by John Cheever
•
The strain of debt; the difficulty of trying to write one’s way out of it. There are seven more days, six more days, etc. Once in New Hampshire for three months I tried unsuccessfully to rip a story out of my brain or to patch together a series of incisive notes with no success at all. I have at times been able to sweat out a story, at times I’ve failed.
It helps to be relaxed.
The lonesome road. You drive for twenty-five or thirty miles on a spring night along a strange road without meeting another car. A few houses are lighted, but most of them are dark. You hear peepers as you drive—the spring night sound swells in your ears and then fades—as you pass a marsh or a pond. There seems to be a lot of water in the neighborhood—ponds and brooks. The road turns, drops, and you see a sign, “7 TONS MAX. LOAD,” and then a little bridge. Most of the houses must be summer cottages; that would account for their being dark. But it’s a lonesome road. You see the headlights of another car—the first in an hour—coming toward you. It is a big, high-bodied interstate bus and as it passes you can see that most of the passengers are sleeping. Then it is gone and you are alone again on the dark road. The noise the peepers make sounds sad.
Yesterday a beautiful day. You sweat in the sun; shiver in the shade. Walked to the station, thinking of the story. The sense of light pouring into the mind. The noise of an outboard motor and its multitude of associations. The sense of the day as if it were reflected in a piece of bull’s-eye glass. Spherical, as round as an apple. To the movies last night; the bizarreness of the village. The façades bent into the streetlight like masks on a stage, grotesque, lighted fronts. The twilight, the afterglow standing behind them, a clear and stormy light. The lobby stinks of peanuts and stales. The old woman who sells you a ticket wears a dress that glitters with brilliants. She wears a necklace of brilliants; her fingers are loaded with rings. You look from her to the twilight, the paper buildings. The picture was “Come Back, Little Sheba.” I thought it was very good. The library at Beechwood was lighted when I drove home. I seem to hold the mirror up to a lot of foolishness. There should be nothing to worry about if you tell the truth.
•
These green, these fragrant, these carven cavernous and not cold days of spring. The smell of fish skin and bloodworms; the chill water.
•
One of the children had a toothache in the middle of the night. Mary got water and aspirin. Her patient, sleepy voice. The sense, then, that one was face-to-face with transcendent patience. Many of the promises have been broken, etc., but here, like the ability to rise to love, like the strength summoned in the throes of childbirth, there is a patience, there is a calmness of spirit and mind that seems womanly and transcendent. It is two in the morning. She gets an aspirin and draws a glass of water. Everything is unhappy, broken, insubstantial, but for an hour it doesn’t matter at all. And for Eben the rain falls on the roofs of the houses where his enemies are asleep. Under the roofs on which he hears the rain fall strangers and enemies are sleeping. In the noise of the rain he hears the slippers coming downstairs and the boots mounting. For Eben the rain, even the rain, falls into the grass of a hostile and foreign country.
New York on a summer night. How many lights are burning? A man sits on the front steps of the public library wearing no coat and no shoes and a dark felt hat. His shoes are beside him on the marble step.
•
Now I resent the tiredness of my mind, from having drunk too much; I resent the craving for some erotic tenderness that is the only end, the only beauty for these days. Seeing an elderly man and woman having breakfast with their son—who may be taking summer courses at N.Y.U.—I yearned to discharge with competence and strength the responsibilities of a family man, to carve for my children something that has moral splendor—I glimpsed the lacks I show in turning my daughter’s loneliness into a poor anecdote—in asking advice everywhere. And with my mouth tasting of old wine, and with this gray sky, I find it so hard not to be incredulous in recalling the wonderful hours and days in the mountains, the cleanliness, P. coming back to the house with her flowers, the breadth of the view, swimming in cold water, making love under a thin roof; and I think now of the months that I have longed to write a story that will be fine, that will be singing, that will have in it all kinds of lights and pleasures.
