On John Cheever
BIOGRAPHY & FICTION 3 Aunt Muffin Competing visions ofJoim Cheever: priapic and puritan, heretical and orthodox, fanatical family man and chronicler ofcarnality
ohn Cheever wrote m,my of his best T HOMAS MEANEY chool", a story about a reenage drop-out "childlike sense of wonder" was strongly on stories ill his underwear. In the lale who bristles at the thick genrlJity of lhe display. Cheever had not yet fruitfully nux-ed j 19 40~ in New York, he would leave hi Blake Bail ey school' s faculty. The only exceptioo b a in the irony that dominated his next phase. II Easl Side apartment dressed in a suit, hisLOry teacher dismissed for preaching the would take decades for his sentences to descend with the other men in the elevator. CHEEVER innocence of Sacco and Vanzeui. Bai ley acqutre their scorpion-like coil and sting strip dllwn to his pants in the basement. A Life suggests that Cheever knew lhis left-leaning Bailey IJi more of a chronicler titan a crilic. and writc in a storage rool11 until nOOn. 763pp_ Knopf. $35. element would appeal to the New Repllblic, and Cheever, along with his deflnitive life of 78 I 400 04394 I The routine became a legend - as Cheever whose a~ shlant editor. Malcolm Cowley, Rich::rrd Yates. makes Iilm the canon-keeper surely intended - but it obscures something John Cbe ever became Cheever'!> lifelong promoter and of the post-war American realists. The bio fundamentaJ about the man. Crit-ics have fellow fa ther-in-law. But Cowley was also graphy is best read as a compendilllll to lhe variously labelled Cheever "the C hekhov of COL L ECTED STORIES AND OT H ER imprel>5Cd by the carefuUy controlled chop of JOllmals, for which it serves as a reliable the <;ubu1"bs", 'lhe connoisseur of the RI TI NG the young author's prose: boast-detector. If Bailey devotes inordinate Edi ted by Blake Bailey mmute". '·the Ja.<;l Puritan": he is seen as 1 knew about the trees from the window attention to Cheever's sexual exploits. his 1,040pp.978 1 5985 3034 6 either the champion of post-war American fnunc ~. J knew the rain only from the sounds of subject demands it. The .follmals of John conform ity, or its greatest apos[ate, either a COMPLETE NOV E LS the roof. J was tired of seeing spring With walls Cheew!r, published po:-.thumously in 1982, minOT wriler who wrote made-for-order 'The Wapshot ChroniL:le", "The Wap~hnt Scandal". and awning to intercept the sweet £un and the may be the fuJlesl carnal portmit we have of a prose for the ivory slabs of the New Yorker, "Bullet Park'", "Falconer". "Oh What,l Paradise hard fruit. I wanted to go outdoors and ,ee the twentiel:b-cemury American male. Already at or a major one who anticipated postmodern ltSeem~" spri ng. ( wanted to feel and taste the air and be Thayer, Cheever (who got hh reading done Edited by Blake Bailey ist tactics by a generation. am(l ng the ~hadows . ThaI IS perhaps 11\ hy l Ien early) was mortified to find himself identify 960pp. 978 I 5985 30353 That Cheever is a writer who has been school. ing with Proust's Baron de Charlos. Bailey Library ofAmericII. :it'] 5 each. mL'iundeT'-[ood owes much to hi~ self-woven These are tbe lines of a precocioul/. if mildly goes further than Cheever's previous biogra web of tensions. Expelled from Thayer prelentiow,. Tomantic selli ng out for thi pber, Scott Oonald!>on, in believing I h~ firsl Academy at the age of fi ft een. he accepted an Academy in 1927 for ~m ok ing cigarettes. Ilr terrilory. Looking back at "Expe.lJed" many sexual experience to have been with his honorary degree from Harvard at slxty~six. fo r poor marks, or was even expeUed at all. year~ later, John Updike nominated Cheever brother,Fred. "I want my big brother to comt! J--Jjs first real job was editing a city guide for remain~ unclear. but Cheever exploited the lor the prodigy club of Rimbaul.l Cballerton back and be my love", Cheever wrote wist the New Deal, but he Inter shunned bis experience for "ExpeUed from Preparatury and ITenry Grcen. But while hi.~ !>ignature fully in his fifties. After '·Expelled" was pub fOmJer colleagut!s amI tried to return his Iil'hed, he lived with Fred in BOMan, where he ocial security cheques. He was an all-star kept company with burle~qllc stars, mOOlhed alcoholk.. who ordered doubles "a~ if a single [f about Henry James in ~pcak-e
