Yet another fact: it is impossible to keep one’s spine from tingling during the reading of that passage. It tingles not because Tom (as the narrator calls him) is so terrifying, but because the narrator goes from yelling the generic and expected, “Get the hell away from here!” to the unexpected and specific, “She’s gone! Rachel’s gone!” See: I felt the chill again, just typing those sentences. Because again Cheever has artfully mis- and then re-directed us: we pay attention to Tom, when we should be paying attention to the narrator, to what he’s trying to stop himself from feeling and thinking and saying. This is testament not to our limitations as readers, but to Cheever’s expert misdirection. But once the narrator shouts out, “She’s gone! Rachel’s gone!” we are reminded, for good, of what’s at stake in the story, to the point where the reader is tempted to wonder if Tom isn’t the narrator’s visible version of the audible Tell Tale Heart: a manifestation of psychic terror rather than something objectively real.

He isn’t; he is. The narrator discovers this a few mornings later at the train station: “Then I saw my man. It was simple as that. He was waiting on the platform for the eight-ten with the rest of us, but he wasn’t any stranger…It was Herbert Marston, who lives in the big yellow house on Blenhollow Road. If there had been any question in my mind, it would have been answered by the way he looked when he saw that I recognized him. He looked frightened and guilty. I started across the platform to speak to him…Then I stopped, because I saw he was not alone. He was with his wife and his daughter.” This scene comes halfway through the story, and what a terrible moment for the narrator, and what a wonderful moment for the reader. Because we both realize the same thing: that there will be no easy answers or epiphanies or confrontations in the story. The narrator admits as much after he physically describes the family, who, despite their problems, are at least together, are at least seemingly happy: “I had wanted to know who Tom was, but now that I knew, I didn’t feel any better. The graying man and the beautiful girl and the woman, standing together, made me feel worse.”

This is a wonderful moment for the reader not because the reader is sadistic, but because the reader realizes he is in the hands of a writer who denies the reader what the reader shouldn’t want in the first place. If the reader wants the story to solve the mystery of Tom, then Cheever will solve it all right, but he denies the reader the easy pleasure usually involved in the solving of a mystery. Because once Herbert Marston is revealed, the most serious mystery remains: if the narrator’s mess survives the unmasking of Tom, then how will the narrator survive the mess? It should be said that Cheever isn’t any more sadistic in creating the mess than the reader is in enjoying it: because no matter what Jones says, Cheever is one our most empathetic writers. He doesn’t mock the narrator’s self-deception, any more than he mocks the way the reader is so easily distracted by Tom. Because if the problem is severe enough, then of course we want to deceive ourselves; of course we’d allow ourselves to be distracted from it. But we should celebrate the writer who doesn’t allow us easy victories, who empathizes with our wanting things we shouldn’t want while still refusing to give them to us. Should we have any doubt about him refusing us, Cheever dispels it soon after the scene at the train station, when the narrator goes to a party. What the narrator wants at the party is “a pretty girl in new shoes, but it looked as if all the pretty girls had stayed at the shore.” Instead, the narrator gets a beautiful woman his own age, Grace Harris, who gives him a “sad, sad look,” and says, “You poor boy…I see a rope around your neck.”

The reader won’t be surprised, then, that when the narrator tries to fall asleep that night, he sees a hangman’s noose, in addition to seeing Mr. Marston outside his window. He burns all the rope in the house, but that doesn’t make the visions of it go away, anymore than the booze or the trains or the rain or the Lin Yutang has gotten rid of Mr. Marston. Things become so terrible for the narrator that he realizes that “nothing now was going to save me,” and the despair is so deeply felt and artfully rendered that the reader despairingly wonders, despite Cheever’s light touch, if he really might allow something awful to happen to his narrator. In the end he doesn’t, and how he doesn’t is worth quoting in full before talking about why he doesn’t:

I took a train home, but I was too tired to go to Orpheo’s and then sit through a movie. I drove from the station to the house and put the car in the garage. From there I heard the telephone ringing, and I waited in the garden until the ringing had stopped. As soon as I stepped into the living room, I noticed on the wall some dirty handprints that had been made by the children before they went away. They were near the baseboard and I had to get down on my knees to kiss them.

Then I sat in the living room for a long time. I fell asleep, and when I woke it was late: all the other houses were dark. I turned on a light. Peeping Tom would be putting on his slippers and his bathrobe…to begin his prowl through the backyards and gardens… I got down the Lin Yutang and began to read. I heard the Bartstows’ dog barking. The telephone began to ring.

‘Oh, my darling!’ I shouted when I heard Rachel’s voice. ‘Oh, my darling! Oh, my darling!’ She was crying. She was at Seal Harbor. It had rained for a week, and Tobey had a temperature of a hundred and four. ‘I’ll leave now,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive all night. I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll get there in the morning. Oh, my darling!’

That was all. It was all over. I packed a bag and turned off the icebox and drove all night. We’ve been happy ever since. So far as I know, Mr. Marston has never stood outside our house in the dark, although I’ve seen him often enough at the station platform and at the country club. His daughter Lydia is going to be married next month, and his sallow wife was recently cited by one of the national charities for her good words. Everyone here is well.

Well, we know, or suspect that everyone there is not well, not really, which is one of the reasons this passage is so beautiful, so satisfying. It acts as a release valve for the story’s terrible tension, while reminding the reader that the valve hasn’t done anything to fix the source of the tension. Another way of putting it is that we know that all is not well, but we also know that the narrator wants to believe it is. He wants to have hope, and after what he’s been through, this hope isn’t self-deception, except insofar as all hope requires a fair amount of self-deception. Cheever has done something remarkably generous here: he has made hope so difficult for his characters not because he wants to drag them through the mud, but so that whatever hope remaining for them at the end of the story actually means something.