As for failure and despair, they seem aggravated by the climate o New York and the suburbs. Both New York and Scarborough seem in some cases to produce an egotism that needs the health and vigor of youth and an imitation of these energies when they are gone themselves. In both places there are portents of the abyss, and now and then you hear the voices and glimpse the faces of the fallen. Waiting to get your fried egg in a dirty cafeteria, you see, through the window between the counter and the kitchen, an old man bent over a stove. He is dressed in a loose white shift—prisoner’s garb—and his face is sullen and bitter. “It is quite cool out,” the baby-sitter says, handing you her seamy furs, and you recognize at once in the grayness of her face and the elegance of her voice that she has come to you from the abyss. The house that the A.s rented at the corner of Alewives Lane is empty again. They struggled for a year and left in the middle of the night, leaving unpaid bills everywhere. But in New Hampshire there are no portents, no manifestations of the abyss, no obligations to imitate the energies of youth, no dread of falling, of loneliness and disgrace, and the smell of wood smoke and the noise of the wind have a direct bearing on our lives. There we understand calmly how we live and how we change. Think of the autumn twilights; think of the old woman cutting her flowers, think of the roar of the purple sea on the island beaches.
A Sunday afternoon; a little rain in the village. A man practicing a violin. On the heels of the rain, dense humidity. Walking over to the C.s’ for dinner. A young man with a suitcase, hurrying down Fifth Avenue. A dressy Englishwoman imperiously hurrying her husband across the street. Cocktails and supper. Farther east a Puerto Rican carrying a suitcase up the steps of a rooming house. Past the Lafayette, now half demolished. Light pours from the sky through the collapsed ceilings of the dining room, the lobby, and the bar. It is easy to remember these rooms on a spring night when the big windows were open, when the room was full of light, friends, the smell of chicken and wine, and that these rooms where we used to come to celebrate arrivals and departures are half demolished and flooded with the light of the sky makes a cheerful memory a poignant one. On Third Avenue a man carrying a suitcase. In a dirty window a Cuban girl in a white skirt that must be new since she seems so delighted with it that her pleasure can be seen as you walk past this rooming house. Later thunder; then a flood, a gorging rain.
•
Driving for seven hours, straight into the sun, tired my eyes. “How lush and green it is here,” my wife said, and I saw how the lawns were shining but I was not particularly happy to be back. It was coming back to offices, back to Grand Central Station, back to the evening train home, back to the discomfort of a full suit on a hot day, back to tiredness, back to parochialism, back to a small part of the world, back to a lack of excitement. That there are no heroes here does not mean that there are no heroes anywhere. I would like to keep the sense of being away from New York, away from the noise and excitement there. I would like to keep the sense of what a small part of the world this is; to master it, not to take it too seriously.
•
Labor Day; storm warning up; a hurricane. The end of the season on the islands and the mountains; the tentative sunlight. The end of the year. Dark and humid here; a little rain. The kind of dim hangover that I haven’t experienced all summer. I am homesick for the islands or the mountains, for something other than this valley, this suburb. It seems to have the subtle power over my spirit of a baneful light—the return, in spite of myself, of passiveness. I still have not satisfied myself as far as discipline and concentration go.
•
Every time I read a review of Saul Bellow I get the heaves. Oh this big, wild, rowdy country, full
of whores and prizefighters, and here I am stuck with an old river in the twilight and the deterioration of the middle-aged businessman.
Into New York—frowzy—the men working to form a concept of race—their hair cut so short that it fits over their scalp like a cap of felt—a woman, and through her veils, her feathers, her furs, her pearls and brilliants, there shines a smile of perfect plainness and sweetness. Over to The New Yorker, where there are mixed opinions about the suburbs. Walked up Fifth Avenue. A fine procession; it is a procession. At the Fifty-seventh Street crossing the crowds seemed to group themselves for a second to form the features of a matriarchy. It was an ugly thought and it passed. A lot of homosexuals drifting around in midmorning. Up along the edge of the Park to the museum. The Assyrian kings. Some early Aegean grave figures—the sense of early time—lions. The exclamatory Etruscan warrior; Mars; a sad athlete with a fillet. All the things found in rivers. The treasure of Constantinople, found in the Rhône, plates and belt buckles found in the Loire, swords found in the Danube, Venus in the Tiber. Aphrodite, fair and still. Some of Constantine’s jewelry, some of the Albanian treasure, Morgan’s thing. My feeling for sumptuousness has changed. At one time these things seemed precious, idle, adolescent, foolish. Now sumptuousness seems to be a legitimate need. Some sallets, visors, basinets, long snouts, idiot grins, old gods. Some swords of great weight and beauty, swords of meaning chivalrous, his heralds of glory, lethal symbols or worship. Waiting for a bus; the general lack of humor with which we regard one another. The tense atmosphere of an economic and a sexual content. Barring the admiration that follows pretty women, there is a good deal of tension—true ignorance—in the scrutiny New Yorkers give one another. There is not much geniality or trust in the looks on Madison Avenue. In the morning the river looked cold; it had an inhospitable gleam. Of the families that have been strung along the banks all summer—the mamas and papas and grandpapas and children—sitting in their underwear on folding chairs, swimming and eating and basking in the heat of the sun—there are now left only a few men, most of them old, with scarves around their necks, their hats pulled down to keep their ears warm.
