The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

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  For the record: On Valentine’s, I give Mary a string of pearls; she gives me a dish. I like china but I would have preferred a suit of underdrawers with hearts on it. I do not claim my pearls; I go to sleep before she comes to bed. I think tonight this fortress is not worth the assault, siege, ladder work, and sometimes broadsword fighting that might be involved. On Saturday we got to the K.s’ for drinks before lunch and I was very happy to be out of my own house. I think I will have an affair. Whom will it harm? Everybody from the infant in the cradle to the old gentleman in retirement in Daytona. But my own house seems dark and darkened by distempers and I do not have the strength or will to overtake them. I feel, most painfully, the lack of tenderness. This involves two things: the lack, and my inability to dress it with humor and love. Susie returns late from town and I am pleased to talk with her. This was all I wanted. But I drink too much and in the morning my liver is painful. We go off to lunch at Z.’s, and sitting in this pleasant room with pleasant people I am at a hundred-percent loss. I can make the gestures, the noises, I can move from the chair where I drink to the chair at the table, but my mind and my spirit are in chaos. Randy at four, I go to bed alone at half past eight with a scalded liver. And lying in bed I lie in great fear of death: death as chaos; death as a force that exposes all the incompleteness in my work—stories half told or untold; journeys only begun; my sons not yet men.

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  And in my makeup there seems to be some kind of knot, some hard-shell and insoluble element that, as far as I can see, conforms to social usage and custom and contradicts the hankerings and declarations of my flesh. It has, I should say, functioned creatively; has made of my life a web of creative tensions. But today it matters less. Its threats, I know, are hollow. Since I am indebted to this mysterious persuasion, perhaps we can live as friends.

  •

  To Princeton on the three o’clock. The unrolling of this industrial landscape, powerful and ugly; but this is where they manufacture your vaginal jellies and your shoe trees, your inner tubes and your floor varnish, your girdles and your shingles, and if we demand so much how can we complain about industrial devastation? Princeton seems to me both tranquil and highly expensive. We seem much farther south. The ponds are stained with the streak of red dirt that runs south through Pennsylvania into Georgia. Distant chimes. Well-dressed youth. O’Hara comes to tea and I find him a fine gentleman but I run up against the old feeling that in the end I will turn out not to be varsity. In the final judgment it will be discovered that I eat my peas off a knife and that there is a hole in the seat of my pants. I speak to an audience of not much more than twelve. On the previous evening, three Beat Generation poets, one of them an advocate of buggery, drew a crowd of hundreds. But I am not very well known and may never be. Home again, pleased to see the landscape touched, oh so lightly, with the spring, and then once more the force and hideousness of the industrial stretches and the great marshes with their outcroppings of stone, their broken hoarding, their tall grasses, a last sanctuary for the criminal, the pursued, the last natural hiding place in this part of the world.

  •

  Easter Eve: dyeing eggs and stuffing the turkey, all pleasant. Easter morning sunny and cool. To church with Susie and Ben. The church for once is full. I am delighted to hear that Christ is risen. I think that it is not against God’s will to have my generative powers refreshed by the face of a pretty woman in a forward pew or to wonder about the hairy and somehow limpid young man on my left. It is the combination of hairiness and wistful grace that seems to mark him. When I hear that Mary found at the tomb a man in white raiment I am incredulous. It is hard for me to believe that God expressed His will, His intent in such a specific image. But when I go to the altar I am deeply moved. The chancel is full of lilies and their fragrance seems as fresh as it is heavy; a sign of good cheer. And that this message should have been revealed to us and that we should cherish it seems to be our finest triumph. Here in the chancel we glimpse some vision of transcendent love, some willing triumph over death and all of its lewd guises. And if it is no more than willingness, how wonderful that is in itself. Walk with my youngest son in the sun. How my whole love of life seems to gather around his form; how he fills me with the finest ambitions. Birds sing. There is a little shimmer of heat. The moment of darkness is gone. He throws sticks into the water, which is a perfectly clear, shallow, and rippled scarf of light. He shuffles through the old leaves.

