The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  At the station, Federico and I wave to the trains. The engineers wave to us, sometimes the conductors and the passengers raise their hands. Down the river in the morning light comes the train from Chicago. The windowsills of the coaches are lined with paper coffee cups. The first-class passengers sit alone in their roomettes, and how muc alone one can be in these places. The dining car is closed. The waiters have stripped off the tablecloths and dressed in their street clothing. Everything is in readiness, although it will be an hour before they reach New York. The ladies have on their hats, they hold their gloves and bags. And in this delay, this dogwatch, this point of readiness we wish them, my son and I, Godspeed and a pleasant arrival. We hope that they will be met at the station by their friends or their family or that they will go to some place where they will be greeted with affection, trust, and sometimes love. We hope they will not end up in a hotel room.

  •

  I stopped smoking Saturday because it seemed to give me painful indigestion. But at a party on Saturday night I must have smoked a package of cigarettes. I smoked three cigarettes before noon on Sunday and one in the afternoon. I smoked two or three on Monday. On Tuesday I smoked one. Today, Wednesday, I have smoked none and it is a quarter to ten. My chest promises to clear up and it is a pleasure not to have a bronchial wheeze like a rusty gate. I cough in the morning but I cough without a sense of guilt. However, the withdrawal from nicotine leaves me quite dizzy, and we have to drive tonight to Sherman. It might be dangerous. And yet having come this little way I hate to return to a world where I am dependent upon cigarettes and, when travelling, upon cigarettes made, it seems, of twine and dead leaves. We will come back to this. My head is not where it belongs.

  I read “Where Angels Fear to Tread.” When he writes of the love of beauty and the love of truth he writes with purity and eloquence and we seem to be in a place of some elevation; but in fact we are watching two spinsters and one unfledged male steal a child and cause his death. The death of this child seems to be idle and repulsive and I think that in fiction, much as in life, we may not, without good reason, slaughter the innocent, persecute the defenseless and the infirm, or speak with idle malice. He has grace, sometimes elegance, and I think of the charge of vulgarity made against my prose. If it is vulgar, and it may be, it is an honest vulgarity, an incurable or congenital vulgarity, a vulgarity that lies close to my heart. But when he speaks of the invincibility of society I envy his lucidness; again, when he describes the vision, I can’t recall how, of the nature of our transactions here as a trial of what i is men might accomplish. I catch him turning an epigram on the Sacraments, that is, that they are not the facts that they are not meant to be.

  I do not make much sense without tobacco.

  •

  July 8th. The twelfth day here. In the evening, the piece or reach of sea between the dunes is as succinct as a shark’s fin. This looking northeast, the light at our backs. “Oh, how beautiful,” I exclaim, “the most beautiful peace.” Said the same things at Port Ercole and Bristol, New Hampshire. There is a place on the walk to Coskata where I get spooked. But how legitimate, how primitive are our feelings about the sea. This image of death. Brine thou wert and to brine returnest. The sense of malevolence expresses perhaps nothing but my own morbidity, but there it is. The sea is a claimant. Not even your finest will outlast this simple wave. “Doesn’t the Andrea Doria lie off there,” Mary asks, “the sea coursing through her lounges, iceboxes?” We walk to Coskata, and I relate old and idle stories. At the pond, the incandescence of the sea light. Wild roses and knife grass beautifully exposed. At the horizon, always the incandescence of an afterglow.

  Walk over to the bay shore to see the sunset, evening star, and new moon. I wish devoutly that I were a better man. In the morning, Ben and I go swordfishing. Our captain has a kindly, sunburned face, rucked neck—deeply—a tonsure of gray hair, sound teeth. Driving past the hayfields, he recollects the rigors of haying in his youth. This is the image that stays with me. He is no longer youthful, but he has passed most gracefully through the roles of his life—farm boy, high-school student, husband, and father—and is their sum. As we go out to sea he stands on the cabin roof wearing a heavy pullover, ravelled at the elbows, and denims and sneakers. His feet are apart, one arm is looped around an upright, the other arm hanging slack against his trouser leg, but the fingers moving, nervous or ruminative. He seems to want to find a tear in the smooth cloth. I find something in his figure that is unusually fine and coherent, some fineness of penetration. You can see in the cant of his shoulders what he was, what he may be. He scans the sea for six hours, looking for a swordfish fin. His penetration, his kindliness never varied.

