The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  Nailles might write a reply to Tony: I found your letter addressed to God in the middle of your floor after you’d left. You must have wanted me to read it. I’ve never read a letter of yours before. I don’t understand why you feel the way you do. I don’t think I’ve ever gloated over what I’ve been able to give you. If you feel guilty about being on the receiving end of things you might, to lessen your guilt, imagine that I gloat. It’s the only explanation I can hit on. My own father was able to give me almost nothing: no affection, love, clothing, or food. He was penniless, friendless, old, and wretched. It is important to me, of course, that I have been able to give you what I lacked. When I see you drive off in a bucket-seat racing car, with matched luggage packed with new clothing, I am very content, but I did not give these things to you. There is not enough self-consciousness in my support of you to let me use a word like “give,” or “share,” or “contribute.” You are welcome to such mone as I have, exactly as you are welcome to such love as I have, and that seems boundless. You wrote, in capitals, that the only reason you were able to get anything out of me is because you know how to handle me. This puts my serene love in terms of flattery on your part, stupidity on mine. In what way have you handled me? You answer me. When I’ve wished you good morning after we’ve stayed up late a few nights talking about sex while I had my nightcap, I’ve always made it clear that you were under no obligation to keep me company.

  I do not understand why you should say that your mother and I are the people in the world you most hate, unless you feel so deeply guilty about your behavior that you are unable to blame yourself and must blame us. You say that we are the most self-centered people in the world when, in fact, our love for you verges on fatuity. Aside from erotic reveries, you are the first thing on my mind when I wake, and when I sleep I sometimes dream, lovingly, of you. I remember watching you, like a swain, while you fired Roman candles into the brook; watching you ski in the orchard; watching you ski at Stowe. Climbing a mountain with you and your cousin, I had a painful wrench at my heart and thought that it didn’t matter, because I was with my son. Night after night in Saratoga, unable to sleep, I imagined that we climbed together over the Dolomites. It is possible, I suppose, that in order to become a man one has to mutilate the carapace of one’s father’s affections. I pray that this is not so. You mention someone’s bullying you, and I wonder if there is some unself-conscious connection between the terrors of your adolescence and your feeling for me.…

  But if Nailles wrote such a letter he would destroy it.

  •

  I would not want this to degenerate into the journal of an invalid, but pain, discomfort, and anxiety have dominated these weeks, and I have a feeling that the medicine makes me dopey. I drink at eleven to still an unruly gut, and read about Ben Franklin in Paris in the 1780’s. The day is unseasonably warm. Hornets and yellow jackets fall into our soup and our cocktails. Wasps swarm on the upstairs porch. A stupid possum comes up the front steps. I think he is wounded or rabid. He is in no hurry. A small snake, marked with deep red, black, and white, lies on the stairs to the garden. Geese, snakes, wasps, the flowers in the garden all seem apprehensive about the inalienable power of th coming winter. A. comes, and I lose four straight games of backgammon and am bored. I think this is the medicine. It is so warm and fair that we have dinner out-of-doors. Sitting on the terrace, I see an orb of light appear in the atmosphere, as large and brilliant as a full moon, only orange and green. It throws a double reflection on the haze. I rush into the kitchen and urge Mary to come out and see this mystery, but she is washing a teapot and it is difficult to get a woman away from the dishpan, even to see the millennium. When she comes out, the orb has faded, but there is still some luminous vapor in the air. T. asks me for a drink. After much talk he says that he has lost his job. Thirty-five years old, with three children. He seems cheerful, and confesses to having stolen the Help Wanted section from my Sunday Times. He goes on to talk about his father. That man, he says, has an unclean spirit. He bought his sons train tickets to their colleges and did nothing else. They worked as grocery clerks, hospital orderlies, waiters, etc. That man, he repeats, has an unclean spirit. I am superstitious about condemning one’s male parent. Leaving them, I have a nightcap and think of how little my father did for me. He did not even give me bus fare; but he didn’t have it, and I think his spirit was pure.

