The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  What I would like—to speak very generally—is a celebration; I say from time to time that I would like to write a story about a success, although that may not be in my range. There is the old man who seems to be taking shape—although as I walked yesterday in the woods, pursued by deerflies, it seemed that the old man could be a great bore. Could you write a success story about a man whose determination, whose inspiration, whose giftedness enabled him to dissuade or conquer some force of thoughtlessness? Is there any hero in the literature that I have loved?

  •

  I do the shopping. “OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS” says the sign, but the store seems caught up in some vortex of decay. The shopping-cart situation is chaotic. Abandoned carts make parking difficult, the carts for use are stuck together, and the boy employed to organize carts is smoking pot and looking at pornographic magazines in the stationery store. Within the supermarket itself the music is ended. I am speaking literally. Here and there one sees a face on a checkout clerk or a boy pushing a broom, which seems so fresh and well intentioned that one knows the human race will outlive the ceremonies of marketing.

  •

  What the priest says is, “If you are one of those who has waited patiently for the summer I most sincerely hope you are enjoying what we have now. For my part, I have had enough. The church has been very hot, and the fan in the sacristy window makes very little difference. I am hoping and praying that someday we may have a more effective ventilating system. Be assured that you will be in my prayers and thoughts, especially at the Passion play in Oberammergau.”

  •

  The night is hot and airless, and I have a recurrence of that chest pain that seeps into my jaw and that, as I recall, has entertained som doctor. A little freshness comes into the valley, but it is soon gone. The two conversational exchanges with my wife are hideously unpleasant, and then when I enter the kitchen to get a cup of coffee she seizes her lemon juice and flees. It is precisely as though I had encountered a witch. I do remember that as a child she was accused of burning her mother’s house to the ground. It may be that her negativism is too deep to be described as iconoclasm. I mean simple matters such as leaving the tap running all night during a water crisis, or unplugging the deep freeze and spoiling a large investment in frozen food. This is the same thing one saw in Heathrow Airport when she was pounding on a door—and weeping. The door said “ENTRANCE IS FORBIDDEN” in four languages, but her action seemed nothing so small as an endeavor to inconvenience her husband. She seemed to be playing out a role in some world other than this, which she has experienced or is preparing to experience. When he first saw her pounding on the airport door at three in the morning he felt that some insight was being revealed to him. It was some years later that he felt merely impatience and then boredom.

  •

  Dinner is a vast fish, and by lighting a fire of applewood I am able to give the house, for me, some usefulness. It would otherwise be a string of cold and senseless rooms in which an old couple calumniated each other. Fire, we are told, is a chemical process and not an element, but it is for me an element, it is what I mean by an elemental force, and while the night is far from cold, windy, or hostile in any way, it is a night, and the light and warmth of the fire give this place and its sticks of furniture their heft and meaning.

  •

  I wake with a lack of enthusiasm that seems intestinal. The taste in my mouth and the unease in my intestinal tract seem completely to dominate my sentimental and my spiritual lives. Reading some journals of the year before last I come up against the problem of continence. It seems this morning that I have never successfully mastered this; that the most I have done is to delay my discharges for a week or so, no more. And yet I did, however fleetingly, possess a sense of dignity that seems now to be quite lost to me. The most lasting advantage has been to accomplish some work.

  •

  I sleep uneasily and wake on a morning of such freshness and lightness feeling such a despair that I can only conclude its cause is intestinal, although I enjoy exceptional health. It is obtuseness that keeps me from realizing that I have lived with such contradictions for many years. “What seems to be bothering you?” says the doctor. Spread out on the examination table, stark naked, one says, “I feel terribly sad.”

  •

  M. arrives as the clock strikes five and we watch a ballgame, screw, have dinner, watch another game, and part, at my wish. In the morning he is late, and my inexperience in such affairs leaves me no traditional conclusions or anxieties. I am at a loss. When he arrives a light rain is falling, but we circle the Club Circle Motor Court route. Some villages in the Carpathians enjoy a forlornness that we find in this country only in a failing trailer settlement on a rainy Saturday morning. Even some of the television antennae are broken, and this one universal link is gone. The clotheslines are empty but for a single bed sheet that holds autumn leaves in its folds and must have hung there for weeks. There is a rank of mailboxes, but who would ever write these people a letter? One quite new car seems to have been abandoned, and while the paint shines and the license tag is current, goldenrod and daisies grow up between the wheels. The difference is that this forlornness in the Carpathians seems to have been carried over from Pleistocene days, while here in this country we seem to have cultivated it.