  We go out through the lethal shoals at Smith Point, where a big fishing boat, grounded there last week, is breaking up—her life rafts swinging from their tack, gulls plundering the wreck. I am intensely uncomfortable, but I think that if, at this time, life should prove to be so tonic and so bitter you have no choice but to take it—the galling elixir—or sink into the living death of a neurasthenic; a rainy-day boy, startled by the shadow of a falling leaf. I drink some gin and fall asleep; wake with a wonderful sense of refreshment. My under-consciousness is strengthened; my anxieties are gone.

  •

  Fred calls to say that he would like to discuss some business with me and I invite my brother to lunch. I have suspected that he was drinking again; but he was not today. Heavy-faced. A little alcoholic lameness. He gets up unreadily from his chair and flinches getting into his car. However, his constitution seems unusually strong and durable and I am happy to share this with him. After lunch I drive him to the station with my younger son and we park there waiting (1) for him to explain his visit; (2) for a train to pass, to the delight of my son. Finally a train passes and this much is accomplished. Fred talks on about his trip across the country in August and finally I ask him, as gently as possible, what is on his mind. “Nothing,” he says, “nothing,” but as I press him a little I find that he plans to open a men’s-clothing store in either San Juan, Puerto Rico, or Palo Alto, California. He is going down to San Juan to look things over. He is also thinking of a little excursion to Nantucket. I ask if he would like some money. No, this will not be necessary; but we drive back to the house and I write him a check for five hundred dollars. He puts this in his pocket and leaves. I am not genuinely petulant—I have to work at the feeling—and Mary is not at all shrewish. The facts are only these: that to continue to make such contributions I must find ways of making more money. At least he does not suffer today from the illusion of being cunning. Mary points out that his wife will not work although she could very easily, and that he is unrealistic about looking for work; that he looks for nothing but the kind of job that will never come his way; but I sympathize with him here. I could not get a job as a haberdasher’s clerk myself. I might get a job in the liquor store, and I could work as a gardener, but pride and status are nearly insuperable obstacles. “Neither of you will ever let a woman work,” Mary says, and here we have a change of scenery, a change of atmosphere. This is a sore point. When my mother went to work she abdicated all of her responsibilities as a woman. Our house was cold. I was the cook, dishwasher, and cleaning woman. My father was wretched. I defend myself, confusedly, but I have no objections to a woman’s working as long as she remains my wife, as long as there is no exchange of roles. And I come back to the bad feeling of a triangular relationship: that in my delight in erotic love I leave myself without a position of retreat.

  I think the atmosphere has changed but the fault may be mine, there seems to be some canalization in my feeling, some inclination to seem grief-stricken, a lack of vigor. Mary talks with her sister on the phone for an hour and there is a change in her voice, her accent. She talks with her other sister for half an hour and there is still another change. We all, to some degree, continuously play out the roles of the long-since discontinued dramas of our childhood—and in myself I sometimes hear a change of accent in the com
pany of my brother. Then she sends a cable to B. and here we have still another change. We talk about the administration of the summer place. “You don’t have to worry about this,” Mary says. The remark is simple enough but I think it is spoken meanly and I multiply the possibilities of bad feeling by asking sarcastically to be forgiven for my presumption. We kiss good night and sleep but I am angry and feel unclean, almost scabrous. The boy wakes and I take him into our bed and it is his power to remind me of the freshness and the cleanliness of love: to deliver me.

