by John Cheever
To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of as well as the force of lust, to write, to love.
•
May 4th, my son Benjamin was born. My splendid, my forgiving, my gentle wife. Both of us caught up on a tide of stronger circumstance. In the hospital the lamps blooming in the linoleum floor. The delicate lights of the distant amusement park; the city; the highway. The sense that one’s heart and watch are nearly stopped. And Mary’s talk of the universal subconscious, the illusions of gas and ether, the parched taste, the coronas and ridges of fire. The uprush of human greatness that answers to charity and pain. Holiness. The remote neighborhoods of the city—the hospitals, graveyards, and wharves—that we forget. The day that you were born I broke a bottle of bay rum on the bathroom floor. The night before I’d taken your mother to hear Maggie Teyte.
•
Very pleased and excited by Mailer’s book “The Naked and the Dead.” Impressed particularly with its size. Despaired, while reading it, of my own confined talents. I seem, with my autumn roses and my winter twilights, not to be in the big league. Particularly impressed with his description of one man, an Italian, watching Red, an old soldier, and thinking first, This man is comical; then, This man is brave and knowing; then that this man is stupid, reflecting perfectly, clearly a responsive and immature spirit.
Knowing at last that the smell of birch in a Franklin stove is not everything. The morning returns to me my self-confidence and all my limitations. Eccentric I must be, gentle, soft in some ways, broodin, subjective, forced to consider my prose by the ignobility of some of my material.
•
The park on a Sunday night. The light withdrawing from the sky and the life on the walks darkening and intensifying. The unrelieved sexuality of the experience. Small breasts in the streetlight; breasts held in a black dress so the crease shows. Young men travelling in pairs, in threes, whooping, wrestling in the grass. The round lights blooming, the shapes of the trees, the shapes and lights of venery itself. And the music, the much-used, the ill-used music, music that had been played through rainsqualls and thunderstorms, music to which people had eaten in restaurants and on park benches, music used to swell a climax in a radio play or to bring to their resolution the terrible problems of a movie; music played in high-school auditoriums with that smell of radiators, played from memorial bandstands in India, Italy, New Hampshire … At a turning of the path, the fragrance of a garden. The strong sense of youth, although many here are old; the innocent lusts.
•
We are as poor as we ever have been. The rent is not paid, we have very little to eat, relatively little to eat: canned tongue and eggs. We have many bills. I can write a story a week, perhaps more. I’ve tried this before and never succeeded, and I will try again.
•
New York-Quincy—New Haven—New York. I took a plane late Thursday morning. This casual sense of travel, of writing about it easily, garrulously. The taxi, the delayed plane, a Martini and a roast-beef sandwich in the Commodore or Longchamps, the dark half-empty news-reel theatre, the gray-and-white refugees that have for so long been marching across its screen, the bus to the airport and the plane itself, hot and decorated for some reason like a bedroom, the place names on its window curtains. The revved motors, the instantaneous charm slums achieve when they have fallen a thousand feet beneath your wings, the sense that the small plane remained earthbound and overburdened and remained a few thousand feet above Long Island only because of the greatest exertion of its motors. A storm at the edge of the afternoo, like a fire in heaven, the smoke of which was blown down from the clouds and spread over the earth, the dimness of smoke. That Boston from the air seemed to have an Irish complexion …
How small and ingenuous Boston seems. Out to Quincy. Mother, still restive, still willful. In the morning the train to New Haven, the cast of characters there. And also Quincy, this bleak town on a Christmas Eve. The people waiting in the glow from the drugstore window for the trolley car to the shipyards, the ironworks. The Christmas plumage of the women and the men. And all through the day, all through the night, from hidden and from unhidden amplifiers carollers singing “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” and bells playing “Silent Night, Holy Night.” The beauty of a piece of tail.
•
The New Yorker has turned down “Vega,” “Sisyphus,” “The Reasonable Music” and probably will turn down “George.” The fact that they have paid me no bonus this year and less than a living wage sets me off, frequently, on an unreasonable tangent of petulance. This is a patriarchal relationship, and I certainly respond to the slings of regret, real or imaginary.