I’ve been talking mostly about readers so far, about what they might gain from reading and reading Cheever’s work, without or without the influence of Blake Bailey’s new biography. The same holds true of fiction writers. How much we have to learn from “The Cure”—about scene setting and genre bending, about voice, about pacing, about pattern and repetition, about empathy, about the inner lives of our characters, about how their milieu might gesture toward their inner lives without us wanting or allowing that milieu to stand for or be the entirety of those inner lives—and from the rest of Cheever’s stories and novels. How much so many of us have already learned from reading and studying those stories and novels.

Except that Charles McGrath in his March 1, 2009 New York Times Magazine piece, “The First Suburbanite,” says we have not: “The problem, perhaps, is that Cheever…doesn’t lead anywhere…he’s not an ‘influence,’ except possibly on a writer like Rick Moody.” Unlike Jones, McGrath gets a good deal right about Cheever in his essay: he manages to keep what he learns in the biography from tarnishing what he sees and admires in Cheever’s fiction; he pays attention to the actual stories and novels even as he pays attention to the life; he seems less willing to dismiss Cheever’s importance simply by virtue of his recent sales record. So let’s say, for the moment, that McGrath is right about Cheever’s influence, too: let’s say that Cheever hasn’t influenced contemporary fiction writers the way, say, Faulkner, Hemingway, O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, and others have. But might this be the fault of contemporary fiction writers, and not Cheever? Might we simply not be up to the standard that Cheever has set for us? Might we (so far) be incapable of doing what McGrath himself said that Cheever did in writing his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle: “he succeeded only by reinventing the novel form for himself” (Oh, that “only”! If only more writers could accomplish something so “only” as reinventing the novel form!). If McGrath is right in claiming there aren’t any followers of Cheever, maybe the fault lies not in Cheever, but in ourselves.

All that said, McGrath is not right: Cheever does lead to other writers. McGrath doesn’t see them because he’s not looking in the right places. When he identifies Rick Moody as the only carrier of the Cheever torch, he means, simply, that Moody has set much of his fiction in Cheeverland. But is setting the only gauge of literary influence and commonality? What about sensibility? What about Cheever’s great contemporaries and near contemporaries—Bellow, O’Connor, Barthelme, Walker Percy, Grace Paley—whose work, like Cheever’s, could be surprisingly experimental, or surprisingly traditional, depending upon the tastes and the expectations of the reader? What about Frederick Exley, whose boozy, articulate, self-wounded, self-deprecating, self-mythologizing alter ego in A Fan’s Notes owes a great debt to so many of Cheever’s conflicted men, from the tender yet rage-filled narrator of “Goodbye, My Brother” to the violent yet redemptive protagonist of Falconer? What about Russell Banks, whose now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t first-person narrator in his novel Affliction is surely reminiscent of Cheever’s first-person-narrator-as-product-of-authorial-will of “The Jewels of the Cabots”? What about Lorrie Moore, whose smart and smart-ass protagonists obviously resemble Cheever’s own as they both court and resist tragedy and disaster? What about Lee K. Abbott, one of our greatest contemporary short story writers, and, of the writers listed here, the one most mostly clearly influenced by Cheever, even though his work is set in New Mexico and Ohio instead of in Westchester County? What about Padgett Powell, whose novels and stories, like Cheever’s, push against and challenge certain traditional narrative forms without dismissing the forms and the traditions altogether? What about the new generation of fabulists—writers like Judy Budnitz, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link—whose work, like Cheever’s, treats sometimes-familiar settings in fantastical ways? Is this not an impressive enough group of writers for McGrath, or for anyone else? Who would not want to be included in such a list, as part of such a legacy? Who would not want to be considered a literary child of John Cheever? I would. And that is another fact, one that is probably obvious to whomever is reading this essay.

Of course, the risk (for me) here is that one could ask these writers if Cheever influenced them, and they might say “No.” But this is what happens when you love people: you see them everywhere. I see Cheever everywhere, which is why you should listen to me when I tell you to read his work, even though I’ve never lived in a Massachusetts coastal town. Even though I’ve never lived in the suburbs of New York, or the suburbs of anywhere. Even though I never met Cheever, nor have I met any of his family, although I spoke with Susan Cheever on the phone once, and she was unbelievably pleasant to me, especially given she had several reasons not to be. Even though I am heterosexual, not bisexual or homosexual. Even though I am not an alcoholic. Even though I have not read Blake Bailey’s biography of Cheever, or Scott Donaldson’s earlier biography. Even though I have not read Cheever’s journals. Given all that, what can I possibly add to this discussion of John Cheever? I have read his fiction. I love his fiction. If you read it, you will love it, too. This is this essay’s final fact, a “fact” being an opinion or hope that has the transformative force of love behind it.

Because all of this, of course, is the familiar cry of someone in love. When you are in love, you want people to know you’re in love, because you want them to recognize the beauty of the beloved and ignore the things about the beloved that aren’t so beautiful. Admittedly, you also want them to think, if this guy is in love with someone who is obviously so worthy of love, then maybe there’s something worth loving in him as well. But mostly, you want them to love the person or thing you love. Not because it reflects well upon you if they do, but because the beloved deserves to be loved. The beloved has earned it.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Read the whole article on one page

Tweet

Related Posts

• No related posts...