by John Cheever
•
On the question of crypto-autobiography and the fact that the greatness of fiction is not this, I am writing not from my experience as a teacher in prison but from my experience as a man. I have seen confinement in prison, but I have experienced confinement as a corporal in a line rifle company, as a stockade guard, as a traveller confined for thirty-six hours in the Leningrad airport during a blizzard, and for as long again in the Cairo airport during a strike. I have known emotional, sexual, and financial confinements, and I have actually been confined to a dryout tank on Ninety-third Street for clinical alcoholics.
•
This, I think, will be my last long narrative, and that is exciting; but what have I got? The escutcheon—and I might be able to write an overture around this—the interview with his wife, the cats, the love affair with Jody and Jody’s ascent, the drug addiction, and the three letters. That’s it. And what do I intend? A story about a man of forty-six who enters prison. He falls in love with Jody, who escapes; he is visited by his wife; he suffers the agony of drug withdrawal; and he escapes. You’ve got to have more narrative in your bag than that. So he must have some failed escapes. Other attempts and other relationships. With whom? E. J. Farragut entered the Falconer Jail on the 23rd of March. All right, I want something beautiful, and it will be done by June.
•
I must make a stab at the income tax, have my pants dry-cleaned, prune the grapes, etc., and ride my bicycle. There seems to be such a thing—for me, at least—as a pledge of sexual allegiance. There are juicier orifices, more musical laughter, vaster and darker fields of comprehension, but I was born in this country and shall serve under this flag.
•
I do prune the grapes and will today paint the iron and do the wisteria and the roses. I suffer an inconsequential interview and after dinner, lacking TV, read Updike on Borges and Nabokov. I am grateful to John for having presented the masters so splendidly. I have not liked Borges, but the quotations John gives leave me feeling that the blind old ma has an extraordinarily beautiful tone, a tone so beautiful that it can, quite gracefully, encompass death. And there is Nabokov, who can be better than one thinks possible. This, then, is the thrill of writing, of playing on this team, the truly thrilling sense of this as an adventure; the hair, the grain of sand in one’s mouth; the importance (but not at all a selfish one) of this exploration—the density of the rain forest, the shyness of the venomous serpents, the resounding conviction that one will, tomorrow, find the dugout and the paddle and the river that flows past the delta to the sea.
•
So I think that we, the good writers, are at bottom ungainly. Rereading, I deeply doubt my judgments. At A.A., a strange parish house, I wonder if this book is not simply a testament of conversion. Conceal this. I do observe how loudly and with what feeling we say the Lord’s Prayer in these unordained gatherings. The walls of churches have not for centuries heard prayers said with such feeling. Deep. So I know how it ends. Ransom is in for twenty-five years for hijacking an airplane from Miami to Cuba. Kidnapping. The hijacking law hadn’t been passed. And the stranger gives his coat to Farragut. “I want you to have it.” So he puts on the stranger’s coat and with it a peace that he cannot understand; and in character, prone to misunderstanding, he gets off at the next stop.
•
Ski briefly into a stand of pines. There is in them the sound of the wind, loud and faint, and I will skip the similar sound of traffic from the throughway. That’s for another writer on another day. I see the strength and beauty of the copse and think that it reminds me only of a photograph of an old woman who has written, “Standing among my great trees, I think of all my loves.”
She was the queen of Romania. I know what she meant, but I have no similar feelings. I do observe that the light in the copse forms four distinct strata. There is first the whiteness of the snow, tracked by my skis. Then there is the color of the pine boles, or trunks; the color of cinnamon, an inward color that seems to need very little light to be drawn out. Above this is the darkness of deadwood, as dense and impalpable as smoke, and above this the stratum of fresh green that depends upon sharing the light of the sky.
•
I think the work is successful and that I may be rich and famous. I claim not to care. I can always scythe my fields and walk in the streets. It is the strangeness of this excitement that I must examine. Why should it seem to be so strange to succeed? I do not mean pride or hubris; I mean only to have solved most of my problems and to have exploited, to the best of my intelligence, my raw materials. Take your rightful place, I say, standing at the bathroom window, free of the fact that I have always been content with second best. I am not better than the next man, but I am better than I was.
•
So, Easter morning. Mary is sick. I wake early, feed the dogs, and drink coffee. That this is Easter morning is very clear to me, as it was when I was a child. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Driving over the hill past St. Augustine’s, I think the experience is absolute. Christ is risen, and it all follows—the eggs for fertility, even the candy rabbit. I am deeply moved. My eyes are filled with tears. I am late for Mass. The altar, dark last Sunday, is filled with light, and during the climax of the ceremony I cry. It is not possible for me to diagnose religious experience. I say my prayers beside a woman dressed in white, a dental technician, or nurse. A man leads a cripple—a spastic, I think—to the altar. I think—sentimentally, perhaps—how glorious to be taken to the fire in defense of this faith. And I also think that the ecumenical church, with no fires at all, is progress.
