When I first encountered the poem “To My Son Parker Asleep in the Next Room,” an urgency, a vortex occurred within me, as if awakened to a new viridity. Such reaction is not an exaggeration for a nascent poet to experience, especially one instinctively seduced by subconscious dioramas. It is a writing seemingly soaked by a surreptitious light from a vacated sun. Then reading poems like “Sheila,” “Unhistorical Events,” “Blue Slanted Into Blueness” became for me, like obscure motions spinning in a transfixed carbon house. I was magnetically engulfed.
As Kaufman poetically appeared with his broadsides he was already of seminal import, he was already the nizam, the rajah. According to the photographer Jerry Stoll, Kaufman was a “pioneer,” a “functioning … critic of society,” “much more social and political … than any of the other poets in North Beach … ” He carried his own migrational light which led “people like Ginsberg” into a greater activists’ capacity. In this regard, Kaufman was the proto-source, the engendered proto-Sphinx, who simply appeared without formal literary precedent, much in the manner of Lautreamont or Rimbaud. Of course, this is plain to us now, but in the atmosphere of the 1950s, with the case against the Rosenbergs still hissing, with the rasping carcinogens of McCarthy generally rife throughout the atmosphere, he showed unprecedented character. General threat corroded the foreground; metropolitan areas swarmed with informers, all enigmas were suspected. Noncondoned behavior was thought of as allergic, as partaking of treasonous errata. And Kaufman at this moment was the inscrutable lightning rod, possessed of courage and greenish defiance, who transmuted life into sound; into supernal ensembles of magic verbal liquid.
His “flaming water,” his “Indian suicides,” capable of conversing with a box of amoebas, capable of “shining” on “far historical peaks.” Kaufman in this register remains eminently uncontainable. In this he literally embodies the surreal in that not a single line is operatically planned or thought out as regards publishable criteria. But upon reading his work, levels of intensity are not lacking, nor is a spectacular use of oral language convened to suicidally incinerate the printed page with aleatoric detachment. No, the language remains powerful in book form, fused in its leaps by antisedentary scorching. Yet Kaufman seemed to swelter with an inborn hostility to literature and its sustained identity in the reductive. Because of this, his verbal tremblings remain profuse with usurpation and voltage as he acknowledged “the demands of surrealist realization,” as he challenged “Apollinaire to stagger drunk from his grave and write a poem about the Rosenbergs’ last days” while smouldering in the “Death House.” In the poem “Voyagers,” he speaks of
Twice-maimed shrews, ailing
In elongated slots
Of public splendor.
or, in “Afterwards, They Shall Dance,” he speaks of his face being “a living emotional relief map, forever wet.”
Where do we find lines like Kaufman’s in the present poetic American pantheon; lines stunning with irregular galvanic, with endogenous wingedness, with relentless surprise?
In the surge of Lamantia there are parallels, there are moments in Corso and Crane, in the visions of Daniel Moore, which synaptically lurk in the ricochets of his concussive charisma. He remains ulterior, clandestine, in the way his verbal cancellations deduct their actions in crossing subversive esplanades. And he poetically protracts this vapor across dialectical respiration being “eternally free in all things.” He spoke of “Java,” of “Melanesian mountain peaks,” of Assyria’s “earthen dens,” of Camus as a “sand faced rebel from Olympus.” So Kaufman continues to exist for me like a verdigris Phoenix, arising and re-arising from the poets’ ill-begotten lot even as he smoulders “in a cell with a view of evil parallels.”
The quintessential scion of chance linguistic praxis, Kaufman’s poems continue moment by moment to irradiate electricity. Continue within the range of immaculate verbal searing, spun from green elliptical finery.
