The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indescribable beauty, raised to gods that have never been seen; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and comfortable auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; and thousands or perhaps even millions of museums where man’s drive to celebrate life is recorded. Here the joy of women’s breasts and backsides, the colors of water, the shapes of trees, athletes, dreams, houses, the shapes of ecstasy and dismay, the shape even of an old shoe, are celebrated. Let us rush to see the world. They serve steak there on jet planes, and dance at sea. They have invented musical instruments to express love, peaceableness; to stir the finest memories and aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of young men. They have ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. They make their vows to music and the sound of bells. They have invented ways to heat their houses in the winter and cool them in the summer. They have even invented engines to cut their grass. They have free schools for the pursuit of knowledge, pools to swim in, zoos, vast manufactories of all kinds. They explore space and the trenches of the seas. Oh, let us rush to see this world.

  •

  To put down what I know as well as what I hope to know. To describe my alcoholic thirst beginning at nine in the morning and becoming sometimes unmanageable at eleven-thirty. To describe the humiliation of stealing a drink in the pantry and the galling taste of gin; to write about the weight of discouragement and despair; to write about a nameless dread; to write about the gruelling seizures of unfounded anxiety; to write about the horror of failure. The struggle to recoup an acuteness of feeling, the feeling that a margin of hopefulness has been debauched.

  •

  Hung over after the holiday and feeling painfully worn, I go through the motions of waking, eating, dressing. Go to the train. I think on the platform that I may faint, spin around, and fall down, a searing pai in my side. I breathe deeply of the north wind. A. joins me, and I stay close to him in case of trouble. On the train I tell myself, in a kind of panic, the long story of Donna Orieta, including her cocktail party. I have a drink at the Biltmore, where my hand is shaking so that it is difficult to get the glass to my mouth. A young man down the bar gives me a hound-dog look; when we succumb to alcohol we lose our self-esteem all the way down the line. Lunch at the club, where I am blotto, and go to the Biltmore to dry out. It is, as I have said before, a little like Hell. Fifteen or twenty naked men wander around. None of them is comely. The air smells of pine scent, as unlike the freshness of pine as anything in the world. A fat man in the shower soaps his cock. Does he have an erection? I look away.

  •

  I skate; I knock a puck around with my son—the pleasures of this simple fleetness, this small prowess. The light on the snowfields, and I see it as I move, all purple and gold. Back here, the library flooded with the last light of day, chrysanthemums, Christmas music on the piano, Ben plays with the manger that we brought from Rome. The setting is nearly perfect, but I seem suspended in it; seem unable either to cast it down or to bring it to a climax. Shall I ask the As, the Bs, the Cs for a drink? Then my narcissism, if that’s what it is, will reach a climax. What a beautiful house, they will say, what a perfectly beautiful house. So the sun goes down, the fields turn blue, I turn on lamps and warm myself at the fire. What do I want: a furnished room, a doorway on a windy street?

  •

  A dark, raw day, me cold and depressed. I might bring it off with a narrator; it means a lot of work. Finish the Nabokov, that violet-flavored nightmare. To construct a novel from footnotes is a brilliant eccentricity, but the homosexual king disconcerts me. Mary takes the boys off to see the Nativity play, and I sit around the dining room drinking and playing records; Schumann and Louis Armstrong. I plan a large cocktail party; I write a letter to the Social Register, I give my daughter away in marriage. I should read. I should write. I should translate a page of Italian. But all I do is drink and polish the candlesticks. Oh, to put it down, and to put it dow with the known colors of life: the reds of courage, the yellows of love.

  •

  I dream that I see my mother, leaving the state capitol in Boston, where she has gone to defend some good cause. She wears a long black coat with a fur collar, a tricorne hat. The flight of steps that separates us appears to be the steps of a Spanish church up which the last of a wedding procession is moving. When the procession has gone I go to my mother. “I’m very tired,” she says, “I’m terribly tired.” Her voice is small, a little cracked. Before I can reach her she falls. Her body begins to roll down the stairs, and I think with horror that she may go all the way, but the fall is stopped; she lies sprawled on the lifts.

