The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  I read Berryman on rehabilitation centers. When I wake this morning my feeling of dislocation is very strong. I am nervous; my vision is poor; I keep singing Dartmouth songs that I can’t have heard for forty years. I’m a son of a gun for beer/I like my whiskey clear and if I had a son sir I’ll tell you what he’d do/he would yell to hell with Harvard as his daddy used to do.

  •

  A heavy rain at five. I am a boy again, a child. I hear the rain strike the air conditioners, watch it gleam on the slate shingles in Thursday’s last light. I read, sleep, dream, wake myself with the loudness of my voice. I am riding, wearing loafers, and my loafers keep slipping through the stirrups. “Short stirrups,” said Lila. “Did you ride much in Italy?” I never went near a horse in Italy. “She still loves you,” said the woman with braids.

  •

  I’ve got those picking-up-the-pieces blues; I’m feeling blue all the time. I’ve got those picking-up-the-pieces blues, can’t get the pieces on the line. I’ve got those picking-up-the-pieces blues, but the puzzle ain’t mine.

  •

  I was sprung from the alcoholic-rehabilitation clinic yesterday. To go from continuous drunkenness to total sobriety is a violent wrench. This moment, this hour, is the sum of the not immutable past and the necessity of a future. I don’t know where it began, and I might be able to retrace this year eighteen times without mastering it. It began, I suppose, with the pantomime on the other side of the river and continues this morning with a brief salutation, orange juice, and a little cold coffee. Now the house, containing two people, is still. Laughter seems to be my principal salvation. Laughter and work. I seem unable to resurrect the months in Boston. The role alcohol played is inestimable. I seem to have lost some manuscripts. I claim not to be troubled beyond worrying that they might fall into someone else’s hands. I cannot face the shame of having lost my moorings through drunkenness. I seem this morning to have lost twenty pounds and perhaps twenty-five years. One thing is the old drag-ass I used to justify by age. Ask me to take off the storm windows, but ask me tomorrow. Eat. Drink seventeen cups of black coffee. Since I claim this to be a means of communication, I must prove it. What do I have? The escutcheon, booze—but after a century as black as unpolished basalt, onyx, or anthracite. The representation of liberty and justice. The night of the cats. The visit, still unclear. I think of O’Hara kicking the shit in his forties and continuing to work. He was about the only one.

  I’ve changed violently, but nothing else seems to have changed. Looking for a good-night kiss, I find the only exposed area to be an elbow. The dogs wake us before dawn, and when I ask if there is anything I can do, the reply is distempered. Recently, she has seldom enjoyed sleeping with me. I’m the king of the mountain, but nobody seems to know it. You can do the set piece about watching the visitors leave.

  Day No. 2. I’m still very uptight but I think I won’t take Valium. The set piece I’ll aim at will be on liberty. There are three points of hazard. One is the euphoria of working at what I think is the best of my ability; one is the euphoria of alcohol, when I seem to walk among the stars; one is the euphoria of total sobriety, when I seem to command time. That bridge of language, metaphor, anecdote, and imagination that I build each morning to cross the incongruities in my life seems very frail indeed.

  In Russia, in the 1860’s or 70’s, one would have written, “The tiny village of X, a hundred and twenty-seven versts from Moscow, was mentioned in the encyclopedia as the place where a landowner had successfully bred a dog with a cat.” In France, a little earlier, one would have written, “La peu que nous savons de la petite ville de B—, nous savons parce que là se trouve un homme à deux têtes.” In my own country, in the fifties and early sixties, one would have written, “The little mill town of Pearl River was one of those small industrial communities that welcome the driver with a sign saying ‘OLD IN TRADITION, YOUTHFUL IN GROWTH’ and that are covered by a single Zip Code.” Today we are, thank God, spared these euphemisms and can say succinctly, “The little village of Pearl River was an asshole.”

