Concluded June 25, 2012
Books
Bailey, Blake. Cheever: A Life. NY: Vintage, 2009.
Cheever, John. Collected Stories and Other Writings. NY: Library of America, 2009.
---. Complete Novels. NY: Library of America, 2009.
---. The Journals of John Cheever. NY: Knopf, 1991.
See also . . .
The Critical Response to John Cheever. Ed. Francis J. Bosha. Critical Responses in Arts and Letters 6. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.
1. 1912-1938
Bailey, Prologue & ch. 1-6
Other Writings
My Friend, Malcolm Cowley (1983)
Why I Write Short Stories (1978)
Stories
Expelled (1930) B-
1st published story: New Republic. Including history teacher fired for speaking truth rather than patriotism and for helping students learn rather than prepping them for Harvard, where few from the school go anyway.
Brooklyn Rooming House (photocopy) (1935) C+
1st New Yorker story.
The Autobiography of a Drummer (1935) B-
Of Love: A Testimony (1935) B+
In Passing (1936) C
Play a March (1936) B-
The Brothers (1937) B-
Homage to Shakespeare (photocopy) (1937) B-
Reading Shakespeare makes a man feel noble, and makes him do foolish things. (Cp. antinomianistic gnosticism.)
In the Beginning (photocopy) (1937) B
His Young Wife (photocopy) (1938) C+
2. 1938-1945
Bailey, ch. 7-10
Other Writings
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1971)
bad behavior, "and yet in his work and in his letters to his daughter he preserved an angelic austerity of spirit. Noble might be a better word, since as a boy in what had been the frontier town of St. Paul he had considered himself to be a lost prince. How sensible of him. His mother was a ruthless and eccentric daughter of a prosperous Irish grocer. His gentle father belonged to the fringe aristocracy of the commercial traveler, moving from Syracuse to Buffalo and back again. How else could he explain his giftedness?" [The contrast between life and work, even the parents, sound like Cheever.]
"here and there one finds those appalling lapses in discipline of a serious writer working to support a beautiful and capricious wife"
The Melancholy of Distance (1977)
Of Chekhov
"One does not ask of a short story does something happen? One asks is it interesting?"
"The content of his work seems to me as formal as the earliest tales we possess, but it was innovative genius to seek form at a stratum more profound than the simple lines of a pursuit."
"a mastered irresolution"
Describes the post-, pseudo-Chekhovian story: "A woman dresses and leaves her home. We are spared no boring detail. We know the color of her dress, the shape of her door key, the condition of her front porch. She goes to the store and buys a deck of playing cards. The clerk tells her that his favorite cockatoo has died. We follow her home step by step and watch her put her deck of playing cards into the refrigerator. The telephone rings and we have a long and inconsequential conversation between her and a neighbor about the difficulties of making celery soup. When this conversation ends she decides to play solitaire, but she can't remember where she left the deck of playing cards. Oh where can they be? On this note of mystery, or another note of mystery one may choose, the story ends. Throw in some sexual intercourse. Throw in some perversion if the day is rainy. But nothing really helps."
Stories
Saratoga (photocopy) (1938) C+
The Happiest Days (photocopy) (1939) B
The Man She Loved (photocopy) (1940) B-
Summer Theatre (1940) C-
Forever Hold Your Peace (1940) B
When Grandmother Goes (1940) C+
Publick House (1941) B-
These Tragic Years (1941) B
Family Dinner (photocopy) (1942) C+
My Friends and Neighbors All, Farewell (photocopy) (1943) B
Town House (1945) C
The first of a series of six "Town House" stories published in The New Yorker
3. 1945-1949
Bailey, ch. 11-12
Stories
The Sutton Place Story (1946) B
Child Deborah lost while Mrs. Harley lets Renee take care of her so she can go to church. Found.
Roseheath (1947)
Neighbors visit new residents, who swim naked. Neighbors won't return.
The Enormous Radio (1947) B+
First truly Cheeveresque story, but a little too clever perhaps in its first sentence (I think of Tolstoy having done the same thing better in ch. 2 of "Ivan Ilyich" and in its central conceit, with radio that lets Westcotts hear other families and makes Irene worry that others can hear back and worry she and Jim aren't happy; Jim yells at her for being "Christly" suddenly. Radio as snake that reveals true nature of an apparent Eden. Irene's worries as self-fulfilling worries.