  Later we go to the B.s’ for the Easter-egg hunt; but I am smitten suddenly with shyness, my smile is strained, my sensibilities are inflamed, I am round-shouldered and bent-necked and dreary and nothing but a pint of bourbon will straighten me out. I count on painkillers until ten, when I retire and, half asleep—courage, lustiness, cleanliness, love, charity, strength, industry, intelligence, vision—I recount to myself a dozen times those virtues I admire.

  •

  B. tells me Fred is suffering from something that happened to him before his adolescence and I think it may have been my birth. I have tried for years to uncover the turning point in his life but this had neve occurred to me. This is a clinical or a quasi-scientific disclosure, but it seems to me as rich as any other revelation. I can readily imagine it all. He was happy, high-spirited, and adored, and when, at the age of seven, he was told that he would have to share his universe with a brother, his forebodings would, naturally, have been bitter and deep. They would have been deepened by the outrageous circumstances of my birth. I was conceived mistakenly, after a sales banquet. My mother carried me reluctantly and my father must have been heard to say that he had no love in his heart for another child. These violent scenes must have given great breadth and intensity to his own conflicts. His feeling for me was always violent and ambiguous—hatred and love—and beneath all of this must have been the feeling that I challenged him in some field where he excelled—in the affections of his parents. I have felt for a long time that, with perfect unconsciousness, his urge was to destroy me. I have felt that there was in his drunkenness some terrible cunning.

  Here then are three worlds—night, day, and the night within the night. Here are the passions and aspirations of the dead, moving freely among us with malevolence and power. Here is a world of open graves. Here is a world where our imagery breaks down. We have no names, no shapes, no lights, no colors to fill out these powers, and yet they are as persuasive as the living. Out of his window he can see the city shining in the light of day and he adores it but he will be motivated less by this vision than by his remembrance of a scream heard in a dark stairwell fifty years ago. They seem to destroy him and to counsel him to destroy me. We seem to be at one another’s throats. We hear the lashing of a dragon’s tail in the dead leaves, the piteous screaming of a child whose eyes are plucked out by a witch, we smell the damps of the snake pit. This suggestion or disclosure seems very important to me and I pray it will be as helpful to Fred.

  •

  After dinner we hear “Tosca,” which I think tremendous. I read “Oblomov” in this empty house. The big window stands open. The loud night sounds on the terrace outside make me uneasy. But what can I be doing that would trouble the unquiet dead? I sleep and wake at dawn—partly my bladder, partly the vigorous noise of nest-building going on among the birds. They can be heard dragging sticks over the tin gutters. They are all singing loudly. Then up springs my capricious muscle, all ready for fun. Downstairs I hear my friend coughing and flushing his toilet. I think about trout water but I resent this forced cheerfulness: I wade down the stream, pool after pool, catch a big trout, and use my hat as a landing net. My muscle keeps up its nagging and complaining and I do not want love or beauty or lewdness, I only want to get back to sleep. I fall asleep at last and have a sweet dream in which I crash a cocktail party at J. P. Marquand’s. I am well liked and passed gracefully from guest to guest. Toward the end P. appears to be with me and when we speak Italian several guests speak Italian with us. At the end my brother appears, drunken, apol
ogetic, and intractable. He comes to spoil the party, not because he wants to, but because he is driven by unreasoning forces. When he was a boy, and after my birth, there was a party in the neighborhood. He was not invited and he went to the house and threw a stone through the window. Now he is reliving this incident in our lives and in my dreams. I wake feeling rested and happy.

  •

  I must think of alcoholism as a progressive disease. It has been for a week or longer that I have, on almost every day, drunk too much. There is also the question of my being denied my desires. This has also been a matter of a week. Even before dinner is put onto the table, I am discouraged. “As soon as the dishes are washed,” says Mary, “I am going upstairs and going to sleep.” This may not be conscious but I think it is intentional. One thing or another. Last night such an array of metal rollers, curlers, and pins that it was discouraging. I awake with a thorn in my groin and think sentimentally of prostitution. Why should the whores be persecuted, arrested, and thrown into jail when all they mean to do is to lead us out of the dilemma, to let us live peacefully with ourselves? And I think of a man who has been denied for six weeks, who is in an agony of desire, who is driven. Where can he turn, where can he go?

