles as well, represent facets of the author’s own personality. He shared a cafard with Hammer, along with a sense that he was mistreated by his wife and an embarrassing habit of falling “suddenly in love with men, women, children, and dogs.” He shared with Nailles a devotion to home and family, regular churchgoing, a fondness for working with the chain saw, and the train phobia. Like Tony, he was beset by a lassitude born of depression. “I would like to stay in bed for two weeks,” he confided. So he resorted to incantations much like the Swami’s “cheers of place” to rouse himself from bed.

  In the winter of 1969, while the book was in press, Cheever broke his leg skiing. He was showing off for a pretty woman, he admitted, and ended up in the emergency room. The leg was still in a cast on the eve of publication, when he entertained interviewer Leslie Aldridge from New York magazine in the St. Regis Hotel room Knopf was paying for. He ordered up a bottle of gin and another of Scotch, and drank half the bottle of gin while plying Aldridge with the Scotch. He talked engagingly if not entirely reliably about his working routine, his wife and family, his personal finances, even his compulsions. “I chain smoke, I chain drink. I chain everything else.… I love to drink. I’m hooked on it. I drink a lot but I don’t drink heavily when I’ve got to work the next day.”

  That was a stretcher, and so was his drastic assertion about reviews: “I do read reviews of my books but they don’t affect me.” In his journal, too, he reassured himself that he had done the best he could and hence should not be bothered by criticism. Nonetheless, he was devastated by Benjamin DeMott’s review that ran on the front page of the New York Times Book Review for Sunday, April 27.

  DeMott’s review rehearsed the usual objections to Cheever’s long fiction. Structurally the book was “broken-backed, parts tacked together as the Hammer-Nailles ploy of nomenclature suggests.” Stylistically it read like a short story, which could get by with setting down what happened, and not like a novel, which demanded explanations. Moreover, DeMott thought that Bullet Park had replaced the pure energy of the Wapshot books with “a sluggishness, a heaviness, a crude useless film slicking bright wings.” The tone throughout was antagonistic. With its “grand gatherum of late 20th-century American weirdos,” DeMott conceded, Bullet Park might provide “a necessary fix” to the legion of Cheever addicts, since he was “a topline fictional entertainer.” Otherwise the novel’s discontinuity, its non sequiturs, its “sad, licked lyricism” were disappointing.

  In the same issue with this review, the Times ran an interview of Cheever by Lehmann-Haupt, and two days later in the daily Times John Leonard wrote a favorable review of the novel, but DeMott’s front-page Sunday assault had its effect. Sales amounted to thirty-three thousand copies only, and did not earn back the advance.

  Unlike DeMott’s, most reviews of Bullet Park were respectful, though somewhat mystified. Cheever seemed “carried away by the flood tide of his imagination,” Anatole Broyard observed. The novel was full of brilliant digressions and incidental felicities, but what was it that the author set out to say? The problem lay in the presumption that a novel, unlike a poem, must not only be but also mean. Latter-day enthusiasts, determined to rescue Cheever’s novel from critical limbo, have struggled to impose a pattern of order on it. It is a religious novel, one argues. The themes of “chance” and “evil” knit it together, another maintains. But the book will not yield to tidy explications. As Stephen C. Moore has divined, “Bullet Park is not about a ‘mystery,’ it is a mystery.…” If there are answers to the questions, solutions to the problems, ways out of the quandaries therein depicted, Cheever and his narrators are not at all sure what they are. The book ends in ambiguity, on purpose.

  In a very real sense, Bullet Park confesses Cheever’s own uncertainties and discontinuities. He invests a troubled part of himself in each of the three principal characters, and the criticisms of contemporary culture embedded in the novel may be regarded as projections of his private malaise. As with The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever felt almost suicidal when he finished Bullet Park. He would never be able to write in that vein again, he knew, and he was rawly sensitive to any implied disapproval of the book. Philip Roth wrote to congratulate him, singling out parts of the novel he liked. “I’m glad you liked those pages,” Cheever replied. “I liked all the pages of your book [Portnoy’s Complaint].” So he did, and regaled his guests one evening with a reading from Portnoy’s outrageous adventures. Mary Cheever was wearing a beautiful yellow dress that night, Steve Becker recalls. She looked like a jonquil, her husband told her, and made him feel like a honeybee.

  Such glimpses of sunshine were rare. By May his leg had healed,
but he still felt crippled by a “massive melancholy.” The struggle with drinking also continued. “A day for me; a day for the hootch.” The incantations that worked for Tony were not working for him.

  I am no longer sitting under an apple tree in clean chinos reading. I am sitting naked in the yellow chair in the dining room. In my hand there is a large crystal glass filled to the brim with honey-colored whiskey.… I am sitting naked in a yellow chair drinking whiskey and smoking six or seven cigarettes.

  He needed help, and no Swami Rutuola was at hand. Bullet Park depicts a series of incompetent and venal psychiatrists—the worst of them circles his patient’s chair like a dentist and sells real estate on the side—yet it was a psychiatrist that Cheever consulted in the valley of his depression.

  Cheever saw Dr. J. William Silverberg eleven times between May and November 1969. For the most part the treatment stayed on a superficial level. Cheever wanted it that way. He chatted with Silverberg as if they were at a cocktail party, withholding himself behind a facade of charm. And as the psychiatrist acknowledges, he may have been a little awed by this remarkable patient, this man of genius in trouble.

  At their first meeting the problem seemed to be alcoholism. Cheever had been drinking before he arrived. He spoke of his phobias, and how he needed a drink to cross a bridge. Susan had told him six months ago that he was drinking too much, he said. At the second session, however, depression seemed to be the most serious problem. His current spell of depression had begun about eight months earlier, he said, or about at the time he put the final touches on Bullet Park, but he had been depressed on and off for years. There was also a hint of an identity problem related to the characters in his fiction. “I’ve begun to feel they’re walking into my life instead of my walking into theirs.” He discussed his homosexual concerns, too. His relationship with his brother had been “psychologically incestuous,” he said. He felt a need “to prove his sexual prowess over and over.” He loved the feeling of discharge: of semen, urine, feces, sweat. He outlined the story of his parents: his father’s losing his money, his mother and the gift shop, her “dominant, eccentric, opinionated” nature. He gave Silverberg an inscribed copy of The Wapshot Chronicle. “A loving novel about my father,” he called it, but it contained feelings of hostility toward him as well, Silverberg concluded after reading it.