  “Shut up,” says M., “you’ll turn on the sprinklers.” I howl and so does he. We start north and hit a strip on Route 20. Here are the cut-rate furniture store; the doughnut factory; the countless outlets for public-execution food, many of them designed to resemble the mansions and mushroomy houses of dream landscapes; the Realtors’; shopping malls; and gallerias; and a drive-in theatre showing “The Night of the Great Massage-Parlor Bust.” But this clustering diminishes and vanishes and we are in what was once farming country, with acre and half-acre fields divided by light stands of timber. We see churches and houses that are quite unpretentious but whose façades show a charm and invention that seems patrician. How far we have come from talking doughnuts and “The Night of the Great Massage-Parlor Bust”! These houses enjoy views of this broad and fertile valley that leads from Albany t Buffalo and lies on the Laurentian plain between the Catskills and the Adirondacks, with an allegiance not to the Hudson estuary but to the Great Lakes. The valley is fertile; the views are vast; the sense for me is of a paradise, since everything I see represents intelligent and peaceful cultivation; avaricious nomadism, which has produced the strip, seems to have no place here. We visit my old friends the T.s and I lose four dollars at backgammon. I have lost my loneliness briefly in a vast, erotic engorgement, but I am still so lonely that, passing a remote farmhouse on whose lawn stands a little statue of a fisherman, bought perhaps from a mail-order catalogue, makes me wonder if the farmer’s wife, or the farmer himself, bought this ornament with the hope that the winter would be less lonely. I am with a lover who, whenever I have touched him, has always been responsive, but I think of the pioneers who settled the west and their travels through this valley and my loneliness comes to seem insignificant. We return down the valley as night falls along the lights of the strip, and we go into the terrain of vast highways that link Boston, New York, Buffalo, and Albany, and our progress brings me a sense of dissipated energies. The force one found in the valley with its farms and their views is scattered here, and the sweep of light on the six-lane interstates is nomadic and impuissant. I think of the patrician farms on the hill and that the new houses there are uniform and uniformly vulgar. But I also recall a tract of uniform houses being slowly altered to resemble their owners and eventually triumphing over the sameness and monotony of their beginnings. One cannot intelligently long to reconstruct the circumstances of building a farmhouse two hundred years ago.

  •

  Fatigue is something I sought, and seem to have enjoyed on my return. I spoke with G.—a truly old and dear friend. Then in my studio I wrote a letter to Mary. I ate dinner with the company and went to an A.A. meeting. This is one of those
gatherings where the sense of an encounter is forceful. I return to my studio and watch the ballgame. In the seventh inning I suffer a convulsion called a grand mal seizure. I completely lose consciousness and come to in the emergency room of the Saratoga hospital in the company of a man who claims to be having an epileptic seizure. They are slapping him in the face and assuring him that his seizure is a transparent fraud. I am put in a room with a old man who rails loudly about his bowels. His bowels rack him pitilessly. I would find more serenity almost anywhere, and I am brooding on my escape when a male nurse kindly moves me to another room. In the morning my determination to avoid hazardous investigations of my brain lands me in an ambulance, speeding south. I move into the hospital at home and am given tests for two days. Nothing is concluded; nothing is discovered. Mary is loving, patient, and I can really not recall a time when she has so unselfishly given herself to me. This is not carnal, and I am unable to feel, now, that my carnal sport with M. involves an infidelity. As men who love women we know our acrobatics to be second-rate, and our parting this morning seemed mandatory. We have work to accomplish, and we have appointments to keep. I shall endeavor to write Mary.