•
Cutting the field in the middle of the afternoon in order to plant a cherry tree, I feel how profoundly important such work is to me. Then I recall, by chance, my mother’s drinking herself to death, and think of her as uncommonly clear and strong. It is at about this time that my brother dies. A. calls later. I cry. He seems, as most people I love have seemed, to be lost, to be suffering a loneliness more painful than anything experienced in life. I read the prayer book, but—other than that God will not be a stranger—the descriptions of life everlasting are not what I have in mind. The next day my sorrow seems visceral. Susie and Ben are here. Ben does seem estranged. Susie and I talk about the family. I am inclined to make a legend of the Cheevers, and this can easily be done, but it seems idle to me. I will write a eulogy, including the fac that my brother wasted half his life. Susie throws some light on our intractability—my swiping a cigarette and Fred’s cleaning his fingernails with a fruit knife. We seem to have got the provincial eccentricities of New England, but we seem to have got them wrong. This seems unimportant. I am late for church and am very heavy-spirited until I drink a great deal of coffee.
Coming in late to Communion, I see what someone else—my son, for example—might see: a homely building of common granite, with an archer’s parapet and a clock that has lost its hands, built with the wealth of the 1870’s when the village was a lively river port. Now impoverished and in debt, barely kept together by the hands of the faithful, it might seem to a young man no more than a husk, lacking even the distinction of ugliness and ruin. Built to accommodate hundreds, the church on this and almost every other morning has perhaps a dozen communicants. The priest, from some African country and trained in an English seminary, is wearing heavily embroidered vestments inherited from his homosexual predecessor; he reads the Epistle and the Gospel in such a distorted accent that almost nothing can be understood. The young man would observe that he could not pump gas, sell appliances, or even weed a garden, and so the young man might observe that the priest’s choice of becoming God’s advocate was a position of retreat. The carpet is, of course, worn; the colored windows are flashy and vulgar; and the black cleaning woman plays a very modest tune on the organ. The words spoken by the priest and the responses from the rest of us would make no sense at all to the young man. This is a cardhouse, a silly game for children who are much too old for such games, a threadbare display of pr
ovincial wealth and absence of taste. But to me this is the climax of the week.
I had not, because it reminded me of a movie in the forties, planned to report this, but this is what happened. Early in the service I hear, in the distance, the sound of trumpets. This sort of thing has never disconcerted me. Then, as the ceremony continues, I hear below the trumpets the commanding beat of drums. It is the fire-department band, practicing for tomorrow’s parade. The music is quite distinct—they must be at the crest of the hill when we make the general confession—and as they come down the hill the trumpets and the drums fill the church, and when we exclaim “Holy, holy, holy, Heaven and earth are filled with Thy glory” not a word can be heard. The windows rattle a the band comes by. Then, in the front pew an old spinster, a spare relic of the past of the village and of the church, turns to the rest of the congregation to express her feelings at having the word of God obscured by the fire department. She is laughing. When I wish the priest a good morning, I see the band—men, boys, and girls (one with very fat, white legs, of which she seems proud) dressed in approximations of the uniforms of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police.
•
The telephone rings at four. “This is C.B.C. John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment?” I am crying. I cannot sleep again. I think of joining Mary in bed, but I am afraid she will send me away. I think I am right. When there is a little light I feed the dogs. “I hope they don’t expect to be fed this early every morning,” she says. I do not point out that John will not die every morning, and that in any case it is I who feed them. This restraint costs me nothing. When I go into the kitchen for another cup of coffee she empties the pot into my cup and says, “I was just about to have some myself.” When I insist on sharing the coffee I am unsuccessful. I do not say that the pain of death is nothing compared to the pain of sharing a coffeepot with a peevish woman. This, again, costs me nothing. And I see that what she seeks, much more than a cup of coffee, is the gratification of a sense of denial and neglect—and that we so often, all of us, put our cranky and emotional demands so far ahead of our hunger and thirst.
As for John, he was a man I so esteemed as a colleague and so loved as a friend that his loss is indescribable. He was a prince. I think it not difficult to kiss him goodbye—I can think of no other way of parting from him, although he would, in my case, have been embarrassed. I think him peerless as a writer of his generation; and his gift of communicating—to millions of strangers—his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition. John, quite alone in the field of aesthetics, remained shrewd. Mercifully, there is no consolation in thinking that his extraordinary brilliance presaged a cruel, untimely, and unnatural death. His common sense would have dismissed that as repulsive and vulgar. One misses his brightness—one misses it painfully—but one remembers that his life was dedicated to the description of enduring—and I definitely do not mean immortal—to enduring strains of sensuality and spiritual revelations.
So the call about John’s untimely death was a fraud. I have decided, says my daughter, that it was an overambitious stringer, who saw the name on a police blotter and tried to cash in. This is a wish founded on the desirable simplicity of being charitable; one of her best characteristics. I am distempered, forlorn, and idle.
•
So, tomorrow I go to Boston to bury my brother.
