2-79

RAIN AND DIAGONAL LIGHT: NATURE IMAGERY IN THE NOVELS OF JOHN CHEEVER

THESIS

Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

By

Cynthia J. Baker, B.A.

Denton, Texas

December , 1987 Baker, Cynthia J., Rain and Diagonal Light: Nature

Imagery in the Novels of John Cheever. Master of Arts

(English), December, 1987, 92 pp., bibliography, 28 titles. John Cheever uses nature imagery, particularly images of light and water, to support his main themes of nostalgia, memory, tradition, alienation, travel, and confinement in his five novels. In the novels these images entwine and intersect to reveal Cheever's vision of an attainable earthly paradise comprised of familial love and an appreciation of the beauties and strengths of the natural worId. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER page I. INTRODUCT ION...... P.1 1I. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE AND THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL ...... 10 IIl. BULLET PARK.37

IV. FALCONER...... 60 V. OH WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS.-.-...... 72 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..... 94

i i i CHAPTER I

INTRODUCT ION

In a 11977 interview focusing on his work, John Cheever expressed a strong conviction in the "boundlessness of possibility" offered to man in the modern world (Hersey

26), and this conviction is a dominant concept in his five novels, The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet

Park, Falconer, and Oh What a Paradise It Seems, published between 1957 and 1982. Cheever consistently uses his

principle of possibility, verbalized by one character as

"one can do better than this," as an important component in

all his major themes, including those of nostalgia, memory,

tradition, alienation, travel, and confinement. Throughout

the novels, these themes entwine and intersect to gradually

reveal Cheever's unique vision of the contemporary world as

a place that is undoubtedly flawed, yet still offers a

potential for personal happiness. Each theme, expanded by Cheever's certainty that contentment is possible in the

contemporary world, offers a new and separate view into

Cheever's complex vision, and each theme is supported by images drawn from a single source, that of the world of nature.

1 2

Natural imagery is a significant support of the themes of nostalgia and memory. In Cheever's novels, the term nostalgia often signifies the longing individuals have for a time and place that no longer exists,.a seemingly inborn desire to regain an Edenic existence of security and innocence. But the sense of nostalgia is not meant to be a negative emotion. In a 1977 interview, Cheever stated that nostalgia is "one of the greatest human emotions. No regret for the past, but a keen sense of the present, saying, How splendid it was! But spoken without regret"

(Munro 75). Thus nostalgia is an appreciation of the past, and this joyful appreciation is a natural enhancement of the present.

While nostalgia implies brief glimpses of some thing that is gone and seems for Cheever to be a part of man's universal soul and shared with others, memory is the individual's store of personal and unique remembrances of events that have actually occurred. in his lifetime. But, in Cheever's world, memory is not a passive accumulation of past occurrences, but a potent power in itself that may propel characters into unexpected thought or action. Both nostalgia and memory are essential parts of an individual's personality, and Cheever uses a variety of natural images to stimulate both memory and nostalgia in a consistently positive way. Thus the sound of thunder may remind a man of what it was like to be young or the feel of rain may 3

trigger a memory of love and happiness. Again, these

images do not cause a feeling of regret; they remind

characters of the joys of the past and also seem to create

a guarded optimism that the joy may be found again.

Cheever's theme of nostalgia is often joined with natural imagery to form one particular controlling image, that of modern man searching for an earthly paradise. For Cheever's characters, a vision of sunlight slanting across trees may cause one to "remember" an Eden, although he has never actually lived in a paradise, or the sight of a snow-capped mountain above a clear lake may cause one to long for a place and time that have not existed in his lifetime. These images are particularly important to man because the world he must now live in seems to be a confusing mess of contradictions that often cause human disappointment and misery. Cheever's concept of man existing in a chaotic environment while longing for a recoverable haven of peace and order again reflects his principle of possibility, but also encompasses the idea that man must consciously strive for a paradise in order to achieve it. The subtle but unflagging sense of hope and optimism that this philosophy expresses seems paradoxical in a writer known as a chronicler of modern absurdities that sometimes metamorphose into modern horrors, but it is Cheever's continual insistence that the world perpetually offers an opportunity for joy and 4

contentment that leads critic Samuel Coale to state that

Cheever was determined "to discover beauty and possible

redemption even in the modern landscape" and is creating in

his fiction a "new but precarious Eden" (95).

Cheever's precarious Eden is not a literal place which

each character must discover or create, nor a place of

retirement and meditation, but a continually existing

paradise of inner serenity that man can obtain despite the

complexities of modern life. Although his vision is of an

unseen paradise for the spirit, Cheever uses natural

imagery drawn from the living world to remind man that such

earthly contentment may indeed be achieved. The beauties

of the sky, of sunlight, of the mountains, and of the rain

and the wind exist in Cheever's fiction not only for his characters to see and feel, but also as signposts to

symbolize an internal counterpoint, the beauties of a contented and orderly soul. As a character nears his own personal paradise, usually comprised of a sense of familial

love, his awareness and enjoyment of the natural world seems to intensify; and often a natural phenomena, particularly a sudden flash of sunlight or the quick onset of rain, seems to act as an independent entity which forces him to the realization that life can indeed be lived in a moralistic manner despite the complexities of the modern world, and that this chosen manner of living will bring great peace. 6

If nostalgia and memory guide man toward the

"boundlessness of possibility," other themes show the

obstacles that slow his progress. Cheever's theme of

travel emphasizes the rootlessness of twentieth-century

American life and is used to contrast another theme, that

of the place of tradition in the modern world. In a 1979

article, Cheever stated that "suburbia, which is the

setting for many of my stories, reflects the restlessness,

the rootlessness of modern lives. It is a way of life that

had to be improvised. There were no suburban traditions"

("Fiction" 24). Traditions are difficult to establish in a

new society, and Cheever complicates this problem with his

travel theme. Cheever's characters seem to travel

constantly--they daily ride the train into the city for work or entertainment, fly from country to country on business or pleasure, or move around the nation pursuing employment. Cheever implies that this excessive mobility has destroyed the security naturally given by an unchanging home address that is returned to on a daily basis. In

Cheever's vision of the world, continual travel becomes a disorienting occupation in itself and makes an establishment of traditional values, which demands a fixed group of individuals with only occasional newcomers, almost impossible.

In addition, consistent travel removes man from a positive contact with nature, a constant which would bring 6

needed security. Thus the mountains become only obstacles

to be overcome as man moves around the planet, and the rain

and snow only impediments that slow his movements. Man

largely ignores nature in his quest for perpetual activity,

and the gifts that nature may present, the stimulation of memory and nostalgia, are lost. The complex contemporary world becomes more of a disappointment to man, and this

disappointment may be another motivation for him to seek

some form of a calm, earthly paradise.

Together, consistent travel and a lack of tradition create the sense of isolation and alienation that haunts many of Cheever's characters. This theme of alienation implies that the contemporary world has destroyed the cultural continuity of social attitudes and institutions, and, without these dependable supports, man becomes

increasingly alienated from himself and from others. Robert Collins defines this theme as man moving "from a central role in his own life to that of a peripheral, almost ignored spectator of a social process" (2). Other blocks to the fulfillment of Cheever's principle of possibility are personal hindrances that each character must confront and that may confine him to a particular form of being or action. Some confinements, Cheever's own term for various external and internal restrictions, are easily seen--Ezkiel Farragut's confinement in Falconer prison is the most obvious--while others, such as selfishness or 7

maliciousness, are hidden within the personality. These

confinements prevent man from- living a life of joy or

pleasure, increase his alienation, and hamper his quest for

a recoverable paradise. Into this theme of confinement

Cheever incorporates the necessity of a continued struggle

against various confinements, and Cheever illustrates this

theme with natural imagery. Sometimes the sensual aspects

of nature, the feel and smell of rain or the sight of

glorious sunlight, seem to awaken a character to the

possibility that he may conquer his confinements; and even

if his attempts are temporarily or permanently

unsuccessful, the stability of the natural world seems to

provide a balm for the spirit or a brief time of rest that may then invigorate the character to work toward another

effort to improve his life.

By illustrating his major themes of memory, nostalgia,

tradition, travel, alienation, and confinement with natural

imagery, Cheever has effectively juxtaposed those things of man with those things of nature. His most successful characters--in terms of achieving personal happiness--are able to find a balance between the two worlds and are able to function in both. Cheever does not expect his characters to retreat from the modern world and live a

Walden-like existence completely immersed in nature, nor does he expect them to live a life encapsulated in a sterile, artificial environment of entirely man-generated 8 objects and emotions. Neither existence would yield the total sense of emotional stability and physical comfort that Cheever is certain man may find and earn. Cheever's vision of the world suggests that when a character discovers a balance between the world of nature and the world of man and when he effectively uses the best of both, he also finds his earthly paradise and fulfills the principle of possibility This is the vision that Cheever moves toward during his five novels, and this is the vision supported by his frequent use of natural imagery. CHAPTER I

BIBL IOGRAPHY

Cheever, John. "Fiction is Our Most Intimate Means of

Communication." U. S. News and World Report 21 May

1979: 92.

"Not Only I the Narrator, but I John Cheever." With

Eleanor Munro. Ms. Apr. 1977: 74-77.

"Talk with John Cheever." With John Hersey. New

York Times Book Review 6 Mar. 1977: 1, 24, 26-28.

Coale, Samual A. John Cheever. New York: Frederick

Ungar Publishing Company, 1977.

Collins, Robert G. "From Subject to Object and Back

Again." Twentieth Century Literature Spring 1982:

1-13.

9 CHAPTER Il

THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE AND THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL

In his creation of the concept of an attainable paradise, John Cheever uses natural images to support and expand major themes in his first two novels, The Wapshot

Chronicle (1967) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964). In these books, natural imagery is concentrated around two themes, the existence of nostalgia in contemporary man and the exploration of the proper place of tradition in the modern world, both important elements of his unique vision of the wor Id.

In The Hobgoblin Company of Love, George W. Hunt defines Cheever's theme of nostalgia as a tone "dramatized as the recognition of the loss of some thing' or some place once cherished or desired" (79). In the Wapshot novels, this sense of nostalgia is acknowledged by several of Cheever's characters. Leander, Honora, and Coverly

Wapshot all express a desire to recapture or return to a time or place, with boundaries, characteristics, and ideals that they intrinsically understand, although they also realize that the place they long for may not have actually existed in their lifetimes. Thus the longing is not inspired by individual or unique memories, nor is it a

10 11 memory-motivated desire for return to a wondrous and fresh childhood, to a previously-lived life, or to an angelic prebirth existence, but rather a desire for an abstract world, an emblematic rather than literal lost Eden, where piety and morality are appreciated, pain is comforted, and love is offered to all. Unlike the modern world, this paradise, as Cheever sometimes labels the nostalgically recalled vision, is calm and orderly and is characterized by a sense of permanence. The ruling tenets of this paradise are encapsulated in the words that the narrator shouts at the end of Cheever's short story, "A Vision of the World." The narrator is awakened by rain on the roof at night and considers others that the noise will wake--farmers, plumbers, old ladies, and lovers--and sits up in bed to exclaim aloud, "Valor! Love! Virtue!

Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!" (Stories

611). These are the enduring standards of Cheever's Eden, and although his characters realize that this calm and equitable paradise may not have actually existed, and therefore cannot be realistically regained, they still have a persistent desire to locate this world somehow.

Frederick R. Karl, in his essay "John Cheever and the

Promise of the Pastoral," identifies this reaction as a particularly American "paradoxical need for Edenic memories even as we recognize they are mythical, that is, no longer visible, even if irresistible" (211). 12

Samual A. Coale and Burton Kendle also acknowledge

Cheever's use of nostalgia as a primary theme of his work.

Both find that although a Cheever character may know that an innocent Eden no longer exists, the frightening and conflicting demands of the contemporary world often force a character to search for just such a refuge, and, as Karl stated, this paradox of stimulus with no release may cause strong internalized tension in the character. Burton

Kendle describes the situation as characters obsessively pursuing "this image of lost innocence. . .sometimes simultaneously registering the painful reality that motivates this nostalgia" (219).

In The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal,

Cheever writes of characters, overwhelmed by the painful reality of the flawed modern world, searching for an Edenic existence. Although most of his characters have achieved a material version of the American Dream, which, by assuring comfort and security, is expected to bring psychological satisfaction, they have not found the happiness they reasonably anticipated.

Despite their worldly successes, many characters exhibit an unexplainable and unreasonable feeling of disappointment. In the Wapshot novels, Cheever suggests that this disappointment is caused by the strange personal isolation that exists in his vision of the flawed modern world, and, to illustrate this alienation, creates 13 characters that do not seem to interact or connect with each other except on the most superficial level. In addition, Cheever stylistically expands his idea of human isolation, for he frequently describes only one character at a time, and this technique restricts social interaction and limits reaction by others to an individual character's words or actions. Keeping only one character at center stage and the other characters in the shadows reinforces

Cheever's theme that each individual exists in a virtual emotional vacuum.