  •

  The fear of insanity, I was told by Cummings, who spoke for much of New England, is an unfortunate display of self-importance. Anyone who makes such an unnatural claim should be taken to an insane asylum and shown how the truly mad suffer gruelling and unremittent pain. I think I remember that B. in her madness suffered an unhappiness unlike anything that I have ever known. But I am uncomfortable (not intensely so) and would like to address Mary, H., and M., although the clarity I would seem to enjoy in this address would so lack warmth and lovingness that it would be frightening. I wake thinking of scrambled eggs, and it is revealed to me that any sustained sentimental life with a man who is not my brother or my son is highly taxing and quite impossible. But the wind blows the leaves off the trees, and the shadows change, and I think that I am an old man and should become more retiring and settle for a male companion and an uneventful life on a bicycle in some very flat country like the Netherlands, moving to the tropics when the cold winds of winter blow. This seems to be a delusion, and one associated with the resumption of my drinking life and consequently a prolonged and obscene performance of self-destructiveness beginning with obesity, a cirrhotic liver, a mistaken memory—and presently—irreversible brain damage. Nothing is asked of me at this hour, nothing at all. I will take the lunch pails to the garage and perhaps bicycle around the block, leaving my manuscript in a cottage where a fire is burning. I could have the manuscript duplicated before I take my bicycle trip, but I will take the trip now, leaving my papers here so I can write letters when I return.

  •

  I miss drinking. That’s the simplest way of putting it. When it grows dark I would like a drink. The Hemingway story, or stories, about Nada—the utter nothingness that is revealed to an old man—seem to correspond to what I’ve experienced these last months. I do believe in God’s will and the ordination of events, and it is perhaps stupid of me to question the ordination of my lying unconscious on the floor, convulsed and senseless. It did bring my wife back to me, and have I ever asked for anything more? I feel that perhaps the sorrow of these days will be revealed to me as having had their usefulness. The nature of this sorrow is bewildering. I seek some familiarity that eludes me; I want to go home and I have no home. I think that I have been ill, and one problem is that I lack vitality.

  •

  My biggest problem seems to be that I’m not working on my novel and won’t be until I return to Saratoga. In reading my journal I see how, in Saratoga, I was available to seizures of lostness. Indeed, I have lost consciousness and my memory. I seem unable to comprehend that experience is consecutive. I was a young man here, then a mature man, and now I am an old man. Here I have been rich and poor, sick and ecstatically well, I have committed fornication with several women and now with a man. It is a struggle to comprehend this. Now I am writing a story about an old man who loves to skate. He becomes erotically involved with a young woman who reminds him of the national anthem at ballgames, and when she rebuffs him he becomes the lover of the elevator operator in her building. The only resolution I can imagine is that he could salvage the body of water on which he skates. I regret that I do not understand why it would seem mistaken to work on the story here, since Saratoga seems to be disputed territory. I trust I will be able to comprehend the passage of time. I am one of those old men; I am like a voyager who cannot remember the streams he has travelled. He cannot remember their swiftness or their depths, he cannot, at times, even correctly remember their names. I like to think that I am prepare to return to Saratoga and sit in that small house in the woods, quite uncertain about who I am and what my purpose in life is.

  •

  So, M. comes, and thinking that my malaise might have something to do with being crouched over a bicycle we walk up the dam path. We meet some people—virtual strangers—whom I once assailed on Cedar Lane and urged to take this walk. They are out to see the autumn foliage, so why do they all wear dark glasses? They have with them a fat dog. I am thoroughly happy with M., and I believe he feels the same way with me, and it is a happiness that I have never known before. I look, quite naturally, for its limitations, and when my great, dear friend gestures toward a field of golden leaves I admire the lightness but I have no wish to write a poem, as I would with a girl. This is not a lack but it is a difference, and I do feel strongly that we both have work to do. Parting with M. is truly sweet, but in the morning I wake in the arms of an imaginary girl.

