by John Cheever
•
My first feelings about the Kerouac book were: that it was not good; that most of its accents or effects were derived from some of the real explorers, like Saul; and that the apocalyptic imagery was not good enough—was never lighted by true talent, or deep feeling, vision. It pleased me to catch him at a disadvantage, to sum up the facts, which could reflect on my lack of innocence. Here is a man of thirty who lives with his hard-working mother, cooks supper for her when she gets home from the store, has a shabby affair with a poor Negress—who knows so little about herself that she is easy prey—wrestles, very suspiciously, with his pals, weeps in a train yard where his mother’s image appears to him, discovers that he is deceived, and writes a book. The style has the advantages, to make a rough comparison, of abstract painting. When we give up lucidity we have, from time to time, the power of broader associations. Life is chaotic, and so we can state this in chaotic terms. In trying to catch him at a disadvantage, I find him vulgar, meaning perhaps unsophisticated—his sexual identity, his prowess, is not much. He is a writer and wants to be a famous writer, a rich writer, and a successful writer, but the question of excellence never seems to cross his mind. The question of the greatest depth of feeling, of speaking with the greatest urgency. My life is very different from what he describes. There is almost no point where our emotions and affairs correspond. I am most deeply and continuously involved in the love of my wife and my children. It is my passion to present to my children the opportunity of life. That this love, this passion, has not reformed my nature is well known. But there is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living, and one is not exempted by being a poet. You have to take some precautions with your health. You have to manage your money intelligently and respect your emotional obligations. There is another world—I see this—there is chaos, and we are suspended above it by a thread. But the thread holds. People who seek, who are driven to seek, love in urinals, do not deserve the best of our attention. They will be forgiven, and, anyhow, sometimes they are not seeking love; they are seeking a means to express their hatred and suspicion of the world. Sometimes.
•
If we do not imagine the future how can we believe it to exist? I think now that in a year or two the atmosphere will recuperate, the damage will be repaired, and we will walk in the clear light of day again. But I have never been so deeply conscious of chaos, as if we were i the act of falling from some atmospheric and moral orbit, as if the sweet seriousness of life were in great danger.
•
In town, and pleased to have this contest suspended for a day. At 11 A.M. on the corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street a tart gives me the eye. I am alarmed, excited, astonished, etc., as we pass, but when we have passed my mind continues along at her side, climbs the stairs, waits while she turns the key in the lock and performs with copious and revolting detail the whole shabby encounter. This seems to me unclean, unmanly, and I protest, and there you have it, the mind climbing the stairs as the conscience calls it back and both of them powerless to change one another’s ways. At the next corner I see a head of light-brown hair and that love of the future that is excited by my children leaps up in me like an illumination and I am refreshed by those sentiments that cool our blood. What fine things I will do for them. What tall things I will build. But the independence with which my imagination pursues the tart seems to reflect on the seriousness of my wish to lead a worthy and a cleanly life.
•
We climb Cardigan. I am short-winded. There are clouds, and from the summit we see their shadows—continents, with neighboring islands, moving over the hills. The air has a perfect lightness, perfect for carrying the smell of pine, moss, the delphinium that grows by the ranger’s cabin. The granite down Firescrew still has the rush and flow of lava. I climb down slowly, relaxed from the trip up, sniffing the woods, admiring the moss with its second growth of red hair, microscopic flowers. The stone bed of the lowest stream is paved with moss. I remember coming down another mountain two years ago, my mind as lame as my legs, as lewd to boot, and hearing suddenly the noise of water pouring over stone and seeing it in my mind all green and golden in the pools, as it truly is in these streams; pouring, pouring, pouring, pouring, as sweet as the sounds of wine, oh, much sweeter, this pouring noise.
•
Waiting in the police station to pay a parking ticket, I hear on the radio that a middle-aged man, slight build, five feet seven, brown hai, is wanted for open lewdness. He unzipped his trousers at the corner of Elm Avenue and Chestnut Street and did the same thing twenty minutes later in front of the A. & P. He is driving a yellow convertible but the license number and the make of the car are unknown. A five-state alarm is out; and where can he be? Reading “Tommy Titmouse” to his children. Hiding in a garage, or a movie theatre. Drinking in a bar. I pray for him, among others, in church. It is a rainy Sunday and the smell of pew cushions is dense. One can hardly hear the priest, the noise of rainspouts is so loud. I seem to be back at the farm, a happy child, sitting on burlap cushions and hearing rainspouts. For a second the recollection is so vivid, so full, it is like the rush of memory brought on by a mouthful of hot pudding. I reproach myself. I reproach myself for reproaching myself. I contemplate the quality of introspection in church. I think that faced with the mystery and passion of life we are forced into a position of humility that is best expressed in the attitudes of prayer. I think of the mystery and passion of life. In front of me or behind me is a wayward youth and I brood on his problems. He seems, out of the corner of my eye, thoroughly depraved. I read the Sunday paper.
