The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  A new journal, and I have only to observe that I seem impelled to write nothing, not even letters. I can’t remember what I did when I finished the last novel. I went alone to Rome late in the winter. As I came to the end of “Bullet Park” I felt the need to overhaul my approach to things; that is, to avoid constructing fiction out of the minutiae of upper-middle-class life: She was the kind of woman who gave all automobiles and many other appliances the feminine gender. The Volkswagen, refrigerator, and washing machine were all “she,” and when they broke down they were described as sick. “She is sick,” she would say of the refrigerator. She spoke freely to traffic lights and described the car as being thirsty.… I would like to stop this sort of thing.

  •

  In trying to clarify my past, it would be much easier if I could look back with pure bitterness and scorn. If I could damn the sexual ignorance and suspiciousness of my parents, damn the ghastly wreckage of their marriage, damn the house, the neighborhood, and the schools I attended, it would be clear and easy, but their affairs were a mixture of excellence and stupid cruelty. The fact that I was often very happy seems in retrospect to be a massive limitation.

  •

  Federico carves his pumpkin, and we get it onto the porch and lighted before night falls; but either I am morbidly sensitive or drunk, or Mary is maldisposta—things are not cheerful. She seized the galleys and read them straight through. “Of course I cannot judge the book,” she says, “because I know in every case the facts on which it is based. Hamme is revolting.…” Since there is some correspondence between Hammer and me, I am offended or wounded. “Isn’t it better than the ‘Scandal’?” I ask, but she doesn’t reply. Praise, however foolish, is very important to me now. I invent praise.

  •

  At eight o’clock, on All Hallows’ Eve, in the middle of a TV show of incredible vulgarity, the President of the U.S. announces that we will stop bombing in Southeast Asia. He is tired. The face seems wasted, one might say corrupt. He uses the first person pronoun more often than I think is necessary and seems, through a massive egotism, to have damaged his ability to communicate. There is no jubilation to this announcement, but this may be because I am drunk. I am skeptical, and the possibility of expediency or cynicism is inescapable.

  •

  Election Day, and I have the brains not to stay up for the returns. Mary’s friend arrives quite late, and I do not see her; and why should I take such an uneasy dislike to someone I have not seen? Unable to sleep, I make out with Mia Farrow in Leningrad and wander around Rome again. I have, in my memories, walked around Rome so often that these days I find myself in the slums that ring the old city. Past the Borghese Gardens I run into slums; I see the slums on the Aventine, the slums past Santa Maria. Santa Maria, I say, was constructed to commemorate a miraculous fall of snow. There are some splendid early mosaics, but they are so poorly lighted as to be invisible. Coming into Rome on the train during a thunderstorm on some late afternoon, I saw a naked man in a shed, washing himself from a bucket. He was washing himself very carefully. Why should this figure seem so enviable? He might be going to work in a dirty trattoria and suffer the abuse of a distempered cook. Driving toward the sea from Siena I saw a young man pulling off his bathing trunks at the edge of a stream. On the steps of a boat club in Venice I saw a man taping an oar. Why do I long for these circumstances? It seems that in my coming of age I missed a year—perhaps a day or an hour—so that the consecutiveness of growth was damaged. But how can I go back and find this moment that was lost?

  •

  I have been on the spiritual, alcoholic, and emotional ropes for six weeks, and I don’t know how to get off them. To ration my drinks is one way, but this sometimes amounts to nothing but a struggle. I could go to a shrink, I suppose. I could get more exercise. There is a path through the woods that I can take this rainy morning; but instead I will take the path to the pantry and mix a Martini. Look, look, then, here is a weak man, a man without character. Dishonesty is what one means, purposeless dishonesty. It is the most despicable trait. You take a nap and claim to be tired from work. You hide a whiskey bottle in the closet and claim to be a wiser man than your friends who hide whiskey bottles in the closet. You promise to take a child to the circus and have such a bad hangover that you can’t move. You promise to send money to your old mother and do not.