  •

  Seventh day out of stir. It will be a week at 11 A.M. NO meeting last night, but I think I’ll need one tonight. Work, sandwiches. My only brother arrives at half past two to scrutinize my sobriety. We both seem rather clumsy about the facts of age. It turns out that he’s had a prostate operation, followed by a blood clot that nearly killed him. He pisses ten times a night. My digestive and urinary tracts are crippled by their encounter with institutional food, and my asshole is quite sore. Time sits with us at the table, an unwelcome stray. My brother goes into New York, looks at Grand Central, is frightened, and comes home. The phobic curse of my family, all of whom were afraid of heights, crowds, thunder, wealth, and fame. No, thank you. My daughter comes. She seems a little breezy. I read Carson’s biography, and I shall report to A. Half awake, I have a glimpse of my iridescence, or my erotic stratifications. At the lowest, a shade below the subconscious, I embrace Z. This may be the comprehension of death by the love of death. At a stratum approaching consciousness, I embrace Y at that disarmament table where my social and my erotic natures put their signatures on an honorable truce. Fully awake, I embrace X. She stands on the highest step of the stair, stands in the sunlight, calling, “Ben tornato, caro, carissimo.” I will draft two letters before I get to work.

  •

  I miss Big Brother’s telephone calls and wonder if he’s sauced. He shows in time and we go off to an A.A. meeting in an Episcopal churc behind the Hartsdale canine cemetery and across the street from the hair-transplanting center. “Southern California,” says my companion. The church, with its mortared fieldstone walls, aimed at being Trinitarian and wound up looking like a Neapolitan grotto. “Everything but the Virgin Mary,” says my companion. So, another meeting of no great moment passes.

  •

  Mr. Cheever says that his knowledge of confinement has been informed by the two years that he taught at Sing Sing; by being confined, as a writer, to a typewriter and a small room; and by having spent several months in various rehabilitation clinics for chronic alcoholics.

  •

  Twelfth day out, and I shall stop counting.

  •

  My sixty-third birthday. I feel as well as I’ve ever felt and thank God for this. Ben can’t come; Susie will be late. Mary says, “Shit, I’ve got this big piece of meat,” etc. It doesn’t matter at all. I am very fortunate and should go to church. Yesterday I worked, spaded the peonies, won 20¢ at backgammon, spaded some more, stepped in dog shit, took off my stinking shoes, and, washing the dogs, punctured my right foot on a cultivator. Mary bandaged the wound, and I went off to A.A. I could do a scarifying description of an old man in an ill-fitting suit, celebrating his 38th year of sobriety. They put out the lights and bring a cake with lighted candles down the aisle. An unseasonably cold wind blows out the candles. We sing: “Happy anniversary to you,” etc. One might point out that he could have done as well dying of cirrhosis, but that would be sinful. Returning here, I have acute pains across my middle and crawl naked and unwashed into my warm bed, where I fall asleep almost at once. Now I suffer from excessive loquaciousness, woolgathering, “Muskrat Ramble.”

  •

  Mary goes on one of her protracted shopping trips. One can only overlook that which is not to be understood. A letter from A., somewhat looser than his recent correspondence. I am spared a list of the perfumes that float in his window. He seems to be back on his tease routin, something I have seen clearly only for a moment. Read Saul. The wonderfully controlled chop of his sentences. I read him lightly, because I don’t want to get his cadence mixed up with mine.

  •

  Work in the garden, which is much untamed, with Federico. Buy cauliflower and bean seeds, and, later, three moribund trees. My regression involves a lively concern with the property. I don’t recall doing much. I read, make a stab at hedge clipping, eat a nice dinner, go to A.A. in Croton. The damp and cold church basement. A woman with
the blazing makeup and straw-colored hair of the town whore who used to work in Woolworth’s when I was a boy. A heavy woman with as much makeup. Our heavyset Irish leader, who twice, for mysterious reasons, speaks of unmanliness. “I mean, now you can feel tenderness for a man without no guilt,” he says. I split before the confession, which seems to take place at covered tables. Watch asinine TV with my son, sleep, wake on Sunday with work to do, but I seem, involuntarily, to be obliged to observe the day of rest. The dogs dig holes in the lawn, and I swear at them. Mary swears at the vacuum cleaner. Toward the end of the afternoon, I recall what I have done, in the rectitude of this environment. I could not, yesterday, and in this environment, confess to any of this, and yet I claim to be unashamed.