  •

  I take Ben and his friends down to the river fishing. Spiders and bumblebees among the rocks on the embankment. The potency of this place, this milieu. Cinders, beer cans, the rusty siding, a freight trai pulling a hundred cars disappearing around the bend, an old man emptying his bladder for the third time in an hour, boys throwing rocks, tough angler in a rowboat—he picks on little kids and makes jokes during catechism—the slow smiles of the Saturday passengers in a train as we wave. A dead-end place but a very peaceful one. It is very peaceful to sit here drinking beer, although I am afraid that the boys will fall off the railroad bridge into the cove. What I am afraid of, it seems, is that I will have to dive in after them. I am a coward.

  •

  Walk in the garden with Federico. He is full of beans. My love muscle is restive. Federico admires the granite lion and the marble dog, he stuffs the faucets with gravel and is not obedient. It will rain. I pick him up in my arms and he falls into a deep sleep. “Oh, I love you,” I say as I carry him. “You are my best; you and the singing of the cardinal birds dissuade me from lust and anger.” I go with Ben to the doctor and he slips his finger up his rump and knocks his b–ls together. What a strange life this must be—this seascape of rumps. There is on his face and in his manner the trace of a terrible loneliness. Mary watches a flock of yellow finches in the garden. There must be fifty. I embrace her and hope to declare my intentions for the evening but in the kitchen there is some unpleasantness. I am oversensitive but what can be done? Anyhow, my desires persist. I help Susie with her homework and go upstairs early but it is already too late. The lights are off. Her eyes are shut and there is so much hardware protruding from her brow that an embrace might be dangerous. You could put out your eye.

  All my kind feelings have been turned into bitterness and anger. I sit on the edge of the bathtub smoking and I resent being forced into this position but if I should earnestly try to explain it I might be answered with peals of callous laughter. I am very angry and I think I have some insight into the bewildering passions of a murderer. And I think that a perverse woman can sometimes, as with my brother, destroy a man. She denies with ridicule his deepest means of self-expression, his whole power of love. He should take a mistress but where will he find one? His secretary is too skinny and has bad breath. It would be indecent to attack the maid. A is too fat and B is too short and C is too passionate and D is not passionate enough and so forth and so on. Oh, she has excellence and kindness, I know, but I do not feel like going on m knees to ask her favors. This morning I feel sad and tired although I hope for the best. She is standing at the window watching the yellow finches in the garden. There are fifty—very shy—and at each movement or voice from the house they fly up into the trees, the hemlocks. Then when it is quiet they come down—yellow, and like a fall of leaves on a cold wind.

  I go into town and decide to lunch with a pretty girl, but when I look up her number in the telephone book my eyes have grown too weak for me to read the pages. I must, to the amazement of a man behind me, strike a match and hold it close to the book to find the number. We will meet and so I walk on the streets for an hour, up past, by chance, the house—the windows—where Mary and I first became lovers. A fine day, and the weather has brought more beauties, more freaks, more everything out onto the sidewalk. It is a spectacle. It is spring and I am happy and will meet a pretty girl at a bar. The bar is dark and full of advertising men. They all seem to drink here regularly; they talk about what happened last night and the night before. R. comes in, very pretty, we lunch and I leave her at her door. I feel better, I am not depressed; there are plenty of pretty women in the world and I am not unattractive. I am cool to Mary. Why should I worry about her intractableness? We go to a concert—three quartets: Mozart, Debussy, and Beethoven—and it is the music that persuades me that I should try to understand Mary, that my emotional responsibilities lie here. This seems to be the purport of all the melodies. Later, when we are together in the bathroom, my desires seem maniacal. “I had lunch at the Nautilus,” she said, “and it was expensive and awful. First I had a floury cup of clam chowder and some old salad, some leftover salad. Then mackerel, very greasy and not fresh. I can still taste it. And some awful broccoli.…” Oh please, please, I groan, please hurry. There is some difference of opinion here.