Saying this, do I place Kaufman on a pedestal just to celebrate him in death, to claim inspiration from the sum of an abstract mirage? I can answer without hesitation, no. During the late 1970s and the early 1980s I would travel to North Beach as towards some internal Mecca, wandering its labyrinths around sundown, just to catch sightings of the darting giant flitting in and out of enclaves. These illusive glimpses were like poetic talismans for me, sparks of gold in the labyrinth. I would always see him on angles from a distance, and near the end of one auric afternoon we stood face to face at oblique remove, and I called out his name, and at the evaporation of his name from my lips he literally vanished into one of the teeming dives in the vicinity of Vallejo. Which immediately brought to mind the parallel of Pessoa and his spontaneous disappearances during his walks across Lisbon.
During this period he lived adjacent to Philip Lamantia. And it was one morning after emerging from a dozen-hour dialogue with the latter, that we walked across Harwood Alley to Neeli Cherkovski’s, who tended Kaufman during those days. It was about 8 A.M. one Monday morning, and Kaufman remained sequestered in the other room, as both of us peered at the original typewritten manuscript of The Ancient Rain. I mention this episode because both Kaufman and Lamantia have had instantaneous impact upon my poetic formation. Have made foray after foray into my hermetically sealed lingual athanor, and their verbal osmotics continue to seep into my imaginal ozone, letting me know moment after moment that imaginal radiance can prevail.
In discussing Kaufman, all academic insertion is passionately declined, is ravaged, with all its footnotes exploded. The contours blurred, the circumferences alchemically splayed by the beauty of mathematical absence. And I mean mathematics in its lower form, in its niggling banter concerning the petty matters of equated equidistance.
When poets sought shelter beneath an academic archway, Kaufman assaulted police, and was arrested more than thirty times in a single year. When poets sought for the proper form to ensconce their subject matter, Kaufman wrote of “Unholy Missions,” of “Heather Bell,” of the previously mentioned “Sheila” “cast out of rainclouds … on warped faded carousels.” The verbal structures collapse and revisualize, not in terms of a furtive literary comment, nor as an ironic line sustained by the pressure of brilliantly acceptable wit. Kaufman’s language condenses to aboriginal ubiquity, being that status of poet who heard his words as untranslated molten, like an abnormal eaglet deciphering his reptilian forerunners with intangible preciseness; the sound spun by “illusionary motion,” by the liquor of exploded roses, blazing as quantum mass beyond the reasoned scope of antideracination.
A poet who followed his own endogenous helical road, roaming through “vacant theaters,” erasing “taxable public sheets,” Kaufman so derealized the archives that he negated all rational effort by sifting through auricular winds of dialectical transparency, thereby mining an inevitable verbal aurum. The three dimensions magnificently destabilized and fleetingly focused like “Tall strips of carrion moonlight sparing only stars.” Thus he occupied a seditionary grammatical bastion, implying “a horror of trades.” He knew like Rimbaud that “The hand that guides the pen is worth the hand that guides the plow.” Thus, he threw routine and stasis into the quarrelsome antidotes of debris.
And even in death, Kaufman continues to magically advance across a blinding reticular sea, without the mercator’s imprisoning symmetries, electric with Utopias, far outside the parochial reportage of mechanical matching burins, poised as they are against the pure “fluidity of desire.”
Of course, Kaufman refuses to match, to sustain the subject of “conferences” à la Kerouac and Ginsberg, so crucially pointed out by Maria Damon. He continues to exist “beyond official Beat history,” beyond its canon as inscribed by the Whitney Museum, beyond the delineated form of the countercultural figure within the scope of defined exotic boundary. No, there is a more sustained projection from his blood, which at present remove naturally leaps the specific mercury of a bygone era, transcending its once arresting intent, spiralling into an expa
nded counterrotation, which occupies the poets’ true domain, which Parker Tyler on another occasion deemed the interior kingdom of “Elsewhere.”
John Cheever. Ossining, New York, 1976. Photograph by Nancy Crampton.