Walk with Federico at four. We see the sun setting when we come up by the rise above the river. A tawny light burns on the lower windows of the M.s’ house, empty now for two years, a haunted house for children, a point of adventure for boys, a headache for the police department—and yet for a moment it seems that fires and lamps burn in the drawing room, the smell of cooking rises up the back stairs, order and love reign here; it seems for the moment that the sun lights the lower windows.
The grass is beginning to yellow; it has a yellowish look in the last of the light. The ground is still covered with cut-leaf maples. Federico sees the moon for the first time and is enchanted. He points at it, and I tell him the word in English. “Moona,” he says, “moona, mia moona,” and when we lose it behind a tree or at a turn in the path he says, “Ciao, moon, ciao,” and is surprised and pleased to find at another turning that the light still hangs in the sky. Mary is covering roses in the garden, and he shows the light to her. In the house, he drags a chair to the window and stands on it to see the light.
•
How the world shines with light.
I dream of a better prose style, freed of expedients, more thoughtful, working closer to the emotions by both direction and indirection, feeling and intelligence. A pleasant dream, and I feel like myself.
•
But my brother, now, what will become of him? There seems to be no way of appealing to him; he seems to be blundering impatiently toward his grave. And what about the children? S., whose beauty was refined and sweet, has dyed her hair an orangy yellow that makes her features seem sharp. But will he, in his blundering, be able to give her the support she needs?
We cannot cope alone with the devil; we cannot cleanse our hearts and minds by our own devices. When we sin, and I have sinned—I have indulged lewd fancies and read the writing on the public wall—it is not our own flesh and blood that we seem to disfigure or our chances at immortality that we seem to damage, but the whole picture of life, shining or dark as the case may be, seems to have been offended by our lapse.
Heaven may be no more than the tender memories of our friends and lovers; some ghostly reappearance that we make, touching on courage and humor.
My brother, when he got offensively drunk here and when I reproached him later, used to say that he only wanted to educate his neighbors, but he did come into our comfortable house where our attachments are, as a rule, t
ranquil and affectionate, like a blast, a thunderclap of obscene misery, a man utterly unable to cope with the problems of his life, deaf to every appeal, his mind, his sentiments, and his body ravaged with alcohol, a stupid and impenetrable smile on his face, and in his heart a determination to destroy himself. And I think of the pleasures of our life together when we were young: hockey games on the ice pond, Emerson’s Pond, snowball fights, walks on beaches, rides on summer nights in the old roadster, high purpose, high spirit, clowning and love. Now he is so drunk that he cannot walk from the chair to the table and when he gets there he can’t eat. He falls into a drunken sleep. He thinks the fault is hers. He wanted to leave at two and play touch football as we used to on Thanksgiving, but she delayed and delayed, she took two hours to dress, she denied him his touch-football game, this simple pleasure, and while he waited he got drunk. The fault is his, we all have to wait, but why in God’s name does she lead him into destruction?
•
Lunch at the Plaza. Truman Capote is in the men’s bar. His bangs are dyed yellow, his voice is girlish, his laughter is baritone, and he seems to be a conspicuous male cocotte. This must take some doing, but on the other hand it must be a very limited way of moving through life. He seems to excite more curiosity than intolerance. Almost everyone these days drinks a special brand of gin—Beefeater, House of Lords, Lamplighter—and vodka. I hear the orders come over the bar. The bartender calls to a handsome Italian waiter and they disappear into a broom closet, to straighten out their racetrack bets, I hope. But to someone familiar with a rigorous and a simple way of life these scenes might seem decadent and final, like those lavish and vulgar death throes of the Roman Empire that we see in the movies.
•
Waiting in a basement corridor of the Saratoga Hospital to have a chest X-ray I feel very tired and wonder when I will feel well again. It seems now that all my life is false—jerry-built—the structure is of the wrong design and set in the wrong place. What, I think, are the rewards of virtue? Respiratory infections, ulcers, and night sweats? Is it cant to turn from whiskey and debauchery and speak of the holiness, the dignity of life? But there it is, a most solemn and beautiful process. Here are our powers of foolish debasement. I deny myself to be myself.
Either because I am convalescent or hung over or because of the lights in this room, its remoteness and the heat from its radiators, I do not seem to find what I want. What I want is blue sky—some robustness, some escape from this perpetual half fever. Skiing on the lawn I seem to come close to it, some opening of the mind, some way of embracin the world—the lightness, vitality, and movement that the prose I’ve been writing lacks.
