The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  I read some stories of mine. Their preciseness galls me; I seem always to be plugging at small targets. I hit them all right, but why don’t you get the 12-gauge double-barrel and go after bigger game? And the lack of genuine climax galls me, too. I have been racked by a big orgasm as often as there are stars in heaven, but I don’t seem to get this down. However, I think the stories an accomplishment.

  •

  So my hours of happiest comprehension seem limited. They are roughly from six to eight in the morning, and it is now half past nine. For reasons, perhaps, of decorum, comprehension, or dishonesty I recast my dilemma in the light of those days when my brother left for Germany and I lay on the sofa crying for him. The sofa was a ridged, Victorian piece of furniture constructed for straight-backed callers taking a cup of tea. This I remember vividly. I wept for a love that could only bring me misery and narrowness and denial; and how passionately I wept. And so I weep again (not really), and go out for dinner looking, really, for nothing but company and warm food.

  •

  A new journal, and since more than half of the last novel was encompassed in the last journal I hope that something will be accomplished when I complete this. Alone, and much less lonely (I claim) than I am with my wife, I eat sketchily and the first thing I think of when I wake is that I must have lost weight. I will weigh myself. By a loss of weight I mean that I will have recouped some of that youthful beauty I never possessed, that I will be kissed and caressed and worshipped. I see how far all of this is from the realm of common sense. Anyone who caressed and worshipped this old carcass would be someone upon whose loneliness, fear, and ignorance I preyed. This would be the exploitation of innocence. This I see as I swim so briefly through that part of the stream that represents common sense. I will get into other, more seductive, waters, but there is always the chance that I will return to this.

  •

  I go into town to see F., a charmer, an Eastern European with just that margin of irresistibility that is necessary for the world of film. Then I go down to see H.’s show. It is sold out, but I get a seat in the last row of the balcony. She’s a very attractive woman, and I feel estranged in my balcony seat, and it would be vulgar of me to review the intimacies we have enjoyed—but none since the snow melted, and this is August. Instead of taking her to supper, I leave before the end, walking to the station. I look, rather wearily, for the prostitutes, but there are none. There are tourists in the city, men and women with children, and young men with their arms around the slender waists of their girls. The beauty of girls seems to have dimmed for me, and the truth is that I no longer have the kind of bone that is needed. This, I trust, will pass since I have a bone in the mornings. But am I growing old, and should I accommodate myself to this? When does one’s spirit yield to one’s chemistry? The last time I scuffled with a woman the lingering perfume on my skin and my clothes lasted for three marvellous hours, and I remember the skein of L.’s hair across my face. But there is at corners, waiting for traffic lights, the sense that the time has come to part with all of this. Is this supine; is this less than courageous? Will I be content with one-night, one-hour stands, really, when, after I have come, I wonder why they don’t get dressed and go away?

  •

  So, as an unnatural and undeservedly lonely man, I go to the diner for supper. The waitresses are all meant for us, and I love them. Bringing me bread and butter and a glass of ice water, she is like the dove bringing a green branch to the ark. I hear a couple behind me. “All you want to do,” says the man, “is to pick a fight. Whatever I say, you’ll use it as a springboard for a fight. If I order celery and olives you’ll pick a fight over that.” He seems to have got all my wife’s lines, and, remembering them, I think them perverted and unnatural. They are quite insane. I have never, I think, thought of my wife with more finality. But I have only nine days here before we go to the sea, and so I will wait for the beaches and the Atlantic. Walking around the place that contains so much of myself, I feel that to live here is not truly a compromise, that it does not suffer the lack of light, the malodorousness o a compromise. So I shall cut wood, set some stones. Answer your mail, pay your bills, go to the dry cleaner’s and the laundromat.