  •

  The legitimacy of otherness. The dentist. The eyes are, for a man, soft; the mouth pretty; the face a little coarse now with age and fatigue but must, when he was younger, have been appealing. On his hideously elaborate office wall is a photograph of the warship on which he was dentist; also a photograph of him in a scant basketball uniform—a comely youth. I think my suspiciousness is perhaps more prominent than his oddness, and yet there is some otherness here, and if we became friends our friendship would be based not on a shared enthusiasm for professional football but on a shared memory of aloneness, improbable dreams or ambitions, disappointments.

  •

  Dressy, scented, strung with pearls, and quite alone, they order beef Wellington and leave it half eaten. It troubles me that their dilemma should seem so apparent. The jocular businessmen at the bar—laughing and drinking—offend me deeply because (I think) so little of their nature is hidden. This is the square world and I detest it. Walking on the streets, I am not pleased by the crowds. Looking for a pretty girl, I find none; and even if I found one she would not be my salvation. Because of this, perhaps—this invertedness—the dark hotel room, and my own nature I have, at dusk, a powerful yen for Ganymede. I love him. I want to talk with him, embrace him, debauch him. I call him, and th sound of his voice pleases me. I wonder if this could have something to do with my early life with my brother. He says that he may call me later. Oh, what bliss it will be! But when I come in at eleven the yen has vanished, and if the phone rang I think I would not answer it. It is not the ardor of my desire that astonishes me but the mysterious ease with which it comes and goes. So this is my nature; this and gin.

  •

  As for holy matrimony, she wrote in August of the same year to her old friend Lady Agatha Simmons, it is not all advantages. He has, of course, a male member. It is an ugly color and has a tip like an enormous radish. He likes to thrust this, rudely, into my privates. Then he makes a pumping movement, and presently there is a discharge of fluid from the radish. When this happens he makes loud animal noises. I do hope he will soon tire of this.

  •

  We leave for the tropics in a light fall of snow. The traffic on Long Island is hellish, and if the plane had not been delayed we would have missed it. I say that the planes we travel in these days are a little like the buses that used to take the unemployed from city to city in the thirties. The air is bad, some of the seats are broken, there is a general atmosphere of disrepair, nomadism; and this is hyperbole. The fuselage looks like a tenement roof. We come out of the snowstorm into a hot night in Puerto Rico. The mixture of black and white seems to generate some sexual force. The powerful eroticism of travel—one travels with a hard-on. There are some prostitutes in the waiting room, including a youth in yellow trousers, his hands draped limply over his prick. He’s not bad-looking. How did a boy like you get into a spot like this? Don’t you want to marry, have children, breed dogs? Where would one take him, and what sort of performance would ensue? My curiosity proves my innocence. We fly farther south, and at two in the morning, in the harsh light of the airport, we seem singled out more by some force of judgment than by the wish to travel and see the world. We seem penitents. There is a country-club couple, bound, I guess, for the Hilton. His face is boyish and ravaged. She shakes her yellow mane girlishly. It is nearly three in the morning when we reach the inn.

  •

  I remember none of it clearly this morning. I cannot seem to summon or recall the sea and the beach. The Caribbean is the color of the Caribbean, and the sound of the waves is much less vehement, much less resonant than the sound of the Atl
antic. One walks on the coral strand. Clink clink. The coral under one’s sneakers clinks like hotel china and small change. Golgotha. Clink clink. Fibula, tibia, brain, kidney, and the bones of a thousand fingers. I do not snorkle, because (I claim) I am unable to hold a tube in my mouth, and while this is partly true, it is also true that I suffer from both claustrophobia and vertigo. I read Graham Greene and sneak up from the beach at eleven for a scoop of gin. They travel to the tropics and read Rex Stout. They travel to the tropics to get a tan. The husband oils the wife. The wife oils the husband. They stretch out in the sun. Ten minutes on one side. Ten minutes on the other. They lie with their feet in the air to get some color under the chin. One man has achieved an exceptional shade of gold. His body—or what I see of it—is hairless, and comely. His chest is unmuscular, and when he rounds his shoulders he has small and fetching breasts, like the statues of Apollo. The face is not much—darkened, I think, by vanity. Returning to the beach at dusk, I find him with a towel looped around his neck like a skater’s scarf. Aha! Narcissus. Watching the sunset, I drop my trunks and get my cock between her legs. We make out. We make out at sunset, make out after lunch, make out before going to sleep. Once while I score she holds a glass of ice water in her hand and does not spill a drop. This is not a source of bitterness. This is to observe the invincibility of a hard-on.

