The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  So, I aim at a longer working day and get unhappily overexcited. I don’t find the serenity that I seem to remember while working on “Falconer.” It could be a simple question of health, or how many cups of coffee I drink. I cycle the new route, and toward dark and with this room at long last quite warm, I seem to enjoy some repose.

  •

  I am at loose ends. I go to A.A., this in the parish-house kitchen, an interior that is of first importance to no one. Rummage sales, festivals, and door-to-door fund-raising resurrected the place ten years ago, but now half the fluorescent lighting blinks erratically and half the cabinet doors hang askew. So people talk with absolute candor about the bewilderments of life. “Yesterday was a memory, tomorrow is a dream,” says a man who is dressed like a gas pumper and has only three front teeth. From what text, greeting card, or book he took the message doesn’t matter to me at this hour.

  •

  So, I wake this morning and think, What but a truly great country could freely elect for its Chief Executive a faded and elderly cowboy actor whose veins are so calcified and whose memory is so depleted that he can seldom remember the armchair opinions he expressed at yesterday’s lunch?

  •

  And walking and bicycling and wandering I think myself a bad father, and I think that this decision is to be made not by me but by my sons, and I think that by commenting on my loves and my deepest anxieties I jockey myself into the position of a bystander, a traveller, even a tourist, for by claiming to enjoy a degree of perspective I seem to be planning to move on to some other country. I like to think that this is a passing depression, and that I will live the role of a father with the authority of true love and truly be a man of my time and my place.

  •

  So on my knees in church I am grateful for the present turn of events in my marriage, and I pray it will continue, although I do see that some of the difficulties seem to be part of my immortal soul and that these difficulties were at times made tolerable by my drunkenness. The complexity of my nature seems represented by the morning after the birth of a son. This was what I most wanted in life; it was to be for the rest of my natural life a source of boundless pleasure. He was to be not only an enthusiasm but a salvation. Experiencin and anticipating this great fortune on the balcony of our apartment in Rome I saw a sports car loaded with drunken bucks racing down the street—for Ostia, I guessed—and I deeply longed to be with them. So, this longing beyond the perimeter of what I ardently desire seems often to be with me. But I have been to Ostia with the bucks, and with them my longing for the permanence I have left is much more painful. So on my knees the first Sunday in Advent I pray for courage.

  •

  The drug I take for epilepsy seems to leave me rather sleepy and unresponsive. That seems to be my message for the day.

  •

  This is my eighth or ninth day on Dilantin, and I feel poorly. I am expected to pick up my medical records, take the dog to the veterinarian, and find someone to drive me to the hospital for my chat with a leading neurologist. I don’t seem able to do much else, although I will try to answer the mail.

  •

  We dine with M.’s teacher, and I will observe that I find myself less than brilliant. When orthodoxy is discussed, I recall that perhaps twenty years ago I discussed this on a porch in Providence, Rhode Island, where a couple whose names I can’t remember gave a large dinner party in our honor. Mary wore a becoming dress that I recall as being vaguely Japanese. What I said was that one cannot, in the space of a lifetime, improvise a code of good and evil, and thus one must resort to tradition. In the morning I am constipated and do not go to church. I go early to Shop-rite to buy cat food. One might describe the few shoppers as ambassadors of a new world. They seem quite strange to me. The air is filled with music. “It came upon a midnight clear,” sing a hundred angels, “that glorious song of old. With angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” I think of that mural in Moscow, at the Hotel Ukraine, which depicts the peaceable kingdom of the Communist world. Poets read their verse to masked steelworkers, and farmers sing as they reap the harvest that will enrich them and their friends. The irony in both cases seems mostly poignant. I thank a stranger for holdin a door open for me. “You are very welcome,” he says with charming enthusiasm. We wish each other a good day.

  •

  There is a story in the Times about toxic waste being buried across the river. I might be able to use this. One novel begins with the Fourth of July, one with Christmas Eve, one with the introduction of a man from the upper classes into a penitentiary, and I would like this to open with nothing less urgent. There is the old man and his skating and the news that the pond is poisoned. This is a possibility, but I don’t feel it deeply. In The New York Review of Books I read a piece on the fact that the American people, in choosing Reagan, chose to vote for an irrecapturable past, a character who is no longer found among us, a landscape and a set of circumstances that vanished long ago.

  •

  Monday morning at the S.s’. The hostages are being released but the TV commercials have not been suspended, so we have fond wives and mothers interrupted by exhortations to buy shorts and underwear. The inauguration will be upstaged, to some degree, by the release of the hostages, but I suppose they can exploit this. A speaker this morning said that the new Administration would be strong and powerful. No hostages will be taken while Reagan is President.

  •

  It is that time of year when small colleges with American Indian names and low-digit R.F.D. addresses write to say that the faculty and the student body have enthusiastically chosen me to receive an honorary doctorate in humane letters. Yesterday I regretted two. As I tell it I will claim three.

