by John Cheever
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Thinking, while fishing, and remembering the night, that love produces its own restraints and governments and that a man whose passion are powerful and requited is usually clean-mouthed. And it may be only the emotionally frigid who can be called lecherous. Whatever we may intend, the act of love is not friendly. We may laugh and joke and talk familiarly about what is going on, but before we are done we will have a blinding vision. Today, a good one, when I feel my age, my gifts and limitations. I feel contented and strong.
•
Scarborough-Portsmouth-Friendship. The preposterousness of the congratulatory letters I write myself. Feeling sleepy, dreary maybe; going into a liquor store for a pint of whiskey for the trip, I meet the image that represents the point of breakdown. A greasy, amorous, or so I think, clerk. The proneness to see the morbid potential in every situation. The bridge will plunge its passengers into the river and the youth under the street lamp will murder me.
•
The limited point of view of a driver who seems to mine, not swoop, through the parkways at seventy m.p.h., unable to see the country, garlanded and spread with such an open hand, and sees only that they have passed through the country of red clay into the country of black dirt, counts the bridges and smells the sea.
Proceeding two by two through what seems to be a run-down or even whory neighborhood—Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, and a brace of expensive dogs, we seem preposterous.
The evening light on this coast is the most beautiful that I have ever seen. The light is raked as it is in the mountains, and twilight is like the exciting gloom before a thunderstorm. The greens are bright and deep—we say “an unearthly light,” meaning, I guess, a light that isn’t solar. This crumbling and lovely coast.
•
I continue to write myself congratulatory letters, choose the Wapshots for a book-club selection, beam and bow as I accept prizes, ribbons, and awards of all kinds, and refuse to contemplate any weaknesses that I know the book to have, such as Leander’s financial arrangement with Honora.
•
And coming here this morning, out of idleness and habit, I am face-to-face with the fact that this is, at times, a kind of retirement from the excellence of life. Any search for truth or beauty is perilous and this is a common peril. There is a world of difference between taking out a sailboat and filling in the pages of a journal and I would like to bring these worlds together. Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil—not the strength to choose between the two—and sometimes it seems that we inadvertently do as much to corrupt our readers as to cheer them. Writing is allied with many splendid things—faith, inquisitiveness, and ecstasy—and with many bad things—diddling, drawing dirty pictures on the walls of public toilets, retiring from the ballgame to pick your nose in solitude. But it is, like most gifts, a paradox, and I will play my cards close to my vest and trust in the Lord.
Took a secret slug of whiskey at eleven on Independence Day. Two straightforward Martinis at noon. Took Mary out to Sand Island in the outboard. Drank gin-and-tonic, ate crabmeat sandwiches, made love in a cove above the sea, the grass very scratchy and me not wanting to be implicated in pagan matters and thinking that these are our gifts as surely as the gifts of piety. We struck a bargain. I could have my way if I would take her around Long Island, everything lying in this thunderstorm light, the island fields a blazing green, etc. Found our way through Friendship Gut and delighted to see the village unfold on the hills as we came through the rocks. Drank Martinis on the grass and very much at peace with the world. Birds singing, the raked sunlight, the noble clouds in the sky.
•
Brilliant, overcast weather, not warm, the light past the low clouds gleaming like a sword, steel, unkind, anyhow. Studied Italian, thinking now and then of that country as the seat of moral depravity. Che cose desidera? Ah ha. Took Ben for a ride after supper, but he didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to run the boat. He only wanted to play with his friends. Ate too much dinner, perhaps, and had a tic or quaver in my gut which I basted with whiskey. Drove Susie to church and so didn’t go myself. A gray sky, the air fresh, cold, and salt-smelling. Standing on the porch I pray to understand the transports and infirmities of my flesh; not to be spared the pain of sickness and hurt but to understand it; and to be spared the pain of what I think of as moral uncleanliness. And if my prayers mean so much, I think, Why don’t I go to the Methodist church? I do not and wonder if I am irresolute. I think of those whose lives are a compromise with their burden of wild dreams, lewd fancies and discontents; of D., his eyes bugged out as if he sat on a tent peg and with his uncommonly stupid and pretentious wife; and I think of A., who has followed his capricious cod over hill and dale and looks, as a result, very weathered and sometimes silly. D. might be admirable. The whole thing breaks down to the fact that I don’t have enough substance myself, much of the time, to make collected judgments.