  •

  J. calls, T. calls, A. is the last to call. I lunch with T. and meet A. at the train. He smiles as he runs up the stairs, smiles both with his mouth and, it seems, with his hips. As he crosses the waiting room there is less of this. I take his hand with deep ardor but release it to turn the steering wheel of the car. I am profoundly stirred, but there appears to be no intellectual equivalent. A. seems, and no one else does at this point, to magnify the incongruities between my social and my erotic drives to the point of combustion. It is all forgotten in a night’s sleep, but I would like a better understanding of myself. Ben calls to say he has been offered a good job. My eyes fill with tears of happiness. I think of my father’s sentimentality, aimed more often at the world around him than at me. He could weep over a fading rose. I think I will not write A. until he writes me. I must do “The Cardinal.”

  •

  A letter from A., who refers to my beauty, my boyishness, and my lucidity. I snap at this bait so greedily that I cannot see my foolishness. I try to imagine the cynicism that would have been involved had I, at twenty-four, flattered my elders. We laugh at dinner, and while I am upstairs I hear the little dog singing. Susie arrives, quite high, and I am a little apprehensive about hubris, but I have no advice to give her. We go up to the pool, but I do not swim because my shoulder is still lame. So to bed; and at daybreak this Thursday seems like something placed in my open arms, placed on my lap; a bulk, a richness of light and darkness.

  •

  I read a short-story anthology from which I have been conspicuously excluded and see how right they were to leave me out. The tone of the stories chosen—most of them excellent—is much more substantial and correct than my flighty, eccentric, and sometimes bitter work, with its social disenchantments, somersaults, and sudden rains. I do see why some people describe my characters as weird; I see this before it gets around the corner.

  •

  At the A.A. meeting, I try to work myself into a conversation, but with no success. I sit alone, not uncomfortably. The first speaker is an alert, vigorous woman, whose legs have gone. The second is a very fat woman with a long history of arrests, jails, nut wards, suicide attempts. “I used to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds,” she says. It looks to me as if she still weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. The next is an elderly runt, the kind of social steerage whose enlistment the Navy used to encourage. One also saw them in the infantry. Great at doing their own washing and ironing; reliable and punctual when sober; and, with or without a record, moving with the dancey, back-to-the-wall airs of a convict. His voice is close to inaudible. He repeats himself. He describes contracting to gold-leaf the dome of the Baptist church. He sold the gold leaf and gilded the dome with paint he bought at the five-and-ten-cent store. After fifteen years the dome, he says, is still shining; but we all know the Baptist church well, and we know it has no dome. The next is a large, young man, not fat but close to it. He wears cotton pullover that shows his voluminous breasts and belly. His dark hair is long, and a thin lock hangs directly in front of his right eye. He removes this from time to time with a toss of his head. For me this is painful. My own right eye grows lame. Lying on a sidewalk outside a bar, he shouted that all he wanted was a little peace of mind, a minute—or maybe two—of being at peace with himself. All he wanted, after sixteen years of drugs and dope, was a minute of this and he never got it. My eyes are wet. The aggressive woman speaks again. She gave away her washing machine (while drunk) and had to take her washing to the public laundry, where she drank from a pint in the toilet. Shopping at the supermarket, she suddenly abandoned her groceries, drove home, and drank a half-pint of bourbon in the coat closet, exclaiming wow, wow, wow. The confessions are too lengthy, I guess, but in spite of my recognition of these cruelties, and my wet eyes for the fat man, the confessions seem to me to go on for too long, and I entertain the thought of a drink. There is no subject and no predicate for what I feel. This I don’t know, but I do know, moving blindly, that the answer is, “Nix.”

  •

  I wake at six. Last week I heard the bells of Trinity while I spaded the garden. This Sunday I will go. Kneeling, I am too deeply moved to shape a coherent prayer. I would like my daughter’s happiness, some largeness of my comprehension, but my feeling is inchoate and close to tears. One wouldn’t want to cry in the chancel, would one? The candles, the fires, are countless, and much of the force of this ritual is ancient and bold. I believe in God the Father. What a courageous declaration! The movements of the priest, the acolyte, and the communicants are like some vestige of a pavane. It is the tower bell that rings as we approach the mystery of the Eucharist. I am deeply moved. Leaving the church, I greet the priest, who has changed from his very heavy vestments—an inheritance from the haggard chorus boy who used to bless this flock—into the service white. “Good morning, John,” he says. He is the same priest—unnamed and uncalled-for—who gave me Communion when I was last thought to be dying. I’ve not seen him since. There is no mention of God’s will. We settle for an ardent handshake and loud laughter. We are both crying. The rain is so heavy that going from the church to the car and from the car to the house I get so wet that I have to hang my clothes to dry in the kitchen. I would like to call him, but I do not.

