by John Updike
With all due homage to the insights and harmonies of his later work, the trilogy of early fanciful novels with parallel titles remains in my mind as perhaps the liveliest and blithest items of his production. All three begin with premises that seem impossible: a knight who is nonexistent, an empty suit of armor; a viscount who is half a man, with one eye, arm, and leg; and a baron who decides to live among the trees, vowing never to set foot on the ground. Calvino’s inexhaustible fancy and his great literary tact breathe life into these grotesques, and use them not only to illustrate metaphysical and psychological ideas but to illumine various historical epochs. The learning behind his flights of fancy was always solid and extensive; his make-believe was spun from the real straw of scholarship. Of the three novels, the most extended and the most charming is The Baron in the Trees, which serves as a metaphor for the Enlightenment and for the life of the mind. Moving from limb to limb like a bird, concocting for himself many ingenious arboreal amenities, Cosimo avoids the earth even in death, when the dying old man sails skyward in a balloon. Calvino, too, seemed to live well off the ground—though of course the trees he so agilely explored were rooted in reality. The son of scientists, he is never loose or vague in his inventions, even when they have the luxuriance of tropical plants. His creative impulse, if a single one can be discerned behind an oeuvre so variously antic, so tirelessly infused with intellectual play, was a curiosity concerning how men live with one another, in this crowded and paved-over world that they have made. His death removes from the global literary scene its most urbane star, its most civilized voice.
John Cheever—I
June 1982
INTRODUCING his collected stories, John Cheever wrote:
My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week and that were often composed aloud. I remember exclaiming: “My name is Johnny Hake!” This was in the hallway of a house in Nantucket that we had been able to rent cheaply because of the delayed probating of a will. Coming out of the maid’s room in another rented house I shouted to my wife: “This is a night when kings in golden mail ride their elephants over the mountains!”
The gusto, the abrupt poetry, the clear consciousness of which room is the maid’s room are all Cheeveresque. From somewhere—perhaps a strain of sea-yarning in his Yankee blood—he had gotten the authentic archaic storytelling temper, and one could not be with John Cheever for more than five minutes without seeing stories take shape: past embarrassments worked up with wonderful rapidity into hilarious fables, present surroundings made to pulse with sympathetic magic as he glanced around him and drawled a few startlingly concentrated words in that mannerly, rapid voice of his. He thought fast, saw everything in bright, true colors, and was the arena of a constant tussle between the bubbling joie de vivre of the healthy sensitive man and the deep melancholy peculiar to American Protestant males. He wrote, in Bullet Park, of a hero pursued by a cafard—“the blues” would be a translation—and he kept a little ahead of his own by means of beautiful sprints of art. His face always looked reddened and polished, as if by a brisk wind, though his hair was perfectly combed and his necktie tightly knotted. His characters cry out for the old-fashioned virtues—“Valor! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!”—while living lives exemplary in their modern muddle of emotional greed and misplaced aspiration. “Truly nostalgic for love and happiness” is how he described his generation. Though he was as alertly appreciative of contemporary details as any writer—his last novel breaks into a paean to supermarkets—he was born and bred on Boston’s South Shore, a pleasant, long-settled stretch that, like much of Massachusetts, has kept a visible residue of earlier centuries. From its steepled, shingled, sandy landscape Cheever distilled the lovely town of St. Botolphs in the two Wapshot novels, and it was there, in the First Parish Cemetery of Norwell, with its grassy hillocks and overarching trees, that he was laid to rest, alongside the traditional slate tombstones of his parents.
He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been. Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams; no one else satirized with such tenderness its manifold distinctions of class and style, or felt with such poignance the weary commuter’s nightly tumble back into the arms of his family. He made of the suburbs another episode in the continuing New World epic of Man’s encounter with Nature. Natural grandeur and human ignominy and dissatisfaction mingle in the haze from the cookout grill:
We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.
Thus spoke Johnny Hake, in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” before telling the reader how his quest for the good life led him to crime and repentance. It took an effortlessly moral nature to imagine fall and redemption in that realm of soft lawns and comfortable homes; Cheever’s sense of the human adventure lay squarely in the oldest American vein. Like Hawthorne’s, his characters are moral embodiments, rimmed in a flickering firelight of fantasy. Like Whitman, he sang the common man, the citizen average in his sensuality, restlessness, lovingness, and desperation. A suburban man infatuated with his babysitter should make a sad and squalid story, but in “The Country Husband” the story ends with a glad shout of kings in golden mail riding their elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever—II
November 1982
HE WAS a courteous fidgety man with a rapid laugh that ended in a blend of hum, snort, and sigh, as jazz singers used to end a chorus with “Oh, yeass.” He was wonderfully quick—quick in apprehension, quick to find the words he wanted, quick to move on. The prose reflected the man, except that what in the man sometimes seemed impatience was in the prose all golden speed and directness. In his first short story, written when he was seventeen and published in The New Republic, he wrote: “In the spring I was glad to leave school. Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.” The mature Cheever is already here, in these definite declarative rhythms, the unexpected but echt adjectives, the love of the outdoors. He loved air and light and smells and weather and flesh; he had, like his character Moses Wapshot, “a taste for the grain and hair of life.” If his novels and even some of his longer short stories surprise us with the directions they take, and lose thereby something of momentum, blame his very acuity and ardor, which were excited by any scent and found the heart’s prey trembling in every patch of experience. He was of an ever-rarer breed, a celebrant.