•
The city seems strange or unattractive and I am depressed. It is quite possible that my equilibrium is such a touchy piece of machinery that I only waste time in trying to control it. But this slip of a youth, I wonder, carrying groceries across Park Avenue, is he taking them home to his wife or is he an international whore. In short, I do not have that which I so often have—a strength of heart and bowel, a pleasant sense of self-esteem which is the point of view from which I certainly reach the most practical, happy, and charitable judgments on strangers. I go to see “Moby Dick,” which has some wonderful stuff in it and many clichés. Dissolve from a dramatic scene to waves breaking over the bow. I think of poor Jim Agee, who would have done better. I eat a sandwich at Reuben’s and think I see an old schoolmate in the next booth. A party of middle-aged couples comes in—all of them sun-black—all of the ladies wearing jewels and furs, their hair and their dresses cut with much thought, but there seems to be some discrepancy between this outlay and their appeal, at least to my senses. I may be depressed. In front of the hotel I see a slender woman with bare shoulders and bare heels, but she does not please me. I think she is not as pretty as the girl in the Waldeboro laundromat. I go to bed with a bottle of beer, but I cannot sleep and I don’t know why. I cannot blame it all on Mrs. Loins’ spectres and so I make a tedious review of my sexual autobiography. It all adds up to the fact that I have received most generously a force of life that gives proportion to all this trivia. I read the abridgment of a bad novel an turn on the TV at 2 A.M. and am bid good night by a minister. I read the abridgment of another bad novel—my bones, my eyes, and my head are tired and I cannot sleep. I read the abridgment of another novel and go to sleep. It must be four o’clock. In the morning the air is stale. I say my prayers at St. Thomas, eat breakfast at Longchamps, and come back here.
•
Since I seem to weigh, on the streets, step by step, minute by minute, some idea of beauty, I might try to state or restate this here. By beauty I never mean anything that is not close to sensual. In these beauties, I recognize clearly forces that appear triumphant and forces that seem destructive. The sea is fair and blue but if my boat should capsize I will drown. The stranger’s cheek is fair and round, but if I caress it I will end up in the police station. But these anxieties seem to stand in a realm where the light is dim; they do not seem to rise from our deepest nature. On the other hand, the sea is fair and blue and a pleasure to sail upon and my love’s cheek is round and soft, and if I caress it I will be rewarded with inestimable riches. It is this contest that I do not understand; that conflicts with an instinctive feeling that life flows or should flow like the waters in a stream.
•
O fall. This summer’s places—Friendship, where the bedsheets smelled of kerosene; the Hotel Madison, the lovely house at Tree Tops, the Hotel Dauphin; I am most comfortable here, feel most productive, most enjoy waking at night and hearing the wind change its quarter and seeing the dark sky through a hole in the trees. And going into town yesterday, the fishermen along the banks of the river. Their seasonal
appearance. In the early spring, the early birds with scarves and hats and then as the summer comes on they seem to bloom; they are joined by their girls, their wives and children; they undress, they drink beer, they spread out on the banks of the river like the flowers in an unweeded garden and they scatter, all but the most hardy, when the first cold winds begin to blow. And then the last of them—hats, scarves, their noses cherry-red. And also the relationship between these fishermen and swimmers, the overdressed and the undressed, the sober and the beer drinkers.
