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| John Cheever |
CHEEVER’S ART OF THE
DEVASTATING PHRASE
The New Yorker, May 31, 2012
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| Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis. |
Had he lived, John Cheever
would have turned a hundred this week. A lifelong admirer of his work, I find
myself again returning to one of my least favorite Cheever
stories, “Boy in Rome.” Delivered through the unconvincing voice of a teen-age
American boy living with his vapid expatriate mother in a Roman villa, it
unfolds an overlong yarn of a wastrel writer, a bogus princess named
Tavola-Calda (or “Hot Table”—an Italian term for cafeteria or diner), and the
bungled smuggling of a Renaissance painting. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever
read a story by Cheever that failed to offer authentic rewards, large or small,
and a paragraph toward the close of “Boy in Rome” haunts me.
The paragraph is a modest
island, surrounded on either side by a sea of white space and wholly contained
within the gently curving shores of a pair of parentheses. “But I am not a boy
in Rome,” it begins. A new voice has circumspectly, wistfully intruded on the
young man’s narration. The speaker identifies himself as “a grown man in the
old prison and river town of Ossining, swatting hornets on this autumn
afternoon with a rolled-up newspaper.” This is no authorial surrogate; this is
John Cheever, stepping off the page to introduce himself.
This literary device may
sound potentially tiresome—some self-conscious preening, a bit of postmodern
flummery. But those who love Cheever’s fiction will recognize here a familiar,
defining trait: he was forever emerging from two dimensions into three, from
the rectangle of the page into the cubic complexities of actual life. Time and
again, an unexpected “I” surfaces in his stories, as the perspective forcibly
shifts to accommodate the presence of a sly and witty observer. He was
restless, and felt the page confined him. As that parenthetical insertion of
himself into “Boy in Rome” suggests, he was impatient with plot. In his
stories, the trappings of narrative tend to fall away, and in “Boy in Rome” we’re
left with some artfully turned self-inquiries: “Why, never having received from
my parents anything but affection and understanding, should I invent a
grotesque old man, a foreign grave, and a foolish mother? What is the incurable
loneliness that makes me want to pose as a fatherless child in a cold wind…?”
Cheever relished the
creation of chaos—especially the placing of keenly idiosyncratic characters
into situations of ramifying turmoil—but his denouements tended to be
startlingly abrupt, especially in some of his best-known stories (“The
Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” “The Angel of the Bridge,” “The Country Husband”).
He was temperamentally far better suited to presenting problems than to
portraying solutions—one of many reasons why his short fiction is more
gratifying than his novels, where the larger form often requires that
consequences be responsibly, painstakingly chronicled.
The more you read Cheever,
the more you feel his best work is often less about plot than about
language—about poetry in the broadest sense. You feel, too, the vivid
immediacy, and the turbulent, benign influence of a number of
authors—particularly Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, and James. All four were
masterly stylists, and at the end of the day Cheever’s prime accomplishment may
be stylistic: the construction of something readily identifiable as a Cheever
paragraph, a Cheever sentence, even a Cheever phrase.
He achieved a style that
was surpassingly nuanced and nimble, and devoted it mostly to the happy
marrying of lyrical and absurd comical effects. His style was a complex
amalgam—a blending of heterogeneous attitudes, a rapid shifting (sometimes too
rapid) of viewpoint and diction. His vocabulary was surpassingly resourceful.
Of all the wonderful American short-story writers of the twentieth century,
Cheever strikes me as the most dependable supplier of unlikely, often unflashy,
and yet devastatingly apt word choices. Here are a few examples (italics my
own) of his embedding into a sentence a word or phrase that any poet might
envy: “a gentle and excursive mountain shower”; “I have
cheerfully praised the evening sky hanging beyond the disheveled and expatriated palm
trees on Doheny Boulevard”; “where one heard in the sounds of a summer rain the prehistoric promises
of love, peacefulness, and beauty”; “her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly
lighted”; “[The dog] was as black as coal, with a long, alert, intelligent, rakehell face”;
“There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between
one and two—a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments
and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts.”