Perry Meisel, in review of Stories: "What is shocking about the story's final scene, however, is . . . that the imperturbable and virtually blank Irene . . . has suddenly acquired the abusive rhetoric of intimacy from overhearing the lives of others."
The Common Day (1947) C+
Child Carlotta visiting farm among servants and father killing coon in garden.
Torch Song (1947) B+
Jack Lorey thinks of Joan Harris as the Widow. With different abusive men, then visits Jack, and he yells at her to get out, because he thinks her caring for him means he's like one of those men. Also, Joan as Death figure, or as figure who highlights male degradation and death.
"She was innocently and incorrigibly convivial, and would get out of bed and dress at three in the morning if someone called her and asked her to come out for a drink, as Jack often did."
"It was one of those trains that move slowly across the face of New Jersey, bringing back to the city hundreds of people, like the victims of an immense and strenuous picnic...."
"Hugh Bascomb got very drunk. He began to spill liquor, as if drinking, for him, were a kind of jolly slaughter and he enjoyed the bloodshed and the mess."
O City of Broken Dreams (1948) B
Evarts Malloy and family move from Indiana to NY so he can write plays, after his wife made visiting Murchison read first act of his play about Mama Finelli, whom later Murchison gets to sue Evarts for libel. Malloys return to Indiana or go to Hollywood.
The Summer Farmer (1948) B+
Thinking the Russian Communist with the decrepit mare poisoned the pet rabbits.
The Hartleys (1949) B
Once-separated couple, for the sake of daughter, take ski vacation to try to restore happy relationship. Daughter dies.
Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor (1949) B+
Poor bachelor elevator operator. Experiences generosity, feels giddy joy, which leads to quick firing. But feels joy and power from giving to less fortunate landlady and family, who also have too much and give to someone even less fortunate: "she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over."
The Opportunity (photocopy) (1949) B
4. 1949-1952
Bailey, ch. 13-14
Other Writings
What Happened (1959)
"I count among my relations people who feel that there is some inexpungable nastiness at the heart of life and that love, friendship, Bourbon whisky, lights of all kinds--are merely the crudest deceptions.
My aim as a writer has been to record a moderation of these attitudes. . . ."
My aim as a writer has been to record a moderation of these attitudes. . . ."
On "Goodbye, My Brother": "I had spent the summer in excellent company and in a landscape that I love, but there was no hint of this in the journal I had kept. The conflict in my feelings and my indignation at this division formed quickly in my mind the image of a despicable brother . . . . I made the narrator fatuous since there was some ambiguity in my indignation."
Moving Out (1960)
On move from NYC to Westchester (1951)
StoriesThe Season of Divorce (1950) B+
The "season" is winter. 1st person narrator's wife Ethel and Dr. Trencher have affair. Dr. tells him he loves her. He says to get out. Ethel speaks of intellectual past she has given up. Marriage goes on.
"Why do I cry? What do I cry? . . . . I cry because my father died when I was twelve and because my mother married a man I detested or thought that I detested. I cry because I had to wear an ugly dress--a hand-me-down dress--to a party twenty years ago, and I didn't have a good time. I cry because of some unkindness that I can't remember. I cry because I'm tired--because I'm tired and I can't sleep."
The Pot of Gold (1950) B-
Opportunities for business success undercut by bad luck, leading Ralph to realize (in a sentimental ending) that his wife is his gold.
Clancy in the Tower of Babel (1951) A-
Elevator man disgusted by Mr. Rowantree's attraction to Bobbie. When Bobbie leaves, Clancy rescues Mr. Rowantree from repeated suicide attempts (head in oven thrice, pills once). Bobbie returns to live with Mr. Rowantree. Ends with Clancy's realization that his love for wife and son is half blind too, and so is like Mr. Rowantree's for Bobbie.
The Day the Pig Fell into the Well (1954) B+
Many characters at Whitebeach Camp (cp. Treetops). Retold story of pig is some solace for Mrs. Nudd for her disappointing children.