John Cheever and Indirection
Rick Moody
I FIRST HEARD THE NAME at boarding school. What better place to learn of the bard of the suburbs, if that’s who he really was. Creative writing at St. Paul’s School—as at many of your private schools—was frowned upon. It wasn’t considered a discipline. I enrolled two semesters anyhow, along with five or six other kids like me: marginal types who didn’t write realistic fictions about their teenaged lives or their elegant hometowns. They wrote of their melancholies.
Mr. Burns, our instructor, read to us from Cheever’s collection The World of Apples, and also from the novel called Bullet Park. The novel is noteworthy for the nomenclatural coincidences of its protagonists: Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer. This conceit seemed too easy to me. In fact, since I was writing science fiction at the time—and not even the Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard kind of science fiction, the good kind—I didn’t really understand Cheever at all.
For graduation, my dad gave me a trip to Europe—to Paris, London, Rome and Geneva. He also gave me a copy of The Stories of John Cheever. Foreign travel made me homesick, though, and I did nothing in London and Paris but read the Cheever stories. I lurked with my bulky red tome in the various parks near the hotel, in case Dad should permit me to fly home. In recognition of my afternoons spent reading, I decorated my hardcover copy of the Stories with a sticker (nontransferable) that allowed me to sit in a chair in Hyde Park. This luxury, back then, cost fifteen pence per diem.
I don’t remember thinking much of the stories. I thought they were neither good nor bad. Fiction was narcotic, the way I saw it, and that was what I liked about this particular book, though I also remember admiring one piece, “Three Stories,” in part narrated by a protagonist’s stomach (“The subject today will be the metaphysics of obesity, and I am the belly of a man named Lawrence Farnsworth”), as well as a catalogue-story entitled “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear.”
Next came the punk rock years, during which I threw out most of my dinosaur records (Genesis, E.L.P.) and replaced them with totems of a new orthodoxy, the bands of CBGB’s and of King’s Row. As part of this dislocation, I began to bristle at aspects of my biography. I began, for example, to refer to St. Paul’s as a high school— as if, like other people’s alma maters, it was just down the road and had a prom night. I began to avoid certain garments (Oxfords with button-down collars, tartan boxer shorts, loafers, tweed jackets), and to ridicule writers or artists or musicians or anybody else who seemed to have anything to do with the upper middle class or station wagons or cocktail hour or golden retrievers or show tunes or tennis lessons or backgammon or the Episcopal Church or ambitions for success in the world of finance. I began to ridicule the very archipelago of suburbs that had spawned me. I ripped holes in my T-shirts and jeans. I had my ear pierced by a friend.
Cheever, along with Updike, I suddenly included on the list of enemies of my new state. Who was this khaki-clad, Scotch-drinking New Yorker writer scribbling his sentimental prose about ordinary life? My resentments became more acute during my first year at Brown University when my freshman creative writing instructor, a graduate student, brought in The Stories of John Cheever as a model of good form, going so far as to single out the celebrated last paragraph of its first piece, which runs in part:
Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to inestimable greatness of the race, that harsh surface beauty of life?
Well, I was the kind of student writer who looked eagerly for the dwarf or the burn victim or the heartbroken octogenarian, who scoured the newspapers for the tale of the pit bull who’d ravaged the schoolyard (three dead, scores injured), and I could hardly think of the close of “Goodbye, My Brother” as anything but propaganda for readers who wanted only affirmation of their conventions, an impression exacerbated by the PBS-style beauty of the last sentence, in which “the naked women came out of the sea.” Nor did I care for the other, frequently anthologized Cheever stories my grad student instructor offered me: “The Enormous Radio,” “The Sorrows of Gin,” etc.
From freshman year forward, then, the mention of Cheever and any of his ilk was enough to provoke in me tirades about conformism and hypocrisy and oppression, about the schoolyard and country club cruelties I’d known back home. Ideally, youth is supposed to be flexible and open to ideas, full of reverence for the impromptu snowstorm or the poetry of kids crossing quadrangles with arms full of flowers and beer, overjoyed by certain loud guitars and amplifiers, altered once and for all in the thrall of great books, but above all disinclined to think prejudicially or to be contemptuous without investigation. Not in my case.