  •

  Uncommonly hot and humid. Reading Henry Adams on the Civil War, I find him distastefully enigmatic. I find him highly unsympathetic, in spite of the fact that we breathed the same air. Walker Evans once said that he was queer, and this struck me as an idle remark; but his descriptions of Milnes and Swinburne, and the posthumous gossip of the period that is, alas, known to me, bring the matter up once more. Absolute self-knowledge is, I believe, never a claim of a thoughtful man. The enormous, subjective prejudice that manipulates so broad a field as our memory is only a glimpse of the prejudices and whims that affect our judgments. So here is vastly connected Henry in London, quite androgynous and absolutely incapable of admitting any such condition. Here is the distortive force of society, and here is a most unnatural bloom. He praises a father he would happily murder and anticipates Freud’s illuminating the Commandments with Oedipus Rex. Honor thy father, that thy days may be long.

  •

  So we have The Return from the Mountains. I’ve been content these three weeks, and one source of my contentment has been the conviction that I can see my limitations from a different altitude and in the light of a different time of day. “Hi,” I shout. The response is faint. I lean for a kiss. There is none. If my questions are answered at all they are answered with a sigh. The groceries I bought are worthless, the corn is questionable, and would I mind if it is thrown away? “Not at all!” I exclaim, which means that it will be served. This is perversity and madness. She sweeps the floor, empties the wastebaskets, and spends the next two hours cleaning the refrigerator. Federico and I go for a swim. “She does not do this because she is mean,” says Fred. I do not embrace him or shake his hand. I don’t know what to say to him. I’ve lived with his brother through the same scene, and his brother now considers me contemptible. I can say to myself—to no one else—that his brother is full of shit; but I do realize how mysterious and beautiful his person is, and that judicious reproach, or even common sense, are cruelties in this case. I have been told t
o avoid emotional crises and extremes of heat and cold. This triumvirate will kill me. My heart is racing, from an emotional crisis. The sun is hot. The water is cold. So the scene is set for my assassination, but I must go into the pool to wash off this emotional uncleanliness, and so I do.

  •

  I am afraid to enter the house. I read on the porch. When I step in to get a drink, Mary asks in a sweet voice if I would like some crackers and cheese. So it is the old routine that her brother used to call Pavlovian, but this, perhaps, is taking it too far into the past. Clearing the table, I must struggle to keep from throwing the serving dishes onto the floor, but this was true—I remember this in detail, even to the figure on the carpet—when I was fourteen and alone with my parents. “Dear heart,” she says to Fred at table. Out from under my feet goes another rug.

  So through another summer night to the parish house, where I see people I like muchly. And I see how and why and how cleverly I catch the sound of the wind changing its quarter, the loudening clash of night sounds, and the moon’s being not quite full. I am troubled by the fact that this eccentricity can be used by me to justify my other eccentricities; to justify sexual engorgements that I will always doubt. And driving home through the summer night—through an uproar of noise (including the great horned owl in rut) and a confusion of odors—I think how contemptible is a woman who accepts her livelihood from a man for whom she has nothing but scorn and loathing. But what are her alternatives; what, then, is she to do? Neither of them can afford to set up separate households.

  •

  New journal. The right front tire needs air, and the car needs gas. This morning I am sad; quite naturally so, I think. That is, no unease is involved. I seldom wake in a vile humor, but I am often thrust into one. Seeing, in an unspeakably vulgar TV show, a man and wife touch each other lightly and tenderly, I am stricken. I always remember L. saying, “But I deserved better.” There is, of course, no such law. I think I know enough about the possible relationships between men and women to name my marriage as obscene and grotesque. I think there is nothing wrong in taking inordinate pleasure in the company of someone who will smile at me over the eggs. I’ve been breakfasting alone for years while my wife in the kitchen screams obscenities at the refrigerator. But it seems not quite right to put onto the shoulders of someone else the burdens of this miscarriage. I don’t think I have anything to worry about other than alcohol.