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Cominued from page 3 BIOGRAPHY & FICTION 3 Thomas Meaney Blake BaiJey Cheever - A Life By his late lorties. all the guns were ftrin.g at John Cheever Collected SLOries and Other Writing. Complete NoveL~ once: Cheever resumed his homosexuality as if making up for lost time. Bailey describes POEMS 5 Benry Shukman Wind In Trees some sordid scenes f-rom later years; one 14 John Levett An Idle Bm;k moment, Mary is taunting Cheever about his 28 Raymond FTiei The Run chronic impotence; !be next. he is offering 1 34 John Mole SPalTOWS and Bamboo read a male sWdent'!; work in exchange for a helping hand with the "punctual accrual<; of LElTERS TO THE EOTTOR ------.------6 ------Jeremy Thacker: Longitude fake? Guemica. Cobbe Portrait. etc semen tJmt must be discharged". Cheever's tll"5t published collection of ART HlSTORY 7 Frank Whitford Kuniyoshi (Royal Academy). Timothy Clark Kuniyoshi stories was a modesl success. But The Way & ART Michael Holroyd A sad reflection - My ponrait by Michael Reynolds Some People Ln'e (1943) lacks t.he expansive COMMENTARY 12 John Shakespeare quality of the mature work. In these early Jacob Sim on vi gnettes. Cheever writes like an amateur Rugo Williams sociologist with undelfed insights: '"In the Then and Now ver history of communities there are few migra tions as futile as the suburban PUn-Ui l of ART 17 Jon Barnes Watchmen (Various cinemas) respectability" . He later suppressed the col Andrew Porter Aulis Sallinen The King Goes Forth to France (Gu il dhall School of lection, even denying its ex.istence in his intro Music and Drama) duction to The STOries of follll ClJee ver ( 1978). Bailey ha" included the book in his FICTION 19 Frances W ood Yll BUD Brothers - Translated by Ei leen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos generOll s Library of America volume. which Rojas also featu res Cheever's valuable writings on Anthony Cummins ClrimamaniliJ Ngozi Adichie The Thing Around Your Neck Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgernld, Sillli BcIJow Lara Pawson Maggie Gee My Dri ver and Malcolm Cowley. and DOW far super Sara Newman Elissa Elliott Eve - A novel of the first woman sedes the standard Cheever Omnibus. •1oseph Farrell Niccoli) Ammanili The Crossroads - TransJ ated by Jonathan Hunt Cheever's next collecti on. The Enormous Ben Jeffrey Toby Litt Journcy Into Space Radio ( t 953), wriggled further outside the Alexander Starritt Marcel Theroux Far North New Yorker strairjackel. "Plot impiJ es IlilITU tive and a lot of cmp'·. Cheever wrote il) the PSYCHOLOGY 22 Andrew Scull Journals. But many of the stories seem to be api ng K,tfka by way of Alfred Hitchcock. In SOCIAL STUDI ES 23 Caroline Moorehead Douglas Preston, with Mario Sperl The Monster of Florence the title story. a couple in an East Side town house buys an expcnl:>;ve new mdio that, they HISTORY 24 Ian Thomson Toussaint L'OuvertuTe TIle Haitian Revol ution - Introduction by lean-Bertrand A1isti de. Fidel Castro The Declarations of Havana soon discover. picks up all the arguments coming from the other units ill the buildjng. I ntroduction by Tariq Ali They get the device repaired. but )'oon stan Alan Bell j. Morda unt Crook Brasenose - The biography of an Oxf ord college having shouti ng matches just like the ones 26 Rebecca Langlands Fay Glinisler et Ill, editors Verrius. Festus and Paul they overheard. The best of Cheever's New Helen King Mary .Iaeger Archimedes and the Roman Imagination. Lilia Taub Aetua York fables - "The Five-Forty-Eight". "The and the Moon - Explailling nature in Ancient Greece and Rome Bus to SI. James" and the indelibk 'Torch H Song - have a feel of Edward Hopp~r, SCIENCE 27 Susan Haack Steven Shapjn The Scientifi c Life - A moral history of a late modern capturing every pO$:.iblc posture o( despair. vocation "Goodbye. My Brother" (1 95 I), one of Cbecv('r's most celebrated ~ l ories. marked pmLOSOPHY 29 Peter Simons Hans-Johann Glock What is Analytic Philosopby ? his departure from umnitigated irony. A T imothy Williamson The Philosophy of Philosophy black sheep brother comes home prepared to wreck his family's happiness. but ie; nearly POETRY 30 Chris Andrews Gwyn F ox Subtle Subversions - Reading Golden Age Sonne t~ by Iberian bludgeoned to death by the story 's narrator Women. Nigel GritTm et al The Spanish Ballad in the Golden Age who upholds and glorifies the social order Essays for David Pattison This conservalive streak was new for Cheever and the duty to write about social REUGION 34 John Polkinghome Christopher Southgate The Groaning of Creation - God. evolution, and mores became for him a kind of mjssion: the problem of evil. Timo{hy O ' Connor Theism and Ultimate I think that the laM.. of all American writer is Explanation - The necessary shape of contingency not to dc~c r i hc the misgivings of .. woman lN BRIEF 32 Paul LeClerc et aI, editors Voltaire - The Martin J Gross collection in taken in ndullery U ~ ~he looks out of a windo" the New York Public Library. Matthew Mead The Autumn- Born in at the rain but to dc~c fl be fOllr hundred people Autumn - Selected poems. James Shea Star in the Eye. A. S. Morrison under the lights reaching for 3 foul ball. Thi~ Russian Rule in Samarkund: l868-J9 1O - A comparison with British i ~ ceremony. The umpires in clericals, ~i ft i ng India. Brad Kessler Goat Song -Seasonal life. a sh0l1 history of herding. out tJle StH1Is of the players; the faint thunJer and the art of making cheese. Marina Krcmar Living Without th as ten th o u ~u n d people. at the bottom of the Screen - Causes and consequences of life without television. Craig eighth. head for the exits. The ~cn~c of moral Taylor One Million Tiny Play:. Abollt Britain. Alex Beam A Great Idea judgments emhodied in a migratory va.