The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International)

by Cheever, John

  •

  Lunch with L., my melancholy friend. “I don’t want to move to California until I’m sure that I’ve failed here,” he says, but he’s been here for twenty years and has not done much. I think he is what we mean by a melancholic—full of ambitions that he does not have the vitality to requite, a sensualist, but an inhibited one and a man who came to his wife with such a deep feeling of his own imperfections that he was uxorious and dependent. And here is a man without a defense against loneliness, without the vitality to seek friends or girls in a strange city; a man who, finding himself alone in Rome or Paris, would sit in his hotel room, writing letters to his wife and children. He must have been terribly lonely and so decided to surprise his family by returning home on Christmas Eve. His wife met him at the airport with the news that she had fallen in love with another man and had been living wit him for three months. She went on and on, and he said, O.K., he had the basic facts, all she had to do was to leave him off at some hotel.

  And then she says, “How could you be so inconsiderate? The tree is lighted and we’ve bought presents for you, and Mummy and Daddy and the children are waiting for you.”

  Then he says, “Look, you’ve just told me that my life with you and the kids is just over. You’ve just told me that I’m through and out. Now you want me to go back and play Santa Claus. I never liked your parents anyhow.”

  Then she says, “Oh, I never knew you could be so cruel. It wasn’t my fault that I fell in love with Henry. I didn’t have any choice in the matter. You’re behaving as if I did it deliberately. And how can I explain the whole thing to Mummy and Daddy? They don’t know. We’ve spent all evening decorating the tree, just for you. They’re all waiting; they all have on their best clothes.”

  And so he, wanting to see the children, wanting to see his own four walls, goes back. It seems to be his luck to find life a sad, sad tale. And I wonder how he could do better. And like many melancholies his sexual arrangements are extremely important and yet never very vivid. Speaking of homosexuality in Europe, we both mantle and lower our eyes as if we were virgins, as indeed we are; but I don’t suppose it would do him any good to spend a honeymoon in Verona with a Negro bootblack. I wish he were happier and I don’t see why he isn’t.

  •

  Feeling very lousy with a sore tail, and off to Barnard saying I am tired of this thread of love and whiskey, of courage and memory that is the only thing to hold my world together; I am tired of threads and all other frail things. And the lewd man, half asleep and weary of his mind’s sportiveness, thinks then of bridges and how bridges leap and multiply in his head; suspension bridges in thunderstorms and marble bridges in Venice; railroad bridges over the Susquehanna and the Delaware and wooden bridges over mountain streams, Seine bridges and Loire bridges, Hudson River and Bay bridges, and that lewdness is the energy, the touchstone, for all of this cannot matter.

  Feeling sick and not knowing if I should go to the hospital. These things are hard to decide. Using whiskey as a painkiller much of th day. Happier elsewhere than here and yet not knowing where to go. Yaddo seems like such a position of retreat. The rubbish of pain, a sense of closeness, a small attic of the emotions, unlighted, unventilated, some closet perhaps in which as a child, playing hide-and-seek, one was locked. I am, I say, a lambent flame with piles. And then I think, In the morning it will be better, it is getting better. I should learn to be less intense, a message I seem to read while raking leaves. I rake them in a frenzy. So then we hear the wind change its quarter suddenly and flow freshly out of the west and we are delighted, because this reminds us of our own recuperative powers.

  Our stores of humor and goodwill seem depleted by illness, and the misery we feel when we are separated from our amiability does not seem to do anything to restore it to us. And then, when we seem about to repose on the gravel bed, the mind springs up, strikes and rebels, and we see flags, red and gold, and other signs of cheerfulness and vitality. I can understand that I should be sick, but I cannot understand why this feebleness should spread into my emotional life—why a kid, slipping on a sky-blue sweater, should bear down Pine Street like the very angel of destruction, armed to the teeth; why I should have no taste for light, why should I be left with nothing but my misty ambitions for the good weal. But at least I have these; at least, at three in the morning, I can feel all warm and pleased with the thought of some clear relationship.

  All day in bed; a beautiful day; but I won’t take the beauty of the world as a reproach.