  •

  Wake at six to a day of such beauty that it seems as if this corner of the planet was all one bloom, all opening and burgeoning, and there is more here than we can say: prismatic lights, prismatic smells, something that sets one’s teeth on edge with pleasure. The morning light is gold as money and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting, the light that cannot be defined, the maple tree, it leaves not yet formed, that is astounding in its beauty and its succulence and that is not itself but one of a million trees, a link in a long chain of experience beginning in childhood.

  Rogation Sunday. There are two known worlds, the visible and the invisible, and this drop of wine and crust is the link between the two. I seem to see the chain of being, reaching from beneath the earth up into the sky. And I think of the prayers that rise up into the chancel: Shall I sell my beer stock? Shall I stay away from Mrs. Piggott? Shall I enter Ralph in Princeton? Shall I turn in the station wagon? But among them some of worth, some of the deepest yearning.

  •

  The lower school here burns down. A rambling frame building with turrets and amendments, saturated in creosote, it seems to explode in flame. Ten minutes after the old teacher smells smoke, it is a pillar of fire. The firemen can’t approach it, the heat is so intense. All the surrounding trees can be seen to wither. Here is the savage power of fire, the smiting force, which, like so much else in life, evades precautions and is ruthless. Within half an hour everything is gone, the clothing, the children’s toys, the souvenirs of travel and athletic prowess, the rich precipitate of their lives. At three o’clock they possessed an environment. At three-twenty they are naked and dependent upon charity. The bitter smoke.

  •

  Year after year I read in here that I am drinking too much, and there can be no doubt of the fact that this is progressive. I waste more days, I suffer deeper pangs of guilt, I wake up at three in the morning with the feelings of a temperance worker. Drink, its implements, environments, and effects all seem disgusting. And yet each noon I reach for the whiskey bottle. I don’t seem able to drink temperately and yet I don’t seem able to stop.

  •

  My forty-seventh birthday and I feel neither young nor old, sprightly in the middle, and pray that I will have done a decent book by the forty-eighth. Shaving, and trying to come to terms with myself, I think that I am a small man, small feet, small p—k, small hands, small waist, an that these are the facts. I must confine my a
ttentions to little, little women, sit in tiny chairs, etc. And then I think of how I hate small men, those whose incurable youth is on them like a stain. How I hate small feet, small hands, small-waisted males who stand behind their small wives at cocktail parties in a realm of timid smallness.

  •

  I would like a more muscular vocabulary. And I must be careful about my cultivated accent. When this gets into my prose, my prose is at its worst.

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  A four-round booze fight, beginning when I take Susie into town and get a nervous stomachache in Ardsley. There is the usual psychological turmoil and I drink two Martinis before lunch and feel very playful. I seem entitled to these drinks. As the afternoon wanes the turmoil waxes, and when I get home I think I deserve a few cocktails. I know that in the morning I will have to take care of Federico—I can’t work—and with this as an excuse I drink after dinner. In the morning I feel sick, disgusted with myself, despairing and obscene. I have a drink to pull myself together at half past eleven and begin my serious drinking at half past four, when I also begin the cooking. I have my excuses. My prudence has been destroyed and when I’ve finished with the dishes I take a tonic dose of nut-brown whiskey. On Saturday I feel even worse. I have a drink before lunch. This seems to leave me with a sick headache, nausea. After dinner we have to pay a call on La Tata; this is a mandatory courtesy, and S. keeps filling my glass with Scotch. On Sunday I feel the worst. I take Federico for a walk. At a quarter after eleven I write an attack on the evils of drink. Then I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin, and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on. Now the bout is over and I am myself again, but I wish I could be done with this.