  •

  This is truly the worst kind of day the Hudson Valley can produce. Its Precambrian memories are refreshed, and the vines, some of the earliest in botanical history, grow with great rapidity. The light is melancholy, the air is lethal, everything one touches is wet, and I, of course, am lonely. Yesterday, doing what the Boy Scout Handbook forbade, I observed that my imaginary partners are chosen not for reasons of sentiment but for their obscene expertise. Mary calls and seems both friendly and intelligent, and I glimpse the landscape of my marriage as a fertile and well-lighted place, where I can be malicious and untruthful. This does not last for long. The chairs and tables all speak in complaining, embittered, and hateful voices. “How long,” the stove asks me, “has it been since you have heard in this room a clear and loving voice?” It was twelve years ago, on the night when I first returned from Russia. “My mother wanted me to be a boy,” she cried, and let me hold her passionately.

  •

  This is a splendid sea. I play backgammon with a young man for most of the afternoon and come out two games behind. Into the village I drive to A.A., which helps immensely, and where I think I see two gays sitting in the corner. I think I am completely mistaken and that the fault is mine. A woman confesses to her sins. She weighed 280 pounds; she couldn’t climb a flight of stairs; she couldn’t drive; she couldn’t do anything but drink, and even that was difficult because she would vomit most of the first bottle. I think of my mother at Christian Science Testimonial meetings, confessing to having been so enchained by the flesh that a cancer was destroying her. And so we say the same; our confessions all deal with self-destruction and love. Look away from the body into truth and light! We find, in these church basements, a universality that cuts like the blade of a guillotine through the customs we have created in order to live peaceably. Here, on our folding chairs, we talk quite nakedly about endings and beginnings. When I leave the church the village has the charm, eclipsed for me, of a restoration or a stage set. The nostalgia is openly false. The beauty of the architectur is striking and splendidly preserved, but the clash of a whale-oil port is nowhere; and how absurd to look for it. This is a place for vacationers, mildly in search of a quaint past and a nice answer.

  •

  This is the sort of seaside hotel about which people used to write romances; here one met the lady with the dog, here old Aschenbach came in his woolly underpants, watching a youth sport in the sea.

  •

  I could write to X that when I say I need you what I mean is that I need the swiftness with which you respond to the importunacy of my needs, and that when I am with you I am as close as I have been to another person in some months. I could write this, but I will not, because some of it is bullshit and because it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I could write a humorous report on the bicycle situation here, but I really ought to try to be serious. The only urgency I seem to feel is the urgency—and the mysteriousness—of my sentimental and my carnal drives. I seem to be married no more. Mary is charmed by the simples of the Atlantic—its iconography—which is truly the iconography of birth, and she walks up and down the shore and covers the windowsill with shells and stones that have a spectrum of great delicacy and beauty. She comes to the breakfast table with thistles and beach-plum sprays, bayberries and other wild and delicate specimens evolved by the prevailing southwesterlies, and while she is charmed and charming I am moved mostly by a sense of parting.

  •

  The runt, the vagrant, in the pew ahead of me in church. I notice first the unwashed, uncut, uncombed brown hair partially concealing tipped ears that someone would describe as elfin. The pallor, I think, is Polish, never having been near Poland. From the cowlick one can anticipate every thread of his clothing, either lifted from some bin in a charitable bureaucracy o
r bought in some back-street, downhill, cut-rate Army & Navy store. The north-woods-lumberman’s jacket is colorless and seems made of bad, thin air. There is no point in holding up for scrutiny the sketchy wash trousers and the wet sneakers with their knotted laces. “You are twenty-three? twenty-four?” you might ask. “I’m thirty-five,” he will say. “I know I look young.” What he means to say is that he looks undernourished and immature, and when he stands for the Gloria he has the posture of someone waiting in line for a handout. He is waiting in line. He will always seem to be waiting in line. Utterly alone, picked up by your headlights at dusk standing on the road shoulders of Route One Million, possessing nothing but his clothes and maybe three dollars, he will seem to be standing in line. But he is on his feet for the Gloria, drops loudly to his knees at the first hint of prayer. Where did he learn his High-Church ground rules? He is, I conclude, imitating the woman ahead of him until I see him slide into base seconds ahead of her when we switch from the Epistle to the Gospel. So he learned them in line, I conclude, learned them in some church orphanage, where you lined up for the Holy Eucharist before you lined up for the boiled egg and the day-old bread. He leaves the church ahead of me, and the priest asks, “You’ve been away?” “Yar,” he says. Then he turns to me, very brightly, and says “Hi!” I can’t imagine where we met. I think he cut the ivy off my chimney two years ago. What do I want? I want to fatten him, mature him, dress him, and send him to Yale. Driving my car around the block, I crank down a window, planning to speak and ask him where we met, but he, of course, has vanished. Those are his accomplishments. He can queue up and vanish.