  •

  For the last time (I pray) this is the journal of an invalid. Feeling poorly as well as frightened, I go to bed after lunch. I see the golden leaves outside the window, see a shaft of light reflected on the glass, and sleep until five, when I dress and go down for a drink and some supper. Back to bed at eight: I am very happy in my bulwark, my sanctuary, my firm, clean, warm bed, and I think that my infection was probably brought on by the gruelling burden of nervous tension. How unwarranted and mysterious it has seemed. Vertigo on the station platform. Will the blacktop fly up and strike me between the eyes? I never know; but it never has. Vertigo in Grand Central. Walking in the city with my son, I stay close to my club so that in case I collapse there will be some place where I can be taken. Scrotum-grabbing vertigo on bridges, tunnels, and freeways. So I think that some organ was bound to give—and one did—and that the cure is rest. Rest was all I needed, and I needed an uncommon amount of rest because the burdens were uncommon. Waking from time to time, I think that I am no longer sick, that I have been granted some great bounty. I am stirred by a immense gratitude, but at whom can I aim my thanks? The divine intelligence cannot go from bed to bed like Santa Claus. So I am grateful, humble, convinced that the worst is over.

  •

  My only brother, after twenty-five years of hard drinking, including three critical alcoholic crises; after having lost his job and all his worldly goods, his wife, and the trust and affection of at least two of his children; after having found everyone who employed him stupid and unresponsive, and after having drifted around furnished rooms on the South Shore, selling advertising time for a small radio station; after having been seriously crippled with arthritis, and after having reached the age of sixty-two, calls at nine while I lie sick in bed. The voice is exclamatory and cheerful. He asks after me solicitously, as he used to when he had been drunk for a week. I am pleased to think that we share a durable constitution. I remember how mysteriously our relationship took on the nature of a contest. He is driving to Colorado on Saturday, while I, so temperate, industrious, etc., can scarcely drive to the next village.

  •

  Sunday morning, jumpy and megrimish. The President, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, says, “Your weapons and your wings are the swords and the shields of our freedom. The names of your planes—Phantom, Intruder, Hawkeye, Vigilante, Skyhawk—they are the watchwords of our liberty.” We will fight for freedom of speech wherever it is threatened, even if we have to sacrifice our own freedom of speech. Day after day the makeup man at the Times runs the photographs of dead or wounded soldiers cheek by jowl with the Tiffany advertisements. The war is not going to be won at cocktail parties. Republicans and Southern Democrats have hamstrung the anti-poverty program. Men and women of Jewish descent are blackballed at the country club. Next to armaments, the nation’s largest-selling product is whiskey and drugs. Wall Street capitalists are real, militaristic, and avaricious. You can see them on the station platform any morning, the overt and cheerful sponsors of tyranny all over the world. They raise the bonds for Salazar, Franco, Papa Doc.

  One knows all of this, and the corruption of the war is inestimable—the dead soldier and the Tiffany bracelet. This is madness. And yet I don’t want “Bullet Park” to be an indictment. The admissions committee at the club does not scandalize me. Neither does the fact that D. has sold a bond issue for Franco. But without an indictment I seem to have no moral position—no position, in fact, at all. Hammer was not such a fool as to assume that Bullet Park, because it is affluent, is sinful. I would not be such a fool as to assume that, because Hammer is comfortable, happily ma
rried, and has few discernible moral mandates beyond the mandates of mannerliness, he is a villain. What I wanted was an uncomplicated story about a man who loved his son.

  •

  Half awake, I remember how totally important my brother was to me—the center of my world, my universe. With him at my side, no harm could befall me. He did not begin to destroy himself until after we had, at my insistence, separated, but I think that his drunkenness and madness could have been more of a blow than I have ever admitted.

  •

  Ben returns with a beard and a shaven pate. We go to the M.s’ party. More old friends. When we return I go downstairs to hang up the stockings. “What right have you to hang up the stockings?” says Mary. “You didn’t buy any of the presents.” This is the night our Saviour was born. Prince of Peace!

  •

  There is still snow on the trees; it is that kind of snow. One sees it out of the windows here like some extraordinary garden. It is the kind of snowfall about which girls write verse. “How like a fairyland it seems/a veritable land of dreams/The garbage pail with ermine cap/and all the lawns a pearly nap.” There is an uncommon silence when I walk Federico to the school bus. The light is eclipsed and lovely. One wants to see it all so clearly.