~tness . Migratory vastness is nowhere more at tbe Time - The rise. fall , and curious afterl ife of rhe Great Books apparent than in "The Death of Justina" TRAVEL 34 Elizabeth Lowry Rachel Cusk The Last Supper - A slimmer in Italy ( 1960). The story is a mad dasb \0 the finish line that confimls Cheever as the great 35 Tllis week' s contributors. Crossword sprinter of American short fi ction. A man named Moses who lives in the Westchester NB 36 J. C. Spring perambulations. Muriel Spark anu Derek Stanford. Bourgeois TLS ",uburbs has been ordered by his doctor to qait drinking and smoking. The symptoms of Cover pi cture: Philip Larkin by Feli ks Topolski. c 1970 © Feli k.." Topolski/Hulton Archive/Getty lmag~ ; p2 © Bachrach/Gerty Images; p3 @ IMAV /editions withdrawal are not encouraging: "AI break Goscinny·SempetMmnc de Paris: pS © Fraenkel Gallery , Sall Francisco; pI S © National Purtrait Gallery' p l7 CO Warner Bro~; pI S © Nobby Clark~ fast on Monday my English muffin stared up pJ9 © A.~ ianArt & Archaeology. Jnc.lCorbis: p22 © Burstein Coli ection/Corbis: p24 © akg-imagesINorth Wind Picture Archives: p30 © Convent of (he Madres at me from the plate. ] mean J saw 11 face Brigidas. Valladolid there in the rough, toasted surface. The The Time.s Literary Supplcmt!nt (lSSN 0307661. USPS 021 ·626) is published weekly by TIll! Times Literary Suppl ement Limitt,d. Lnndnn UK, and distributed in I11C USA by OCS America Inc. 49-27 , I M Street, Long Island City. NY 11 10 1-3 11 3. Periodical postage paid a1 Long Island City NY and additi onal mailing moment of recognition was fl eeting, but it officel>. POSTMASTER : please send address corrections to TLS. PO Box 3000, Denvill e, !'II) 07834. US A was deep. and Twondered who it had been" .
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BIOGRAPHY & FICTION 5
While Moses is at the office, he receives word that his vjsiting aunt hal> expired on the living room COllCh' "1 would like to spare you the unpleasant details, bUl J will say thaL both her mouth and her eyes were wide open". Moses's ~uperviso r insists be [in i ~h writing a commercial before he leaves. Exaspemtcd and ru~hed. he dashes off the copy: Does your face in the morni ng ~el! m rucked and ~e;).ITlc d Wltil alcoh(llic and ~xu a l exces.' ,llld doe" the rest of you IIppear tn be a grayish-pink lump, covered all over with brindle hajJ') . . . L" your sense of sl11,ell fading. IS your intere'l( in gardening wani ng, is your fear of height:; increasing. and arc your sexual drives as ravening ,llld intense as ever. and does your w ife lnok more and more to you like a ~I rallger wU h ,unken cheeks wbo ha.' wandered into your bedroom hy mibla.k.c? If th is or an) Ilf th i' is true you need Eli xircol. the lme juice of youth. This sort of send-up of co m me rcia.le~ e which Cheever nevenheless sees as an oppor tu nity fOr lyricism - would be taken up by his nemesis. Donald Bnrthelme, whose "stuntiness" unnerved Cheeyer. "It's like Lll IUSL act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago". The black comedy of "Justina" climaxes when Mose~ learns that an over-zealous zoning law prohib its Juslma from being buried - or even dying - in the neighbourhood. All lhis would be par for the course for Cheever if it did not also include Moses's supermarket dream: Musil: wa." playing and there must have been al least a thousand s.lw ppers pushing their wag on~ amllng the lung Cflrric.\Ors of come;;tihles and victuals. Nllw is there - or isn' t there someth ing a/l(lot the pobture we assume when we push 3 wagon that unsex e~ us? Cun it be done with gallantry') I bring this up beclluse the "New York Corner (CorDer Saloon)" (1913) by Edward Hopper; from the exhibition Edward Hopper & CompllllY at the Fraenkel multitudc or shoppers seemed thaI evening, as GaJlery,San Francisco, until May 2 they pu s.hed their wagons. penitential and ullsexed. There were all kinds, this being m)' they'd seen the Cream of Whea!. They see no culture better left to Adorno, th ~ b beside the memory we have not un derstood". he wrote beloved country. There were italians, Finns, reason for it, tind no sense in it. The scouring point for Cheever: his Story is populated