In the Wapshot books, both Coverly and Moses Wapshot experience the painful reality of being an isolate in the modern world, and their existence in twentieth century

America becomes a series of unrelated journeys and events that seem to have no meaning. The brothers must leave the quiet village of St. Botolphs because Cousin Honora, controller of the family funds, demands that they follow the Wapshot tradition of young men achieving financial security and starting a family before they receive their inheritance, and there is no way for the younger Wapshots to become financially successful in the small town. Each obtains employment and loses it several times, not because of individual shortcomings but because of the of idiosyncrasies of others. Each moves often, and neighbors and acquaintances come and and go in their nomadic lives without leaving any mark. Their alienation is intensified 14 because in Cheever's modern world even married couples do not communicate successfully or make a lasting emotional connection, so the brothers are essentially alone despite their marital status.

This unsettling sense of personal loneliness constitutes a major flaw in the world as Cheever views it, and his characters combat their loneliness in various ways. Moses drinks heavily; his wife, Melissa Wapshot, has an affair with a teenage boy; and Coverly counts by computer the number of times certain words appear in Keats' poetry. Unhappy Betsey Wapshot, Cover ly's wife, combats her loneliness by shopping, drifting from store to store, telling her life story to uninterested clerks; and Coverly, aware of her pain but unable to alleviate it, sees that

"every suit, dress, fur coat and piece of furniture in the store windows had to be judged, its price and way of life guessed at and some judgment passed as to whether or not it should enter Betsey's vision of happiness" (Chronicle 187), but he knows that her vision of happiness is unattainable because "through every incident--every moment of her life--ran the cutting thread, the wire of loneliness"

(Chronicle 197). Melissa Wapshot shares this feeling that the modern world must be inadequate because she knows that

"loneliness was one thing, and she knew herself how sweet it could make light and company seem, but boredom was something else, and why, in this most prosperous and equitable world, should everyone seem so bored and disappointed?" (Scandal 34).

Although the world is a disappointment, personal alienation prevents any discussion of the problem, so bored and disoriented with their lifestyles, both Coverly and

Moses become adroit at the "capricious rearrangement of the facts in his history" (Scandal 47). Isolated and faced with emotional burdens, the infidelity of a wife, or a bleak financial state, Moses or Coverly will "decide cheerfully and hopefully that what had happened had not happened although he never went so far as to claim that what had not happened had happened" (Scandal 47). Problems are whitewashed or unmentioned, even between the brothers themselves. The emotional isolation and the inability to explore openly their difficulties combine with the basic impermanence of the brothers' lives and cause them to long silently for some sort of refuge, Cheever's paradise, although they know that they are merely led on by "the instinctual foolishness that leads us to love permanence when there is none" (Scandal 19).

But hidden in this modern desolation is a small spark of hope. Cheever can never discount the strong sense of optimism that seems to be a deeply ingrained strength of the characters he creates. While she is attending a noisy cocktail party, Melissa Wapshot first expresses the hope that motivates many of Cheever's characters. Like the 16 brothers., she is engulfed in loneliness and boredom, but she has a vision of a more positive existence. Watching

the other guests attempting to find pleasure, she feels

a profound nostalgia, a longing for some emotional island or peninsula that she had not even discerned in her dreams. She seemed to know something about its-character-it was not a paradise-but its elevating possibilities of emotional richness and freedom stirred her. It was the stupendous feeling that one could do much better than this. (Scandal 35)

This feeling of hope, that one can do better and

achieve a more complete life, makes the vision of an

emblematic Eden an inspiration, not a shackling or negative

emotion. In an interview focusing on his work, Cheever

stated the idea that nostalgia for an unseen Eden may be a

motivating force by describing the emotion as "finding

ourselves not in the world we love, but knowing how deeply

we love it, enjoying some conviction that we will return,

or discover it, or the way to it" (Hersey 21). This idea of

a positive conviction, a knowledge that one may find

fulfillment when the nostalgically visualized world is

rediscovered is supported and reinforced by Cheever's use

of natural descriptions and imagery. In Cheever's fiction,

vestiges of a paradise, "the world we love," linger in the

overwhelming sights, sounds, and smells of the world of

nature that exists alongside of the manmade, modern world.

As if aware that the disappointments and distractions of

the modern world can easily separate them from the

pleasures of the natural world, characters in the 17

Wapshot novels urge-each other to "Feel the breeze!," "See the sky," and "Smell the trees!" The natural world is a

lovely and fragrant place, and in the village of St.

Botolphs there are "hedges of lilac-there were whole groves and forests of it blooming the length of River Street and growing wild around the cellar holes on the other side of

the hill" (Chronicle 138), and the odor of the flowers

permeates the entire town. Encased in this lovely smell,

Leander Wapshot sails his ferry boat on her first voyage of

the year and sees that the bay is "green inshore, blue in

the deeper water and as purple as wine at forty fathoms,"

(Chronicle 149), and it is humid "and mixed with the smell

of lilacs that came down from the river banks was a sour

smell like the smell of wet paper. It might storm"

(Chronicle 139). Cheever's characters observe the

beautiful light of the sky as the flood of go.Iden light

"spread all through the woods and sank into the water so

that every blue stone and white pebble showed" (Chronicle

58). In the evenings in St. Botolphs, Leander Wapshot is

drinking "bourbon and admiring the light" (Scandal 14),

while in Proxmire Manor an old man has his "blue eyes fixed

on the last piece of yellow light that touched the church

steeple, as if exclaiming to himself, How wonderful, how

wonderful it is!"' (Scandal 67). In' the sky there may be

"cumulus clouds or thunderheads standing out to sea in a

light of such clearness and brillance that they seemed 18

(Chronicle unrelated to the river and the little village"

49). vivid and In the Wapsho t novels Cheever's imagery is

characters respond to the beauty of nature in varying and Cover ly, and degrees. Leander Wapshot, father of Moses spirit" labeled by Samuel Coale as the "reigning deity and and (71) of the books, is the character most attuned records the natural responsive to nature. He meticulously

world in his journal and his recordings become a lyric

celebration of life. Leander notes the seasons by

writing Leaves a grand and glorious autumn that it was too. coming down like old cloth; old sails; old flags. Solid curtain of green in summer. Then north wind takes it away, piece by piece. See roofs and 89) steeples, buried since June in leaves. (Chronicle

He also records bright and compelling memories of his youth

that form glorious pictures of nature such as,

Mackerel sharks-fourteen, fifteen feet long-chased porgis up to town dock in middle of afternoon. Big excitement. Ran up river bank to village. Water foaming white. Mysteries of the deep. Grand thunderstorm came down from the hills. Fierce rain. Stood'under apple tree. Grand sunset after. Sharks went downriver with tide. Beautiful hour. Skies all fiery. (Chronicle 82)

In his choppy, fragmented sentences, Leander

acknowledges a world of beauty where, "life is a gift, a to mysterious gift" (Scandal 199), and even his last advice

his sons is to "admire the world" (Chronicle 249). To

Leander Wapshot, the world was "contrived to cheer and 19

wrong in delight him" and he wonders "how anything could go such a paradise" (Chronicle 66). the Like Leander, cousin Honora Wapshot also views often world as a wonderful and miraculous place. Cheever "life describes her in terms of water imagery so, to her, seemed like a chain of brilliant reflections on water, but unrelated perhaps to the motion of the water itself Scandal completely absorbing in their color and shine" of 100). Powerful. and eccentric, Honora admires all "sorts

freshness: rain and the cold morning light, all winds, all

sounds of running water in which she thought she heard the

chain of being, high seas but especially the rain" (Scandal

55). She is of the same generation as Leander Wapshot, and

perhaps because she has lived her life in St. Botolphs, as

he has, she thinks that the village is unique in its

earthly beauty for "where else in the world were there such

stands of lilac, such lambent winds and brilliant skies,

such fresh fish" (Scandal 96).

In his descriptions of both these characters, Leander

and Honora, Cheeyer uses images of sunlight and rain, "the

oldest noise to reach the porches of man's ear" (Chronicle

123), to create reminders for them of a lost paradise. For

the observant older generation, individual elements of

beauty may combine in a "patch of woodland, charmingly

dappled with sunlight" to create "a happy effect as if it

were some reminder of paradise-some happy authentication of 20

15). the beauty of the summer countryside" (Chronicle

As willing inhabitants of this almost paradise, to sudden Cheever's characters are occasionally subjected and almost -magical transformations which seem to support benevolent Cheever 's vision of the world as an essentially where, to the place where absurdities regularly occur, and careful observer, no human action is ever surprising. for these Cheever often appears to use nature as a'catalyst character transformations as when Cover ly, worried about his uncomfortable reaction to a young girl's strip in a carnival sideshow, doubted his own virility, but later

"smelled a clearing wind and heard it stir in the trees and

saw the overcast rise, the miserableness of that day

carried off and a band of yellow light spill out of the

west. Then he knew what he had to do and he made his

preparations" (Chronicle 53). The wind, however, is not

really a catalyst because Coverly, motivated by a strong

need to conform to the traditions of his time, even if he

finds them unpleasant, has slowly gravitated toward his

decision all day and the evening wind merely alerts him

that the time has come to perform the correct masculine

ceremony.

Yet Cheever does not discount that fact that nature

has a certain magical influence in man's life. The

sunlight may inf luence the Wapshots as it does one

afternoon before the brothers begin their journeys when 21

they see that

a cloud passes over the low sun, darkening the valley, as if and they feel a deep and momentary uneasiness over the they apprehended how darkness can fall continents of the mind. The wind freshens and then them of they are all cheered as if this reminded their recuperative powers. (Chronicle 24)

The link between man and nature is unbreakable, a remnant of the older time when man's life was more directly reminder of the shaped by nature's caprices, and a constant of the river possibility of paradise. Even "the blue water below them seems mingled with our .history" (Chronicle 24), and the snow seems a "part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere" (Scandal 2). Sophisticated Melissa

Wapshot is not immune to the magic of nature either, for

after her sudden, inexplicable self-transformation into a

sexless crone, she hesitates to walk in the garden, "as if

she apprehended that the summer night might end her

imposture" (Scandal 224). She does not know if her own

strength of determination can overcome the seductive beauty

and warmth of a summer night.

But for the younger generation of Coverly and Moses,

once away from St. Botolphs, the loveliness of nature

provides only elusive glimpses of-a nostalgically

visualized paradise, a place of permanence and order, not a

realistic or concrete sense of actually living in a

paradise. Because the brothers are no longer insulated by

or encapsulated in pretty St. Botolphs, they more readily 22

in it are understand that the modern world and the people Cheever's flawed, and that paradise can not be regained.

theme of nostalgia allows these glimpses, but he signals such as the inability of man to regain Eden by using words Moses "illusion" and "seems" in his natural imagery. For "seemed to Wapshot, after an argument with his wife, there

be some indestructible good health in a dark path on a

summer night" (Chronicle 220), but he returns to find

Melissa still inexplicably withdrawn.

Other characters also glimpse.possibilities of

paradise. Emile Cranmer, the delivery boy Melissa Wapshot

takes as her lover, admires the world on a perfect spring

night and sees that

the stars were shining. It was much too early in the year for there to be anything blooming but a few clumps of snowdrops and the only wild flowers were the speckled skunk cabbages in the hollow but there was in the air a soft fragrance of earth as fine as roses and he stopped to fill his lungs and his head with it. The world seemed fine in the street light and the starlight, and young, too, even in its shabbiness, as if the fate of the place had only just begun to be told. (Scandal 174)

But, since in Cheever's novels the world is aging and

its fate often seems decided, Emile has had a vision of

paradise, perhaps inspiring, but not an actual recapturing

of an unseen Eden. To Coverly Wapshot, a memory of St.

Botolphs "in the light of a summer evening" (Scandal 138)

is comforting, but the memory is only an illusion of a

perfect place and time because even rural St. Botolphs is 23 not immune to change, and so is not truly an orderly or

permanent paradise. Even though "in a drilling autumn

rain, in a world of much change, the green at St. Botolphs

conveyed an impression of unusual permanence" Chronicle 3),

it is an illusion, and Coverly finds that.a visit to St.

Botolphs makes him no happier.

Describing this inability of Cheever's characters to

recapture paradise, Samuel Coale, writing about one of

Cheever's short stories, states that the narrator is

concerned that "some meaningful pattern of human experience

will continually elude him and that only meaningless chaos

will continue to haunt him" (26). In the Wapshot novels,

this concern, perpetuated by the confusion and

disappointment surrounding the characters, becomes a

motivating force and creates such a strong desire for

order, an almost overpowering psychological need, that some

characters admire the seemingly comforting stability of the

landscape, seeing in the scenery the order their own lives

lack. Coverly Wapshot compares the natural world to the

manmade world and sees that "the distant mountains had

been formed by fire and water but the houses in the valley

looked so insubstantial that they seemed, in the dusk, to

smell of shirt cardboards" (Scandal 24).