•
Yesterday, cold and rainy. A dark day, a black house, the exacerbating worries of indebtedness. Today the burnished light makes your eyes smart. Polished blue and burnished gold, brimming with brilliance. The north wind, the air smells of water, purple here, green there. The wind came around before dawn. The leaves are piling down. A tumultuous, a harmless wind.
This house, with its long living room looking north and south so that there are only a few days in the year when the sun enters it, with its pretentious and inefficient equipment, with its jumbled memories, dark and often cold, depresses me and seems to challenge the health I have enjoyed. It is perhaps the closeness of our life here and the dullness we run into when we try to vary it. These habits, these days, like ol clothes. Yesterday a day of brilliant light, acoustical brilliance—the ringing of wheels on rails from distant trains sounded clearly. Sinus pains. Drove Ben up the hill to see the sunset, the clear darkness, the hills, the distant lights, the dyed clouds, the lavender-and-lemon-colored sky.
•
Some brief reassessment might be in order. This role was always volatile; but it’s difficult to recall. There was the accumulation of things over two years, self-protests, bad book reviews, a feeling of having grown away from the lamentable influence of my mother, a decrease in the fear of loneliness, and a conviction that most of the conflicts in my disposition are guises of emotional ignorance that I inherited from my parents. I was made so happy that there seemed, in my thinking, to be a trace of hysteria. In the middle of this, the Saul Bellow book had on my mind the power of shock. My identification with it was so deep that I could not judge it sensibly, and there is a grain of legitimate identification here. Then there was sickness, weakness, and the exhaustion I felt when I finished Mrs. Wapshot. There was a sick, rainy day in New York when Lexington Avenue seemed like a catacomb. There are my very legitimate troubles with The New Yorker. What it adds up to is that I have never felt so strong and so happy and feared hysteria so deeply. I think that a few days in the mountains would solve all these problems, but I cannot go. And what it adds up to also is that in making such a profound change in the attitudes of my mind, the body may be laggard. I do not have the sweetness of some of the people in question and it is an insupportable strain to aim for it; but I have my own sweetness and I see no reason why coming on this in the forty-first year of my life should undermine my health.
•
Waiting at the R.s’ for Susie to finish her French lesson, with Ben. A northwest wind and a winter twilight, a moon already bright before dusk and a cold night on the way. This hour when we seem caught in the bluff death of the year. The light loses its breadth, but not its clarity or its power. These subtle blues and lemony lights are like the lights of anesthesia, lust, repose. The stars come out and the play of light continues. It is not that the light goes; a dimness falls from the sky ove everything, obscuring the light. The dimness falls over everything. The cold air makes the dog seem to bark into a barrel. Bright stars, house lights, rubbish fires.
•
Waking and dreaming I seem caught in this ridiculous cycle of petulance, suspicions, and hostility. Working, and at the hour of waking, I see clearly what it is that I want: love, poetry, inestimable powers of understanding or forgiveness if that is needed, humor that is not rueful. But I seem to see much too clearly the deterioration of my high spirits. I seem to see much too clearly the working of an idle and a morbid imagination, I see myself succumbing to all kinds of imaginary meanness and, what’s more, how can I take pride in my skin when my skin seems lacerated? But I also see that we perform our passions in the large scene of what we have done and left undone in the past and that now and then the curve of feeling—hostility—seems to intersect the structure of my disposition, for this painful feeling of laceration was felt years and years ago. Reason cannot enjoin the carcass to be cheerful and lusty—and when my powers of desire are maimed, so are my powers of wisdom—but I can persist at least in my hopefulness—in my knowledge that a simple cure—a trip, some skiing, the heat of the sun—will set the mind free.