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Up to Saratoga. Very hot here. Smell of burning rubber in the valley. Some French Canadians on the train. A not young woman with brilliants in her hair. I smoke in the toilet and look out at the Hudson River, which seems broad, handsome, and sad, and with the leaves falling I think that I will not see my country for another year. I buy some coffee and drink whiskey out of the empty paper cup. I go up to the diner and lunch with a pleasant Swiss who is travelling in this country for the first time. Outside the window we see hardscrabble fields, abandoned garages, a gas station, its unused tanks wrapped in burlap. I point out to him the monumental ruin of an old mill along the banks of the river, but he seems perplexed; unimpressed. I go from the station to the spa and take a Turkish bath, which seems a good idea since my anxieties about the masseur seem unfounded and in general if you pursue these things the truth turns out to be cheering. As I waited on the porch for a taxi, a thunderstorm broke. The smell of rain as it is blown in on a porch where you sit. I am taken by P. through the house, which looks very pleasant to me, to a large room with a view of the lawn, fountain, and Vermont mountains. I wander around in fact, memory, and purpose. It is not in me to settle down in a businesslike way with some galleys. I talk with Harvey Swados and leaving the house run into Saul B. I drink cocktails at E.’s with Dick Eberhart, whose plain, healthy, and unshadowed mind amazes me, and with M., who is a first-class gossip. At dinner I am conscious of being in the same room with Saul. We speak after dinner and I am delighted by his presence. He is about my size, I guess, his hair quite gray, and I think I feel here that sometime tragic fineness of skin, that tragic vitality. His nose is a little long, his eyes have (I think) the cheerful glint of lewdness, and I notice his hands and that his voice is light. It has no deep notes. So we take a walk and I have nothing to say but I remember my other passionate friendships on this road—R. and F.—but I have no way of judging my feelings. I cast around for some precedent of two writers with similar aims who are strongly drawn to one another. I do not have it in me to wish him bad luck: I do not have it in me to be his acolyte. Today all this seems foolish.
•
I go to town; I go to the Italian Consulate and wait and wait. It is my first brush with this classical red tape. The vestibule is full of people waiting for some scrap or particle of their identity to be certified or returned to them. We are all loaded down with photographs of ourselves and we wait and wait. The bureaucrat has patent-leather hair, patent-leather shoes, and a suit as black as death’s advocate’s. It is his pleasure to keep us waiting. We—this cheerful generation—notice the variety and the patience in the faces.
I walk and walk. I say a prayer on Fifty-third Street. I have lunch and see the ballgame. I come home on the train, drink some gin, and study Italian. I wake at three in the morning, paralyzed at the thought of what I have left undone, such as my teeth. And then I think I see clearly that passage in human relationships where the line between creativity and light, and darkness and disaster, is a hair. And I think this is an inherited burden, one that Mother carried much, and that, as in everything else, light will triumph. But I think I see the seductive face of wisdom, articulateness, and poetry; that it can be cultivated and made to bloom like a perverse lure, a chain of false and gentle promises, an artificial land of milk and honey. So I say there is a worm in the rose, but it is not fatal. But I would like to be spared this vision of disaster and pray for this, or for a fuller and more relaxed understanding of the fact that the force of life is contested.
•
Observe then this man, woken by his bladder at 3 A.M., and who, returning to bed, finds himself wakeful; more so, much more so than he will be at seven, when the alarm rings. There seems to be some excitement in the darkness. There is a little sweat in his armpits. Something is happening, he thinks, and he thinks he hears a footstep in the gravel outside. It is the footstep of a dope addict, armed with an icepick, who has come to murder his children, but listening for the opening of the front door and the footstep on the stairs and hearing nothing his mind wanders to a voyage he is about to take. The ship sinks and he is in a lifeboat with his wife and children—one of a convoy led by a navigator—but the wind and the tides separate them from the convoy and he realizes that he knows so little about navigation that even if he were only five miles from the Azores he would not be able to sail his beloved family to safety. He rolls onto his back and at this point his male member, bristling with usefulness and self-importance, takes th center of the stage, but since the night offers no promise of requition this seems a foolish performance. Then thoughts of such lewdness cross his mind that he rolls onto his side and sends up toward Heaven an earnest prayer for some better understanding of cleanliness. He is back in the lifeboat once more. Now he lies on his stomach and prays once more, this time for the simple gift of sleep, and he seems to be enfolded, but enfolded in the wings of some rented angel’s costume with an unclean smell. He rolls onto his back and suddenly it is Christmas. It is Christmas Eve and he is a boy again, beloved, naked and cuddly in the clean sheets. Up goes his cod again, followed by his prayers, and so forth and so forth, ad nauseam.