  •

  New Year’s Day, and I shall make something illustrious of this year. The entire nation is in the grip of an unprecedented cold wave. Villages and cities isolated. Men, women, and children without heat or food. Etc. J. writes from Iowa; Ohio, rather. He will return. The wind from the river is better. Young Ben, Susie, and I drink and play records. “Shall we open the Upstairs at the Downstairs in the Outdoors?” I ask. Is there something ridiculous about this man of fifty, dancing the Charleston?

  During dinner, Susie says, “You have two strings to play. One is the history of the family, the other is your childlike sense of wonder. Both of them are broken.” We quarrel. She cries. I feel sick. We make up, but I feel the generation of that bitterness which overwhelmed me on Christmas Eve. I cannot check it. My first resolve is to ask my family to help me with my drinking. Since I seem unable to handle it myself, I must find someone to help me. My second resolve, and this in a spate of bitterness, is that I will learn to disregard their interference. I think, abysmally bitter, that Orpheus knew he would be torn limb from limb; but he had not guessed that the Harpy would be his daughter. I lose at darts to my son and scold Mary about my dilemma. No money, no place to work in, no chair, even, to sit upon. I wake this morning, remorseful, exhausted, to begin a new year. The sky is the dark blue of high altitude.

  •

  Snow lies under the apple trees. We picked very few of the apples, enough for jelly, and now the remaining fruit, withered and golden, lies on the white snow. It seems to be what I expected to see, what I had hoped for, what I remembered. Sanding the driveway with my son, I see, from the top of the hill, the color of the sky and what a paradise it seems to be this morning—the sky sapphire, a show of clouds, the sense of the world in these, its shortest days, as cornered. Later, much later, clouds rise up all around the sky like the walls of a well, but then, when we are coasting, the sun, very low, breaks through this wall, seems to single out windows from which to flash its chill and yellow light, floods the valley and the house with color. I lay a fire in the library, play backgammon with Ben. Go between games to the window to see the outpouring of color, the waxing moon, the evening star.

  •

  I struggle with the problems on the last of the book. After lunch I seem in charge of Federico. I read him some rubbish, we walk to the mailbox, at three I make him some lemonade and sneak some gin. Frustrated, I think that I, the novelist, must rock the cradle while Mary, the housewife, corrects, for her pleasure, freshman themes. I read Hannah Arendt on the repulsive moral chaos in Fascist Germany and turn these facts back onto myself. I am the immoralist, and my failure has been the toleration of an intolerable marriage. My fondness for pleasant interiors and the voices of children has destroyed me. I should have breached this contract years ago and run off with some healthy-minded beauty. I must go, I must go, but then I see my son in the orchard and know that I have no freedom from him. Never having known the love of a father has forced me into a love so engulfing and passionate that there is no margin of choice. I cannot resolve the book because I have been irresolute about my own affairs. So these feelings, coming from a variety of dire
ctions, center on my slightly intoxicated mind. The immorality of Fascist Germany, Mary’s intellectual enthusiasm, Ben’s manliness, the neglect I received at the hands of my long-dead father, my guilty love of tranquil interiors, and the itchiness in my crotch come together in a ridiculous collision; and I take the toboggan to the top of the hill. The light is fine, the air pure and cold, the sun is setting, and I think that by going down the hill again and again I wil purify my feelings, learn to be compassionate. I partly succeed; but I go on drinking gin.

  •

  He sat on the edge of his bed, already exhausted before the journey had even begun. What he would have liked, what he dreamed of, was some elixir, some magical, brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step, the gleam in his eye, the joy of life in his heart. He took quantities of pills, but they made no difference in the way he felt. It seemed that he had been tired for years. “Before you go, dear,” his wife called from downstairs, “would you see if you can do something about the kitchen drain?” This reasonable request reminded him of the variety of his responsibilities. He had taken them all on willingly, but his willingness had not produced, as he somehow had thought it might, corresponding stores of energy. Three children in college, the interest and amortization on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar mortgage, an insecure position in business, a loving and impractical wife, a balky heating plant, a leaky roof, a car that needed repairs, a lawn choked with quack grass, a driveway with weeds, and three dying elms on the front lawn seemed, along with the stopped drain, to excite his discouragement. He had taken care of himself for most of his life. He had supported his old parents and indigent relations, raised his family, greased the sump pump, balanced the checkbook, filed the income tax, assuming that an increase in responsibility would develop an increase in confidence, but what he seemed to have developed instead was some spiritual or emotional curvature, like a hod carrier’s back. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he realized that what he wanted was someone who would take care of him. Not for long. He didn’t want to flee, he only wanted a respite—a week, perhaps, in which someone else would grease the sump pump, shine his shoes, and travel with him to Cincinnati. Twice in the last year he had waked alone in a hotel room with an acute pain in the vicinity of his heart. Both times he gave the pain ten minutes to abate before calling the desk clerk, and in both cases the pain had subsided; but this was another tax on his strength, another cause for anxiety, and now he wondered, Would he, tonight, in the hotel in Cincinnati, suffer his pain again?