  •

  Sunday, an overcast day, snow in the dark clouds, it seemed, but the air warm. Played a little football, and how much I like to do this. Drank a beer and to bed early. Very jumpy on Monday morning; also a sore tail and dyspepsia. Took a pill, telling myself that my only trouble is intensity. Lunch with Mr. K. and H.T. Ready to jump out of my skin at any moment. The usual atmosphere of crucifixion in the classroom. Downtown in a bus. Now I am most miserable. Drank two Martinis in a dirty saloon. Then over to the Shaws’. A two-room suite, the roses three days old, two private telephone lines, three television executives. I admire and perhaps love Irwin but he is so rich and has dined so often with the Duke of Argyll and I am so poor that these differences come between us. The TV executives tried to place me and failed. I may have behaved drunkenly or clumsily, but I will not reproach myself. I read the Sunday paper while Irwin talked large sums of money with Hollywood. And I remember a character in one of his novels—an expatriate musician—whose struggle with art ended in suicide and I think that perhaps Irwin judges my own struggle with pity and condescension. Then I leave, perhaps drunk, and oh Lord I am miserable. But where will I turn? My only friends in the city seem to be very gloomy people and I don’t want them to dress my wounds. And I do not want to chafe my wife’s ears with my long tale of bitterness and woe. And I am so sensitive that I seem to be insane; even the stars in heaven discountenance me. And I think, tearfully, of my lonely life. Alas, alas. Even the voice of the conductor, calling out the place names, seems to heap scorn on my wretchedness. And then I wake in despair at 3 A.M. and try to think of good things—sailing and skiing and the high spirits of children—I fail.

  •

  In town and theatre with the B.s, me high-spirited after, Mary squinchy, as she is so often on these trips; and I think that while a marriage is like a boat there is a point where we can dive from the bow. And then the city seems beautiful, hustling, full of purpose and life and vitality, and I would like only to be happy and enjoy myself. We meet the B.s at one of the inner parlors of the Harvard Club and Mary, or so I think, is at once animated and flirtatious. Now I may be insane, neurotic, queer, impotent, and worthless, and I may imagine all of this, but my pleasant evening begins to come to pieces. It is not significant, I think, but on the way to the checkroom I am accosted by old Walker Evans, whose face looks very puffy. Mary chats gaily with B. and I am consumed with jealousy and hopelessness. She turns to me once during the intermission to express a flat contradiction and whether or not this is imaginary I feel disembowelled. After this there is no civility left in me; my toys have been broken. Coming home I throw a beer bottle against the wall of the garage. I will curl up on the sofa and weep bitter tears; and then it seems that I have wept too many tears, gin tears, whiskey tears, tears of plain salt, but too many; I have walked around these paths too often, hump-shouldered, trying to spin a happy ending for this capriciousness. And now today I have no will, no guts, no stomach for inventing hopes. I dream of some gentle wife and lover, blond or dark-haired, who has some clearness in her disposition. And how will I ever find her, bent over this typewriter in a room with a shut door? I should go away and yet I postpone my goings away interminably. I could take a plane to France; all I lack is guts. I may be completely mistaken in all my feelings; but they are mine at the moment.

  •

  So I wonder if it is my legitimate business to probe into these matters—if perhaps I don’t make trouble by holding every word, every change rung in
the emotional climate, up to the light and examining it carefully. That if I were an account executive or had the charge of a television program, left here in the dark of morning and returned in the dark of night, things might go along a little easier. I dream of Mary, I seem to pursue her through the many courtyards of what are called garden apartments, but she escapes me, she closes the door in my face. And then I see a reconciliation, a regular valentine in which she lies on a bed of those light-pink roses. Very libidinous. And it seems to me that I try to repair a web that is everywhere broken; that with every reparation I find that a new part has been broken or kicked loose. I think perhaps that Mary is in love with X or Y or Z but I will never be told and I will never know, although it’s a subject that I can’t think about without getting weak in the belly. I bring in my jokes, my presents, my scraps of news, and all I harvest are sidelong glances and bitter contradictions and I take long, sad walks. And I wonder sometimes if I am not face-to-face with a destructive force; something with which I am unable to cope. If there was a quarrel a sad tale might be told me; I have been impossible, ill, nagging, mean, and cruel, but there are limits to my self-reproach and I don’t have the stomach for a Donnybrook. I do not want to spend my Christmas alone in a rotten hotel nor with gentle friends (my God). I would like to smell the green tree and give my children their presents and go to church and carve my turkey and sit on the sofa drinking whiskey and brooding on the richness of life; but I do not know what to expect. It could be a season of the most exacerbating distempers, tears, slammed doors, hysteria and dark looks and silences lasting for a week. Today I wake up in the morning feeling lewd and high-spirited, but my only harvest is haggard looks and bitter contradictions. I can blame myself. This seems to be the only direction in which hope lies; and I trust that everything will work out; work itself out. My jealousy is a laughable aberration. Who cares, who cares?