•
My most frequent thought, during the funeral of my brother, is that my thinking is superficial. Any tears I shed are facile. The architecture of the early-eighteenth-century church is splendid. The smell in the vestibule of wood, the heat, and some salt from the nearby sea is, I think, unique to this part of the world and unlocks my memory. The high arched windows with their many lights must make it a cruel place to worship in the winter, but on this splendid summer day they make of the building a frame for the trees and the sky. I do not miss my brother at all. I think that he, with my mother, regarded death as no mystery at all. Life had been mysterious and thrilling, I often heard them say, but death was of no consequence. Some clinician would say that, while I part so easily with my brother, I will, for the rest of my life, seek in other men the love he gave to me.
•
So, to and from Massachusetts for Federico’s graduation. Mary does the driving, a heavy chore. I think that in another twenty miles, or fifty, or a hundred, we will turn off onto one of the two-lane highways of my youth, with their trees, houses, and wonderful smells ranging from pond water to a newly cut hill or field. Here there is no sight line for the eye, nothing to smell but exhaust, nothing to see at all but dynamite craters and the tracks of gigantic backhoes. Here is a battlefield. The railroads are bankrupt, and subsidized by taxes. They are bankrupt because it is cheaper to truck freight than to send it by rail. The highways are also supported by taxes and represent the clash of two spheres of influence, motivated mostly by avarice. The highway will be the first to feel the diminishing sources of energy. It is difficult at this point, perhaps impossible, for me to imagine someone moved by greed. Here is the evidence. The twenty-wheel, three-axled trucks that can with a trifling misjudgment or some small malfunctioning wipe out three families on their way to the mountains roar down the ten-lane highways with the force of a cyclone. Among these are the nomads travelling with their homes, their boats, their curtains and rugs, and people like us bringing a son home from his commencement. What can one expect from a nomad society? The great trees have been preserved. This takes money. The lawns are splendid and have the intense smell of vegetation you find in a greenhouse. It is a summer’s day, and there may be a thunderstorm. So we move, a hundred or more, over the fragrant grass at that particular pace and in that particular spacing one only finds in crowds on a summer’s day, moving or even drifting toward some peaceable performance.
•
Approaching the fortieth year of my life, I had published well over a hundred short stories that expressed my feeling of life as intense and profoundly broken encounters. I then had two children and was into the fifteenth year of my marriage and hoped, in my first novel, to celebrate a sustained relationship over a long passage of time. I had not lived in New England for more than a decade, and the past of my family, beginning with the seventeenth century, appeared to me with some perspective. The pattern of my life during the year in which the “Chronicle” was completed was thought, in the Iron Curtain countries and by my daughter’s generation, to be a bitter irony, a response I never quite understood.
I worked four days a week on the “Chronicle,” with intense happiness. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I had a course in advanced composition at Barnard College. My weekends went roughly like this. On Saturday mornings, I played touch football until the noon whistle blew, when I drank Martinis for an hour or so with friends. On Saturday afternoons, I played Baroque music on the piano or recorder with an ensemble group. On Saturday nights, my wife and I either entertained or were entertained by friends. Eight o’clock Sunday morning found me at the Communion rail, and the Sunday passed pleasantly, according to the season, in skiing, scrub hockey, swimming, footbal, or backgammon. This sport was occasionally interrupted by the fact that I drove the old Mack engine for the volunteer fire department and also bred black Labrador retrievers. As I approached the close of the novel, there were, in my workroom, eight Labrador puppies, and on my desk the Barnard themes, the fire-department correspondence, “The Wapshot Chronicle,” and a correspondence with both the American and the Royal Kennel clubs, since the litter had been sired by an English dog. Any account of the months in Russia is thought to be the hilarious account of a capitalist trying to forget the tragedy of his way of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. My happiness was immense, and I trust that the book will, in some ways, be a reminder of this.
•
The fact that I seem unable to enjoy an erection seems to be associated with my painful sense of estrangement. Painfully estranged,
I go to take the train. I watch a man training a dog to lead the blind. The dog is struck when he goes too close to a sign. A bearded young black on the platform bends his knees, runs his hands up his inner thighs to his crotch, and shouts with joy. Having just returned from a Communist country, I regard the advertisements in the light of my memories. Two magazines are advertised not for their content but for their increase in advertising linage, and circulation. A coming generation is promised in terms of its vitality, its beauty, and its spending power. Alcohol and tobacco are praised between celebrations of two broken-down Broadway shows. If I were a Communist I would remark that the east bank of the Hudson River, down which I travel, is an economic, cultural, and human ruin. The roadbed itself is so rough that it is not possible to read a book, and the bankrupt railroad is supported by the government, but I count among my friends people who took substantial fortunes out of the railroads earlier in our history. The large industrial plants are obsolete and abandoned but for the spotty tenancy of sweatshops for the production of cheap clothes and shoes. The cultural sorrow is represented by a travelling, state-supported art show in a tent. Look, for the human ruin, into the faces of the other passengers. The river is broad, and continuing efforts to cleanse the water are effective. I am charmed by a mountain on the western shore. It has the appeal of a woman’s breasts, of a friend’s shoulder bent in gentleness. I am pleased with the sight of a sail filled with wind. I am depressed. It is God’s will that I should not pursue this depression, but Plato observed that the soul can endure every sort of good and every sort of evil.