His life, which began in late May of 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts, followed a classic tripartite pattern: the provincial, sheltered home territory (Boston’s South Shore); the years of adult initiation in the big city (New York, from the early 1930s to 1950, with time out for war); and eventual settlement in suburbia (Westchester County and, from 1956 on, Ossining, in an eighteenth-century Dutch farmhouse). The major decision of his young life would seem to have been leaving New England and the company of his brother, Frederick, who was almost seven years older; versions of the break figure in his early short story “The Brothers” (1935) and in that splendid monument to his youth The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). By quitting the sleepy tidal land where his ancestors presided, Cheever created for himself a changeless paradise, to whose skating pond and steepled village profile his imagination recurred in his last extended work, a valedictory novelette disjointed by the pain in which it was composed but overall as luminous and rapt as its title, Oh What a Paradise It Seems.
Inherited Yankee notions of virtue and rectitude gave edge and shadow to the Manhattan sh
ort stories of which “The Enormous Radio” is the best known. At the age of twenty-two Cheever had become a contributor to the also youthful New Yorker. For three decades his short stories stood out, in that crowded display case, in a heyday of the genre, as the most trenchant, being at the same time strikingly lyrical, frequently comic, and overtly tender. He was a fine observer and, better yet, a brave inventor. He became typecast as a laureate of the comfortable suburbs, but in truth Shady Hill and Bullet Park were as much states of a religious mind as paradisaical St. Botolphs, the site of the Wapshot tales. His suburbs were anything but comfortable: vastly uneasy, rather, and citadels of disappointment, vain longing, disguised poverty, class cruelty, graceless aging, and crimes ranging from adultery and theft to murder. He sniffed out corruption with the nose of a Cotton Mather or a Hawthorne. The Puritan admonition to look into the darkness of our hearts was not lost on him. Though a great evoker of lust, he does not show it as a simple force, or love as an unmixed blessing; Rosalie, the nymph who brings sex into St. Botolphs, grows “weary of trying to separate the power of loneliness from the power of love” and, looking at a lover, sees that “Lechery sat like worry on his thin face.” When Rosalie is spied naked, Moses Wapshot, the spier, feels “shamefaced, his dream of simple pleasure replaced by some sadness, some heaviness that seemed to make his mouth taste of blood and his teeth ache.” Alcohol, another two-edged pleasure, figures on the whole benignly in Cheever’s vision of mundane happiness; yet as he aged it was eroding his life. It testifies to his strength as an artist and to the irrepressibility of his wits that as things fell apart he was able to make of his sliding sensations such poetic and universal stories as “The Ocean” and “The Swimmer”—this last a counterpart in nightmare to “The Enormous Radio” a generation earlier.
I had known John as a reader knows a writer for some fifteen years before we met, in 1964, in Russia. He and I were both guests of the state, and his lively fancy and brave ebullience lit up those potentially glum Soviet surroundings and made our days of touring catacombs and classrooms and speaking to wary clusters of writers and students as gay as an April in Paris. Ten years later, we lived for a time on opposite ends of Boston’s Back Bay. He had almost ceased to write. He taught and, living alone on Bay State Road as a Boston University faculty member, touched what looked like bottom. Being back in New England had activated dormant devils in him; the hellish atmosphere of Falconer contains those strange penitential months. He performed his duties in a daze and suffered cardiac seizures that might have proved fatal. His brother, who lived on Cape Cod, called his apartment every morning to see if he was still alive. Miraculously, he was. At last, in April, John returned to New York and signed himself into a hospital to be cured of alcoholism. He never took another drink, not even in the last days, seven years later, of terminal cancer. With sober dispatch he wrote his long-deferred prison novel, Falconer. With even greater success he collected his short stories, in a big shiny red book that appeared under everyone’s Christmas tree. Those old New Yorker stories had put on weight since their first printing: they had become the imperishable record of an American moment; the glowing windows of suburban houses would never again seem so beaconlike. If Cheever did not, like Hemingway, create a life-style, he did, like Faulkner, give a style of life its definitive fictional locale.
