The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  Mary says that my presence is repressive; she cannot express herself, she cannot speak the truth. I ask her what it is that she wants to say and she says, “Nothing,” but what appears in some back recess of my mind is the fear that she will accuse me of being queer. I think this is ridiculous, the area of sensitivity that clings to an old wound. I know my skin, indiscreet and capricious, and can cope cheerfully with all of its ridiculous and romantic yearnings, but I wonder if any of this affects my son. He seems very ready to love me and we play catch on the lawn. At dinner Susie refers to my imminent death and I fly up like an old hen and must learn to have more reserve. I drink too much and have this morning an incoherent memory of what went on. My eyes are sore.

  B. says, about our moving to the country, that the biggest difficulty may be Mary’s melancholia. It is a strange thing to say, although he is the master of strange remarks, but I wonder again if something isn’t going wrong. Her face seems so drawn, her lips set in pain or anger. I walk with Federico up to the ridge. The setting sun appears to be advancing toward the earth, its shape is so clearly incised in the atmosphere. Its color is a curdled red. Now the fruit trees are all in bloom. The Russian violets have bloomed and gone in the space of a week. Now there are periwinkles, primroses, other violets all in bloom. Bu I am badly disposed and with no reason. We make love and yet I feel forlorn and feel forlorn this morning. A lovely summer day and the birthday of my son and wife. I am writing two pages a day. I should make it four or six.

  •

  I do a little work on the island, six or eight pages, and leave three days earlier than I had planned. Sit and talk with a pleasant, aging investment banker. Observe nothing of the land below. An overcast day in New York. The baneful green glass windows not really a submarine world, not the world in the light of a storm, not even a nightmare world; these travellers, some of them with orchids, moving in a poisonous green light. My homosexual anxieties seem allayed or cured by this change and motion, and I cheerfully watch the people come and go. I think I see a madam and two girls. The madam appears to be a substantial matron—extensively dyed dark-golden hair, a double rope of pearls, a nice tan, only a trace of calculation in the face. The first girl must be nearly fifty but her skin is still white and soft, her arms are round. She wears a hat nearly as big as a wastebasket and shaped like one, but made of the black lace and satin we associate with underwear. The second has green eyes, wears a huge mobcap, her hair dyed red and her lips a coral color along lines that do not conform to her mouth. She sits beside me, and from the heat of her body comes a nice perfume. I am delighted, tickled. Her manner is very genteel and prim, comically so, but at the bottom of her gentility there is some crudeness in speech, some mispronunciations. “My home was in Connecticut,” she says, meaning to evoke swimming pools, golf links, but evoking instead the back streets of Bridgeport. I would like to buy her dinner and a drink and go back to her apartment for the night but I am sweaty and rumpled and have no fresh clothes and do not. Perhaps I should. As her taxi draws away she wriggles her gloved fingers at me. I take the train out, feeling contented and substantial. Mary seems happy to see me, and the baby, also the others. We have a pleasant dinner but when I go upstairs she is asleep.

  The morning is very dark and the sense of the house is oppressive. I am served my breakfast with a scowl. I go into town, but when I return I feel that something has gone wrong. The fault may be mine. The faces on the street cut at my sense of self, my happiness. I a afraid of having an unsuitable erection. This is morbid, this is neurotic, but much that I see is morbid and neurotic. Very few of the faces I look into seem cheerful and self-contained. I read my stories and some of them seem to me good—“The Wrysons” very bad. Here is a contained, almost a complacent prose, and the substance of the story is nasty, nothing more. I wish my line were stronger, more vigorous, more involved, I wish I could strike a different level of seriousness. Lunch with B., home on the train, my cod sore. Mary cleaning the broom closet in the kitchen. She has repaired the toilet seat, which I should have done, painted the front door. I try to catch the roughness of my own nature, try to see how difficult I am, but there seems to be no bond between us, I seem to have no way of appealing to her. I feel that she does not love me, that she does not even imagine a time when she might. All the means of intercourse seem broken down. She seems crushed with unhappiness, with despair. I give the baby his bath, at the table I reproach Susie for grabbing a sugar doughnut and she cries. I ask why the table should seem so unpleasant and at the back of my mind is the knowledge that Mary’s father’s table was always a battlefield. I feel that I must speak and yet I do no good. I give the baby his bath, warm his clothes at the fire, and dress him. I read him stories, give him a bottle, and put him to sleep, virtuous I. Susie is out, so is Ben. The S.s come, the S.s go, I watch an old movie on TV.

  The boat strike goes on and our plans are unsettled. Work in the garden, sweat, the S.s for drinks. Sickle the backyard, play badminton, go to a garden party. I see a woman I have been blaming for three years for her divorce, but now it occurs to me that perhaps her husband was a neurotic sorehead and that the fault was mostly his. Talk freely with Mary and tie a can on. A beautiful summer’s day. Shifting winds.