  •

  The second of February, the valley darkened by fog; but I wake with no cafarde, no hangover, no aches, no pains, no shakes, no megrims, no racking thirst, no hunger for pills, no strange sensation in my cock, no anxieties, no crushing and nameless sorrows, no tremors; a healthy, well-preserved man in his fifties, at peace with the world.

  •

  Having nothing better to do—which is a mistaken position to have got into—I read two old journals. High spirits and weather reports recede into the background, and what emerges are two astonishing contests, one with alcohol and one with my wife. With alcohol, I record my failures, but the number of mornings (over the last ten years) when I’ve sneaked drinks in the pantry is appalling. As for the marriage, a number of things appear. The most useful one is a view of marriage that is neither larky nor desperate; a sense of how large a continent this is, and how complex are its burdens. Sentiment and intelligence seem more important than passion. There are many accounts of sexual and romantic ecstasy, but they are outnumbered by an incredible number of rebuffs. It literally pains me to contemplate this. I urge myself a hundred times to be cheerful and keep my pecker up, and how puerile this advice seems. Another alarming fact is the number of people, from my point of view, who appear to feel that I am in the right. Do I appear to the world to be henpecked? I think not. I think this is a part of the vastness of this continent. I think my mistake is to consider marriage vows as something on a valentine, and marriage itself as a simple romance. (Try it for Hammer, painful as it may seem.) And another disconcerting thing about the old journals is the recurrent mention of homosexuality. But why do I blame myself for this? Homosexuality seems to be a commonplace in our time—no less alarming than drunkenness and adultery—but my anxiety on the matter is very deep and seems incurable. I suffer, from time to time, a painful need for male tenderness, but I cannot perform with a man without wrecking my self-esteem. What, then, is my self-esteem? It seems composed of imponderables—shifty things. It is, at its worst, I suppose, a deep wish to placate Muzzy and Dazzy. It is, at its best, a sense of fitness that approaches ecstasy—the sense of life as a privilege, the earth as something splendid to walk on. Relax, relax.

  •

  I brood on the lack of universality in our sexual appetites. A loves his wife and no one but her. B loves young men, and when these are scarce he makes out with men who impersonate youth. C likes all comely women between the ages of twelve and fifty, including all races. D likes himself, and jacks off frequently. He also likes men who resemble him sufficiently to make the orgasm narcissistic. E likes both men an women, depending on his moods, and I don’t know whether he is the most tragic or the most natural of the group. None of them share, at any discernible level, the desires of the others. They share customs, diets, habits of dress, laws, and governments, but naked and randy they seem to be men from different planets.

  •

  Easter Sunday. The temperature at 72. No one can remember such a fine day in this part of the world. “I’ve never seen such a beautiful Easter,” we say to one another. “Have you?” Last year it snowed. Flowers in the garden, and the birds in the trees seem to be singing an invitation list: Peabody-Peabody, Tickner-Tickner, Trilling, Ewing, and Swope. A law firm? It is a serene day for me. The empty tomb. Life everlasting. I lie in the morning sun thinking about the mysteriousness of obscenity. All those cocks and balls drawn on toilet walls are not the product of perverse frustrations. Some of them are high-hearted signs of good cheer. We go to the egg hunt, mostly out of respect for P., and the party is ostensibly one of those informal gatherings in which the social rituals seem heightened by the absence of neckties. I remain happy and serene, thinking in the middle of the night of the love I feel for my sons.

  •

  I read Roth’s continued accounts of jacking off in Jersey and elsewhere, and there is something intensely interesting about the three-finger squeeze, the full-fisted yank, the four-hundred-stroke orgasm, etc. His accounts of his youth are a universe apart from my limpid record of an artistic aunt and a cousin who played Beethoven. My parents were not Jewish, and our house was large and well appointed. In self-defense, and there is much of that in my thinking, I observe how my curiosity leaps, but that my best interest soon lags. F., sitting in the front row of a vaudeville show, noticed that the man beside him was yanking his prick. F. asked politely what he was doing, and the man explained that if you pulled it long enough white stuff squirted out of the end, and you had a wonderful feeling. F. went home and gave it a try and told me about it at school. Lying in bed that night I jacked off while listening to a philosophical radio commentator. The orgasm was racking; my remorse was crushing. I felt that I had betrayed the fatherl voice on the radio. F. and I used to pull one another off in theatres, rub one another off in the golf club shower. One rainy day at camp when the administration had broken down and we had nothing to do we all doubled up in bed. I first got an Irishman named Burke with a big prick and a very fatherly embrace. Then I switched over to F. for the second trip, but when we had come we dressed and, standing in the rain outside the tent, decided to swear off jerking off. I don’t remember how long this resolve lasted, but my jacking off was mostly a genuine extension of love. Roth is always alone, and there is never any question in his mind about his maleness, although he does say that he missed being a faggot by luck. So I come back to the bitter mystery, bitter and legitimate. I claim to enjoy some invincible maleness, and if I am mistaken I will stick to my claim. But I am frightened of colorlessness, the thought of being a homosexual terrifies me, and I am frightened and ashamed to recall that G. sucked me off, that P. doesn’t want to marry and have sons and a home, and I flatly deny that mine was a guise of sexual cowardice—that I didn’t have the courage to pit my homosexual instinct against the censure of the world. I didn’t find the world that contemptible.