He was a gentleman, with a gentleman’s graces and scruples and sometimes a gentleman’s testiness. Expelled from prep school, he educated himself in the “elegant and savage and fleshy” world. He travelled widely and keenly and set some of his best later stories in Italy, where he lived for several periods with his family. He had one wife and often described connubial love. His books preach paternal nurture, and he practiced it with his three children. He served four years in the Army in World War II and wrote almost nothing about it. He could not, it seemed, write about people without imagining a town, without painting a backdrop of community. In a profession for loners, he was generous with praise and practical encouragement. His letters were as deft, kind, and droll as they were brief. In conversation he could be immensely, cascadingly funny. Like any quest of old, modern life for him was rimmed with the marvellous; his adventurers and adventuresses are beset by enchantments, monsters, sirens, strange lights. He himself, in his reasserted career, lived a redemptive fable. His never-gray hair burned away by cancer therapy, his trim outdoorsman’s frame softened and leaning on a cane, he accepted the National Medal for Literature on the stage of Carnegie Hall two months before his death with a speech that said, “A page of good prose remains invincible.” All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith.
John Cheever—III
July 1985
THOSE OF US even modestly acquainted with the work and life of John Cheever had heard of his first published short story, “Expelled,” written when he was seventeen and accepted by Malcolm Cowley at The New Republic; but it is still an invigorating shock to read it now, and to see so many elements of the Cheeverian genius firmly in place at an adolescent age: the declarative swiftness of the prose; the dashes of unexpected color (“the gravy-colored curtains”); the matter-of-factly mordant social eye (“Her skirt was askew, either too long in front or hitching up on the side”); the casually surreal detail (“He was a thin colonel with a soft nose that rested quietly on his face”); and the air of expectancy, a vibrant translucence wherein the momentarily disarmed narrator prepares to yield to the next tug of enchantment.
What happened to Cheever at Thayer is not here (and never was elsewhere) made clear: the circumstances that led the fictional Charles, with his manifest intelligence and precocious sense of style, to be expelled by his school are not explained by the story’s murmurs of leftist protest, of sympathy for Sacco and Vanzetti and their champion Laura Driscoll, dismissed from a “faculty [who] all thought America was beautiful.” Charles truthfully, five months after his expulsion, finds it “strange to be so very young and to have no place to report to at nine o’clock.” As Malcolm Cowley has described, the young Cheever had a hard row to hoe—on his own in New York in the depths of the Depression, trying to begin as a writer in a world of failing magazines, living in a three-dollar-a-week room on Hudson Street, making do on a weekly ten dollars supplied by his older brother, Fred. Within a few years, Yaddo and The New Yorker took him up, but in the meantime the school of hard knocks proved to be the alternative to Thayer; the adult Cheever—a superb, quick learner—was always somewhat embarrassed by the aborted nature of his formal education. A violence of indiscipline is implied by “Expelled” but not pictured, much as the vintage Cheever short stories were written around, but never openly confessed, a central problem of alcoholism. Curious circumstances and specifics are from the start sublimated into a quasi-religious imagery of stark and simple contrasts: “I wanted to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows. That is perhaps why I left school.… It seemed a shame to stay inside.”
The contrasting portraits of the two female teachers, the satiric sketch of the colonel’s inconvenient chapel address, and even the brilliantly wry opening section (similar, but for Charles’s unexpected dream of “dry apple trees and a broken blue egg cup,” to the beginning of Catcher in the Rye) are all in their material schoolboyish; it is the electric presentation that is alarmingly mature, with a touch of the uncanny, as the rare examples of literary precocity—Rimbaud, Chatterton, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Green—tend to be. True, the young Cheever had borrowed a bit from Hemingway and Dos Passos, and some of the sentiments were taken from their time; an enlightened liberalism generates an image of untypical ugliness and strain: “Because the tempered newspaper keeps its eyes ceilingwards and does not see the dirty floor.” But we feel, as we feel reading Thoreau and Lawrence, that the author has primarily put himself to school with the brooks and the wind, that a miraculously direct access to the actual has been established, in a language as solid as wood, and as quirkily grained. Cheever spoke as he wrote, with a rapid humorous poeti
c fancy and an ardor of intuition that did not invite revision; his voice is already here, and his keen and careless eye, and his gallant love of a world both magical and out of joint. It is touching and amazing to find these gifts in the possession of a self-proclaimed “lost” boy who, as he puts it, “lacks a place to stand where [he] can talk.” He was to find a place, and to talk enduringly; but something of the nervous radiance and careening momentum of this first published effort was to follow him all the way to the grave.
John Cheever—IV
July 1990
IT WAS WITH SOME SURPRISE that I read, in The Letters of John Cheever (edited by Benjamin Cheever, 1988), “Updike, whom I know to be a brilliant man, traveled with me in Russia last autumn and I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company. I think his magnaminity [sic] specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.” This was to Frederick Exley in June of 1965; somewhat later in the month he wrote Exley, of the same trip to Russia, “Updike and I spent most of our time back-biting one another. I find him very arrogant but my daughter tells me that I’m arrogant. We dined together at the White House last Tuesday and I did everything short of putting a cherry bomb in his bug juice. It made me feel great.”