  He could not recall a day recently when he had not suffered some kind of pain; and—what was more painful—he could not recall a da recently when he had enjoyed any sort of unself-conscious repose. He had taken a ten-day vacation on a beach, but he had been, stretched out in the sun, as touchy as a triggered rattrap. He had known—in the past—calm, healthy excitement, the pleasures of physical exhaustion, but all of these seemed to have been lost to him long ago. When had he last felt peaceable, cleanly, and strong? He could not remember. But now it was time to clean the drain, time to go, time to summon the crude energies of nerve; he had nothing else. He went downstairs and used the plunger on the drain. The drain showed some improvement, and he experienced a fleeting contentment at this. “You won’t forget to buy something for Ella’s birthday, will you?” his wife asked as he kissed her goodbye. He walked to the station, step by step. Was this a common condition? Were the pains in his heart, chest, and esophagus, the sense of being harried, the normal terms of his time of life or was he just unlucky? And how would he ever know, since if anyone had asked him how he felt he would have exclaimed, “Fine! Fine? I’ve never felt better!”

  •

  Here it is, more or less. There are questions of fact to be clarified and transitions to be improved, and I would like to rewrite the last ten pages, but I don’t see much more than a week’s revision. The typing was done by a Briarcliff housewife and is execrable.

  •

  This is not in any way confused in my mind with the New Testament, and I am sincerely interested in criticism. A great many people felt that the “Chronicle” was not a novel, and the same thing is bound to be said about this, perhaps more strongly. I do hope you’ll like it, but if you shouldn’t I will understand.

  •

  Waking this morning, I think the book so poor that it should not be published. I think, an hour later, that it can’t be so bad. I shall scythe the orchard.

  •

  And I think about the past—how orderly, clean, and sensible it seems; above all, how light. I sit in a well-lighted yellow room thinking of the past, but I seem, in relation to the past, to be sitting in darkness. I remember my father, rising at six. He takes a cold bath and goes out to play four holes of golf before breakfast. The links are hilly and there is a fine view of the village and the sea. He dresses for business and eats a hearty breakfast—fish hash with poached eggs and popovers, or some chops. I and the dog walk with him to the station, where he hands me his walking stick and the dog’s leash, and boards the train among his friends and neighbors. The business he transacts in his office is simple and profitable, and at noon he has a bowl of crackers and milk for lunch at his club. He returns on the train at five, and we all get into the Buick and drive to the beach. We have a bathhouse, a simple building on stilts, weathered by the sea winds. There are lockers for dressing, and a fireplace for rainy days. We change and go for a long swim in that green, dark, and briny sea. Then we dress and, smelling of salt, go up the hill to have supper in the cavernous dining room. When supper is over, my mother goes to the telephone. “Good evening, Althea,” she says to the operator. “Would you please ring Mr. Wagner’s ice-cream store?” Mr. Wagner recommends his lemon sherbet, and delivers a quart a few minutes later on a bicycle that rattles and rings in the summer dusk as if it were strung with bells. We have our ice cream on the back lawn, read, play whist, wish on the evening star for a gold watch and chain, kiss one another good night, and go to bed. These seemed to be the beginnings of a world, these days all seemed like mornings, and if there was a single incident that could be used as a turning point it was, I suppose, when my father went out to play an early game of golf and found dear friend and business associate on the edge of the third fairway hanging dead from a tree.