•
I have a slight cold, nothing serious, but it acts as a depressant, and fever and a hacking cough have always affected my stability. Also the fact that I infrequently cough up a little blood fills me with premonitions of death that seem to be pure petulance. Last night, for reasons that I understand, my wife suggested that I leave her for a little while, a suggestion that I can’t take reasonably. The kind of pride that can articulate itself only in something perverse, like a long separation or a divorce, has been excited. A long separation would be dangerous since neither of us is very communicative or forgiving. There is some part of her that is not gregarious or affectionate, that has never been yielded to me or to anyone else without pain. She was alone much when she was a young girl and the habits of solitude sometimes return to her. Now and then, by a complete absence of privacy, she feels suffocated. She is entitled to this—I recognized it when I met her and married her. There is also the fact that my life, recently, has had all the characteristics of a failure.
•
Last night, folding the bath towel so the monogram would be in the right place (and after reading a piece on Rimbaud by Zabel), I wondered what I was doing here. This concern for outward order—the flowers, the shining cigarette box—is not only symptomatic of our consciousness of the cruel social disorders with which we are surrounded but also enables us to delay our realization of these social disorders, to overlook the fact that our bread is poisoned. I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
•
Love, love on a spring night. The cotton lace of her nightgown, the fresh perfume of some lotion or cologne she has used in getting ready for bed, her dark hair and her pale and hardly visible face and the lace of broken and reflected streetlights, scored by the window frames and the folds of the curtains, that lie across both our bodies. The perfect unburdenment of tenderness and disappointment, the perfect response of one body to another, of one answering the other, and the slow journey toward that captivation of our faculties, into that country whose violence remains alien and overwhelming; and then a sweet sleep.
The pyramid, the gods.
Read the Italian grammar, read whatever French you happen to read with a dictionary. How we will eat this month is a real question.
I have recounted my unsuccessful stories over again and again, planned to revise them and felt that this was aiming below the mark, and so have waited for something better, but nothing better has come and I must look on these stories as a business venture and finish them off, as second-rate as they seem. I will have “The Reasonable Music.” This should be revised again and sent off.
There is “Vega,” this lacks some intrinsic drama. I want to dramatize the irresponsible interference of the intellectual. I can’t seem to breath fire into Atcheson. I will read that over again, at once, and see what I have.
There is “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor.” This can be a reasonably funny story.
There is “Emma Boynton.” This is slight, but it might sell.
•
Back from two days fishing at Cranberry wit
h G. and J. (the eleventh of May). Very little to report; less than from most trips. There seemed to be nothing—no color, no sound—that I had to name. We took the train to North White Plains, where J. met us. We got worms at Armonk, fish poles in Chappaqua, and then started north, up the Taconic Parkway. An unseasonably hot, late afternoon in the early spring and at four or five turnings in the road the green valley country, below us, opened like a vision of the peaceable kingdom. We stopped at an inn in Rhine-beck for supper, ten minutes before dark. Green light. A woman taking down the flag in front of the post office. A summer evening in a river village that, even on the eve of war, would lose none of this repose, this fat tranquillity. Then up through the dark, through Albany and Saratoga, to Glens Falls. A hotel room, a hotel bar, a window looking out onto an empty, green park with a white bandstand, a self-contained city with trees everywhere, settled comings and goings, continuity, custom. A sinking moon. Sitting naked in the rock-maple armchair, drinking straight Scotch, unable to sleep, thinking of my wife’s face in its frame of brown hair; unable to sleep; watching the moon set. In the morning a stubborn rain was falling through the elms, the graceful elms in the park. The settled comings and goings of this city in a May rain.
Then up through Lake George and Warrensburg; reminded by Lake George of that particular life; sunburn and swimming, Peg and gin. Then up into the mountains through a light so powerful and colorless that it seemed, as it does in New Hampshire at dawn, as if you were looking through a lens. To Cranberry and up the lake by Warren’s boat to the camp. Here, briefly, a peculiar, a nearly indescribable disorder. Old Saturday Evening Post and Woman’s Home Companion covers nailed with rusted tacks to the walls, the Grecian Arts calendar of 1909, wall after wall curtained with old clothes, old union suits and Norfolk jackets, old flannels with moth grit in their folds, and from a crisscross of wire on the ceiling, hung by their laces, holey saddle shoes and sneakers, moccasins, pack boots, leather-and-rubber high boots, none of them useful but all of them saved for some use in the future. This collection of useless clothing embodies something for her, perhaps for both of them.