  •

  Coverly’s return does not stand alone. I will try Honora’s death. I think of a Saturday afternoon in childhood when our plans to play games misfired; the football was flat, and nobody could find a valve. It was autumn. We went over to the R.s’ barn and had a penis-measuring contest, followed by an orgy, but when it was over I felt so guilty and ashamed of myself, so sorrowful and uneasy. All of life seemed to lie around us, but we could not escape into it, and how long, dear God, must we wait? I went home and ate a sandwich and was put by my mother into a bath so hot that it made my skin pucker and made the touch of everything unpleasant. My white shirt (too small and badly ironed by the old Finn) and my serge suit (also too small) felt like a punishment, and I couldn’t find my dancing pumps. I connected this with my lewd behavior in the morning. I was being punished. I went into the closet, got to my knees, and said the Lord’s Prayer three times, noticing, at the end of the third time, that my dancing pumps, in a serge bag, hung from a hook above me. At least this much of my prayer was answered, but I was filled with terrible longings, and I still felt, after the bath, parboiled and uncomfortable. I walked down to the Masonic Temple with Charlie and got there just as the grand march was beginning. I would have run away, except that my mother was a matron that afternoon, and anyhow where would I, in my blue serge, find a haven? They were building houses in the meadow; they were building houses in the woods. We spent the rest of the afternoon pushing little girls around the waxed floor and watching the light outside the windows get faint, and by the time dancing school was over so was that Saturday.

  •

  That was the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality. They were worried about other things, too, but their other anxieties were published, discussed, and ventilated while their anxieties about homosexuality remained in the dark: remained unspoken. Is he? Was he? Did they? Am I? Could I? seemed to be at the back of everyone’s mind. A great emphasis, by way of defense, was put upon manliness, athletics, hunting, fishing, and conservative clothing, but the lonely wife wondered, glancingly, about her husband at his hunting camp, and the husband himself wondered with whom he shared a rude bed of pines. Was he? Did he? Had he? Did he want to? Had he ever? But what I really mean to say is that this is laughable. Guilty man may be, but only an absurdly repressed people would behave this way.

  •

  I think very vaguely of The Death Of The Short Story; the year the squirrels came in; some projection of my feelings about returning to this country. I read two stories of mine and find them too breezy. They were deeply felt at the time but there seems to be a lack of deep notes; no bass clef; a lack of fundamentals. Why should some of these lines, drawn from the deepest pain and pleasure I have known, seem to be glossy and so little else? Haste, maybe. I think of Coverly as Apollo and Moses as Dionysus. And looking around for some general, some fundamental axe to grind, what do I come up with? The fundamental competitiveness of brothers. And of this society: it is not so astonishin that we should find violence here, but is it not nearly impossible to relate it to the niceness—the religion of niceness with its sacraments, its jealousies, and its demanding faithfulness that seems to be the religion of this province?

  What is the meaning, though, of this sudden, this random tenderness that we feel for the woman in worsted stockings and the young banker from the Congo? What stirs in us? Is it the chance that we may be perfectly understood? Is it the thought of some peaceable kingdom where men and women love one another freely and without guilt? Or is it a promise of the conquest of death?

  •

  If I am writing narrative prose, and I sometimes am, I must content myself with these limitations. Every line cannot be a cry from the heart, cut in stone. But I do rebel against common speech, against the quality of filler I find in my work, and I try to escape in Leander’s journal, the boy’s story, the chambermaid and the latrine. But since I was not born with a strong accent I will have to get along on what I have.

  •

  Half asleep, I think or dream of fields that, when I was young, were fertile but that are neglected, forgotten now. How sad. And I think that we, who, when we were young, demanded brave and explicit counsel, find ourselves, in the middle of life, unable to answer any of the questions our children ask. I can’t seem to get the drunk’s voice off the page, to make him speak with color. You entered life with absolutely nothing and you’ll go out with absolutely nothing. A bigoted and anesthetized world. But what I don’t seem able to do is to pull up the vision: the feeling of what life can be without uncommon bigotry, censure, and repression. And I don’t seem able to get the triangle, the balance between the niceties, the stress on the appearance of things, the natural violence that lies beneath all of this, and the vision of a world where the balance is more commodious; where the sense of tragedy is not lost in anesthesia.