by in his Journals, and I.he besl of his stories Jews, Negroes. Shropshiremen, Cubans - any pads are with the hand soap now, the condi his equals, whose source of spiritual failure is channel that primal mystery. one who had heeded the voice of liberty - and ments are scattered. The older the man or much harder to locate. There is no operable But Cheever was an uneasy mystic. H they were dressed with that sumptuary aban woman, the more carefully dressed and truth in the story; Cheever in s~e ad gives his often felt passed over by the very sense of don Ihat European caricaturists record with groomed. Men in Sansabelt slacks and bright readers the exalted feeling of witnessing a wonder he was trying to express. "Having such bitter disgust. Yes, there were grand knil shirts. Wumen with a powdered and fussy revelation. His shoppers encounter thuggish triumphantly separated hi mself from the fool mothers in shorts, big-butted women in knitted look. a self-conscious air, prepared for some men at the check-out counters, who savagely ishness of religion", be nevenhcless wrote of pants, and men wearing such an assonment of anxious event . ... Evcrything we need that is tear open their packages: "In every case the himself being ill "the unh appy frame of mind clothing that it looked as if they had dressed not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. customer, at the sight of what he had chosen, of a man who has been excommunicated". hurriedly in a burning building. But this, as I The tales of the supernatural and the extraterres showed all the symptoms of the deepest guilt; After watching a drunken y achl~cl ub da.nce say, is my own eOllntry and in my opinion the trial. The miracle vitamins. the cures for that force that brings us to our knees". What on Martha's Vineyard in the summer of caricaturist who vi ti tles the old lady in sborts cancer, the remedies for obesity. The culls of does this mean? We sense only the desolation 1956, Cheever ruefully observed that "lhe vilifies himself. I am a native an cl t was wear the famous and the dead. of a chosen people who no longer believe nation li ke a miserable adult, tmns back to ing buckskin jump boots, chino pants cut so For DeLillo, too, the supennarket is the their own fortifying myths. RighI to the end, lhe supposed innocence of its early life". Il tight that my sex.ual organs were discernible, appropriate site for the apocalypse. But Cheever believed fic tion's responsibility was can be tempting to consider Cheever a faith and a rayon-acetate paj Ulna top printed with whereas he contemptuously glares at his nothing less than re-enchanting the worl d for ful guardian of the American Golden Age, representations of the Pinta, the Niiia, and the customers, and levels a critique of capitalistic his audience. "Literature is a force of preternaturall y aware of the nostalgia he i ,allfa Maria in fu ll sail. preserving, bUl it would be more accurate to Here is Cheever at his best: hugely comic, say he assimilaled the country's exile from rangy and Whitmanian (even if the masses innocence with his own. In his late master are re ndered sexless), baldly patriotic with Wind In Trees piece, Falconer (1977), he flouted that just enough leftover irony to keep the bathos innocence with a masterful prison novel of at bay. When trees toss in high wind and a suspicion homosexual love. There was a Nixon-Goes Compare the passage with Don DeLillo' s of rain travels across their dark faces, to-China aspect to the enterprise: onl y a much more revered scene from the end of I long for the old summers under smoky oaks. writer with Cheever's establishment creden White Noise (1985): Whoever r am, it's not who I thought. tials could transfonn the subject that had The supermarket shelves have been re once haunted him into a national bestseller. U aITangeu. It haPI>ened one day wi thout warn Who is it the rain and wind wake with their sigh? Cheever continues to be read - and a handful ing. There is agitation and panic in the nisles, That tree-lover, sum mer-lover - try and find him, of his stories assure he will be - it is because dismay in the faces of the.ol der shoppers. They was he ever there? Did he love? Was he love? he lit up this border territory between ortho walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, Shh, say the trees, listen closer, listen closer. doxy and heresy. He equated truth with a clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the sense of rapture - and belieVed with the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, d i ~c em fervour of a fallen Puritan in the restorative the underlying logic. trying to remember where HENRY SHUKMAN power of a page of good prose. ~---~ ------
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