  •

  M. and I go to the Pyramid Mall, a shopping center that is four or five years old but that I have never seen enjoy a sense of prosperity. Urban renewal is struggling to refresh the old center of the village with an axial sense of merchandizing which goes back to the horse-and-buggy days. The automotive strip and the rudimentary village compete with each other, a competition that is heightened by the price of gasoline but made unequal by the use of tax money. I have never seen this mall thronged, festive, or even modestly prosperous. There are many ornamental fountains meant to contribute to the gaiety of the place, but these have been dry for years. The interior of the bank is a replica of some cabin in a space vehicle on TV. Galaxies can be seen through portholes in the walls; the walls are luminous; and the ceiling is concave. In the line at the teller’s window there is a clinically obese woman in pants and a dwarf with large ears, and in this scene with its suggestion of space one feels that travel in the darkness beyond the stars is retrogressive and that we are hurtling away from that civilized force of selection that has taken aeons to develop. And, judging the scene along moderately conservative lines, what do we find? Vistas, acres of merchandise without the imponderable allure of style and without a trac of quality. The lack of custom has left the clerks either embarrassingly overanxious or bored and rude. There are three theatres. In one, an old comic is playing the role of God in an amiable farce about life everlasting. The second film is a charming, low-budget account of high-school mores. When we open the door on the third film, called “Caligula,” we see someone sucking a cock, and lest we should doubt the authenticity of this we are shown the ejaculation splashing into an antique ewer. None of these three theatres has any audience to speak of. Back in the mall again we notice that the music, the universal music, is “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” We pass a short, elderly woman in tennis shorts who is carrying a battery-operated flashlight that is at least two feet long. This, along with so much else that we see, will never be explained. If we are hungry there are a dozen places to eat and the food is, without exception, that barbarous holiday fare that has been fried and enjoyed at ceremonies and festivals since the beginnings of civilization. This is the food one ate at the execution of the first of the kings, the quartering of the traitor, the hanging of the witch, and the crucifixion of the Saviour. It is not all fried, but much of it is, and you can eat it with your fingers, picking it out of
a cornucopia of leaves or a cone of paper while you ride a horse, or paddle a canoe; while you drive a car, or walk up a mall or rialto with your arm around the waist of your beloved. And on TV last night I saw a man speak emotionally about the new beginnings he felt with the Reagan victory. He said with great sincerity that the voters had chosen Reagan for his economic and his foreign policies. One would not want to be supercilious, but I can discern neither. I would describe Reagan’s partisan as being slightly ill-favored. His hair was a little thin, his eyeglasses were a little thick, and he wore a heavy, V-necked sweater under his jacket. This seemed to give him some discomfort. He moved his shoulders a good deal and stretched now and then. His symbol for the Carter Administration was a tattered flag, and he spoke with such deep emotion of Carter’s failure to control the currency and the oil crises that his account began to sound autobiographical, as if the Carter Administration had been responsible for his personal sorrows, his rained-out picnics and sexual hang-ups, his acquaintance with melancholy and loneliness. I thought that I had never seen this before and that it helped to explain the vote. Someone said that if gasoline cost more than a dollar a gallon and we had two-digit inflation the incumbent would be defeated. This seemed to make sense.

  •

  I turn on the TV, but George C. Scott is about to defend, with his life, a bridge in the last war with Germany. Actors impersonating combat—the agonies of death and the glory of victory—have been made ridiculous by documentaries. We are all too familiar with the facts to take seriously the spectacle of an actor pretending to die in an artificial trench. I read about Nancy Mitford and remember being in the next cabana to her on the Lido. Just think of that! She was with Victor Cunard and they were guests of an Italian princess whose name I cannot remember. I never met her, but I’m inclined to suggest that I knew her well. Mussolini gave her father his title, and I once went swimming in her pool with Lord Somebody. Nancy Mitford’s brother-in-law—a somewhat broken-down felon—once paid me a compliment. I sleep well and wake to think of a young woman. I shave, build my fire in the hutch, and go to the village, where I buy a paper and a container of coffee. I am one of the few men you can see coming into McDonald’s with a container of coffee so that they won’t suffer any delay in getting their caffeine. There is a couple—a mother and son, I think. She is one of those women of such exhaustive plainness that you wonder about the moment of conception. What could have compelled anyone to penetrate her? But perhaps she is an aunt. She seems quite happy. The boy is adolescent—twelve or thirteen—and dressed in a yellow costume with a yellow cap with a visor. This seems to be one of those mornings of his life when his strength, beauty, and agility have only just been revealed to him, and while he waits for his scrambled eggs and bacon he poses, absolutely without grace, catches a happy glimpse of himself in some reflecting surface, and pretends, for a minute or two, to fly. They take away four breakfasts, and I expect them to get into a car and drive to the home where Daddy and Sissie are waiting, but not at all. They sit down at a table and attack the four breakfasts with an efficient and experienced air, as if they did this regularly.