  •

  The deadline seems to be an artificial one that I have set up myself to impress myself. It may be childish, but it’s kept me occupied. I think of Joyce, choosing here and there a word with such brilliance that it floats through my mind all day and is hanging there when I wake. I have my way in bed and seem returned, as I take her in my arms, to some fine summer night. We cling to one another’s lips as if we were inhaling the warm dark, the warmest, darkest air. My son didn’t dream of the werewolf.

  “Of course,” Mary says, “it’s only natural for a woman to be unfaithful to her husband.” This re the man who delivers dry cleaning. “Youse are very charming” is a sample of his style. Standing on the threshold, he says, “I didn’t pick up on Saturday because I’ve been having this trouble. It seems I couldn’t do nothing right. My wife went off with this police lieutenant, the one who directs traffic at the corner of Main and Broadway. Here’s a picture of her. Pretty, isn’t she? When we got married, everybody said it was a perfect match. She run off leaving me with the four little kids to take care of and the job and all. Now she’s come back but she don’t sleep with me. She says she’s saving herself for him. She still thinks she’s in love with him. But he, he don’t care about her anymore. He don’t ever want to see her again. They told me this at the police station. Next week we’re going to see the monsignor and talk it over with him and the Department of Welfare; they’re going to get a psychiatrist for her. She needs help and I’m going to help her. I’m going to be very kind and strong. I’ll bring the rugs back on Saturday.”

  •

  We run out of liquor as I had planned, at noon. At three I study the bar with its empty bottles. At four I drink four cups of tea with sugar. At five I stuff myself with bread and cheese and play backgammon. At six, when Mary returns, I drink the last of the liquor in the house, two fingers of cooking rum. This does not make much difference and I begin to feel the symptoms of withdrawal. I shout at Federico. Drying the dishes I think of my dead mother, lying in her grave; and death appears to me to be a force of loneliness, only hinted at by the most ravening loneliness we know in life; the soul does not leave the body but lingers with it through every stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat and cold and the long nights. Another symptom of withdrawal is anxiety. The oil burner will explode. Thieves will come i and harm my children, etc. This morning (9 A.M.) I have also given up smoking. Walking down to the station I am pleased to fill my chest with the cold morning air. I seem to feel it refresh my blood. How much better this is for me than smoke. But in the last half hour I have begun to feel the absence of a habitual stimu
lus. I feel sleepy—horny in a disgusting way—my eyes are sore and my sense of things is faded and dim. Here is the letdown, the distortion.

  Gino the barber looks out of the Saturday paper, gracefully brandishing his hairy forearms. In his middle twenties, I guess, and from south of Naples, he seems to be the archetypal Italian boy. His skin is a fine olive color, very fine, and drawn over a well-shaped, egg-shaped skull. His curls are black and well groomed. His eyes are large and full of appeal and he touches one on the shoulder, the knee, the arm and hand; his whole manner is of a continuous and fairly gay sexual flirtation, but if he were pressed I think he would claim to be innocent, and I think he is. His innocence is part of his democratization. In the New World one isn’t rolled for three hundred lire; one is monogamous, one is innocent, one is pure. I think he is comical and charming but I also think that, having contented oneself with such an explanation, he might find that Gino was the destroyer of his way of life.

  I dream of the photograph of a woman kneeling in a field and holding two yellow roses. The sense of the picture is that she is tributary to the roses; that the picture was taken for some rosarian who was proud of his yellow blooms. It seems to be in the past because her summer, cotton dress has long sleeves, a long skirt, and a high bodice, although this does nothing to conceal the fullness of her bosom. She is kneeling in a field of straw and holding the two roses over one knee. Her face is oval, very fresh in color, and her hair is the lightest brown. I don’t mean blond; I mean a refinement of goldenness, of brownness that has no relation to a blonde or a towhead. Her hair is long. This and her skirts convince me that the picture is an old one. Her hair is drawn softly back from her face and fixed in a bun at the back of her neck.