  THE SIXTIES

  Memorial Day. A new notebook. A man wearing a powdered wig and a tricorne carries a bass drum past the liquor store. I do not take my younger son to the parade, as I would have done two years ago. I have grown this old, not to say jumpy. Taking Ben to see “The Bridge on the River Kwai” I think of X, who, suffering from melancholy, walked through the city looking for moving pictures that dealt with cruel and sudden death, torture, earthquakes, floods, and assassinations—with any human misery that would, briefly, make his own burdens seem lighter. And sitting in the movie I wonder if this cafarde, this immortal longing, this mysterious and stupendous melancholy from which I seem to suffer is no more than common alcoholism. So I look yearningly at the soft stars, but they will do me no good. I think of moral crises, but when have I known the taste of abstinence and self-discipline?

  •

  To describe human misery in all its vastness and intensity without creating an air of disqualification. To trim misery of petulance and morbidity, to give pain some nobility. But can one do this—can one handle tragedy—without some moral authority, some sense of good and evil?

  •

  Having drunk less than usual, having, as my father would say, gone light on the hooch, I find myself, for the first time in a long time, free of the cafarde. Quarter to nine. Eastern daylight saving time. It would be pleasant to consider this a simple matter of self-discipline. Thunder and rain in the middle of the afternoon; the first of the month. Our primordial anxiety about drought and its effect on the crops, the crops in this case being three acres of lawn and forty-two rosebushes.

  •

  In thinking of the book, I would like to avoid indecency, but to overlook the fact that we have, after a long struggle, achieved a practical degree of sexual candor would be like perching on a stool and writing with a quill pen by candlelight. We have the freedom to describe erotic experience, and it seems irresistible.

  •

  Since we lack a well-defined sense of good and evil, we find it impossible to invent a villain, and villainy is essential to the dynamics of narrative. The lecher is no longer villainous; in fact, his prowess is a virtue. The usurious banker is admirable; the bugger belongs to a minority that deserves our understanding; the murderer merely needs psychiatric help. It seems to me that the young come at this with less self-consciousness than we, and, feeling instinctively the need for villainy, conclude, perforce, that the adult world is at fault. Clean, decent, lusty, youthful procreative men and women are the targets of their anger and their scorn, while their only real fault is their inability to evoke a figure of evil. Cancer is villainous, but the devil seen through a microscope is lacking. In the end, we may put horns and a tail on death, that most innocent fact.
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  The congress of church organists produces fewer odd sticks than I expected. Several of the men would have passed in business; one of them actually appears to be athletic. And one of them—a small man—has a harried or demented look. The women have that look of widowhood or bereftness that sometimes seems to follow a life dedicated to music. Two of them are plump, florid, and dressed in pink. One of them has a liverish face that is deeply and unremittingly incised with pain. She appears to have been crying continuously. The national, cultural, and economic differences in the houses of God are abysmal. The painted memorial windows in the Polish church need repair. The church itself has a vast and institutional bleakness. The Stations of the Cross are bloody and vulgar. The floor is dusty. But, even so, there is something here: the unequalled poetry of our faith, this vast reflection of human nature, the need for prayer, love, the expressiveness of grief. Christ Church in Greenwich is a triumph of wealth and Trinitarianism in thi leafy corner of the United States. In preparation for a wedding, florists are tying white stock to the ends of the pews. This scents the air, not with sweetness but with an exciting smell of earth. The stained-glass windows are explicit, gloomy, and dated, but they have, like everything else in this house, the authority of great wealth. There is no baroque foolishness about the organ, no liquid and nostalgic reach. It is straightforward, wrathful, and thunderous, and has in its fainter ranges an echo like some sweetness of remorse. To be buried from this chancel would, it seems, assure one a place in Heaven.

  •

  The first land we see from the airport is France—Normandy, I guess. Gardens and rivers. Then the Alps rise up to the snowy massif—Mont Blanc; the massif makes a second horizon, and along the shore one sees Nice, Monte Carlo, Elba, and the house where we will stay. Like those people who, as the boat approaches Nantucket, point out loudly the houses of friends, we, approaching the coast of Tuscany, do the same. It is close to noon in Rome. Mary seems bewildered and disappointed. Ah, yes, she says when she hears the coach horn on a bus. And it is the coach horns. The smell of coffee, the sound of bells. We go to the Eden and spend the afternoon shopping. I am drinking gin at a coffee bar when two Americans come in to discuss, in sign language, some hot dog sandwiches displayed in the window. I speak loud Italian and express in this way some of my divided feelings about my own country. We go to the villa for cocktails and see from the terrace the city like a painted backdrop; we hear the famous bells.

  •

  In all the fields, after the rain, men and women go out to gather snails. We climb the hill to San Filippo. The noise of traffic, sharp and loud, comes from the curved road below us. I see a house across the valley that reminds me of Pennsylvania—a particular measure of verdancy and tranquillity. The massive beauty of the Spanish fort. There is no festival, but just before dark the sounds from the village below us are the sounds of a country fair—bells, music, laughter, the hum of voices.

  One sees here, in the space of an hour, the reversal of sexual roles. In the country the sky is black, there is thunder, and the farmers star coming in from the fields. The men ride comfortably astride their asses with bottles of good wine hung from their saddles. The women walk behind them, each carrying forty pounds of firewood on their heads and leading a fat sow by a rope. Along the Via Véneto some women stride along determinedly, each holding a guide book in one hand. Their husbands follow behind, sheepish, stooped, and depressed. Their clothes do not fit, and each carries in his breast pocket three cigars, two pens and a pencil. In a bar a man in shirtsleeves mumbles something to his wife, and she replies, in a voice that is light and tearful, “Well, it makes no difference to me.”

