The work of one of the most important writers of the 20th century – revered by Nabokov, Hemingway and Capote – returns to bookstores. First there were his novels, Falconer, Buller Park and This Seems like Paradise and now his stories, fundamental pieces of contemporary literature. Successful and tormented, Cheever was one of the masters when it came to narrating the incompatibility and deterioration of human relationships with Lifeguard training near me.
In the preface he wrote for the selection of his stories entitled The Stories of John Cheever (1978) – the same one that Emcee has just published as Relates I and II–, Cheever makes a comparison between the first steps of a writer and those of a painter. According to what he says, in painting masters and apprentices establish alliances that prevent the latter from exposing certain immaturity errors in their works. The writer, on the other hand, says Cheever, “presents himself”, so that “even a careful selection of his first works will always be the naked story of his struggle to receive an education in economics and in love”. For this reason, Cheever deleted tales from his youth, which he found “embarrassingly immature.” And that is something to regret: it would be interesting to be able to observe the complete maturation process of this author, to be able to see how he was mutating his style until he reached something similar to perfection.
Beyond this, the appearance of Stories I and II is an editorial event to celebrate: it brings together sixty-one stories – most of them unfindable – that Cheever himself organized chronologically, although with a small modification so that Goodbye, my brother was in first place. Even so, there are still sixty-eight stories of his authorship that have not yet been collected in a book.
The demure narrator
Cheever is a unique writer: in addition to being a prolific author, he managed to be a best seller publishing first-rate works – Falconer(1977), for example, stayed several months in the first place of sales in the US, and also won prestigious awards, the National Book Award in 1957, and the Pulitzer (precisely for The Stories… ) in 1978, among others.
His first publication was an autobiographical short story, titled Expelled , which he wrote when he was expelled for smoking from Thayer Academy in Massachusetts at the age of seventeen. About the ending of Expelled we read: “At school, America is always beautiful. It is always the gem of the ocean and it is very bad that it is so. It’s wrong because people believe it. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and know nothing. Because the newspaper is always in a good mood and spends its time looking at the ceiling so as not to see the dirt on the floor. Because all they know and know is what the newspaper always tells them in a good mood”.
This unruly and outspoken teenager has little to do with the mature writer, proud of having achieved a “modest” style. In this apprenticeship, Cheever essentially acknowledges a debt to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker .– where he published one hundred and nineteen stories. According to Cheever, Ross taught him that “modesty is a form of speech as deep and connotative as any other, different not only in its content, but also in its syntax and images.”
The tightrope walker
The interview he gave to Annette Grant in 1969, John Cheever defined himself as an “intuitive” writer. “I don’t work with plots,” he said. I work by intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts.” Because of his style, he was compared to a tightrope walker, and it is an accurate comparison: at times, we do not know where his stories are based, what they are narrating. And that is his trademark: Cheever launches into storytelling without a net because he sees the plot as “the calculated attempt to capture the reader’s interest at the expense of moral conviction.” There is no other formula, to avoid this, than to abandon oneself to narrate.
In one of his press releases, entitled “My personal Hemingway”, Gabriel García Márquez makes an interesting comparison between the styles of Faulkner and Hemingway. He says: “Faulkner did not seem to have an organic system for writing, but rather he wandered blindly through his biblical universe like a herd of goats let loose in a glassware. When one manages to disassemble a page of his, one has the impression that it has too many springs and screws and that it will be impossible to return it to its original state. Hemingway, on the other hand, with less inspiration, with less passion and less madness, but with a lucid rigor, left his screws exposed from the outside, as in the railroad cars”. Continuing with this comparison, Cheever seems to be in the middle of the two: he is not blind, but he is not rigorous either. And in his stories there are no “springs and bolts”, but solid narrative pieces polished and assembled with skill and elegance. If, as García Márquez does, we compare his style of narration with the design of a train, it would undoubtedly be very similar to that of the model that Cheever has behind him –although without the rivets– in the excellent photograph taken by Donald Hallway in 1979 for The Washington Post, in which he is seen drinking coffee from a china mug.