The ugliness and wildness of this country. Like derelict masts, dead pines stand in all the shallow water. New poplar and yellow birch cover the hills. Beaver dams. Ducks and geese. We fished off a dock on Saturday and caught ten trout, throwing your baited hook into the dark body of the lake to connect with a pugnacious trout. We fished off the dock Saturday, Saturday night I couldn’t sleep again, and on Sunday G. and I packed the rubber boat and walked through the woods to Darning Needle Pond. The striking bleakness the dead trees give to the pond, as if they were the relics of some human failure. White light reflected on the black water. Cold. Misery. Frying eggs. Fished all day and took nineteen trout. Back through the woods just before dark and across the lake in an outboard. Saw a deer. Slept soundly.
•
These two people, or these three, counting myself. He never smiled at her, or gave her a kind word, and whenever she began to express an opinion he sighed and left the room. His impatience and neglect is expressed in her long face. She seems pleasant sometimes and sometimes convinced—by his impatience—that she is a fool. Did her brothers, her father do this, too? A lonely woman. A lonely and foolish woman, doing what is expected of her. Making the beds. Having the fires lighted when we return. Cooking our dinner. And then, long after we have finished, making herself something to eat, drinking six cups of coffee, forgetting her lighted cigarette, reduced to a mean position and reconciled to it, almost as if she were an alcoholic or sustained some similar, hopeless weakness—foolishness perhaps—a weakness that was not discovered until after the marriage contract, after the children were born, and, talking once all night, they have agreed to include this vice, whatever it is, in their marriage and to live with it until they die. Now that I think of them sitting by the fire, I think of them as a man and a woman, not speaking, who are bound together by the knowledge they share of some tragedy, some hideous miscarriage of their efforts, but who will remain together because of their love of their children and their regar for law. I know that this is not true, that none of their children drowned, that they have not poisoned a relative for his money, that this unspeakable crime that lies between them is only the consequence of their ordinary comings and goings, of an unkind word here, a disappointment there, but it lies on them as heavily as any vice, as murder. He has an exalted regard for social law, a puritanical regard for this, and is so diffident that it was hard for him to point the privy out to me, and when I took off my pants to dry them I think he disapproved. He looks with disapproval on all nakedness, as my father used to. I like him; sometimes I feel for him the profound delight of friendship but when I feel this, it seems like misery speaking to misery. What an exchange. How despairing. He is not a guilty one, but he seems to move, ahead of me, down the trail to the lake, like one who has become involved by chance in a hideous crime.
After drinking two bottles of beer in the diner, I decided that man is not physical, man is bestial. I am troubled, however, by the sexual interpretation I put on everything—that the mountains should look to me like knees and clavicles—but this seems to be one of the burdens of men without grace. Within ten minutes a trainman at Tupper Lake, a porter, two waiters, and a salesman told me that they could use a good eight inches of it; they could give a good eight inches of it. Money and lust are prevalent in the talk you overhear.
•
I am tired, but this will pass. I love my wife’s body and my children’s innocence. Nothing more.
•
Yesterday. A hot, midsummer day, past haying weather. Hot. In the back rooms the smell of burning paper from the heat. Then how subtly the air becomes fresh at dark and how a perfectly round, pale moon comes out of the woods. There is the excitement of autumn in the cool damp air and the light of the moon, coming back across the field through the orchard, the rich smell of windfalls, the beautiful flavor of an apple—and the next day will be still, hot, the next moonlight night will seem like fall; this variety, this continuous and stimulating play on your senses and your memory. How subtly the autumn arrives on the northwest wind and the full moon. There is really no summer at all; the summer is an illusion. The flowers are formed on the goldenro by the Fourth of July, the green of the maples has begun to fade. The calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones.