  •

  For Coverly she was his notchke, his hunchke, his everything that the dry vocabulary of St. Botolphs gave him no help in expressing—she was his mouse and his turtledove, and how gently and like a turtledove she seemed to flutter and tremble when he mounted her, but more than this she was the key to that simple, or perhaps crude, poetry that made up the bulk of his life, such as the sound of changing winds, and snow in the embers of the hearth, and the bloom of winter afterglows, and stealing roses past midnight in the rain, so that her distempers, whether or not he was to blame for them, took from him nearly everything that seemed alive.

  A fine winter day; and I think I make some progress with Coverly. That point where men extricate themselves from what is in theory a hopeless situation; that moment where, in theory, all should be silence, a healthy and impertinent question is asked. Banked the roses with dead leaves. A little dry snow blew crosswise on the north wind although there was much blue sky. How fine it feels. The sun going down takes many forms; gold, brass cauldrons, streaks of lemon yellow and then, unexpectedly, a field of rose. I drive Susie into town and think what a joy my life is, for I feel healthy, passionate, and useful and all in all the pitfalls of my life are not as hazardous and deep as I make them out to be. It seems that we must do some penance for our sins and the sins of our fathers. And so we do our penance and it is done. And so we watch the winter twilight and drink too much gin and help the children address their Christmas cards. And go to a party for the choir with the S.s, A. angry at the poor director with his haunted eyes and his thin lips and his ailing wife and his sweet daughter. You could pick him up with one hand and if you shook him he would rattle.

  And so we wake at dawn on Monday morning (up on the hill there is one other light burning in someone else’s bathroom) and shaving we seem to be overtaken by a subtle and pervasive grief. We have most of what we want and need and yet our feelings are saturated with this disenchantment, like a filament filled with light. It is perhaps no more than that we glimpse the possibility of failure or that we drank too much on Saturday night. What we seem to see is our incurable tenderness. But on Tuesday morning we seem to have woken from a splendid dream of the Mediterranean and some of its civilizations and we are bushy-tailed and full of high hopes. Drank a good deal of whiskey, trying to relax so that I could read the Wapshots. I don’t know what to make of it. The whole picture of Leander has got to be refreshed. I can’t say that I know what the novel is about. I don’t know the moral within Leander’s tragedy. He breaks with tradition or is made to break with it and suffers. He is growing old, and suffers. But he is like a figure in a minor poem. Colorful, erratic, and not filled out. But the tragedy of Clarissa ties up with the tragedy of the Topaze. It is the time after this that I don’t understand. He is nothing but an old man waiting for a grandson, and that is not enough. And I have to do much work on Sarah and insert Lulu. One of the things I have to worry about most is haste: haste and money. And I want it to have some moral value. Since it is not Leander’s fault that the Topaze is wrecked, how can he redeem himself? It is the complexity of life that wrecks the ship and I would like to show his triumph over this complexity. And I don’t, so far.