Places, characters and atmospheres
Cheever doesn’t need a lot of characters or unfold big scenarios. Everything happens in a Manhattan apartment, in a restaurant, in a house in the suburbs of New York, even in a modest elevator where life just happens. The places matter less than the desires, frustrations and torments of his characters: always harassed by the loss of youth, class privileges, money, family or love. “He, or everything around him, seemed to have imperceptibly changed for the worse,” says the narrator of Goodbye, Youth! Goodbye, beauty! And in these stories, that feeling is recurrent. Especially when alcohol abuse appears. Cheever is one of the first writers to crudely show the scourge of alcoholism in the American middle class, evidently because for many years he suffered from it himself. His daughter, Susan, published Home Before Dark , a book in which she discusses her father’s rehabilitation, and says, “…it was like having my old father back, a man whose humor and tenderness I vaguely remembered from my childhood. (…) In three years, he went from being an alcoholic with drug problems who smoked two packs of Marlboros a day, to being a teetotaler for whom his main drug was the sugar in his desserts and the caffeine he drank instead of whisky.”
Cheever masterfully captures the signs of incompatibility or deterioration in personal relationships. And some links interest you more than others to display. Marriage, for example, is one of his favorites: with or without children, old or young, poor or rich, ambitious or conformist, executive or peasant. He likes to show them going to town, their country dreams intact, and failing – the Malloy’s in Oh, City of Shattered Dreams , which includes one of the best scenes in all the stories, when Alice Malloy, in the middle of a rich party , at the end of the song Mrs. Bachman had taught her (and which ended with “I’ll lay me down and dee”), collapses on the floor for emphasis, causing a woman’s necklace to burst with laughter. Or the other way around, when they go from the city to the country in the hope of finding some peace – the Hollies in Summer Farmer . Or simply while they are at home, sensitive to any intrusion or disruption of routine – the Westcott’s in The Monster Radio.
But it is the narrator of the story entitled The Five Forty-eight Train who seems to best synthesize Cheever’s thinking on marital relations, when he says: “Anywhere there are voices of marriage – the patio of a hotel, the holes in a ventilation system, any street on a summer night – harsh words will be heard”.
Not in vain did he demonstrate – in The Rural Husband – that a plane crash is less stressful than family life. Especially when the children are young, your wife drinks too much and you come home tired after work.
Incidentally, this is a scene that Cheever took forever: driving home at sunset from a hectic day and meeting the family. He also repeats other scenes: cocktails, beach days, train trips… And he can do it because he is less interested in thematic variety than in the search for new narrative procedures. “Fiction is experimentation –he says–; if it ceases to be, it ceases to be fiction.” Hence, in each story he innovates in the way of narrating, and thus manages to create a particular atmosphere for each one of them. In this sense, among the best are those that border on the detective genre, and those in which, like Hitchcock in The Man Who Knew Too Much , or Fritz Lang in The Vampire of Dusseldorf, Cheever doesn’t hesitate to put a girl in danger to gain intensity – The Hartley’s or The Sutton Place Story . “The first principle of aesthetics is interest or suspense,” he declared. You can’t expect to communicate with anyone if you’re tedious.”
The solid green water
In his literature classes, Vladimir Nabokov – who said he was, like Hemingway, an admirer of Cheever – recommended not to start a work with generalizations. “A generalization takes us away from the book before we have begun to understand it,” he says. John Cheever seems to have taken note of this advice as a narrator. If something is repeated in his stories, almost like a formula, it is the beginning. It doesn’t matter if the story is written in the first or third person, the narrator quickly takes care of letting us know what the protagonist’s name is, what he works for, what his marital status is and how old he is. Everything else is uncertain. We never know what’s going to happen, because we don’t know what’s beyond the first paragraph. Hence, reading a Cheever story is an experience similar to going for a deep-sea swim. Farewell, my brother , when they go down the cliff to get away from Lawrence, but also to swim in that “solid green water” and feel refreshed, “as if swimming had the purifying force that baptism demands.” In the same way, immersion in Cheever’s literature seems to have a healing effect on each of us.