•
Not working well: how deeply buried in this community are the dramas of hardship and lust. Or so it seems to me. Traces of midwinter angst. Asking myself each minute: This is not the maximum of my happiness. Why am I not as happy as I was in the golden days of autumn? To read the hardy text of this bright day: all bold things. Hill the bright colors of smoke, in the winter sun’s heat the fragrance of last year’s leaves, the bewilderments of childhood; also fishing trips in the north. Now love. Skunk cabbages pushing through the dead leaves. And still the brook runs. Sweet and hardy, life seems like the faintest perfume, coming and going. Why, I wonder. I am poor and I am bored. But this day should shatter all these things. Looking up from the sawhorse in the woodpile, he saw the winter twilight. Pruning the apple tree that was planted on their tenth wedding anniversary. Drinking gin before an open fire; in one another’s arms: these passionate, strong, and capricious things.
I do not seem able to call up, at will, the sweet flavor of compassion, but I think I can conclude that life, as it passes before our eyes, is a creative force—that one thing is put usefully upon another—that what we lose in one exchange is more than replenished by the next, that it is only us, only our pitiful misunderstandings that make for crookedness, darkness, and anger. There are times when I seem to see nothing but that world that lies in the corner of the eye: the leering stranger, the flick of a mouse in the hammered-brass woodbox, the prostitute in the drugstore. And there are times when the juices of understanding and love seem to flow freely through my arms and legs and all my parts. That she would never quite lose the appealing look of an American girl in a foreign boarding school. Her dark yellow hair; her white blouse … There is some special bad luck that seems to strike at the end of their journeys, holid
ays, and excursions. The curl mysteriously slips out of their hair, dust seems to settle on their hats and the shoulders of their coats, their lipstick smears, their eyeglasses steam, and the gay smile with which they meant to face the world lapses into the scowl of loneliness which is their habitual expression. Their white gloves get dirty, their ribbons come undone, and although they have attacked the problems of homeliness with spirit—even with gallantry—they are finally discouraged.
•
What a beautiful day; what a fair day. “It’s the kind of weather,” the maid says, “that makes you glad to be alive.” The early-morning air is moist, and mingling with the sweet fragrance of the earth is the smell of smoke, frying fish, and the slack river water. It is no wonder that we are stirred by this show of light and color; it is the plain difference between sanity and horror. I am lifted so high that I think of stopping my conversations with B.G., or at least telling him that I only want reassurance; that I want only to be told that the smell of laurel is not an aberration; to be encouraged in this belated discovery of personal strength. Some of what he said seemed to throw light on a part of the mind that has never been lighted before and there I found a kind of man-made cobweb—a complicated contraption of string, bits of glas, small bells, old Christmas-tree ornaments, and other rubbish so tied and woven that to touch the web at any place would make every last ornament bob and jingle. I may not be able to destroy this contraption with one blow but at least some clear light has been turned onto it. And to describe the feeling of mystery we experience on stepping out of the house on a morning like this. The April dusk that smells unaccountably of mushrooms, the west wind smells of lemon trees.
•
When Huxley speaks of the rut of connubial bliss, I wonder if this is where I am, for walking after dinner with the children and the dog I am very, very happy. My son and I wait at a turn for Mary and Susan to appear. The woods where we stand are dark but it is light beyond the bend. Mary comes into view. Her shoulders are bare; her dress is cut low. She carries an armful of lilies, trailing this way and that their truly mournful perfume. She seems content and so am I and when she takes my arm and we continue to walk under the trees in the last light, under the beeches that spray like shrapnel, arm in arm, after so many years and with so much sexual ardor I think that we are like two sheltered by the atmosphere of some campus; that we are like a couple engraved on a playing card. There is a lack of space and motion and money, to be sure, but I can’t feel that sexual depravity would enlarge our horizons, although the advice seeps in, at times. We are happy, we are lucky, and if we steer clear of sugary dependence it can be let go at this. Venus and Eros are capricious and we may be fighting tomorrow, but we do not lose sight of the fact that with some patience and wisdom the resumption of good feeling is inevitable.