  •

  So, at the mortal risk of narcissism, I am that old man going around and around the frozen duck pond in my hockey skates, stopping now and then to exclaim over the beauty of the winter sunset. And I am he who can be seen in the early summer morning, pedalling my bicycle to Holy Communion in a High church where they genuflect and use the Cranmer prayer book. I am also he whose loud cries of erotic ecstas can be heard through the walls of the Millstream Motel. “You can’t go on living like this,” says my lover. I’m not quite sure what is meant.

  •

  So, the old man says, “None of you are old enough to remember the thrill of a consummate civilization. It was a passing phenomenon, rather like the pleasures of light, although we have come to know that light can move worlds. The dates are quite loose, but it would have been sometime between the two wars with Germany. It would be most obvious if you were a young man or woman from Oklahoma, or Salt Lake City, travelling to Paris, or Vienna, or even London. You would be leaving a painful condition of provincial loneliness for some capital city where men and women were all burgeoning in their relationship to one another, in their inventiveness in industry, the arts, and other forms of understanding, as if our lives might be something much more various than a paradise. It was a fact, happily remembered by other old men and women and authenticated by the legislation, the wealth, and the music and painting of that past. But it seems now that we have only our memories, and the provincial loneliness of Oklahoma has become universal.”

  •

  I do have trouble with the dead hours of the afternoon without skating, skiing, bicycling, swimming, or sexual discharges or drink. I read some Graham Greene, whose mastery I admire, but at about twenty minutes to seven I suffer a loss of memory. I know, perhaps, who I am, but I am not very sure of my whereabouts. It may be of some significance that this always happens as I am called to the table. This time I find the seizure uncommonly depressing.

  •

  I wake terribly blue, and try to remember how often this has been the case; how often I have written about the man who cries at ballgames and Fourth of July parades. I think of how substantial is the gift of prayer; and I am on my knees. And I think of the susceptibility and loneliness of youth, of how this
contributes to youth’s drive and youth’s beauty.

  •

  The last Sunday before Lent, and this is in haste. The light is brilliant, and my spirits are high, and since this is the first of the month I know these high spirits will be lasting. Remembering my letter to O’Hara, I think, on my knees in church, that I believe in narrative as invention. What I mean to say, of course, is that I believe in narrative as revelation. And in writing to Federico I would like to say something about our closeness having some of the elements of chance and that we are rather like travellers taking the same road, gifted or equipped with remarkable instruments of divination, since the road is seldom travelled, or that at least gives that impression.

  And it is with a marketplace that we confound those anthropologists who consider society to be largely a creation of anxiety, theft, and cowardice. We do not gather at that pass in the river to increase our numbers so we can defend ourselves from the tribes in the north. We gather here to exchange our potatoes for meat, our fish for baskets, and our greens for new breads. We are also gathered here to meet our wives, compete in contests of strength and skill, listen to the storyteller recount the night the wolves appeared, watch the thief’s right hand be chopped off, and get fairly drunk. The fragrance of our social origins is what gives Buy Brite some of its excitement.

  •

  At the bank I see D.C., a slender black who does carpentry. “Nails have gone from ten cents a pound to a dollar thirty. You can’t keep your head above water.” An Irishman behind me, who excites my dislike, goes on about how terrible these times are. “Oh, they are terrible,” says D. “All the governor wants to do is build prisons. And they sent that woman to prison for killing her lover, but I know a man who shot his friend right in the face and didn’t get six months. He just paid off the right judge. You get three raps for stealing now, you get life. Life! Buddy’s brother got three raps for stealing, and they locked him up for eighteen years. He had to serve twelve. But one of my girl friends went to this Arab country for her vacation where if you steal anything they cut your hand off. I mean, you see a pocketbook lying in the street, you try to find out who it belongs to. You go into a store and you want to buy something and the owner isn’t there you go out in the street and find him. If you don’t they’ll cut your hand off.” “I suppose,” th Irishman says, “that the judges are corrupt, the lawyers are crooked, even the weather is worse than it used to be because of pollution, but if you buy one of them Japanese cars you’ll throw ten Americans out of work. It’s just terrible, everything is just terrible.”

  And only a few hours later an attempt is made to assassinate the President. That he rallies seems to me splendid. That the Chief Executive of a very great nation is felled by an assassin and upon rising says “I forgot to duck” proves the inspired closeness of language and spirit. We seem perhaps closer to the light than we were in St. Petersburg and Sarajevo.

  I have a traction bed installed and invest a hundred thousand dollars in an energy-saving transportation-improvement bond issue. M. arrives and it is a great pleasure to meet him. This friendship—with its great potential for confrontations, scandal, blackmail, arrests, suicides, and other tragic ends—seems to me intrinsically easygoing and quite natural. When we embrace briefly at the station before he leaves the car to take a train we both enjoy a mastery over some territories of loneliness that seemed endless. Holding him in my arms and being held in his, feeling his cheek against my cheek, I seem to understand the Copenhagen airport in a snowstorm, or Istanbul, or Cleveland.