Young Emile also compares the transitory character of

human life to the permanence of nature as he sees from a

train window "a large, ugly, loaf-shaped.and colorless 24 escarpment of granite" (Scandal 156), upthrust in the the center of a builder's development and.understands that

the roads must circumvent it expensively. Its sides were too steep to hold the foundations of a house. It seemed, in its uselessness, triumphantly obdurate and perverse. It was the only form on the landscape that had not succumbed to change. It could not be dynamited. It could not be quarried and carried away piecemeal. It was useless, and it was invincible. (Scandal 156)

The sight of the triumphant slab sparks Emile's memory and causes him to remember his elation at climbing a similar rock when he was a boy. Coming down from the climb, he experienced a "sense of awakening to a whole new

life, the arrival at a new state of consciousness, as clearly unlike his past as sleep is to waking" (Scandal

156). The state of awakened consciousness reminds Emile how "forceful and interesting the world had seemed in the early winter light! How new it all seemed!" (Scandal

156). But again, Cheever employees the word seemed to

illustrate that what man sees of the world is often an

illusion, and although the natural world may seem new and

fresh, the world man lives in is still a shambles. Not

even the landscape is truly unchangeable in the modern

world, and although Emile had been invigorated after

climbing the rock, the feeling did not last, and he mourns

"how old he had grown since then" (Scandal 156).

So despite the welcome comforting or invigorating

properties of the natural wor-ld, Cheever has again shown 25

in that Eden can not be regained by admiration or immersion the natural world, but his characters continue to search for a place "where one can do better than this," and in their search they continue to turn towards nature.

Confronted with Betsey's escalating.mental problems,

Coverly Wapshot walks across the fields near his temporary home. He finds that

it was late in the season, purple asters bloomed along the path and the air was so heavy with pollen that it gave him a not unpleasant irritation in his nostrils; the whole world smelled like some worn and brilliant carpet. The maples and beeches had turned and the moving lights of that afternoon among the trees made the path ahead of him seem like a chain of corridors and chambers, yellow and gold consistories and vaticans, but in spite of this show of light he seemed still to hear the music from the television, to see the I.ines at Betsey's mouth and to hear the crying of his little son. (Scandal 85)

Coverly can admire the beauty of the day, but the beauty cannot magically improve his existence or provide

him with strength to cope with his difficulties. He is

trapped in the imperfect modern world, and hemust actively

seek solutions to his problems because no mystical

transformation is going to occur to return him to the

emblematic.Eden he nostalgically remembers.

For Coverly and Emile, and to a lesser extent Moses,

contact with nature is a positive influence, even though

its energizing qualities may not endure. But for two other

characters, already beaten by the world, the beauties of

nature and the idea of paradise inherent in the beauty can 26

first be a mocking delusion. For Ray Badger.. Melissa's husband who is driven to theft by his unhappiness, the that morning sky reminded him that nothing was true, and

"nothing was what it appeared to be, and the enormity of

this deception-the subtlety with which the color of the sky Even deepened as he dressed-angered him" (Chronicle 233).

for Honora, nature cannot provide a peaceful paradise as an

alternative to the confusing circumstances that surround

her in her last years. Her appreciation of St. Botolphs

intensifies when she flees the United States to avoid

arrest for tax fraud, and when, due to her age and wealth,

she is granted an audience with the Pope, she is so

disgruntled and homesick that she speaks only of the autumn

leaves of her home, the "harvest of green and gold" Scandal

183). But these memories bring no comfort, and she returns

home to die, asking for "wallpaper with roses on it to

remind me of the summer" (Scandal 199). Honora has

unfortunately learned that her paradise is transitory,

relying on the surroundings of her home town to project an

illusion of reality.

Even Leander Wapshot, who spends his life admiring

the natural world, finds that when he is aging and alone,

the invigoration that nature still brings is cruelly

tempora-ry. When the night winds awakened him, he traced

their course around the dark compass, he still remembered what it was to feel young and strong. Deluded by this thread of cold air he would rise in his bed thinking passionately of boats, trains and 27

deep-breasted women, or of some image-a wet pavement plastered with yellow elm leaves-that seems to represent requital and strength. (Chronicle 158)

But he has been deceived by the wind, he is no longer young or strong, and his sense of illness and unhappiness returns when "the fresh winds died with the morning dusk. There was a pain in his kidney" (Chronicle 158).

But, despite the disappointment and absurdities,

Cheever's characters continue to hope and strive for a possible paradise, and'the Wapshot novels are ultimately illuminated by Cheever's guarded and cautious optimism that man can indeed do better. Again, Cheever uses natural

images to support his theme, showing that although nature cannot cure human problems, and the comfort it gives is only transitory, an awareness and appreciation of the natural world can direct a character towards the only type of paradise available to man in the modern world. Cheever shows that Eden can be domesticated, that human love can provide a modified paradise on earth, and that nature can reconcile man to this less than perfect, but much better than nothing, paradise.

Coverly Wapshot, unlike his brother Moses, who bows to the pressure of his life and slips into a life of alcoholism, continues his search for an attainable paradise and comes to realize the enduring properties of human love during his visit to St. Botolphs to bury Leander, who chose 28 to end his life in the sea. A thunderstorm comes and

in the storm light the fine, square rooms stood for a way of life that seemed to be usually desirable, although it could have been the expectancy of the storm that accounted for the intensity of Cover ly's feeling. Memories of his childhood could be involved and he could remember those thunderstorms-Lulu and the dog hidden in the coat closet-that plunged the sky, the valley and the rooms of the house into darkness-how tenderly they felt for one another, carrying buckets and pitchers and lighted candles from room to room. (Chronicle 248)

Coverly is a man who loves his wife and child, cares for his brother, and stirred by memories, by the reminder of tenderness, he sees, before the rain begins, that "the old place appeared to be, not a lost way of life or one to be imitated, but a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as

laughter and something like the terms by which he lived"

(Chronicle 249). This vision of the rich possibilities of

life encompasses "the world we love," Cheever's own explanation of his use of nostalgia. Eden may be lost, but man has the capacity to live a life of honor and love, and,

in the Wapshot novels, nature is the catalyst that awakens

Coverly to the rich possibilities of his life despite the shortcomings of the world he exists in.

From this theme of an earthly paradise, Cheever moves to an exploration of the proper place of tradition in mid-century existence, and he links this theme also to natural descriptions and imagery. Technology and the booming population have radically altered the United

States, and Cheever, in an essay published in 1959, writes 29 that he is intensely aware of the changes and that he is concerned that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. He states that "the most useful image I have today is of a man in a quagmire, looking into a tear in the sky.

I am not speaking here of despair, but of confusion"

(Fiction of the Fifties 22). He continues by saying that although he expected some changes, "the forceful absurdities of life today find me unprepared" (22).

These absurdities are particularly distressing because an important part of the American character is a sense of traditional expectations which are reasonably anticipated to provide stability and comfort to the individual during his lifetime, and these expectations are reinforced by certain ceremonies which, in turn, become an important facet of the national personality. But the reality of post-war America often does not coincide with or support the traditional ceremonies we have learned. Some ceremonies are obvious, traditional Fourth of July celebrations for example, but others, just as persuasive, are more subtle. For example, a certain American tradition asserts that any citizen can travel to a clear, fresh trout stream, hook a fish, and cook it over a roaring fire. This ceremony of celebration, however, is no longer valid because the reality of the situation is that the stream may well be polluted, the fish inedible, and certain regulations may be in place that prohibit building a fire 30

in the open. Thus the discrepancy between tradition and reality may create strong internalized tension. Cheever writes of both the expectations and the discrepancies, and these examinations form a theme which Lynne Waldeland defines as the exploration of whether or not the traditions

of the past can be made usable in a present that

increasingly devalues tradition altogether (41).

In the Wapshot novels, well-known traditions are most

often exemplified in the words and actions of Leander

Wapshot. He has shaped his existence by a scrupulous

adherence to traditional ceremonies, and although some

ceremonies, such as skating on Parson's Pond every

Christmas Day, are obvious, most of his ceremonies are only

the ritual of his days; he takes cold baths, dresses for

dinner, drinks bourbon at dusk, and wears a flower in his

buttonhole. These daily rituals are the indications of a

deeper. unspoken morality; Leander understands that a man

should strive to be dependable and honest in his dealings

with himself and others, just as he is consistent in his

ordinary rituals. Leander continues these small traditions

because they give him pleasure and security, and because he

hopes that his sons will learn "that the unobserved

ceremoniousness of his life was a gesture or sacrament

towards the excellence and the continuousness of things"

(Chronicle 43). Leander is a man basing proper conduct on

correct morality, and one part of his sacrament to the 31 excellence and continuousness of things is a abiding love of the natural world, and a desire for a respectful coexistence with this world.

A reverence for the natural world is a tradition as old as the world itself. Cheever does not examine this tradition in terms of the various myths or legends concerning the world's creation or explanations of the seasons and weather, nor does he ascribe the natural world with humanlike emotions. Instead he portrays a natural world filled with delights, the beauties of the rain, the

sky, the sunlight, and the trees. Cheever's natural world

is one seemingly contrived to delight and cheer man, and man naturally owes allegiance to nature because of the

abundance and beauty it offers. The Wapshots follow the

tradition of recognizing and admiring the strength and

endurance of the earth. They seem to visualize the earth

as a rugged and ragged ball hurtled though time and space

with incalculable force. On a skiing trip, Coverly is

stunned by the glory of the mountains and sees that

it was late, it would be dark very soon, but all the mountain peaks, all of them buried in snow, still stood in the canted light of day like the gulfs and trenches of an ancient sea bed. What moved Coverly in the scene was its vitality. Here was a display of the inestimable energies of the planet; here in the last light was a sense of its immense history. (Scandal 93)

Coverly remains sensitized to the strength of the

earth, and even the blowing autumn leaves remind him of 32

"the energies that drive the seasons" (Scandal 168).

Although the Wapshots are not overtly religious, they

acknowledge the "beauty of sameness that makes the star and

the shell, the sea and the clouds all seem to have come

from the same hand" (Scandal 129).

But the idea behind this tradition, a reverence for the

natural world, does not coincide with the reality of the

modern, manmade world. Man has developed weapons that can

destroy the world quickly and thoroughly, and a terrible

fear that some "drunken corporal might incinerate the

planet" (Scandal 179) has become lodged in the mind of

man. Thus the Wapshot's consistent admiration of the

natural world becomes ironic when that unquestioning love

is compared to the tremendous vulnerability of the world.

Cheever adds to the irony by employing Coverly, always

attuned to the natural world, at a missile site where

weapons are developed. Cheever uses a natural image to

reinforce the irony; when a missile is aborted and

explodes, the planes that rush to the site can "be heard

roaring like that most innocent of roarings when a sea

shell is held by some old man to the ear of a child"

(Scandal 168). The earth is not longer inviolable, and its

innocent sounds may easily be overwhelmed by the noisy

destructiveness of the humans that inhabit the earth.

Emile also realizes this, and he seems "to listen to the

planet's heartbeat as if the earth were a melancholy 33 hypochondriac, possessed of great strength and beauty and with them an incurable presentiment of sudden and meaningless death" (Scandal 180).

But Cheever is essentially a writer of enduring optimism, and he refuses to accept a future of unavoidable destruction or chaos. His characters, aware of the awful

possibilities, do not lose hope, and Emile, on a beautiful

Easter morning; as the sun rises, feels "joyfully that the

illustrious and peaceful works of man would go on forever"

(Scandal 180). Emile can not describe or justify his

feeling; he can "only watch and admire the vast barrel of

night fill up to its last shelf and crevice with the fair

light of day and all the birds singing in the trees like a

band of angels whistling to their hounds" (Scandal 180).

Cheever offers no explanation for Emile's positive

conviction, but after the night comes the light, and a

reaffirmation of hope.

Cheever does not provide a tidy ending to the Wapshot

novels. The reader is aware that Cover ly, searching for

paradise, has only visualized a "life as hearty and

fleeting as laughter," and now must struggle to live that

life. He must learn to modify older tradtions and

gradually invent newer ones that reflect the realities of

the modern world. But Cheever offers a guarded optimism for

his characters trapped what offers seems to be the chaos of

the modern world. Life is flawed, paradise is gone, but 34 the enduring properties and essential hope inherent in mankind endure and make possible the ascendancy of human love. CHAPTER 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cheever, John. "John Hersey Talks with John Cheever."

With John Hersey. Vale Alumni Magazine and Journal

Dec. 1977: 21-24

The Stories of John Cheever. New York:

Ballantine Books, 1980.

The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Ballantine Books,

1983.

The Wapshot Scandal. New York: Ballantine Books,

1983.

"A Word from Writer Directly to Reader: John

Cheever." Fiction of the Fifties. Ed. Herbert

Gold. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

21-22.