  •

  A fine day in the city—this insular brilliance and freshness. I kill some time in a movie, where I see a fox hunt; lunch with L. There are shells in my eggs Benedict. At Harpers they seem pleased with the book, although I seem paranoiac and keep scrutinizing their remarks for signs of insincerity. I leave the office, have a pleasant drink, take the train home with A., and go to his house. His daughter is having a piano lesson: “Für Elise.” The room is full of sunlight. We have a drink. I walk home over the hill; the grass is fragrant and waist high. Mr. H., at sixty, has been discovered to have a pregnant mistress and has got a divorce. I think the sorrow in this house is all my fault. But the voice I hear sounds one of two notes: anger or weariness. My high spirits are ineffectual. Mary and Susie go off to the movies, and I sit on the terrace with my little son at my side, admiring the lights of evening and waiting for the stars and the fireflies to shine. I tell him to wish on the evening star, and wish myself for the happiness of my wife. We wait until we see seven stars, countless fireflies, and then go in. He falls asleep at once. And it is because of these pleasures that I find so painful the thought of joining the legions of lonely men. But today I seem overwrought, nervous, and I will go on with the casting out of swine. “Wanna screw?” I ask. It is, unfortunately, my style. She seems terribly tired, her face strained, wasted by what tasks I do not know. How I would love to flip up her nightgown, but I cannot.

  •

  I wake, feeling myself to be mysteriously at the bottom of the heap, the bottom of something. It is as though a theft had gone on during the night, and I wake to find myself robbed of spirit and vitality. What I seem to feel is that I have lost the hope that love and reason have any persuasiveness
in the problems of my marriage; that Mary’s struggle with the past is so strenuous and unequal that it would be absurd to expect civility or pleasantness from her. I go into town. My emotional system, no more complicated than the plumbing in this old house and no more prone to breakdowns, seems to be functioning nicely, and I regard the city in the bright lights of a summer day without a trace of anxiety or combativeness. I lunch with L. and his daughter and read Albee’s play on the homebound local. The play adds its weight to what appears to be a basic distemper. “He is not,” says Mary, “the only person who writes wickedly about women.” This makes me cross, and I cut some grass to improve my feelings. But they remain lamentable. We go off to dinner: gentle people in a spacious house; a wood fire burning on this cool summer night; Japanese lanterns in the garden to celebrate the birth of a grandson. My feeling is that it was I who was invited, not she; that it is my charm, good looks, mobility that have got us asked. This is, of course, repulsive. But during the course of the evening she fires a remark across the room that seems to me vindictive. I think the remark should not have been spoken, and I know that my reaction should not be so passionate, and yet I cannot alter either of these facts. I talk with S. and W. when I come home, and, getting into bed, summon the image of someone more magnanimous and adult than myself whos wisdom and compassion I can imitate. I drink with the B.s on Saturday; too much. Swim with the physicist whose hobby is cabinetwork. He is virtually hairless, soft and open in his approach, an object of suspicion. He tells me he was a star of the Princeton water-polo team. What he was doing at Princeton was not clear. The hot-water system backs again into the radiators, a pipe starts leaking, the oil burner defuncts, and I do not seem to have the fortitude to regard these matters with the indifference they deserve. As I am about to climb into my wedding bed for a bounce, I am rebuffed. Then for the next hour, loudly and cruelly, I unburden myself of every resentment I have cherished for the last three months. There may be some justification for this, and yet I am so profoundly ashamed of myself in the morning that I am sick, and repeat that old incantation: Valor, beauty, grace with strength, etc. Mary tells me that she could not sleep; that she lay awake, crying, until three. Anyone so cruel will be punished, and yet these drunken outbreaks seem to have some salutary results. One of the mean things that I said was that I do not like to go anywhere with her, and so she will not go with me to lunch. I beseech her, ask her forgiveness, take her in my arms, and, after drinking three gins, go off to lunch. Whether I appear to be drunken and foolish I do not know and do not much care. I enter the locker room at the pool just as a member of the jeunesse dorée drops his tennis shorts and so we are introduced. I find this disconcerting and am inclined to blame him. He seems uncommitted. So I jaw through a stylish lunch. There is a pretty woman in the company. Home, I sit on the terrace; I feel very tired. My heart pains me and is heavy—alcohol, tobacco, anger, or grief—and the future, when I put my mind to it, eludes me. I hold my younger son against me, and this lightens the pain. Gentle horseplay in the dusk. I sit on the stone steps, still warm from the sun, and wait for the evening star. I drink some bourbon and go to bed, to sleep.