In the meantime, out of desperation and because of limited professional skills, I went to graduate school. There, in a literature class, I had yet again to confront those stories of Cheever. I’m powerless to describe exactly what changed in the five years between freshman year at Brown and spring semester of graduate school, what alchemy of bad jobs (recorded tour salesman, bibliographer), Upper West Side dusks and uncompleted romances did the trick, effected the transformation. I hadn’t yet been through any real tragedies—not of the butchering sort into which one might suture a change of heart. Maybe I was just growing up. The Cheever stories, of course, had traversed the interval intact. Their language was the same.
But in spring of 1986 the stories suddenly had a richness that they hadn’t displayed the last time I’d checked. They weren’t about surfaces anymore, but rather about contradictions and ambiguities beneath the “harsh surface beauties of life.” “The Fourth Alarm,” e.g., struck me as unusually poignant this time, in which the narrator cannot, apparently, tell the story he needs to tell unless he indulges: “I sit in the sun drinking gin. It is ten in the morning. Sunday. Mrs. Uxbridge is off somewhere with the children. Mrs. Uxbridge is the housekeeper. She does the cooking and takes care of Peter and Louise.” Then there was the justifiably celebrated “The Swimmer,” in which a pastiche of idyllic suburban poolsides (and further gin and tonics) culminates not in the bland affirmations I associated with Cheever’s early work but, rather, in a powerful and sudden desolation, as the swimmer approaches his home:
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’ for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone someplace else? … The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.
There were oblique ambitions here that I had been too rigid to notice earlier, and these ambitions were especially vivid in the conjunction of Cheever’s moral vision and the persistent inability of his characters to measure up to this vision. The best example of this later work awaited me, though, as I approached the last story in the collection, “The Jewels of the Cabots.” In recollection, it seems that the only readers in my graduate school class who liked the piece were the instructor and me. There was a persistent feeling, among my fellow apprentice writers, of mystification about this final story. What was it about? Was it about anything at all? Had Cheever perhaps gone so far with his rumored drinking that he was capable only of a narrative so demented and fragmented? “Jewels” had none of the crafted, understated grace of, say, “Goodbye, My Brother.” It didn’t seem to settle down and narrate. In its events, it wasn’t particularly credible. But for me it opened up a new stretch of highway.
*
“The Jewels of the Cabots” begins conventionally enough:
“Funeral services for the murdered man were held in the Unitarian church in the little village of St. Botolph’s.” Superficial impressions are invited immediately. Cheever implies a conflict in the fact of murder, with story to follow (that’s the formula), and the landscape is evidently the kind of smalltown, suburban scenery that we always associate with his work. In fact, St. Botolph’s is a location used profitably by the author elsewhere, notably in the novels The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal. We’re premeditatedly in Cheever country.
Almost immediately, though, the story begins to attend to more curious details: “The service was a random collection of Biblical quotations closing with a verse.” A random collection? The narrator muses upon the deceased, Amos Cabot, and Cabot’s abortive run at the governorship, as though this were the story, and so it would seem, until this potentially straightforward second paragraph suddenly yields half its length to a parenthetical about the narrator himself, though he’s neither a Cabot nor a significant actor in the lives of the Cabots. The substance of this preliminary digression is merely by way of introduction, in which this arguably fictional narrator encounters “a woman carrying a book of mine.” A book with the narrator’s photograph upon it. We are encouraged to take his aside either as “the truth” or at least as something quite near to it. This is either John Cheever’s voice or a constructed version thereof, and John Cheever’s remarks here constitute a violation of story space—one that’s right at home in the fiction of the seventies, if not in the oeuvre of the writer of “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river of light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”
Tributes Page 21