Coale, Samual A. John Cheever. New York: Frederick Ungar

Publishing Company, 1977.

Hunt, George W. The Hobgoblin Company of Love. Grand

Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,

1983.

Karl, Frederick R. "John Cheever and the Promise of the

Pastoral." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. R.

G. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982.

209-219.

35 36

Kendle, Burton. "The Passion of Nostalgia in the Short

Stories of John Cheever." Critical Essays on John

Cheever. Ed. R. G. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall &

Co.,, 1982. 219-230.

Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne

PubIi sher s, 1979. CHAPTER 1I I

BULLET PARK

In the Wapshot novels John Cheever explored a version

of the American dream that incorporated a nostalgically

visualized Eden, and sought to discover the place of

tradition. in a world that is sadly lacking in Edenic

qualities. In Bullet Park (1969), while retaining the idea

of an attainable. paradise, Cheever moves into a much wider

and more universal theme, that of the mysterious and often

random intrusion of evil, in the disguise of an alienated

individual, into a seemingly good world.

Unlike the Wapshot novels, in Bullet Park, Cheever

does not employ details that are possibly autobiographical,

and he abandons any pretense of reporting upon or

recreating actual circumstances or events. The plot is

episodic, a series of vignettes often appearing unlinked to

the ones proceeding or following, and, to add to what may

seem confusing in plot, Cheever moves freely from one point

of view to another in individual episodes and inserts his

own voice as well. His characters often reveal little or

no motivation for their actions, and Cheever offers no explanations. These stylistic techniques were the target of criticism by early reviewers, but later critics, most

37 38 particularly John Gardner in "Witchcraft in Bullet Park," stated that Cheever has merely let his subject create his shape so that his style has become a reflection of his view of the world as an unexplainable mystery where coincidence and accident are ultimately as significant motivators as are carefully formulated plans (259).

In Bullet Park,.Cheever somewhat modifies the concern which dominated the Wapshot novels, that of the overwhelming aspect of rapid change in the modern world.

In this third novel, rapid and often confusing change has been accepted as an inherent and unavoidable part of man's contemporary existence. Accepting, if not always welcoming, change, Cheever is now more interested in determining and portraying the existence of a subtle evilness that creeps into a typical modern suburb, which has built barriers of outward morality, goodness, cleanliness, and has even enacted community legislation to prevent this intrusion of evil. The setting of the novel is a paradox, however, for the commuter village of Bullet

Park, a creation that would be expected to symbolize the artificial and sterile properties of life, functions instead as an almost paradise, existing mostly peaceably along side the comforting world of nature and providing an environment of security and ease. Even the suburb's name is paradoxical for no violence or danger seems to exist within its bounds. Although human hypocrisy and 39 petty maliciousness are part of Bullet Park, true evil comes to this world not from within, but in the guise of a psychopathic stranger, attempting sen-seless murder. Almost like a morality play, Cheever's theme is a cautionary one, showing that even in clean, calm Bullet Park, evil, ancient and persuasive, exists.

In Bullet Park, Cheever uses natural images, particularly a mountain and the rain, to restate his theme of a possible paradise, still attainable but.sometimes perverted, and to emphasize the idea that despite their artificial surroundings, some characters live in a natural world of goodness, while others exist in an artificial world that seems to contain great evil. But since Bullet

Park is ultimately a truthful, if not realistic, portrayal of contemporary life, the worlds of good and evil are not static, but frequently intersect to cause chaos and confusion for the humans caught between the two. The natural images also intersect, with images paradoxically changing meaning as they are used to support Cheever's various views of the world.

Cheever seems to suggest that a balance between the natural world, whose talismans are trees, sunlight, and rain, and which encompasses both good and evil, and the artificial world, often represented by train stations and travel, and also containing both, must be found in order for a character to achieve a sense of contentment. Elliot 40

Nailles, the narrator of Parts I and IIl of Bullet Park,

initially appears to have achieved the desired balance.

His work for the Saffron Chemical Corporation, merchandising the mouthwash Spang. provides a substantial

salary that has enabled him to buy "one of those

rectilinear Dutch Colonials with a pair of columns at the

door" (22) as well as other more portable necessities for

the good life. Nailles willingly participates in the round

of parties in the neighborhood, understanding that cocktails and dinner in this "time and place were as

important to the welfare of the community as the village

caucus, the school board and the municipal services" (7)

and with other commuters, Nailles takes the 7:56 or the

8:11 train to the City each day.

In his religious practice, Nailles has a innate

sincerity of belief and also an acceptance of some of the

inevitable absurdities of religion in a modern world which has become so "automotive and nomadic that nomadic signals or means of communication had been established by the use of headlight, parking lights, signal lights and windshield wipers" (21). Following the recommendations of his bishop and readily combining the mundane with the celestial,

Nailles turns on his windshield wipers even when it is not raining to communicate his sincere faith "in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come"

(21). 41

Unlike the characters in the Wapshot novels, in Bullet

Park, Cheever's characters do not have a clearly or nostalgically visualized concept of paradise. Cheever showed that the Wapshots seemed to remember a time and place containing morality, complete love and contentment, but Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer do not have these memories. Yet, without a conscious search, Nailles has

found the domesticated paradise based on family love that

the Wapshots desired. Nailles loves his wife, Nellie, and

his son, Tony, and he feels great pride in successfully

providing financial and emotional security for them. He

simplistically believes that the security he currently

enjoys will always endure, and in his mind, he wraps the

Nailles family in a warm, unchanging cocoon, thinking that

the love he "felt for his wife and only son seemed like

some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would

surround them, cover them, preserve them, and leave them

insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic" (24).

But family love alone cannot create an earthly

paradise. An inhabitant of Cheever's domesticated Eden

must also feel a bond with the natural world, and Nailles

shows his fulfillment of this requisite by his conscious

admiration of the Edenic qualities of nature. Although

ostentatiously a completely assimilated inhabitant of the

man-made world of suburbia, Nailles is also an ardent

observer, and lover, of the natural world. He feels that 42

"someone has to observe the world" (131) and he is so attuned to nature that he can "distinguish the sounds made by the different trees as the wind fills them: maple, birch, tulip and oak" (131). Cheever consistently portrays

Nailles in a natural setting--sawing down diseased elms as

he admires their faint fragrance, watching blowing leaves

in the headlights of his car, and striding through the woods near his property, supposedly hunting but actually

only enjoying the beauty of the day. Nailles is very aware

of the cycle of the seasons and also of the human

ceremonies that are superimposed upon the natural cycles,

and he relates the church calendar much more closely to the

weather than with the revelations and strictures in Holy Gospel. St. Paul meant blizzards. St. Mathias meant a thaw. For the marriage at Cana and the cl-eansing of the leper the oil furnace would still be running although the vents in the stained-glass windows were sometimes open to the raw spring air. (15)

Nailles is so sensitized to the natural forces that a

spell of fine weather can lift even a burden of pain from

his shoulders, and like Leander Wapshot. the sound of

thunder stimulates his memory to "what it felt like to be

young" (112).

Elliot Nailles rejoices in the natural world and as he

looks out the window one morning, although he knows he does

not live in a paradise, for there are "septic drain fields

under the grass and that flock of cardinals in the fir

trees might have lice" (56), he feels such great exaltation 43 that "he threw his arms apart as if he were going to embrace the landscape and the birds" (56). Comforting nature exists independently of "peace on earth, love or bank deposits" (56) and this knowledge adds to his pleasure.

In contrast, Paul Hammer, the disturbed newcomer in

Bullet Park and narrator of Part 11, only rarely achieves any form of earthly paradise. Hammer is a man completely adrift in the modern world, traveling endlessly across the earth, knowing his and the world's frightening inadequacies, and longing for "a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of kite string"

(145). Hammer is plagued by a "cafard-a form of despair that sometimes seemed to have a tangible approach" (172), and his depression is so great that he hates "the light of day" (173) and he drinks heavily to dull his pain. In the overpopulated and complex world of twentieth century

America, he fears that he may vanish, because there is

"nothing about me to set me apart from other men" (179), and feels that he can survive only if he finds a room with yellow walls to live in, a place where "the cafard could not enter" (181).

When Hammer finds his yellow-walled paradise, Cheever again shows that even a contemporary paradise must include properties of nature to be complete for it is only when 44

Hammer briefly achieves his dream, his paradise, that he becomes aware of the natural beauty that always surrounds him. Living in a yellow-walled room, he can for the first time "hear the brook, some night bird, moving leaves, and all the sounds of the night world" (185). In his paradise, he realizes how far he had "gone from any natural course"

(185), and how the modern world intrudes upon his elusive

Elysian Fields, for his visions often show that "a railway

track of a thruway had destroyed the beauty of the place"

(173). But Hammer's paradise, based on a paint color that

seemed to provide security, is only temporary, and when

"the yellow paint on the walls had begun to crack and

discolor" (216), and his "obsession with yellow had begun

to seem absurd" (216), Hammer's wife, a woman whose moods

are determined by the winds, has the walls repainted pink,

and he returns to endless travel, and starts to foster his

murderous intent to crucify someone to "awaken the world" (243).

In Cheever's vision of the world, paradise, based on

paint, or family security, is indeed fragile. Ultimately,

there can be no Eden, because, as Hammer knows, "the nature

of man was terrifying and singular and man's environment

was chaos" (230). In the chaos, Cheever's characters can

discover no comforting master plan to rely upon; even

"Lucky Nailles" who felt that "one had one's share of brute

pleasure, hard work, money and love (49), and that "the 45 wicked were sick, the good were robust" (26), finally

realizes that the "fitness of things" (26) is a sham in the modern world--there is only a random selection of luck and

disaster dispensed, and on the luck of some unseen draw,

Eliot Nailles also loses his paradise. Innocent Nailles is

completely unprepared and thoroughly disoriented when pain,

fear, suffering, and disillusion enter his sacred home.

One morning, eighteen year old Tony, "just terribly sad"

(39) refuses to get out of bed. Twenty. two days later he

is still there, and the "image of his lost son, gripping

his pillow" (49), a picture foreign to Nailles' thoughts or

experiences, has completely disrupted Nailles' supposedly

inviolate existence, and his hard-earned balance becomes an

increasingly clamorous teeter-totter.

Tony's illness is caused by several factors, the most

obvious being an argument with his father that degenerates

into near violence as the two play golf on a deserted

miniature golf course. Tony states his desire to leave

high school without a diploma because he feels that he is

learning nothing and that the diploma is just "a phony

scrap of paper" (113). Nailles, clutching his patience

like "a woolly blanket" explains that all jobs need

training, and that one has "to observe some rules of the

game" (114). Caught in adolescent anger, Tony says that

maybe he doesn't want to play by the rules, maybe he "might

not want to come home at dusk to a pretty woman and play 46

softball with a bunch of straight-limbed sons" (116),

effectively rejecting Nailles' own vision of paradise. As

Nailles persists with the idea that Tony must do something

useful, Tony replies, "What? Like pushing mouthwash?"

(116). In anger, Nailles swings his putter at his son's

head, and Tony ducks and runs off into the darkness.

Nailles is disturbed by beloved Tony's refusal to

conform to rules that have provided material success and

security for previous generations. But Tony, a product of

a firmly established upper middle class family, sees no

reason to rely on the accepted procedures. Because he

knows only unlimited emotional security, he feels he should

have the freedom to explore all options available to him

without concern for education or money. But by rejecting

the rules of the game, Tony has rejected his father's goals

and achievements. Nailles does not realize that Tony is no

longer a child to be swaddled and protected, but is a young man who has proved his sexual independence, much to

Nailles' discomfort, and who desires other freedoms that

seem natural to him. Tony's disappointment in his own

inability to convey his desires to his father combines with other disappointments, his loss of a place on the football

team because of his poor grades in French in particular, to create his terrible sadness. Nailles has no advice for

Tony, but as they drive home after the confrontation with

Tony's French teacher when Tony has been informed that he 47 must give up football, Nailles says, "I love to see leaves blowing through the headlights. I don't know why. I mean

they're just dead leaves, no good for anything, but I love to see them blowing through the light" (86). Nailles is offering Tony his own type of comfort, the observation of

the beauty of nature, but Tony is unable to accept solace.

He feels that all is flimsy and insubstantial, so even the comfortable and cheerful house seems only "a house of cards."

Cheever uses a natural image, a mountain or a mountain

range, to illustrate Tony's illness and the collapse of

Nailles' world. For the unwary Nailles, pain and suffering are "a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe. The government would be feudal and the country mountainous, but it would never lie on his

itinerary and would be unknown to his travel agent" (48).

The principality of pain that Nailles never imagined he would enter includes "a view of the statue of Aescualapius

in the public gardens with some snowy mountains in the distance" and a palace that "had been converted into a hospital and rivers of blood foamed under the arched bridges" (48). Nailles is certain that he was not meant to travel here, and he is surprised and frightened "to wake from a dream in which he had seen, out of a train window, that terrifying range of mountains" (48).