Many of his best effects are quiet and slow to emerge. In what may be his
greatest story, “The Swimmer,” the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, contemplates a
neighbor in swim trunks who has undergone extensive abdominal surgery: “Gone
was his navel, and what, Neddy thought, would the roving hand, bed-checking
one’s gifts at 3 A.M., make of a belly with no navel, no link to birth, this
breach in the succession.” It’s a sufficiently spooky moment that a reader may
not readily appreciate how strange and wonderful a verb-choice is
“bed-checking,” how unexpected and ravagingly sad is “gifts.”
A proper study of Cheever’s
style could fill a book, but for now I’ll limit myself to two further traits.
Cheever loved to pair adjectives in productive and surprising ways. He was
especially fond of constructions in which at least one term, and sometimes
both, carried a danger of high-flown orotundity: “the irresistible and titanic
voice of life itself”; “an inestimable and wayward passion”; “something
preposterous and ascendant”; “an air of adamant and fetid sweetness”; “stubborn
and irreducible proof of man’s determination to excel”; “some marvelous and
obdurate part of myself.” We learn that one character’s “sense of these aspects
of privacy was scrupulous and immutable” and that another’s “imagination
remained resilient and fertile.” The high-flown adjective pair was for Cheever
what the incongruous adjective triplet (“orange, bland, ambassadorial”) was to
Robert Lowell: an opportunity to record a legible signature in an extremely
confined space. You come upon a sentence like this—“The world lies before us
like a bewildering and stupendous dream”—and sense that these cadences, this
particular lovely note of vaunting applause, had to come from Cheever’s hand.
Still more Cheeveresque, if
possible, is his use of the phrase “one of those.” When I first began to read
him, in high school in the Midwest in the early seventies, I found the phrase
an off-putting tic. When a character informed me that he met his wife “at one
of those big cotillions at the Waldorf,” I bristled: why assume your reader
knows anything of the Waldorf? Cheever seemed to be constantly presuming his
readers were East Coast sophisticates—probably with ancestral ties to the
Mayflower crew. It took me a while to see that this assumption of a sort of
clubby exclusivity was, as so often the case with Cheever, a kind of delicate,
straight-faced joke: “one of those large cars that cabinet ministers enjoy in
socialist countries”; “one of those flat, cheap cakes with candles that are
ordered to celebrate the retirement of the building maintenance assistant”;
“one of those Italian restaurants that remind us all of how truly new is our
settlement on this continent”; “one of those small, old Italians who always
wear their hats tipped forward over their brows as if they were, even in the
rain, enduring the glare of an equinoctial sun”; “one of those trains that move
slowly across the face of New Jersey, bringing back to the city hundreds of
people, like the victims of an immense and strenuous picnic.” One story begins,
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too
much last night,’” and another begins, “It was one of those rainy late
afternoons when the toy department of Woolworth’s on Fifth Avenue is full of
women who appear to have been taken in adultery….”
Cheever liked to pose as a
scion of an old New England élite, though he lacked both the family lineage
(his father was a failed shoe salesman) and the privileged education (he never
attended college) to support the role convincingly. The posturing may have
fulfilled fantasies of a wordless, unimpeachable social acceptability, but by
and large Cheever regarded with a level head his minor vanities and
self-humoring mendacities. You rarely feel in Cheever, as you do in his
contemporary and fellow New Yorker fiction stalwart John
O’Hara, that a raw hunger for admission into an idealized upper class distorts
his ability to treat his well-heeled characters with the calm skepticism they
deserve. Cheever liked to play at being a Cabot or a Lowell—a Boston
Brahmin—but this charade was delivered with a wink, much as he’s winking when
inviting us, by way of a “one of those,” into a privileged world of shared
values and experiences.
In all of Cheever’s
writing, the most exorbitant use of the phrase must be the opening of “The
Brigadier and the Golf Widow,” the title story of his fifth collection: “I
would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming,
‘O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a
bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three
composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcabs?’” One of those writers? In
the history of the world, only one writer has ever opened a
story quite like that. The opening sentence says, in effect, “I would not want
to be one of those writers like John Cheever”—even as his antic artistic zeal,
his sparkling-eyed glee in the gambol of his wit, reflects off of every word.
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