•
Finish “The Music Teacher” today. Walk into town. The grandiose architecture along Union Avenue. The spectacle of an American small town on a winter’s day. Its stratified past, the rise of ground at the railroad crossing, the new bowling alley with a vestibule shaped like a tenpin, the faint flavor of England that hovers over the Episcopal church, dance music pouring out of the supermarket, the very fat dispatcher at the cabstand, her hair dyed and her face painted for some rendezvous, this plaintive, this complex and moving landscape of love and change. The high-school girls, their eyes mascaraed, their voices loud, their ways bold, followed by a pack of crotch-hitching boys.
•
“The Hill Town” finished and off and all right, I guess, although a little intense. On Saturday I feel fine; feel like myself at last. But Mary seems to me unhappy. Every surface and angle of life seems to frustrate and irritate her. She swears at the turkey and she swears at the mashed potatoes. I am in high spirits and contented with the children and the better I feel the more conscious am I of her unhappiness. After church I make a crude and foolish remark and there is a shower of tears. And I think that I cannot repair this again, there is nothing that I can do or say. I am not concerned any longer with my own happiness; I am concerned with protecting the children. After lunch we go skating at the B.s’. The ice is nearly a foot thick, black here and there, with stones and branches showing. The sky is a winter sky, a little overcast. The dogs are barking. I go up and down the pond, up and down, chasing a piece of wood with an old hockey stick, and I am very happy. This is my sanctuary, this is my pleasure. The ice rumbles and thunders. The wind sweeps off the little powder we have cut with our skates. It is cold. How I love this: the bare landscape, the color in the willows, the exertion, and the memories of a game. How far I am from the Borghese Gardens.
•
I dislike writing here about booze-fighting, but I must do something about it. A friend comes to call. In my anxiety to communicate, to feel the most in warmth and intimacy, I drink too much, which can be two drinks these days. In the morning I am deeply depressed, my insides barely function, my kidney is painful, my hands shake, and walking down Madison Avenue I am in fear of death. But evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. I could very easily destroy myself. It is ten o’clock now and I am thinking of the noontime snort.
•
A dark day, the trees covered with ice and bent with the weight of ice.
“Poor Susie had to walk to the train,” says Mary.
“I am very sorry,” say I, “I would have driven her had I known.”
“Ha,” says Mary.
“Please don’t talk like that,” I say. “It isn’t necessary.” But the damage is done. Gloom is universal. There is, to be said against myself, my fear of impotence; I may not be able to possess her. And there is the chance that she might do or say something that would make possession impossible. I have no taste for brutality. Love for me is love. It seems to me that she is unhappy, that she seeks the cause of this unhappiness in our marriage, and that it lies in some much earlier time of life. But that she cannot, quite understandably, face this.
•
Re my unpleasant remarks this morning, Mary absents herself at lunch with the baby and the dog. There is no note, no explanation. Although the valley is full of fog and the driving is bad, I am not terribly anxious. I drink whiskey and rail loudly to the kitchen walls. The gist of my remarks seems to be petulant. But what is the most reasonable and creative course to take? Things will fester if I don’t mention her absence. I will mention it calmly. I have no stomach for a quarrel.
Re the above: I am far from calm. My voice quakes with anger. “Where were you?” No answer. “Where were you and the baby?” She had gone to visit an old dressmaker she once employed in the city who has now married a lawyer and settled in the suburbs: a queer woman, it always seemed to me, bony, shrill, and vulgar, with a Pekinese at her shins. At five I make a series of cocktails and wind an armature with Ben. He is not tremendously interested in electrical motors. What a nice father I am! How wise and patient. How many things I have constructed for him; how many more than most fathers. Mary goes off to sing, the baby goes to sleep in despair, and we three sit down contentedly to read; Ben reads “Tommy Titmouse,” Susie reads “The Turn of the Screw,” and I read Dante. When Mary returns I am very distant and cool. I read some more—wool-gather, to tell the truth—take a bath, make a curt good night, and sleep. The pump in the basement wakes me at half past three, my kidney aches, and my mouth is dry and sour. I go out to see if the cellar is flooded, but not yet. In the bathroom I smoke a cigarette and my anger at Mary’s having lunched with a dressmaker seems trivial and childish. How could I have got myself into such a rage? I am deeply and painfully ashamed. But then I rally in self-defense. I am not vegetative. I am easily upset. Why, then, invent ways of damaging my equilibrium? The pump grinds on and on and by half past seven, when I shave for church (Ash Wednesday), I seem to have committed in the space of eight hours the sins of anger, pride (what a marvellous father!), carnal self-admiration (what a flat stomach!), lustful fancies, and drunken sloth. In church the Epistle is majestic but my mind wanders. Now a clearing wind has sprung out of the nor
thwest. I will think about Hell and the family.