The train imagery that Cheever often uses in Bullet 48

Park has been identified by critics, including George W.

Hunt, as an indication of one of Cheever's major themes, that of the disorienting nature of travel in the modern world. Cheever's characters travel a great deal, usually by train as a part of their daily routine, or by plane as they pursue what they see as a possible Eden, and their frequency of movement often exemplifies their own lack of a home base, which signals security. In addition, Cheever's travel imagery chronicles man's powerful machines, and shows that their ability to move effortlessly beyond, over, and beneath the earth's natural obstacles, particularly a massive mountain, have effectively destroyed the obstructions' strength as symbols in the modern world. By linking the train with the mountain in the passage describing Nailles' dream, Cheever effectively juxtaposes the artificial world of rapid travel with the natural world of the mountains. The combination of these symbols emphasizes that the mountain, which traditionally is a symbol of aspiration and hope, has been reduced in the modern world to only a vision, seen fleetingly through a train window, and now easily tunneled through or flown over. Because the mountain can be so easily overcome, it is ignored, and cannot represent a challenge or the hope entailed in that challenge. The symbol of hope has become one of loss, representing for Nailles his destroyed

"beloved world-his kingdom" and he feels the loss one 49

morning when he awakes feeling old, "as if while he slept

he had put down the dreams of a strong man- snow-covered

mountains and beautiful women-in exchange for the anxieties

of some decrepit octogenarian who feared that he had lost

his false teeth" (88).

To Cheever's characters the idea of the majestic

mountain as a symbol of hope has become absurd and

ridiculous, and is further reduced by man to become a

perverted symbol, ironically used to advertise chemical

disinfectants which form an "imitation of the sweet

mountain air" and create "snow-capped toilet seats" (124).

But, in Bullet Park as in the Wapshot books, Cheever's

characters are never completely lost, or beyond hope, so

with guarded optimism Cheever also uses the mountain to

represent the cure that Tony desires and that will restore

Nailles' contentment. One beautiful morning, Nailles,

attuned and invigorated to nature, drags Tony from bed to

the window as brilliant light come through. Nailles urges

Tony to "see how bright everything is. Nobody can stay in

bed on a day like this. It's like a challenge, Tony"

(67). As Nailles prods his son to reveal why he will not

get out of bed, Tony howls, "Give me back the mountains."

Nailles responds, "What mountains, Sonny? Do you mean the mountains we used to climb?" Tony cannot clarify what he wants, and gets back into bed, and Nailles runs to catch

the train into the city. 50

Tony and Nailles are at cross purposes, neither understands the other, but both instinctively desire a challenge, a mountain, that Tony can successfully overcome to recreate the security that has been destroyed by the series of relatively minor disappointments he has suffered. To reemphasize the distance between father and son, Cheever uses separate natural symbols for each; to

Nailles, the challenge is represented by the bright sunlight which shows that "everything's ahead of you" (67), and to Tony, by the unreachable mountain, and their inability to agree on even a symbolic label for Tony's needs illustrates their inability to communicate, despite

Nailles' overwhelmingly love for his son.

Cheever uses the mountain image also as a part of the cure Hammer desires, a banishment of his cafard. In his depression, Hammer summons "those images that represented for me the excellence and beauty I had lost" (172). One image is a mountain, "obviously Kilimanjaro. The summit was a perfect, snow-covered cone, lighted by a passing glow" (172). This mountain image, representing "beauty, enthusiasm and love" (173) greatly comforts Hammer until his depression becomes so intense that even the image will no longer keep his cafard at bay.

The hope offered by the mountain image cannot cure

Hammer because his mental illness makes him a lost soul who can find no refuge, but the mountain functions as an 51 important part of Tony's mysterious cure by the magical

Swami Rutuola from the Temple of Light. The Swami is a light-skinned Jamacian with one damaged eye, "raised to heaven in a permanent attitude of religious hysteria"

(127). The Swami is not a religious fanatic, however, but a calm, sensitive spiritual cheerleader. His cheers, of place, of love, of hope, seem to awaken the human spirit, helping to reaffirm what is important, or to remind one of hidden or forgotten strengths. The Swami's prayers are not conversations with God, but some mysterious force in themselves, and Cheever again employees the mountain image when the Swami recounts the discovery of his powerful cheers. He had been a toilet cleaner in Grand Central

Station, and late one night he found a grey-faced man in great pain moaning in the bathroom.

Attempting to help the man, the Swami directs attention to a large, lighted picture that advertised cameras. The Swami says that the picture was of

a man and a woman and two children on a beach-a lake I guess-and behind them, way off in the distance, were all these mountains covered with snow. It was a beautiful happy -picture but it seemed more beautiful because the concourse was so cold and bare and had nothing happy about it. (131)

The Swami urges the man "to look at the mountain to see if he could get his mind off his troubles" (131), and because he cannot remember any prayers, the Swami chants

"valor, valor, valor, valor, over and over again" .(131). 52

The man is revived, leaves the station, and the Swami

becomes a carpenter and a spiritual cheerleader.

The Swami's freely offered assistance and love have

somehow restored the mountain's symbolic power, and again,

Cheever has combined the artificial and the natural worlds

by placing a symbol of aspiration, the mountain, in the most commercial of settings, a camera advertisement in a

train station. The mountain may be an unattainable vision,

but its beauty reawakens the idea of hope that Cheever

believes exists always in man. Combined with the most

positive of human characteristics, valor, the mountain

functions as a cure for human ailments. When the Swami

visits Tony, his cheers cure the boy because Tony, unlike

Hammer, has a moral base, a strongly ingrained code of

moral behavior which makes him incapable of immoral

behavior or even "of a forthright lie" (91). Tony, a

product of Nailles' influence, is also much more aware than

Hammer of the true place of man in the natural world, and

even sitting in a fluorescent lit school room with his

teacher, knows that there is "still enough light in the

air, enough color in the trees to compete with the

incandescence of their cavern" (78). Tony can successfully balance the artificial with the natural, the balance that

Cheever feels will create contentment, but Hammer cannot, and as his horrible depression overwhelms him, he cannot

reach the mountain, and his mental instability goes 53 unchecked and forces him toward murder.

Cheever often uses another natural image, water, in the form of rain or the sea, in Bullet Park. Burton Kendle states that in Cheever's short stories, water has a strong effect on characters, "sometimes tempting them with the

illusion of a baptismal cleansing or womblike peace they can no longer attain, sometimes satisfying these desires"

(230). George J. Hunt also notes that Cheever's water

imagery is often associated "with Christian baptism and its

ritual of purgation and renewal" and states that

symbolically the sea represents "the spring and origin of all the potentialities within existence" (70). It is the

idea of potentialities, the potential for growth, for

regeneration, for repair, that Cheever most frequently

links to the symbols of rain and water in Bullet Park.

Water is associated with the spiritual cheers that the

Swami does with Tony and that bring about his cure. One cheer is a place cheer, illustrating a place of total peace and contentment, a virtual earthly paradise. Describing

such a place, the Swami says,

I'm in a house by the sea at four in the afternoon and it's raining and I'm sitting in a ladderback chair with a book in my lap and I'm waiting for a girl I love who has gone on an errand but who will return. (136)

Tony and the Swami chant this cheer several times,

then move on to chanting "love" one hundred times, and late at night, Nailles hears "Hope, hope, hope, hope" (138) 54 coming from Tony's bedroom windows. The images of rain and the sea in the cheer bring a feeling of comfort to the chanters, and the other words, love and hope, state the strengths of man. The cheers combine the best of nature and man, and when the Swami is finished, Tony's sadness is gone and he is able to rise from his bed. His cure is not really a surprise, for the educated doctors who visited

Tony seemed to rely on guesswork, and the Swami's cheers are no more mysterious than their recommendations of sleep analysis, psychological study or drug therapy.

To Cheever, rain is a vibrant symbol of life, a

reminder that despite the chaos that man may be forced to endure, a method of overcoming the confusion may possibly be discovered. Although Nailles is always conscious of the

rain, Cheever most often links the symbol of rain to his son Tony, by noting the rain that is falling during all the

the particular incidents that lead up to his illness.

Recalling past disappointments, Nailles remembers that it was raining when he and nine year old Tony quarreled over

Tony's long hours of watching cartoon shows on television.

Nailles, concerned about his son's passive behavior, has a

terrible argument with him, and the fight culminates with

Nailles picking up the television and throwing it into the backyard where it burst "with the rich, glassy music of an automobile collision" (74). During the incident, "the rain

sounded loudly in the yard" (74), and the contrasting 65 sounds illustrate that even one of the most artificial and ambiguous symbols of modern man's life, the intrusive television, is not powerful or persuasive enough to overcome rain, one of the most natural images.

Years later, when Tony is ill, his mother, Nellie, notes the rain that falls as she goes to the slums of

Bullet Park to persuade the Swami to visit Tony. She sees that "some rain seemed let down like a net from the guileless heavens of her childhood, some rains were stormy and bitter, some fell like a force of memory. The rain that day tasted as salty as blood" (125). In this passage,

Cheever has linked rain to childhood, implying innocence and contentment, to storms, indicating the troubled emotions that have invaded the Nailles' household, to memory, a motivating force in Cheever's fiction which urges his characters toward a fresh beginning based on a nostalgically visualized attainable paradise, and, by

linking rain to blood, has alluded to the redemptive power of blood in Christian beliefs. The rain image is thus a very positive one, incorporating primary themes of

Cheever's work, and reinforcing the optimism that gradually becomes more prevalent in Bullet Park.

Again, rain falls when Hammer is ready to crucify

Tony, his misguided effort to "awaken the world," and the pouring rain seems'"to crowd into the light. The rain fell with such force that it stripped the leaves off the trees 56 and the air smelled of bilge" (242). Hammer, who has already assured his own downfall by revealing his plan to the Swami, cannot kill Tony, and waits hopelessly as

Nailles cuts through the church door with his "howling" chainsaw. Symbolically, after Nailles has lifted Tony off the altar at Christ's Church and carried him outside, it is the rain that brings Tony back to consciousness, and back

into life. For a brief moment, Tony is almost a

Christ-like figure, troubled, dying, and then alive, and

Cheever has again placed artificial, the chainsaw, next to natural, the rain, to illustrate the balance of man and nature that seems to symbolize happiness and contentment for his characters.

Ultimately, however, Nailles cannot find a balance in his own life. The terrifying experience of emotional travel through despair, brought on by Tony's illness, has so bewildered Nailles that he develops a phobia of physical travel, specifically the train trip from his home to his office in the city. This phobia, the inability to board the commuter train, shakes the very foundations of Nailles'

life because his "sense of being alive was to bridge or

link the disparate environments and rhythms of his world, and one of his principal bridges--that between his white house and his office--had collapsed" (62). A simple trip by train to the city is impossible unless he has taken tranquilizers, first obtained from his doctor and then from 57 a pusher, and although he swallows his pills with a handful of rainwater, he cannot regain a balanced existence after the horrible realization that "fortune was dealt out like the peanuts at the end of a child's birthday party" (49), and that "there was more suffering in life than he had been

led to believe" (50). Nailles has lost his innocence, his blissful belief in what Leander Wapshot called "the continuousness of things," and replacing the lost security of his home with the temporary security of drugs, finds that "everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as

it had been" (243).

Nailles' artificial peace created by drugs cannot

last; it is like "the perfection of a midsummer day whose sublimity hinted at the inevitability of winter and death"

(35). Evil entered Bullet Park when alienated Paul Hammer arrived, and despair came to Nailles when he realized that his love alone could not protect his family. Cheever has again shown that there is no complete paradise on earth, and his characters must struggle on as best they can, constantly "stunned by the mysteriousness of life and death" (61).

But man's determination to survive despite the problems and shortcomings of the modern world is one of

Cheever's major themes, and the struggle is easier for those who can manage a balance of the artificial and natural worlds. Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer cannot do 58 so, but Tony Nailles may, and that possibility proves that mankind still has a more contented future to strive towards, and that one "can do better than th.is." Cheever has used the natural images in Bullet Park to reinforce and restate that optimism,.and to remind his readers of the beauty and grace of the natural world which always exists alongside of man-made creations. CHAPTER Ill

BIBILIOGRAPHY

Cheever, John. Bullet Park. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978.

Gardner, John. "Witchcraft in Bullet Park." New York

Times Book Review 24 Oct. 1971: 2, 24.

Hunt, George W. The Hobgoblin Company of Love. Grand

Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983.

Kendle, Burton. "The Passion of Nostalgia in the Short

Stories of John Cheever." Critical Essays on John

Cheever. Ed. R. G. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 219-230.

Waldeland, Lynne. "John Cheever's Bullet Park: A Key to

His Thought and Art." Critical Essay on John

Cheever. Ed. R. G. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 261-272.