The Bus to St. James (1956) B+
Mr. Bruce tells his mistress Mrs. Sheridan, after Mr. (who never took her opinions seriously, which led her to her affair) has taken children away from her, that "it will be all right."
"The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter."
"Final clarity" of lovers' moment together, in which times before they met are changed and redirected toward the moment.
Goodbye, My Brother (1951) A-
Pommeroy family vacation spot: Laud's Head. Good story, yes--focusing on the narrator and most of his family's focus on tradition and the old vs. his youngest brother Lawrence's denigration of that helps. But I still don't like it as well as some others--William Maxwell, T. C. Boyle, Edmund White--do. It helps that they admit the narrator is somewhat unreliable, as Cheever did (see above); we don't have to adopt his rosy view and his annoyance with his cynical younger brother. But I wish there were more indications in the story itself that Cheever really doesn't agree with his narrator. Certainly that narrator gets very good lines, and the ending (which so many love, but which might be too self-consciously "fine") seems to push us to agree with the narrator.
"I saw her for the first time since our marriage in her wedding dress. There would be no point in saying that she looked to me more beautiful than she did on our wedding day, but because I have grown older and have, I think, a greater depth of feeling and because I could see in her face that night both youth and age, both her devotion to the young woman that she had been and the positions that she had yielded graciously to time, I think I have never been so deeply moved."
Narrator thinking that Lawrence is looking at people dressed as brides and football players at wedding and assuming they are nostalgic for youth and pathetic because they haven't found anything to replace it later in life, which isn't necessarily the case.
"thinking of all the goodbyes he [Lawrence] had made."
The Chaste Clarissa (1952) B+
Clarissa seems modest and shy; wants to be seen as someone with not just beauty but intelligent opinions. Baxter tells her she is intelligent--and then realizes she isn't.
Clarissa seems modest and shy; wants to be seen as someone with not just beauty but intelligent opinions. Baxter tells her she is intelligent--and then realizes she isn't.
The Cure (1952) B+
When 1st person narrator's estranged wife Rachel calls, he feels it as a cure (his reading of Lin Yutang had been interrupted by a peeping Tom and Grace Harris had told him, "I see a rope around your neck") and she returns and they are happy.
When 1st person narrator's estranged wife Rachel calls, he feels it as a cure (his reading of Lin Yutang had been interrupted by a peeping Tom and Grace Harris had told him, "I see a rope around your neck") and she returns and they are happy.
The Superintendent (1952) B+
Building superintendent on a moving day tries to take care of problems and keep tenants happy even as he is insulted.
"The day had failed to have any meaning, and the sky seemed to promise a literal explanation. . . . But the sky told him only that it was a long day at the end of winter, that it was late and time to go in."
Building superintendent on a moving day tries to take care of problems and keep tenants happy even as he is insulted.
"The day had failed to have any meaning, and the sky seemed to promise a literal explanation. . . . But the sky told him only that it was a long day at the end of winter, that it was late and time to go in."
The Children (1952) B
Victor Mackenzie serves and seems loved by employers, whose children then betray him. One setting is near Camden, ME (Millay's hometown), with reference to rental library on Estrella Lane. Ending: another situation, where Victor appears happy, with no indication whether this situation will end like the others.5. 1952-1954
Bailey, ch. 15
Journals
Stories
The Sorrows of Gin (1953) B+
Listening to cook, daughter Amy empties bottles of gin. Her parents think the help is drinking it. Amy goes to station to try to run away.
"The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant."
O Youth and Beauty! (1953) B
Cash running hurdles over furniture until wife accidentally shoots him with starting pistol.
The Five-Forty-Eight (1954) B+
Secretary, fired after boss sleeps with her, follows him with pistol and makes him face in dirt at Shady Hill station.
The Country Husband (1954) A-
Wonderful writing, yes, in this story admired by Hemingway and Nabokov, but would a man's family really care so little that his plane crashed? Would he really see again a young woman he saw in France? Would woodworking make him happy and take his mind sufficiently off the beautiful babysitter? And what about the last "artsy" sentence?
Just Tell Me Who It Was (1955) B
Older man married to younger woman thinks she has cheated on him. Knocks man he thinks is culprit down. Then everything is all right. We never learn if man's suspicions were right.