  •

  Dear Lord—who else?—keep me away from the bottles in the pantry. Guide me past the gin and the bourbon. Nine in the morning. I suppose I will succumb at ten; I hope to hold off until eleven.

  •

  I revert to the expedient of reading my own work as a sort of tranquillizer. It doesn’t really hold my attention, but it does pass the time. The pills do not seem strong enough, and I drink at eleven. However, I take only one nip after dinner and sleep well. I dream a movie in full color. It begins on a deceptively decorous note and then moves gradually into a bloody Bedouin war. The audience is rapt until the Bedouins leave the screen and behead all those in the front row. “Why, it’s real!” the survivors scream as they run into the street. It was produced in Mexico City and was directed by a young woman named Juliet Morro, with whom I have coffee at a café. It is playing in New York at the Left Bank Cinema, on lower Fifth Avenue. There have been 742 performances.

  •

  Two scoops for the train, a scoop at the Biltmore, a scoop upstairs, one down—five in all, as well as a bottle of wine with lunch and brandy afterward. We rip off our clothes and spend three or four lovely hours together, moving from the sofa to the floor and back to the sofa again. I don’t throw a proper hump, which disconcerts no one; I’ve always had to count on circumstances and luck; so it’s all finger-fucking, sucking, tongue-eating, arse-kissing, bone-cracking embraces and earnest declarations of love, with my cock in her mouth and my tongue up her cunt. She is very beautiful. The figure is slender, but her arse is heavy and her breasts are big. “Oh, let me take your cock back to the Coast,” she says. “I love your cock. I can’t even think of you on the other side of the world without coming in my pants. I’ve never felt like this about anybody else.”

  •

  I think fleetingly of the subtle effect computers have on our sense of life. We seldom see the consoles that arrange our taxes, bank deposits, salary checks, and medical prescriptions. They are mysterious, entrenched, and, as we know from experience, very often mistaken. A thousand dollars vanishes from the savings account; mysterious traffic summonses arrive from cities we have never visited; we are overcharged and undercharged; and, while we protest these errors, it is with a sense of helplessness. The computer is invincible, unseen, and antic; at times cretinous. It is a blow to our best sense of reality.

  •

  The substitution of physical pain and infirmity for melancholy seems not to have worked. I am simply saddled with both.

  •

  I must convince myself that writing is not, for a man of my disposition, a self-destructive vocation. I hope and think it is not, but I am not genuinely sure. It has given me money and renown, but I suspect that it may have something to do with my drinking habits. The excitement of alcohol and the excitement of fantasy are very similar.