69 CHAPTER IV

FALCONER

In his first three novels, The Wapshot Chronicle, The

Wapshot Scandal, and Bullet Park, John Cheever created characters who longed for an earthly paradise, and who, while never finding a complete paradise, gladly settled for

a modified version based on familial love and an admiration

and appreciation of the beauties of nature. Coverly

Wapshot and Eliot Nailles discovered that they must

actively and consciously seek paradise in order to enjoy

its comforting properties, but for Ezkiel Farragut, the main character of Falconer (1976), the search is

intensified because the fragile supports of Cheever's

vision of an earthly paradise have been diminished. For

Ezekiel Farragut, a drug addict, a murderer, and a resident

of Falconer, a maximum security prison in upper New

England, there are only infrequent bright moments of family

love, and few glimpses of the lovely natural world, and, as

a seasoned convict explains, "I ain't got no future,

Farragut, and you ain't got no future either" (96).

Falconer is not the complete departure from Cheever's

main themes and familiar settings it first appears,

however, but a legitimate outgrowth of previous works. In

60 61

Falconer, Cheever leaves behind the comforting ordinariness

of Shady Hill, as John Leonard writes in an early review,

"in a black van through the twilight zone and into hell"

79). In this twilight zone, in the quagmire, as Cheever

has labeled the horrors of the modern world, the

eccentricities celebrated in characters of previous novels

have metamorphosed into grotesqueness, so that the

tranquilizer addiction that Eliot Nailles suffered in

Bullet Park has grown into horrifying heroin addiction for

Farragut, and the murderous impulses that Nailles and the

Wapshots experienced have been acted upon.

In addition to the departure from his usual setting of

suburbia, in Falconer Cheever offers more motivations for

his characters' actions than in previous books. Lynne

Waldeland had noted that in Bullet Park Cheever "allows us

more insight than usual in his fiction into the characters'

minds, backgrounds, dreams, and motives" (104), and Cheever

continues this trend in Falconer. Sizeable portions of the

novel are interior monologues by Farragut which reveal his

past as well as his opinions of love, sex, women, men, and

the modern world. In addition, all action, except for one

brief narration by Jody, is seen from Farragut's

viewpoint. This gives the novel a greater sense of

continuity than in earlier novels, and the basic episodic

shape of the novel is modified since Falconer begins with

Farragut's entrance into the prison and ends with his 62

escape, and this framework creates a stronger sense of plot.

Cheever also modifies previous themes (excluding the

use of endless travel as a metaphor for the rootlessness of modern American life), condensing his use of memory and nostalgia as comforting and motivating forces of the

personality and expanding the theme of confinement to become the main concept of the novel. This theme applies most obviously to the literal and physical confinement that

Ezekiel Farragut experiences, but for Cheever, confinement also implies self-inflicted or involuntary limitations that prevent a character from living a life of joy or pleasure, or achieving the "boundlessness of possibility."

Cheever identifies restrictions of personal habits, such as excessive alcohol use or drug addiction, that cause a character to be confined to a particular pattern of behavior. Other confinements are the expected ones of place, such as a small village, a suburb, or a prison, and the emotional confinements of marital or erotic contracts.

Some characters of Falconer are confined by a distinctive personal miserliness of the spirit that creates an

inability to love, shown best by Eben Farragut, the brother

Ezekiel murders in a rage. This confinement is shown in a lesser degree in the inmates and guards of the prison, who seem to delight in continual viciousness and maliciousness toward each other. 63

Most persuasive, however, are the binding confinements of heredity and of environment, illustrated in Falconer by

Farragut's descriptions of his own family and childhood.

Farragut will always be emotionally confined by his early experiences, including being told that his father asked an abortionist to dinner in order to convince his mother to

"have his life extinguished as he dwelt in his mother's womb" (59). Other memories from childhood are equally confining because each shows the great discrepancy between expectations and reality; Farragut can never really "match his own mother, a famous arsonist, snob, gas pumper and wing shot" with the "Degas painting of a woman with a bowl of chrysanthemums that had come to represent to Farragut the great serenity of mother"' (58). Nor can Farragut

reconcile the concept of a dependable father figure with his own impoverished father's frequent and drunken threats of suicide, nor can he adapt his idea of brotherly love with his own brother's attempts to murder him. Farragut's family is a disorienting collection of fractured

individuals, and his personality is the sum of his experiences with and recollections of this group. This

inheritance coupled with the knowledge that the modern world has far "outstripped the human scale, the human

imagination, the wildest human dreams" (44) confine him to a personality that willing drifts into drug addiction and murder. 64

But in Falconer, Cheever's theme is not merely an

identification of confinements, but an illustration of the

possibilities of a struggle against recognized and

acknowledged confinements. In an interview focusing on

Falconer, Cheever stated, "All of my work deals with

confinement in one shape or another, and the struggle

toward freedom. Do I mean freedom? Only as a metaphor for

a sense of boundlessness, the possibility of rejoicing"

(Firth 22). There can be no true elimination of confinements because unfortunate inheritances or personal

shortcomings will always exist but there can be an attempt

to assimilate these confinements into the personality in a

positive manner. The struggle to do so then becomes a positive or optimistic image because it implies the possibility of a successful battle against confinement and the resulting achievement of a particular sense of rejoicing--creating a freedom that is a necessity to the human soul. Confinement, even as horrid as drug addiction or imprisonment, is not a negative image in Cheever's fiction because the continuing struggle against such restrictions offers a feeling of hope, a feeling that "one could do better than this." Cheever is always aware of this feeling of hope and stated that as he started to write

Falconer, he knew that "Farragut had to get out. Out of drugs. Out of the delusions of drugs. Out of...Hell"

(Munro 78). This is the positive conviction that fuels the 65

book, the certainty that the confinement can be overcome.

In addition, critic George W. Hunt finds that the very

"awareness of confinement" is a positive emotion which moves Cheever's theme of simple confinement into a

philosophical notion of freedom, because this awareness

illustrates that there is a mysterious something in man

that makes him both "dissatisfied and hopeful" (84).

Thus confinement may be an important part of Cheever's

concept of an earthly paradise because of the potential of

conquering confinement and reaching a contented freedom of

the soul. Although, unlike other Cheever characters,

Farragut never expresses a desire for an earthly paradise,

or acknowledges the idea that "one could do better than

this," he does indeed search for a paradise because he

constantly struggles against his personal restrictions, the

barriers that prevent his personal growth. He ultimately

succeeds by overcoming his drug addiction, by proving his

ability to love through his homosexual affair with his

fellow inmate Jody and by caring for the dying inmate

Chicken Number Two, and by eventually escaping from prison

to become symbolically reborn from Chicken's death sack with "an unlikely feeling of innocence and purity" (218).

Freed from his confinements of mind and body, Farragut walks away from Falconer, and "he held his head high, his back straight, and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he

thought, rejoice" (226). A generous stranger hands him a 66 coat to cover his prison clothes, and casually offers

Farragut a place to stay. Suddenly the world, where people harm and destroy each other, is mysteriously good.

Paradoxically, Farragut finds paradise from what he has

learned in confinement, and Falconer, which at first appears as grimy novel of prison life, becomes a celebration of human possibilities and hope.

Because the action of Falconer takes place in prison,

Cheever uses fewer images from nature to illustrate his themes than in previous novels. Ezekiel Farragut, however,

like Coverly Wapshot and Eliot Nailles, is an ardent observer and lover of nature. As a free man, he had taken an enormous and absurd

pleasure in his environment. He liked to walk on the earth, swim in the oceans, climb the mountains and, in the autumn, watch the leaves fall. The simple phenomenon of light--brightness angling across the air--struck him as a transcendent piece of good news. (89)

Farragut has a "passion for blue sky" (206) and his love for nature continues to give comfort as he journeys to prison. Walking under the prison escutcheon, convinced he will die there, he saw the "blue sky and nailed his identity to it." (3).

In prison, literal confinement, Farragut initially seems to have lost "his love, his world, his everything"

(131), and the inability to enjoy daily contact with nature is particularly painful because of his previous intense 67

enjoyment of the world. He was brought to Falconer "on a

late summer's day" in a van with windows "so high and unclean that he could not see the color of the sky or any

of the lights and shapes of the world he was leaving," and although in a drugged haze, he resents not being able to at

least "see the light of day" (2). Locked up, he can no

longer hear the "respiratory noises that come from his beloved sea" (63), nor see the light in evening "going, as

it so often does, with a fanfare" (79), or walk in "his darling snowy forest" with its "everlasting newness in the air" (162). He sees only "some sky, two high water towers"

(8) from the window in his cell, and when rain comes at night, Farragut cannot see or feel the moisture but stands at his barred window to savor "that rank and vigorous odor that is detonated by the rain" and realizes that he has "a trace, a memory, of this primitive excitement, but it had been cruelly eclipsed by the bars" (131). Shut away from the natural world, he cannot see "the fields of paradise on the other side of the wall" (77).

Confined in Falconer, Farragut feels that all the anchors of his soul have been destroyed. He, like other

Cheever characters, has always depended upon pleasant memories for comfort, but in prison his memories are

"eclipsed and indisposed" (52), and lying on his cot in the morning he realizes that

the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic 68

memories and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent upon chance smells--grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the showers. (52)

Farragut has lost his beloved natural world and can only sporadically enjoy his memories, and under these conditions he finds "his sense of time and space somewhat

imperiled" (111). Terrifyingly disoriented, he sometimes must resort to asking Tiny the guard where he is, and Tiny obliges with " Falconer Prison,' he would say, You killed your brother.' Thanks, Tiny' answers Farragut (111).

Farragut seems to be a lost soul, alienated from the world and from himself, but unknown yet to himself,

Farragut will find redemption in his confinement, and

Cheever telegraphs this twist of fate by the use of a natural image. The sunlight Farragut mourns the loss of has magical properties that can make almost all things seem good, even the prisoners, because "the light of the sky, shining into their condemned faces, showed a great richness of purpose and innocence" (4). But this is an illusion, a trick of the light, because, as a guard explains, exaggerating only slightly, "They murder...they rape, they stuff babies into furnaces, they'd strangle their own mother for a stick of chewing gum" (4). Thus the world that Farragut has left is a place where illusion may cover reality and where natural beauty may cloak the awfulness of 69

the human spirit, but the prison he has entered is a place

where reality is never camouflaged and, it is here, perhaps

because of his confinement, that Farragut comes to

understand the true nature of himself and of his world.

As Farragut begins his redemptive process, he

discovers that his memories and glimpses of nature exist as

surely in prison as anywhere else. As his drug-induced

disorientation recedes, his memories return, including one

of a perfect day spent with his lover, "smelling the heavy

scent of the white flowers and the loud, loud noise the

bees made--it was like the drone of some old fashioned

engine with a leather traveling belt" (82). He remembers a

snowfall of "very heavy and beautiful snow that, like some

juxtaposition of gravity, seemed to set the mountain range

free of the planet" (84). He gradually regains his sense

of nostalgia, what he "remembers with pleasure" (99), and

discovers that even the sight of sunlight stimulates his

memory so that "the light in the prison, that late in the

day, reminded Farragut of some forest he had skied through

on a winter afternoon. The perfect diagonal of the light

was cut by bars as trees would cut the light in some wood"

(162). Farragut's recollections of his enjoyment of the

natural world are no longer defused, and this blessing is a

symbol of the internal healing process and the struggle against his confinements that is occurring in his life.

Cheever uses images of nature to show that for middle-aged 70

Farragut memories of hours spent observing the beauties of the planet bring hope that he will sometime again be free of confinement and able to enjoy the natural world.

As his memories are reactivated, other signs of the existing natural world become visible to imprisoned

Farragut. He finds pleasure in watching a flock of

red-winged blackbirds, although he is "a little wary about the birds since the legend of cruelly confined men loving

the birds of the air had never moved him" (89). But still

"night after night, all through the summer and deep into

the fall, Farragut stood at his window and watched the black birds cross the blue sky above the walls" (90). His daily ritual of observing the birds reflects an earlier natural image, that of seeing on his first day in prison "a man in prison grays feeding bread crusts to a dozen pigeons" (5). For Farragut, this image has "an extraordinary reality, a promise of saneness" and "the

resonance of great antiquity" (5). Cheever has used this

image to foreshadow the idea that Farragut will find "a grain of reason" (6), a saneness, in Falconer, despite the atrocities later observed. Man's interaction with nature

is a continuing experience, even when man is confined in a place furnished with things "salvaged from a municipal dump" (6).