  •

  At the edge of the swimming pool—twilight, of course—D. and I sit bare-arse, smoking, undisturbed by each other’s nakedness. “I never had an electric train,” he says. “My father never took me to a ballgame, never once. He took me to the circus a couple of times, but he never once took me to a ballgame.”

  •

  Updike’s cover story—and I quite sensibly envy his gifts. I defend myself by saying that he has developed an impractical degree of sensibility, and that my own stubborn and sometimes idle prose has more usefulness. One does not ask, skating on a pond, how the dark sky carries its burden of starlight. I don’t, in any case.

  •

  Ben comes home with a barefoot friend who has a fan-shaped beard and fuzzy hair. Ben is now a photographer, and my reaction to this is to mention all the famous photographers I have known (one) and to explain a subject of w
hich I know nothing. This is unfortunate. His hair is long, his sideburns protrude, his face is lean and handsome, and he seems no longer to be my son. Who is the father of this young man? I think I remember the night when he was conceived; we had spent a month in the mountains and stopped at my mother’s house in Quincy on the way back to New York. We talk about drugs, sex, blacks. Everybody takes hashish, pot; a lot of his classmates have been arrested. His girl is infatuated with him, and in her photographs one sees how full, yielding, and lovely her face has become. “We make out four times on Saturday,” he says. “Then I pretend to sleep while she cooks my breakfast. But it’s just like getting married, and I don’t want to be married yet. She says that I can’t leave her, that if I leave her she’ll wither up and die, but I’ve got this other girl in Baltimore. She’s been staying with some people who seem bohemian.” I remember (egocentrically) what it was like at his age to enter another household.

  •

  I read the Solzhenitsyn with pleasure and think that I will read until dawn as I did with Tolstoy forty years ago. Fortunately, I have enough common sense to go to bed. It is forty years later. The book is not only an exhaustive indictment of Stalin’s tyranny, his hired torturers and murderers, it also seems to be an indictment of the backwardness of the Russian people. This is, I think, because Russian literature, in spite of the fifty-year struggle for change, shows less organic growth and change than any other literature. We do not find characters out of Sterne and Trollope wandering into contemporary English literature, but in this book the cruel and stupid bureaucrats are the same men we met in Pushkin and Gogol. That woman writing with her finger on a steamy window first appeared in Lermontov. It is an intensely national literature, you might say a provincial literature, so that descriptions of drunkenness and stupidity go beyond the individual character into the national character, the Russian people, and the race. Some European sophistication seems to have rubbed off onto the aristocracy, but today’s Russians seem not only backward, they seem determinedly so. On the plane from Copenhagen was a Russian family—beautifully dressed in English clothes—all of them quite plump. What worlds and worlds separate them from the babushkas at the hotel, whose surliness is predicated on the fact that this is a classless society? The French and Germa invasions don’t seem to have affected this backwardness. The linen is stained, it takes an hour or longer to get a simple meal, the rooms are ugly, and in some places, like Yalta, there is no escape from the loudspeakers that broadcast deafening and vulgar music. Solzhenitsyn’s prisoners are mostly serious, spiritual, and decent men, but they are prisoners. In Russia one comes upon impetuousness, candor, and vision, but one also comes upon suspiciousness, a sort of cultivated stupidity, and that hopeless obtuseness that Gogol railed against.