•
I keep telling myself that this cannot go on, no, no, no, that this is all wrong. Lunch at the Algonquin, the Shaws coming back from Cap d’Antibes. Eleanor from Rome, the Perelmans from Siam, Capa giving Irwin a party in someone else’s apartment, the feeling when I hear the mail slap the floor of the hall that among the letters there may be a message of love, friendship, an honor or a check. That sitting at the breakfast table I must be saved. Waking after a deep sleep, so invigorated with sexual energy there is no room in my world for doubt. But why then are my evenings so different: gin, the smell of cooking, the sound of children’s slippers on a staircase, the feeling that one is incarcerated by beautiful and hideous things. Wondering, should this be fatal, whether I have the brains to extricate myself.
•
Nov. 27th. Snowing.
•
Dec. 5th. Partly at my wife’s suggestion I’ve given the Saul Bellow novel a thorough reading. Here is the blend of French and Russian that I like, the cockroach and the peeling wallpaper described with precision and loathing. The principal force of the work I think is poetic. Some of it (“I stand upon bones,” etc.) is bad poetry. I think some of it is very good. I have always been pleased with light and I am always pleased with descriptions of it. Through the desperate choices of my own unhappy mind I have developed, and struggled to discard, a detailed method, but I find Bellow’s detail impressive. It comes back to trying to find justification for the sentiment, carnality, and melodrama in my own work.
•
Yesterday I took Susie to a party on Fifth Avenue given for their daughter by a French-Swiss couple. The pre
tty parlormaid, the melodious French voices, the pink rooms, the smell of candy and perfume like an expensive confectioner’s on a late-winter afternoon; and my own awkward shyness. I asked the elevator man to wait for me and left he at the door, although I can at least do this much better. Then walking down Fifth Avenue; the crowds pouring out of the Metropolitan, the people walking north from the Frick gallery, where the Stradivarius had been playing a Beethoven quartet. The light in the sky is sombre, there is a brume in the air. The dead city trees of Central Park are massed like a thicket in the sombre light. In the brume the long double track of street lamps seems yellow. This appears to be a city of the Enlightenment—like Paris or London at the turn of the century; the irreducible evidence of man’s inventiveness; progress.
My style seems ruminative and soft; my descriptive powers are not what I would like them to be. I want to let some air and light into this room; waking up this morning I thought that I could use a brisk fistfight. I would like to write a story but not the New Jersey night, not the man in Columbus Circle, nothing overbalanced with morbidity, something with bulk and power. Not the heat wave. The news that it was snowing in Berlin.
A guest at the Shaws’, like P., who should, by the way, have come from the West. She came from the West. The delicate coloring of a young woman, a slight cast in one eye, a purple scarf printed with green triangles tied around her neck. “You know that this is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception?” she asked. Then she went on to say that she had been brought up as a Catholic, that her parents had objected to her marrying a Jew, that they still referred to her by her maiden name. “And that’s nothing,” she said. “On the day we were married, they tried to stop it physically.” What I mean is that she is more simple than we. We were sitting around drinking cocktails and eating hors d’oeuvres. She said, “I want a truthful answer: What is a Jew?”
•
Christmas in Boston, Quincy, New Haven, etc. It is a tonic for my self-respect to leave the basement room. The plane to Boston was delayed. The flight was through clouds, and rough. My taxi in Boston got locked in a traffic jam in Charlestown and I walked into the city. Dark and rainy. I go out to Quincy, by trolley car, subway, and bus. In inlets, bays, and tidal rivers along the north-Atlantic coast there are many one-room yacht clubs, ramshackle boat liveries, shacks where bait is sol, oars and dinghies are rented that look as if they had been built, and may have been built, from rubbish salvaged from the sea bottom or left by the tides on the clay banks. The tin chimneys are wired together out of scrap. The crackers and cheese are hung in a basket from the ceiling to protect them from water rats. The signs—BAIT FOR SALE, BOATS FOR RENT—might have been printed by a child in the first grade. In looking at these enterprises, these shacks and piers, it is impossible to draw a line between human endeavor and the sea. Salvaged out of sea waste again. Along the sinking coastline the temporalness of these bait shacks and boat liveries seems to spread into the towns and cities. The biggest houses—the bank—could be demolished by a wave. The sea is omnipresent. At high tide a lake of brine appears in the parking lot of the paint factory. There is a foot of water in the used-car lot. Etc.