As Farragut becomes attuned to the brief glimpses of nature he is allowed, he sees that a guard's hanging plants 71

"with leaves of all shapes, some of them the color of red cabbage and some of them dull browns and yellows" are

lovely because that they "in their greenness and their life

stood for the valleys and pastures of milk and honey"

(155). His vision expands further when, with his lover

Jody, he finds a hide-out in an abandoned water tower and sees, "over the roofs of the old cellblocks and the walls, a two-mile stretch of river with cliffs and mountains on the western shore," and this "most commanding sight he had been given of the world beyond the wall" leaves him "deeply moved" (92). He is equally touched by a gift of fresh tomatoes from a guard, and finds that the fruit "tasted grievously of summer and freedom" (64). His enjoyment of the tomatoes is a particularly promising sign of his healing because he has so carefully named his addiction for heroin as an addiction to the "essence of the flower" (44) and to the "plants that draw their wisdom from the soil"

(59). But as he learns to overcome his confinements, this addiction to the destructive possibilities of the natural world changes into a love for the mundane tomato, a more wholesome product of the soil. In prison, Farragut is coming alive, battling his addiction and demons of the past, "his hated origins" (200), and his awakening is intensified as he observes "the invincible potency of nature" (90). He is learning that although there will always be mysterious confinements in the world, there is 72

still the possibility of finding one's place so that even

if "the flora and fauna of the rain forest were incomprehensible, one could comprehend the path that led to one's destination" (112).

Cheever illustrates Farragut's increasing

comprehension of the reality of his life by showing

Farragut mowing the prison lawn in the summer. Farragut

softly tells the mower " I have my memories,'" emphasizing his increasingly stable mental attitude, and then takes pleasure in mowing, an ancient task, finding that the "contrite geometry of grass-cutting pleased him." He knows that

to cut the grass one followed the contour of the land. To study the contour of the land--to read it as one did on skis--was to study and read the contour of the neighborhood, the county, the state, the continent, the planet, and to study and read the contour of the planet was to study and read the nature of its winds as his old father had done, sailing catboats and kites. Some oneness was involved, some contentment. (147) Farragut has found a sense of contentment despite the unpleasant aspects of his earlier life and the constant pressures of the modern world. With this inner serenity, he can now remember his father without hate, and can again find delight in simple tasks. He has also started to end his personal alienation from the world, to accept again a oneness with the natural world and with others. His own fresh awareness causes him to wonder about other members of the world and he observes their alienation 73

and isolation. Why, he asks, do

they all stay in one room, quarreling, when they could walk to the store or eat a picnic in the woods or go for a swim in the sea? They were free to do all of this. Why did they stay indoors? Why didn't they hear the sea calling to them as Farragut heard it calling, imagined the clearness of the brine as it fanned out over the beautiful pebbles? (215) Because Farragut has battled his confinements, he has rediscovered the great possibilities of the world, but ironically those still free in the world are those still confined and blind to the wondrous potential of their existence.

Farragut has learned that there is indeed "something good at the end of every journey" (9), even the journey to prison. He has also learned how easy it is "to embrace one's self," and "how simple to love oneself" (110), but how tremendously difficult it often is to love others. All one can do is struggle against confinement, and always be "intensely interested in what's going to happen next" (215). This is Cheever's theme in Falconer, a hopeful idea that even those who seem to be troubled souls still carry within them the strong impetus to attempt to better their condition. Cheever uses natural images to illustrate Farragut's improvement, first in his memories, and then by having natural images intrude on his life in prison. Nature is not a catalyst for Farragut; the battle against confinements must be started and waged within because no 74 magical personality transformations will come by observance of nature. But an admiration of the natural world can bring comfort to those who are struggling, and can mark their progress in the healing process. CHAPTER IV

BIBL BIOGRAPHY

Cheever, John. Falconer. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977. "Not Only I the Narrator, but I John Cheever." With Eleanor Munro. Ms. Apr. 1977: 74-77.

"Talking With John Cheever." With John Firth. Sat urdy Review 2 Apr. 1977: 22-23. Hunt, George W. The Hobgoblin Company of Love,. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983. Leonard, John. "Crying in the Wilderness." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 77-80. Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever . Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

75 CHAPTER V

OH WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS

In his fifth novel, Oh What A Paradise It Seems (1982), John Cheever continues an exploration of his major themes, including man's search for an earthly paradise and man's need for earthly redemption, and he returns to the familiar settings of New York City and a small village near the City, where the action of the Wapshot novels and Bullet Park had been centered. The main character of Paradise, Lemuel Sears, is also a familiar type in Cheever fiction for he is a financially successful man who works and lives in the City but has roots and memories in a small town near by. Unlike Coverly Wapshot and Elliot Nailles, however, Sears is no longer young or middle-aged; he is an "old man but not yet infirm" (3), with "white hair that grew like quack grass and a cat-boat tan" (4). Sears is a courteous and intelligent man who seems to have lived his life by the advice that Leander Wapshot gave his sons in The Wapshot Chronicle, including, "Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord" (Chronicle 249). In Oh What a Paradise It Seems, Cheever employees two

76 77

natural images, light and water, to expand his theme of man's search for the illusive paradise, and to show Sears'

personal search for purity, a form of his earthly redemption. Both images are common in all of Cheever's fiction, but are particularly numerous in Paradise because the major struggle of the novel concerns the polluting and eventual restoration of a pond, and the story is set in a time in which "most of our great rivers and bodies of water were in serious danger'" (101). Cheever's obvious concern about the greedy and ignorant polluting that is quickly destroying one of the very life-giving properties of the natural world, water, marks a return to the broad social commentary shown in his discussions of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons in The Wapshot Scandal and the horrors of war versus the material desires of the people discussed in Bullet Park.

As Paradise begins, Sears is an active participant in the modern world who enjoys his work with a company that manufactures "intrusion systems for computer containers" (9) and initially equally enjoys his flirtation and affair with Renee Herendon. He is physically vigorous and quite capable of walking four miles in order to spend the afternoon ice skating on Beasley's Pond, and he feels pride that he can still wear "the same belt I wore when I played football in college" (102). But despite these outward affirmations of his continued strength and alertness, Sears 78

is concerned with aging, so concerned that the process dominates his thoughts, and this sensitivity to his advancing age naturally gives him a different view of the world than either the Wapshots or Nailles had. Sears differs from them also because, he, twice widowed, is no longer engaged in rearing children, and is no longer concerned with establishing himself in the social spheres of the world. Lemuel Sears is a Wapshot or Nailles grown old, and his interests have moved outward, encompassing not only himself, but the world in general, and the over- whelming knowledge of his own mortality is reflected in his increasing awareness of his planet's mortality. Because Sears is "old enough to remember when the horizons of his country were dominated by the beautiful and lachrymose wine-glass elm tree and when most of the bathtubs one stepped into had lions' claws" (3), he is aware that a mysterious something appears to have been lost from his own life and from the precious and admired world. This awareness that perhaps the hectic pace of modern life as well as the "diminished responsibilities of our society" (78) have destroyed many of the important values of the past restates Cheever's primary themes of nostalgia and memory, but this theme, prevalent in the Wapshot books, has been modified in Paradise. Sears' vision of what has been lost is not a sorrowful concept of a unattainable paradise, a memory of "some country which he had been forced to 79

leave" (79) but a realistic acknowledgment that most societies may view the past as a more equitable, pleasant place than is the constantly changing and far-from-peaceful present. Thus nostalgia, what one remembers with pleasure, is a selective memory, not a detailed blueprint of a previously existing world. To emphasize this idea, in Paradise Cheever touches his nostalgia with cynicism by showing that Sears knows

that things had been better was of the music, the reprise his days. It had been sung by his associates, elders, by his he had heard it sung in college and Spengler. by Toynbee Things had been better, things getting worse, were and the lengthening moral and intellectual shadows that one saw spreading over the Western world were final. What a bore it had been to live in this self-induced autumnal twilight! (33)

The very realization that perhaps the twilight' surrounding Sears and other inhabitants of the contemporary world may be self-created and not some unchangeable, hopeless condition of the world existing outside of the powers of man creates an optimistic environment that ultimately reemphasizes the theme of the Wapshot novels-- one can do better than this--and this knowledge is the motivation for Sears' determined struggle to dispel the twilight, to battle what appears to be "a chaos with no guiding lights of any sort" (27). By placing Sears, in his efforts to reclaim Beasley's Pond, in an active and external battle, against earthly dark powers of ignorance and organized crime instead of only against personal demons 80

that other characters had battled, particularly those in

Falconer, Cheever has offered another variation of his

unique vision of an earthly paradise. Added to his

concepts of paradise consisting of family love and an

admiration of nature is the idea that one must sometimes

participate in the activities of the world, perhaps by

court battles or suburban terrorism, to preserve the

infrequent and fragile glimpses of earthly paradise.

But Sears' search for a a peaceful existence also

includes a struggle against a personal confinement, echoing

the main theme of redemption in Cheever's Falconer. Sears

is concerned about his unruly sexual proclivities since it

seems that his "sexual nature seems to contain some self-destructive elements" (55) and that there "seem to be contrary polarities" (55) in his constitution. Although he

knows that his "sexual conduct is moral only in that it

reflects on my concept to love" (55), he is distressed by

his own acceptance of a sexual relationship with Eduardo,

the elevator man in Renee's apartment building. Eduardo offers comfort to Sears at a time when he desperately needs close human contact, but Sears' vision of the world does not seem to include the possibility of a satisfying homosexual union, and he fears that his physical desire for

Eduardo is a lewdness, not a love. Aging Sears feels nostalgia for "the robustness, simplicity and beauty. that life could possess" (56) and would like to find a purity in 81

his life, a source of earthly redemption, but his experiences with Eduardo show him that there are "caverns of his nature that would never enjoy coherence" (71) and that "if he was truly seeking purity he would never find it in h imseIf" (71) . Sears is thus a man attempting to restore his spirit by overcoming his fear of aging, to gain an earthly paradise, and to discover some form of purity in the world. His efforts are centered around a woman, Renee Herndon, and a body of water, Beasley's Pond. Renee's allure for Sears is simple; she seems to be the capstone of all the graceful and beautiful women who have been his wives and lovers throughout his life. Sears' instant attraction to Renee is based on a nostalgic remembrance of his various erotic contacts and intensified because "he growing old and feared the end of love" (10), and the "memories her appearance summoned involved only brightness" (11). Cheever describes Renee in terms of light, for she, much younger than Sears, is "the sunny side of the street" (13). She dresses in bright clothes and "he often heard her say that she loved yellow" (44), and she hangs a small prism in her window to bathe her apartment in a bright spectrum of light. Renee is the sunshine that Sears' twilight craves and "he sought her brightness as he had for all his long life looked for lovely women in airports and railroad stations and ships' piers" (18). 82

For Sears, a man who has consistently enjoyed physical

love, and who places a high priority on such love, this

glowing woman, who offers Sears an opportunity to deny his

years, is perfection. He sees that she is "nothing at all

like a mountain range and yet here was very definitely a

declaration of paradise, either mountainous or maritime,

depending on one's tastes" (11). In his infatuation Sears

even imagines her smooth naked back to be "so like a

promised land" (11), and he knows that "to have a lovely

woman on one's lap as darkness fell from the wings of night was truly journey's end" (66). Renee, with her refrain of "you don't understand the first thing about women," is a symbolic earthly paradise of satisfying physical love for Sears, a garden where he can again and again prove his

virility despite his age. But unfortunately his relationship with Renee creates only a transitory paradise because he is completely ignorant of her true self, despite neatly pigeonholing her as the kind of woman "whose front hall was always a mess," "who always forgot to buy oranges," and "who, as soon as she entered her apartment, turned on first the lights and then the record player" (40). He persists in claiming to know her well, although, for reasons she refuses to explain, she attends meetings three times a week, with a group of people so diverse they look "like the crowd scattered by a thunderstorm on the evening of some holiday in any park in the Western world" 83

(31) and Sears cannot even enter these parish rooms where

Renee spends so much of her time.

Indecipherable Renee seems just as ignorant of Sears as he is of her, and after a few weeks she ends the affair abruptly, perhaps because Sears was some mysterious symbol to her that proved unsatisfactory. Renee "seemed" like a paradise, a reflection of the title of the novel, but she was not, and Sears is forced to the realization that his ignorant illusions may not reflect the reality of the world. He is left in a cold, dirty Balkans of the spirit, a "newfound province of loneliness" (46), where he, defeated in achieving his earthly paradise with Renee, turns to his unsatisfying homosexual affair with Eduardo, unproductive visits to a psychiatrist, and finally Beasley's Pond.

