This summer I have been reading John Cheever. I have seen him called “the Chekhov of the suburbs” – a title that might also fit another John (Updike). I grew up in the suburbs, though a more modern version than Cheever’s, but I still can identify with his people and places.
The stories are middle-class and live mostly in New York City’s Upper East Side or some Hudson Valley suburb.
I first read him in his short stories. Two of them were assigned in my high school English class – “The Enormous Radio” and “The Swimmer” and I bought his big collected stories volume and I reread some of those so far this summer.
He also wrote four novels. I saw a copy of Falconer (1977) in one of my local Little Libraries and borrowed it. It’s not a summer beach read. It is an introspective novel about a man named Ezekiel Farragut, who is imprisoned for murdering his brother.
It has been widely praised by critics for its literary merit and is often cited as one of Cheever’s finest works, contributing significantly to his reputation as a major American writer.
I also borrowed a copy of his journals from the public library and have been dipping in and out of it as I read the stories and the novel. The book’s blurb says, “the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No American writer of comparable stature has left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account of himself: his family life, his literary life, and his emotional life.”
From his 1961 journal: “I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more significant. I have improvised a background for myself — genteel, traditional — and it is generally accepted.”
His journals reveal that he was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. And so, he writes much about himself and little about his family or friends. The journals also reveal that he enjoyed going to church. He was conflicted about his bisexuality. A complicated man.
Updike used to leave his home and go to an office where he wrote and did his correspondence. He treated it like a job – and of course, it was his job – though we often think of writers working otherwise.
Cheever created an image that he was a man in the suit who rode down his apartment building’s elevator along with all the other men in suits who were leaving for work. His daughter Susan later revealed: “From the lobby, he would walk down to the basement, to the windowless storage room that came with our apartment. That was where he worked. There, he hung up the suit and hat and wrote all morning in his boxer shorts, typing away at his portable Underwood set up on the folding table. At lunchtime, he would put the suit back on and ride up in the elevator.”
I have written before about journals – mine and others. Reading other people’s journals or diaries that have been published has a bit of the feeling of doing something wrong – which makes it more interesting.
Here is another excerpt from his journals which I used to write a found poem yesterday afternoon.
“In town for lunch. The air-conditioning, the smell of perfume and gin, the attentions of the headwaiter, the real and unreal sense of haste, importance, and freedom that clings to the theatre. It was a beautiful day in town, windy, clear, and fresh. The girls on the street are a joy. A girl with bare arms by the St. Regis; a girl with bare shoulders on Fifty-seventh Street; dark eyes and light eyes and red hair and above all the wonderful sense of dignity and purpose in their clear features. But there is the imperfect joining of the carnal world and the world of courage and other spiritual matters. I seem, after half a lifetime, to have made no progress, unless resignation is progress. There is the erotic hour of waking, which is like birth. There is the light or the rainfall, some ingenuous symbol by which one returns to the visible, perhaps the mature world. There is the euphoria, the sense that life is no more than it appears to be, light and water and trees and pleasant people that can be brought crashing down by a neck, a hand, an obscenity written on a toilet door. There is always, somewhere, this hint of aberrant carnality. The worst of it is that it seems labyrinthine; I come back again and again to the image of a naked prisoner in an unlocked cell, and to tell the truth I don’t know how he will escape. Death figures here, the unwillingness to live. Many of these shapes seem like the shapes of death; one approaches them with the same amorousness, the same sense of terrible dread. I say to myself that the body can be washed clean of any indulgence; the only sin is despair, but I speak meaninglessly in my own case. Chasteness is real; the morning adjures one to be chaste. Chasteness is waking. I could not wash the obscenity off myself. But in all this thinking there is a lack of space, of latitude, of light and humor.”
Milneville 