  So, we fly home. On the plane a heavy woman, a spinster, perhaps a schoolteacher, with flying gray hair, who takes from her pocketbook a dozen glass animals she bought in Venice and, unwrapping them one by one, holds them up to the light. Beside her a sexually uncommitted youth with large, well-cared-for hands, a pissy smile. In front of them a young man with a determinedly manly air, gruff voice, a manner that is both hearty and unfriendly. But halfway through the flight he finds an area of agreement with his companion, a soldier, and puts down his gruff and manly airs at the same time he puts down his paperback mystery. Now his face is clear, comely, pleasant to see; his smile is open; he seems as easy as a swimmer; and I think of the great energies we spend in imposture. As the plane approaches home again he is gruff and manly. And ahead of them an American, travelling with his wife and three children. His wife is brisk and attractive, but I think one could never find a Roman with so browbeaten an air as his. All the lines of his face are falling lines—formed, it seems, by worry, fatigue and disappointment. He looks—oh, so much more than his wife—like someone crushed by the cares of the household; he has the look of someone who has changed a diaper three times in half an hour. Now and then a little light comes into his face, and one sees that he must have been high-spirited and cheerful some years ago, but he seems to have lost his cheer in the dishpan.

  And the expatriate—a woman, I think—returning. Speaking Italian in the grocery store, stripping the gears on the car, and in a sense using these accidents as a springboard to explain to friends that she has been living abroad. How romantic.

  •

  The dog days go on. I read the Hemingway book. This arouses those mixed feelings we endure when some intact part of adolescence clashes with the men we have become. When I was a young man, my absorption in his work was complete. I imitated his person and his style. He writes with the galvanic distortion that gives the illusion of a particular vision; that is, he breaks and re-forms the habitual rhythms of introspection. I think I think his remarks about Scott’s cock are in bad taste, as may be the quarrel between Stein and her friend. I am for some reason embarrassed by his references to walking home on the dry snow and making love.

  •

  It was Sadie Hawkins Day at the country club. Women chose their golfing partners and paid for their drinks and their dinner. The double-entendres about balls kept them all laughing merrily from morning until night.

  •

  I read with great pleasure “Youth” and “The Secret Sharer”; but concerning the last I would like, at this time of life, to scour any hint of twilight from my work. There will be time enough for that. I would like to write something like Delacroix’s “Sardanapalus.”

  •

  In the men’s room at Grand Central there is a scene not quite comprehended. Two men, I do not see their faces, are pretending to fasten their trousers but are in fact exposing themselves. Presently, the show ends, and they go away, but I am shaken and mystified. Later, while I am having my shoes shined, one of them returns. His whatsit as well as his backside is on display, and the opportunities that he represents seem to me dangerous and fascinating. Here is a means of upsetting the applecart in an intimacy, a word. One could, with a touch, break the laws of the city and the natural world, expose the useless burdens of guilt and remorse, and make some claim for man’s wayward and cataclysmic nature. And for a moment the natural world seems a dark burden of expensive shoes, and garters that bind, tiresome parties and dull loves, commuting trains, coy advertisements, and hard liquor. But I take Federico swimming and find myself happily a member of the lawful world. Decency, courage, resoluteness, all these terms have beauty and meaning. There is a line, but it seems in my case to be a very faint one. I seem to move only on a series of chance recognitions, and when there is nothing recognizable about the face, the clothing, or the conduct I seem threatened by an erotic abyss. The sensible thing is to stay out of such places.

  •

  I don’t know how I will plan my three weeks alone here. I have no compelling work at hand. Loneliness is a kind of madness, but to take a room in town would expose me to questions and tensions for which I have no answers and no cures. My fatherlessness may be at the bottom of some of this, and if it is I would like to go on to something else, take another step, although I may resist maturity.

  •

 
; Either my age or some change in my humor makes the heaviness of the air in the valley these days depressing. At three there seems to be some intensification of this. The air appears to be smoky. There is a double note of thunder in the southwest. I observe that should the rain not come, should the storm not break, I would be bitterly disappointed. Then the storm moves around to the east and finally strikes the valley. The air is aromatic the instant the rain falls. Ben cuts a paper airplane for his little brother. The old dog will not leave my side.

  •

  There is a flight of black birds, starlings I guess, from the B.s’ woods. They come in twos and threes, in dozens and larger numbers; they seem, like the leaves in autumn, to unwind from the dark woods. This is no season for migration. They cross the sky travelling from the B.s’ woods to the S.s’ in thousands; one had not known there were so many starlings around. My son bets me a penny that we have seen the last of them, and when we have made the bet another flight unwinds. Later, we see swallows in pairs, and, later, bats. The woods that stand all around the sky darken. It is beautiful, I think, more beautiful than the rest of the world, as if some curious competition went on between Tuscany and the Hudson Valley.