If Sears has lost the light, Renee, it is a loss that must indeed be mourned. But motivated by his search for purity and knowing that it will not be found within himself, he finds another earthly paradise in his attempts to reclaim the tainted Beasley's Pond. Sears first visits the Pond in the time before its ruin, when it is "a deep body of water, shaped like a bent arm, with heavily forested shores" (2) and spends a lovely winter day there skating up and down. For Sears the fleet movement of skating "seemed to have the depth of an ancient experience" (5) and the exercise provides a sense of homecoming, a 84

sense of Leander Wapshot's "continuousness of things." It is as if "a long last, at the end of a cold, long journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires in the hearth" (6). All the skaters seem "to enjoy that extraordinary preoccupation with innocence that absorbs people on a beach before the fall. of darkness" (7), and Cheever combines the images of nature, home, and innocence to create a lovely vision of earthly paradise. But the Edenic world that Sears glimpses is fragile, and Cheever shows how abruptly an earthly paradise can be lost when Sears returns to the Pond several weeks later to find that it has been turned into a dump. He sees that "nearly a third of it had already been despoiled and on his right he saw the shell of a ten-year-old automobile and a little closer to him a dead dog. He thought his heart would break"' (7). Although the actual dumping is done by a crime syndicate intent on reaping large profits, Sears knows that the characteristics of his own society have aided the destruction since most wandering people evolve a culture saddles of tents and and migratory herds, but here people was a wandering with a passion for gigant ic massive bedsteads and refrigerators. It was a clash mobility--their between their driftingness--and their love of permanence that had discharged its chaos into Beasley's Pond. (7)

By portraying the devastation of the Pond, Cheever has taken his theme of excessive travel and movement to a 85

logical conclusion, the destruction of a natural element, water, in its natural setting.

The destruction of the Pond seems complete. On a trip there with environmentalist Horace Chisholm, later murdered mysteriously, Sears sees "islands of what appeared to be fermenting excrement. Where the water was clear one saw trails of vileness like the paraphernalia of witchcraft" (88). Chisholm identifies newcomers to the Pond like the rat-tailed maggot and the sludge worm, and lists poisons now in the water, polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, thoroviven, and the diseases they cause in man--rickets, blindness, brain tumor, impotence, plus the horrors of birth defects. The lovely pond, symbolizing innocence and the joys of home, has been efficiently ruined by the seeming innate ignorance and greed of man. In addition to the injury to the Pond, Cheever offers another image of life-giving water polluted seemingly beyond recall. He and Eduardo travel to the countryside to fish, but all the ponds in the area, a hundred or so, are so full of chemical dumping that the fish have been killed. The water is "a little more acid than commercial vinegar" (72), and Sears sees "a landscape, a people--and he counted himself among them--who had lost the sense of harvest" (68). Senseless destruction of the entire planet by damaging its individual life-giving properties seems imminent, and since water is the very essence of life, its 86

ruination spells destruction for man as well as symbolizes his loss of paradise.

In these desolate bodies of water, Sears sees his glimpses of paradise lost. In his lifelong appreciation for nature, even a traditional trout stream is a precious and living entity. He sees that

it flowed over stones--glacial rubble--it formed deep pools, its breadth was variable, one could not quite anticipate its variety as it followed gravity through the woods to some destination of its own. The illusion of eternal purity the stream possessed, its music and the greenery of its banks, reminded Sears of pictures he had seen of paradise. (88)

But now the stream only has an illusion of purity, for

it is in fact the drainage point of Beasley's Pond, and is

itself horribly polluted.

To reinforce the idea that paradise is easily lost, and that what seems to be a paradise is not always so,

Cheever uses more natural imagery centered around water, the essence of life. As he has in previous novels, he abruptly places himself, or some omnipotent narrator, into the story, saying "I wish this story I'm telling began with the fragrance of mint growing along a stream bed where I'm lying, concealed with my rifle, waiting to assassinate a pretender who is expected to come here, fishing for trout"

(24). Around this stream bed the sky is blue, the smell of mint is strong, and the music of the flowing water echoes as the well-favored pretender arrives and thinks that there is "some blessedness in fishing trout with flies" (24). 87

The young man "looks up at the sky and around at the trees

to reassure himself of the naturalness of this garden from which, unknown to him, he is about to be dismissed" (24).

The assassin has the location of the young man's heart in

the cross-sights, even though "the smell of mint seriously

challenges the right of this or any other murder" (24).

Cheever breaks off this brief narration and continues the

story of Beasley's Pond, but in this short and almost

whimsical sketch he has painted a portrait of a lovely

world, satisfying all senses, yet hiding unexpected and

unexplained violence, which will shortly destroy the

serenity of the paradise.

By continuing to focus glimpses of paradise around

images of water, Cheever emphasizes the craving for such

glimpses and again their transitory properties. For Betsy

Logan, a young homemaker who later becomes a suburban

terrorist, a trip to a sparsely populated beach with her

beloved family gives great pleasure because "her people

were not fishermen or sailors and she had nothing at all to

do with the sea so far as she knew, but the brine and the

blue sky and the sand all seemed most natural to her as if

this- were her home" (74). When the others leave, she

wonders if perhaps "they had gone because they had received

some urgent message to leave and that the beach was their

home and that on leaving the beach they would be like the

evacuees of war" (75). When she herself leaves, to fight 88

heavy traffic, it is the "convergence of six- and

eight-lane highways that made her think with longing of the

simplicity of their day on the beach, when there was

nothing more difficult to comprehend than blue sky and salt

water" (76). Once again Cheever has used water to

represent a lovely and uncomplicated homeplace, and this

time man is not forcibly removed by violence but calmly

leaves to return to habitats more appropriate to modern

lifestyles. But life in Cheever's vision of the world always contains bizarre happenings--on the way home Betsey accidently leaves her baby Bixney in his carseat at a roadway turnaround, and her idyllic day ends with frantic calls to the police and a headlong rush to reclaim the baby.

In addition to images of running water or standing water, Cheever also uses the natural image of rain to emphasize several characters' concepts of paradise. The opening sentences of the novel tell of a delightful rainy night when "the rain is. gentle and needed but not needed with any desperation. The water tables are equitable, the nearby river is plentiful, the gardens and orchards--it is at a turning-of the season--are irrigated ideally" (1). The world itself seems ideal since the rain is falling on a small, peaceful town containing "no fast-food franchises of any sort" (2). This is indeed a modern paradise, but it cannot be complete without human love, and the image of 89

rain is closely entwined with that necessity. For Sears, "the most he knew of love had been revealed to him while he

heard the music of rain. Light showers, heavy rains,

torrential rains, floods, in fact, seemed joined in his memory to loving" (34). Thus this paradise of the body and spirit is a close alliance of memory, love, and nature. It is raining the first night Sears spends in Renee's arms, and it is raining when he spends his first weekend with

Eduardo. And attuned as he is to nature, rain "corresponded exactly to Sears's sense of the fitness of things" (68). For Sears, rain also seems to reveal the

wonderful paradisiacal properties of erotic love.

Sears's quest to purify Beasley's Pond is ultimately successful,, but success comes not through the court battles, but through the efforts of Betsey Logan. She is distraught over Chisholm's death because of the bond forged between the two when Chisholm found Baby Bixney by the roadside, and begins a campaign of suburban terrorism to save his pet project in repayment for his saving her son. Betsey adds ant poison to a bottle of teriyaki sauce and places it on the shelf of the Buy Brite supermarket with a message that says, "Stop poisoning Beasley's Pond or I will poison the food in all 28 Buy Brites" (98). Her message is made of "words cut from a newspaper while her sons and her husband slept" (98) in the security of the Logan home. Knowing that the newspaper will print "the story since our 90

supermarkets are such an axial part of our way of life" (99), she is confident that the dumping will be stopped, and after a family has been poisoned and are reported in satisfactory condition, the dumping is indeed ended. Cheever's use of ant poison as a homemaker's terrorist tool and the success of that tool in ending a desecration of nature when other more conventional methods have failed seems an ironic statement about the condition of the modern world. The irony is intensified when Sears sets up the Beasley Foundation with "assets taken from the Cleveland branch of the Computer Container Intrusion System" and, as a result, that "subdivision then became a holding company with the status of a tax shelter and short-term bonds that enjoyed a triple-A rating" (101). While Cheever's tone may be humorous and his purpose may be to expose the absurdities of contemporary life, the actions of his characters are no more absurd and at times much more realistic than events regularly reported in any daily newspaper. The world may seem like a paradise, but it is an Eden of abrupt changes, unexplained happenings, and bizarre human behavior, and Cheever seems to think that the best one can do is to strive to cope with this rather grotesque environment and tend one's garden as best one can.

Beasley's Pond is saved. Since "only a third of the pond had been filled, the despoiled end was dredged and an 91

innovative aeration system was installed to cure the water of its toxicity" (101). This carefully designed system, 4500 feet of 0.5 inch polyethylene tubing attached to nine three-quarter-horse-power compressors delivering air at 4.4 cfm 30 psi continually, brings about the eutrophication and decay of the pond, usually taking thousands of years, but with man's great scientific knowledge, cleaning up Beasley's Pond in "no time at all" (102). Cheever must see man as a powerful and capricious being indeed--he greedily ruined the pond, and then, with as much enthusiasm and effort, put it straight again.

This story, "to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night" (1), ends with the old man Sears giving tours and lectures of the pond. Sears understands the complicated process of reclamation perfectly, and enjoys displaying his knowledge for visitors. Since "the loveliness of the landscape had been restored," to him it can serve "as a background for Eden or even the fields of Eleusis" (102). Sears has been restored, too. He has "found some sameness, in the search for love and the search for potable water," and "the clearness of Beasley's Pond seemed to have scoured his consciousness of the belief that his own lewdness was a profound contamination" (104). Sears has not eliminated his confinements, but has learned to forgive them. His spirit is cleansed and restored, he has found his earthly paradise, and, since he is not 92

ignorant of Beasley's Pond as he was ignorant of Renee,

perhaps this paradise will be lasting. Unlike Eliot

Nailles, whose paradise was ultimately the gentle haze of

tranquilizers, and Ezekiel Farragut, whose paradise was one

of probably temporary freedom from Falconer, Lemeul Sears'

paradise seems to be one realistically fitting an aged

man--a small, clean pond of water.

Contented Sears ends the novel with an affirmation of hope because

what moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. (105)

Indeed, what a paradise it seemed.

Cheever has written a fable of despair overcome

and hope awakened in Oh What a Paradise It Seems. The pond

is contaminated and so is Sears, but both are almost

miraculously cleansed, and Cheever's enduring optimistic

prophecy that "one can do better than this" is fulfilled.

Here, as in his other novels, Cheever's natural images

support the idea of an attainable paradise and remind his characters that the world of nature exists even in the most confusing times, and that this world gives comfort and hope to those caught in the quagmire of modern life. CHAPTER V

BIBL BIOGRAPHY

Cheever, John. Oh What a Paradise It Seems. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983. - - -. The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983.

Hunt, George W. The Hobgoblin Company of Love. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983.

93 B IBL IOGRAPHY

PR IMARY SOURCES

Cheever, John. Bul-let Park. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978. Falconer. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977. "Fiction is Our Most Int imate Means of Communication." _U. S. News and World Report 21 May 1979: 92.

"John Hersey Talks with John Cheever." With John Hersey. Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal Dec. 1977: 21-24.

"Not Only I the Narrator, but I John Cheever." With Eleanor Munro. Ms. Apr. 1977: 74-77. Oh What a Paradise It Seems. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983.

The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980.

"Talk with John Cheever." With John Hersey. New York Times Book Review 6 Mar. 1977: 1, 24, 26-28. "Talking With John Cheever." With John Firth. Saturday Review 2 Apr. 1977: 22-23. The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983.

94 95

---. The Wapshot Scandal. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983.

"A Word from Writer Directly to Reader: John Cheever." Fiction of the Fifties. Ed. Herbert Gold. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1959. 21-22.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Breslin, J. B. "John Cheever in the Critic's Circle." America 17 Feb. 1979: 115-116. Bryne, Michael. "The Optimistic Imagination: John Cheever's Oh What a Paradise It Seems." CEA Critic May 1983: 38-42.

Burhans, Clinton S. "John Cheever and the Grave of Social Coherence.'" Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. R. 6. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 109-122.

Coale, Samual A. "Cheever and Hawthorne: The American Romancer's Art." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. R. 6. Collins. Boston: 6. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 193-209.

Coale, Samual A. John Cheever. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1977. 96

Collins, Robert G. "From Subject to Object and Back Again." Twentieth Century Literature Spring 1982: 1-13.

Donaldson, Scott. "The Machines in Cheever's Garden." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. R. G. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 139-153. Gardner, John. "Witchcraft in Bullet Park." New York Times Book Review 24 Oct. 1971: 2, 24. Gilder, Joshua. "John Cheever's Affirmation of Faith." Saturday Review Mar. 1982: 16-19. Hunt, George W. The Hobgoblin Company of Love. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983.

Johnson, Glen M. "The Moral Structure of Cheever's Falconer." Studies in American Fiction Spring 1981: 21-31. Karl, Frederick R. "John Cheever and the Promise of the Pastoral." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. R. G. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 209-219.

Kendle, Burton. "The Passion of Nostalgia in the Short Stories of John Cheever." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. R. 0. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 219-230. 97

Leonard, John. "Crying in the Wilderness." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 77-80. Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

Waldeland, Lynne. "John Cheever's Bullet Park: A Key to His Thought and Art." Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. R. 0. Collins. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982. 261-272.