•
On my first night in Rome I walk to the Spanish steps. I am a little disappointed. But I find the people very handsome and not covert as is the case at home. The girls lovely and the men good-looking, gallant. When I see an American he does not seem as well integrated or as well dressed. We are not a nation of voyeurs but we seem introspective. I have not been happy here, and waking at three in the morning I worry about everything. But there is no point in writing a story about poor Bierstubbe, the TV writer who came to Rome to write a great play about sex; who was shortchanged everywhere, whose money flowed like water, who was depressed by the dash of the Roman men and reminded of his own contested sexual identity, who wondered why he had ever left his cozy home, who drank gin before lunch, etc. So I will not write any such story.
•
Poor Bierstubbe, very homesick, watching people on the Via Veneto boarding the airplane bus for the U.S.A. Never in his life, not even as an infantry private under a sergeant who was court-martialled for cruelty and drunkenness, had Bierstubbe been so homesick. And, having dreamed half his life of sailing away, he dreamed away his days and nights of sailing home.
The hassle with the real-estate agents which seems to come to nothing, although there was no legal or emotional difficulty that I did not imagine. Leaving the Palazzo Doria at five or six—the tumul of a great city at nightfall—much worried and sorely wanting a drink.
•
It is four o’clock and I am in Rome and want a drink. Out of my window I see an orange house which is being turned into apartments and a man walking out of an alleyway in little steps as he buttons up his fly. Mary and Susie have gone out to meet Ben, home from his first day in school. I went to the American Express this morning and found my money waiting. I had been sure that this would not happen. Then I went to the Società Romana di Elettricità with La Signora Muni, where I saw some people of considerable beauty. Through my head run such scraps as this: my life is in the nature of a bargain and a very fair one; I believe in the miraculousness of life but my belief has never been so strained; this painful sense of not having a well-integrated body or mind is all the fault of my poor dead mother, whose life was so ridden with anxiety; look at the pretty girl; pray; of the two—the duchess in a mink coat and the wide-eyed child with a little hump to her shoulders—I prefer the child; perhaps
this journey from one country to another puts too searching a light on the jerry-built structure of my life; a searching light is being brought to bear; people speak of Rome as we used to speak of Scout camp—you will hate it for two weeks and then you will not want to leave. So the intelligent thing is to ride out these storms of strangeness and see where you are in two weeks or a month. And so we leave the Società Romana di Elettricità.
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After lunch I walk in the streets and observe how the facial traits of the people differ from the massive and weary countenances of the emperors and their wives. It may be no accident that much of the Roman portrait statuary we see in America reminds us of Americans. I don’t know. And the ease and grace with which they embrace one another, call after the pretty girls, kiss in doorways or sit on the wall up by the Gianicolo with a girl held cozily between their legs is very different from our idea of things. This is not a difference of language, race, climate, or custom; it is a vastly different approach to the wellsprings of humanity.
•
This is the kitchen of the Palazzo Doria, where I hope we will pass an affectionate and a useful year. The gas stove leaks. The drains are clogged. It is a dark day in Rome with a heavy rain. This is not classical weather. Ben and Mary are both coughing. Susie went off to school in tears. This is the first time in nearly a month that I have sat down and tried to make sense, and now my thoughts, gathered at rainy street crossings and high windows, in damp churches and strange beds at 3 A.M., and gathered often about the full limbs of comely strangers, seem about to leave me.
•
First there was the voyage, and this was ruled by my fear that the ship would sink. I don’t think a day passed without my being made uncomfortable by this foolishness. And when I woke, at 3 A.M., to the noise of smashing flower vases and medicine bottles, my parts would shrink and my heart would flutter like a lark. This is a deck, I would tell myself, walking back and forth; these are stanchions, these are lifeboats and that is an empty swimming pool, and these momentary things are the usable truths, but then seeing darkness off the bow, and in the west a prophetic and baneful light, and noticing that the speed of the ship had slacked off until she hardly seemed to move, I would feel sure that we were done for. Off the starboard bow I saw the snow-covered mountains of Corsica and thought that this would be a dangerous coast to land our boats on.