  •

  For the next year, he did almost nothing but answer his mail and enjoy a life of idleness in his pleasant country house in the hills above the Hudson River. The only writing he did was to make an account of his drinking. “First scoop at half past nine,” he would write. “Held off this morning until eleven-twenty-two.” Sometimes the accounts were more extensive. “Sat this morning in the parlor at half past nine,” he wrote, “reading the Sunday Times.” Riots in California. Nudity on the stage. Wanting a drink but determined not to mix one until Mary had left the kitchen. I had decided on a gin-and-tonic. Her comings and goings took more of my attention than the news in the paper did. Had she made the beds? I went upstairs to see. She had. There were clothes in the washing machine. When the machine had finished its cycle she would probably hang the clothes on the line, giving me a chance to mix my drink. Now she was arranging flowers in two vases. The vases belonged in the library, and when the flowers were finished she might take the vases upstairs, giving me a chance to slip into the pantry. However, when the flowers were finished she left the vases on a table and began to crack hard-boiled eggs. What was she doing this for? We were going to the W.s’ for lunch and had no use for hard-boiled eggs. She went on shelling eggs while my thirst got more intense. By the time the eggs were shelled, the washing machine had stopped. She took the clothes out of the machine, and put them in a hamper. I was ready to streak into the pantry, but she didn’t hang the clothes on the line. She then stepped into the parlor—on her way upstairs, I hoped—but she then noticed a smear on one of the windowpanes, returned to the kitchen for a rag and some window-washing stuff, and polished the dirty light. She then returned to the kitchen and, to my absolute horror, unfolded the ironing board. She seldom, if ever, irons, and this maneuver seemed to me unfair. I supposed she was going to iron the wrinkles out of the dress she would wear to lunch. This oughtn’t to take more than fiv minutes, but five minutes was more than I could wait, and in full view of my wife, and the world, I went into the pantry and mixed a drink. It was eighteen minutes to eleven.

  •

  On the screen four naked men appeared to be doing something to one another, although the scene was so badly lit that you couldn’t be sure. Then the light increased, and there was no doubt about what was going on. A stranger seated on my right put his hand—accidentally, it seemed—on my knee, and I got up gracefully and moved to another part of the theatre. I wanted to avoid encouragement and scorn. On the screen the four naked men had paired off, and the scene appeared to be shot through the opening of a man’s trousers. I thought then, but without nostalgia, of the movie theatres of my youth. In the small town where I grew up there was only one. It was called the Alhambra. It was not palatial, but there was a golden proscenium arch, and some plaster wreaths on the ceiling. My favorite movie was called “The Fourth Alarm.” I saw it first one Tuesday after school and stayed on for the evening show. My parents were alarmed when I didn’t come home for supper. On Wednesday I played hooky, went to the one-o’clock show, and was able to see the picture twice and get home in time for supper. I went to school on Thursday, but I went to the theatre as soon as school closed, and sat partway through the evening show. My parents must have called the police, because a patrolman came into the theatre and made me go home. I was scolded and I believe I cried. I was forbidden to go to the theatre on Friday, but I spent all day Saturday there, and on Saturday the picture ended its run. The picture was about the substitution of automobiles for horse-drawn fire engines. In some fictitious city there were four fire companies. Three of the teams had been replaced by engines, and the miserable horses had been sold to brutes. One team remained, but its days were numbered, and the men and the horses were very sad. Then suddenly there was a great fire in the city. One saw the first engine, the second, and the th
ird race off to the conflagration. Back at the horse-drawn company things were even sadder. The men sat around the firehouse in an atmosphere of dejection. Then the fourth alarm rang—it was their summons—and they sprang into action, harnessed the team, and galloped across the city. They put out the fire, saved the city, and were given an amnesty by the mayor. I would open my Lifesavers and wait for it to start all over again. It seemed that I couldn’t get enough; but I could get enough of what was going on among the naked men, and I got up and left.

  •

  Yesterday my older son was married. I rang the church bell.

  •

  Veterans Day. The paper reports an unusual number of patriotic demonstrations, but the Times is noncommittal. I wish I could understand those men and women who feel Communism to be an acute threat to their way of life, their spirit. People who favor the war in Asia drive with their headlights on. Between here and Harmon half the cars have their lights burning. I find something menacing in this mute and anonymous means of communication. One takes a stand—makes a threat—but the face is never seen, and nothing, of course, is said. So we pass one another’s dark lights and lights that burn—taking sides in a bloody war.