  •

  I wake from a dream or reverie of last February, or this February, or some February to come. I am working at West House. I wake at six or seven, drink coffee lightheartedly and naked in the kitchen, dress and walk through the snow to the garage, where I kiss beloved B. and am given a plate of scrambled eggs. Back at the house, I work until one, when I eat my sandwiches and take a rest. The days are getting longer, but it starts to get dark at four, and I put on my skis, and pole happily around the widest circle. I come in after dark, take a shower, and am dressing when I hear G. at the door. She is a loving, intelligent, and beautiful woman, and why should this be so remarkable? You will say that is the old chimera, but why should a loving, beautiful, and intelligent woman exist only in the imagination of a lonely man? Her hair is dark. This, I think, is a new note. She is not terribly young, but her face and her skin show no trace, no trace of age that can b seen by these old eyes. I am not sure what we do—we might do anything—but whatever it is we are contented with one another. I seem to take her to a restaurant, and we spend the night together. In the morning we have a terrible breakfast in some roadside place, but the coffee is good. This seems to me a poem, or perhaps a song. And I wake happily from another dream in which I think I live and walk in an accomplished, representative government that is efficient, visionary, and victorious. Bureaucracy has vanished, along with smallpox, and we have gone on to better things.

  •

  I was crowding forty when I stood under an apartment-house canopy and planned to write “Oh, what can you do with a man like that!,” and so on, through the end of “Goodbye, My Brother” and those other stories and novels that record my break with irony and dismay. And here is that New York at the close of the Second World War that so few of us remember: one stood in line at Rockefeller Center; the 20th Century to Chicago was on time; almost everybody wore a hat. The singular force of time through which one seems to swim let me describe everyone with gray hair until my own head turned gray when everyone else’s hair went brown.

  •

  Mr. Ross insisted on a degree of decorum. One could not, of course, use a word like “fuck.” One complained, of course, and published stories elsewhere, but I, it seems, had my own concept of decorum, and when Mr. Ross used the word “fuck” at the lunch table I would jump. Having noticed this, Mr. Ross would, at lunch, throw a “fuck” in my direction now and then, to watch me jump. He was, himself, not a decorous man, but he taught me that decorum can be a mode of language—born of our need to speak with one another—and a language that, having been learned, was in no way constraining.

  •

  So, he stands in the forest, making his choice. On his left is the girl, dressed in white, with yellow hair—golden, really. Any gesture or movement she makes—picking a leaf off her skirt—seems to involve an increase of light. The other is dark-haired, dark-eyed; even the luminousnes of her skin is dark. She is slender, long-breasted, with very long fingers. The girls represent—quite unoriginally—night and day, gravity and weightlessness, the sun and the moon. The girl with yellow hair represents a boundless chain of lighted rooms; the easy talk and laughter of friends and lovers; healthy pride, and a winning score. The other represents one room, and that quite small and unlighted. She is contentedly friendless and her appetite is for out-of-season grapes. And yet it is the declivity of her back that his fingers seem to want to trace, and by fingers, of course, I mean something very different. So he stands in the forest, asked to choose between the boundless light and a darkness whose only charm is mystery. But what he overlooks is the fact that lightness and darkness have their own opinions. If he has invested in tax-exempt municipal bonds, thinks the girl with yellow hair, are they insured? Can he get a taxi on a rainy night? Will he be cross at the fact that I am always ten minutes early for everything, everything, and that I eat candy bars between meals and leave the wrappers in ashtrays? Does he snore? thinks the representative of darkness. Does he have a morning cough? Does he have no consideration at all, since it is twenty minutes past the time for my blood-pressure pill, and I am allergic to the roses with which this forest is filled? He even overlooks the trees, who have their own thoughts and anxieties. A virulent rust, invisible to the eye, can wither the mightiest of them. A wisteria vine, no more today than a strand of hair on the trunk, can bend and break the spine of an oak. He stands in Arden—a forest whose richness and profundity he can never comprehend, deceived as he is by the importance of his choice.