  •

  Pain in the chest. Rowed with Mary about lingering glances; very depressed; practically insane. A call from Quincy to say that Mother is very sick. Emotional hurly-burly; some tears. Got a room on the Owl for Boston. The atmosphere of all such places seems to me to be the atmosphere of erotic misdemeanor. This may be a subjective projection. Rainy dawn in Boston; rainy Sunday morning. The unregenerate slums of Boston on a dark day. How lasting they seem; unassailable. Found mother very withered now, weary (she says of life). Her wits and her hearing are sharp. “I shout at Mrs. Bacon and she doesn’t mind. Other people don’t like to have me shout at them. She was talking on the telephone—she was telling someone about her cardiograms. I shouted at her, ‘Nobody wants to hear about your cardiograms.’ She didn’t seem to mind.” Old and feeble and alone and helpless as she is, I still seem to lay at her feet the sense of a tragic misunderstanding. “He’s a regular boy,” she says of someone and I still flinch. Home on the 1:00 and up the banks of the Hudson after dark to this warm and comfortable house. I have my troubles, but they do not seem to be insupportable. I would not like to be the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semisecret.

  •

  Mother died on the 22nd, and I do not note this any more than I note the walls of the chalice full of wine. The A.s’ antic house. This strong emotion as we follow a path to the grave. Norwell covered with old snow.

  •

  The train yards at Harmon on an overcast day. I wonder, Has my life become so ingrown that I cannot travel—but I can. A reproduction of a Cézanne on the train coach. A couple returning from a visit to New York: “On Wednesday afternoon we saw ‘Bus Stop.’ On Thursday morning we went to Radio City. Then we had lunch on the top of the Empire State Building. Thursday night we saw ‘Tiger at the Gates.’ We saw CinemaScope Friday afternoon,” etc. Farther north, snow on the ground. It lies sparsely and like powdered sugar on a winter-killed landscape, bitter as gall—and I think I do not want to make such notes, to write for the sake of writing. I want to celebrate, praise the Lord, discover and restate man’s freedom, although my vision is far from clear. I think of love’s two aspects: all that is gold and splendid, even the dust under the bed, and that other creation of soiled underwear and sidelong glances; both being a part of my nature. Met by a gentlewoman and an old friend, and off to the baths. White matchboard cubicles, a stained tub. Reading the Herald Tribune in a hot room. An old man with a towel around his middle massages my bum with sandsoap. The last days of Rome. But what, then, is this body that can be enflamed with fruitless desire when a stranger rubs witch hazel between my toes? The most I can do is to make a joke, and not a sad joke. Whiskey and talk and, later, thunder, lightning, the end of the skiing here. When I was younger I was delighted to lie on this bed, dreaming of what I would have—a good wife and lively children but now the mind seems stained with desire, and I travel throu
gh some erotic purgatory wondering, Is this a lack of character, of will, a misunderstanding of the meaning o discipline, infantilism, sickness? These are no more than the trials of a lewd and a gentle nature. There are worse. Oh, how I long for what I have known; that healthy sense of self—aging, composed, industrious and unbeautiful. Where are my dear children? Where is Marcie?

  •

  On our knees in church (even in the cathedral) we are face-to-face with the bare facts of our humanity. We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual. The door at our back creaks open and we wonder, Who has just come in? Arthur? Charlie? Henry Penrose? Who is the boy in the plaid shirt? When was he confirmed? Why is the lady in the first pew crying? And even as the service rises to the great poetry of Bread and Wine we continue our observations. We see that the acolytes’ red plush cushion is nailed to the oak floor of the chancel and that the altar cloth is embroidered with tulips. And then for a moment a knowledge of His magnificence and man’s giftedness draws together, in at least a promise of ecstasy, all these bare and disparate facts.

  •

  Up to the West Branch with A.S. Very cold, the ground frozen. Some ice in the brook. The saplings very red, like a cardinal’s wing, but not much cheer or color. No fish, not even a strike. But the pleasure of wading this stream, although I dream of a stream with more fish in it. And the great pleasure I take in A.’s company. I have always felt that this would someday be revealed to me as a union of mysteriously broken hearts, like so many of my friendships, but there has never been a grain of evidence. It is as light, as solid, and pleasant and clear as any friendship I have ever known. And for all my woolgathering and troublemaking I cannot find a hint of darkness or sordidness in it.