  This cannot go on forever, this could not possibly be solemnized—it lasts for only a few hours, and I think, sentimentally, that one never asked for more.

  So I sit at the kitchen table, drinking black coffee and thinking of Verdi. Through government aid I heard, in the last week, the last scene from “Il Trovatore” and the Requiem Mass. And so I think of the enormous contribution Verdi made to the life of the planet and the enormous cooperation he was given by orchestras and singers and the enthusiasm of audiences. And I think what an enormous opportunity it is to be alive on this planet. Having myself been cold and hungry and terribly alone, I think I still feel the excitement of an opportunity. The sense of being with some sleeping person—one’s child or one’s lover—and seeming to taste the privilege of living, or being alive. This sense of privilege or opportunity seems to hint, and no more than hint, at other worlds around us. This seems a singular experience.

  My neck is lame; and last night I read at the church and lost the last page. What is there to say of the evening? My wife seems to be quite simply the air I breathe. It is a spring night, a lovely spring night. We walk from the church to the club and at the foot of the street one can see the full sky, a wall of light.

  •

  So, awakened first by a cat and then by an old dog, I find myself drinking coffee at quarter to six. I am prone to complain, but prone is what I am. It is the old litany. I have no closet, no shirt drawer, and because I invested a hundred thousand in mortgages, I have no ready cash. If the governor can unsnarl an ecclesiastical battle between the Roman and the Greek churches he will be united in holy matrimony on Saturday to a twice-married Greek opportunist whose affairs are, at the moment, under congressional investigation while his gubernatorial affairs are even more chaotic. For the lack of a budget, a million state employees will go hungry over the weekend and more than a million men and women will die for lack of the medicine bought by Medicare. And the old man on Tuesday night who said, “You’ll have to speak louder. I may not be able to hear anything you say. My wife threw my hearing aid into the washing machine last night. $400. Of course I don’t have to listen to her anymore, do I? Ho-ho-ho. Everything evens up. The rich have ice in the summer, and the poor have ice in the winter.”

  So, at six I write that all I know is the importance of love, the smell of fried food, and the music of the rain.

  •

  So, this is upon my return from a week or so in the hospital. There was an early morning when I suffered intense pain. Then there was that part of my consciousness that declared that I was not alone. When I asked who was with me I was told that it was God. It made the pain much easier to bear. When there was another seizure, an hour later, the knowledge that I was not alone was a powerful support.

  So, on waking I think of completing the book, but now I feel an invalid. Reading Calvino, who is very close to Pirandello—a master—I find him unsympathetically cute. I am in the wrong country, but I shall return.

  So, since sickness seems to be no part of the story I hope to tell, I have almost nothing to say this morning. I finish the Calvino book, which I think one should read although I find it terribly arch. I play recording of myself reading “The Swimmer” and think it quite good. I watch the Yankees play in Detroit before an empty stadium because everybody in Detroit is broke. Waking, I hear first the three-axle, eighteen-wheel trucks of dawn and then the first birds to sing at daybreak. I seem to hold Mrs. Z. in my arms; and all it seems that one ever wanted was a blonde whose breasts were a little larger than one remembered them. That my claim to simplicity can be challenged is well known. However, this seems to be the destiny I seek—or the past I instinctively recall—as I lie in bed in the first of the daylight admiring the songbirds.

  •

  I go to the doctor, who does something I see no reason to describe; but I feel much better. Indeed, I feel myself this morning. Mary seems bewildered, and when I think that I am not alone in this dilemma I may be sentimental, but it does give me some latitude or—you might say—generosity. So there is a great deal to do.

  A Turkish murderer, escaped from an Istanbul prison, attempts to assassinate the Pope. “God have mercy on his soul” is what I say, and had I been asked for a reaction I would have said that I would pray. Many of the celebrities questioned speak of the chaos of the modern world. It seems to me that this is something one accepted years ago. It is a point of departure and not an observation. I will pray; I shall pray; I am
praying.

  •

  I have talked with both Mrs. Z. and R. Her voice has its familiar harshness; she is the pretty girl who loves her jackknife and it seems that what she has is something I must have in the women I enjoy. Her voice summons none of the profound music that stirs me when I talk with R. on the telephone, although I have never found anything to say to R. over the lunch table. “Compromise” is not the word to describe my affairs, I think, because my engagement is, I think, very deep, although it appears highly diverse. Mrs. Z. seems, quite unbeknownst to her, to have at times the pathos of a foundling. R. will support me when I am tired. Mary has shared most of her life with me. Last night when I was losing at backgammon there was a hint, or perhaps a memory, of her crying to my opponent, “Beat him, beat him, beat him!” This was long ago and these recollections accomplish nothing.