  •

  There is a degree of mensongerie in some of our loves, but this seems most exaggerated in the love of men. Chucky was a runner-up in some three-round provincial golden-gloves contest eighteen years ago, but he now swaggers around the steam room like the winner he never was; and the lovers he mounts, young or old, seem to feel transported to the manly world of fighters. It is as though some old whore claimed to have been the centerfold in the most golden days of Playboy. She wouldn’t make any such claim. And so we have an enlarged—and, I think, unsavory—element of delusion and regret. We are all, sooner or later, shadows, but we are not overwhelmed.

  Floating around in melancholy, I recall my claim that my life was brightly lighted by the sun until my adolescence. But there is a photograph of me, taken, I think, when I was seven, that would refute this. The face is of a boy whose father regretted his conception and wished that he was not alive. We, the fatherless, sit around trying to top one another’s tales, and I think myself lacking the love of a father, and, living with a father who wished me dead, think I’ve won the game. The truth is impossible to arrive at, but, even when I was in my twenties, he closed and locked the door in my face. So I think I have never used the scene where the doctor comes for dinner, and I will put this down. I remember my father’s detestation of me as I feel for the roots of some destructive vine—the vine, of course, being my bewildering love. To be mistaken in love, to—like Capote—take a lover who will strip your apartment of all its valuables, is something that can be parsed in fifty ways; but it seems to me no more than the mysteriousness of love. It has always been dangerous; its other face has always been death.

  •

  An overcast and foreboding sky—not really dark, because there is light in the woods when I walk the dogs—but a serious sky. It is very cold. Only a little snow falls. See the old man, walking through the woods, pouring into the ears of his dogs th
e griefs and frustrations of his marriage; and on the hill at the edge of his land are the graves of five former dogs, into whose ears he poured his laments, even as they lay dying. Oh, why does she spit in my face? Why does she knee me in the groin? Why has she not spoken to me now for eighteen days? The dogs pick up the scent of deer these days and find the walks exciting.

  •

  So, thinking of H., I think of her as a sunlit playing field, into which I have, often enough, jogged out with my football, ready for fun. But then, to be honest, there were the days in which I hid in the bushes at the edge of the field; there was the hockey game I missed because I couldn’t find my skate laces; and the football scrimmage I sidestepped because my jockstrap was either stolen or misplaced. In short, I have been a coward. In retrospect, I think myself blameless, but this darkness in my nature seems inexpungible. I have been a coward, and perhaps it is cowardice that we see in this old man, haranguing his dogs with tales of his unhappiness.

  •

  My son drives me to Mt. Kisco to pick up my new car. He seems happy with his wife and thus estranged from us, and this is as it should be. The new car stalls driving away from the dealer, and there seems to be something wrong with the ignition. I buy groceries at an A. & P. strange to me. There is for some reason no music, and this I miss. The customers seem to me unclean, stupid, and gross, and I see that this level of perception—this seizure of morbid sensitivity—cripples my usefulness as a man. My sympathy for the young women at the checkout counters is outrageous. I want to gather them all in my arms and take them off to Arcadia. I seem tired, and I sleep. Meeting my daughter at the train I observe again how like an enemy I judge the boots, hats, voices, and faces of these men and women who are merely waiting to take a train into the city. I seem to think they plan the destruction of Western civilization. I talk with my daughter, cook supper, and go to a meeting in a smoke-filled parish-house basement where all but two of the audience are shabbily dressed. I remember my happiness with a burlesque company when I was very young.