Just One More Time (1955) C-
Beers show up, this time to rescue from a sinking boat.
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1956) A
1st person: Johnny Hake loses job, steals, feels horrible, gets job back. Includes episode of children getting aluminum ladder for his birthday.
"The storm was about to break now, and everything stood in a gentle half darkness so much like dawn . . ."
Of his old mother living in hotel in Cleveland: "when I was a kid, she seemed to be a woman whose apron strings were thrown across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans; they seemed to be looped, like vapor trails, across the very drum of heaven."
"Had I looked, the next morning, from my bathroom window into the evil-smelling ruin of some great city, the shock of recalling what I had done might not have been so violent, but the moral bottom had dropped out of my world without changing a mote of sunlight."
Of his wife: "Now Christina is the kind of woman who, when she is asked by the alumnae secretary of her college to describe her status, gets dizzy thinking about the variety of her activities and interests." Followed by funny list of things she might do on a given day.
Funny ending: policeman asks why he's out so late (he has just put stolen money back) and he says he is walking a dog, though no dog is there. He calls, "Here, Toby! Good dog!"
The National Pastime (1953) B-
Characters also in WChr. Catching Mantle foul ball allows narrator to put the past behind him.
6. 1954-1957
Bailey, ch. 16-18
Journals
Novels
The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) A-
Reviewers complain the novel isn't unified, but who cares if some plot lines (Rosalie) don't contribute much to the whole novel's plot. Life doesn't work that way, and everything in the book is interesting on its own. The only major part that doesn't work for me is Leander's journal.
Family tree: Lorenzo and Thaddeus = sons of Benjamin's 1st wife, who died when he was 70; he remarried and (wow!) had two more sons, Ebenezer and Aaron. Honora = daughter of Thaddeus, raised by Lorenzo; Leander = son of Aaron; Moses and Coverly = sons of Leander.
At 4th of July parade, firecracker under horse pulling float with women pretending to give lecture, so tradition/home vs. rebellion/diaspora conflict begins. See Kenneth C. Mason's "Tradition and Desecration" in Critical Response.
Rosalie Young, in car accident in which boyfriend dies, cared for by Wapshots
Journals: Lorenzo's briefly in ch. 2; Leander's later.
Leander's boat Topaze sinks, recovered; wife turns it into floating gift shop.
Moses to DC, then marries Melissa, lives at Clear Haven (modeled on Briarcliff Manor), climbing over roof (where one time he sees towel and suntan lotion) to get to Melissa's room before they are married; getting twin beds replaced with one bed after they are married. Mansion burns down.
Coverly to NY, marries Betsey, he goes overseas, comes back, she's lonely, goes home to family in Georgia, comes back.
Moses and Coverly will get Honora's money only if they have sons; they do.
From Coverly's letter saying he's left home: "I have taken the framed copy of Kipling's IF with me and I will think about this and about all the great men I have read about and I will go to Church."
In passage about Leander, before he fires pistol out window to make someone think he's killed himself: "What a tender thing, then, is a man. How, for all his crotch-hitching and swagger, a whisper can turn his soul into a cinder. The taste of alum in the rind of a grape, the smell of the sea, the heat of the spring sun, berries bitter and sweet, a grain of sand in his teeth--all of that which he meant by life seemed taken away from him. Where were the serene twilights of his old age?"
Moses, of Melissa: "he would have been gratified if some slight hurt had befallen her, for that deep sense of involvement we experience when we see a lovely woman . . ."
Betsey, when finds that Josie Tellerman isn't really her friend: "And as she stood there in the dark it seemed that the furies attacked Betsey; that through every incident--every moment of her life--ran the cutting thread, the wire of loneliness, and that when she thought she had been happy she had only deceived herself for under all her happiness lay the pain of loneliness and all her travels and friends were nothing and everything was nothing."
"Now the world is full of distractions--lovely women, music, French movies, bowling alleys and bars--but Coverly lacked the vitality or the imagination to distract himself. . . . His reality seemed assailed or contested; his gifts for hopefulness seemed damaged or destroyed. There is a parochialism to some kinds of misery--a geographical remoteness like the life led by a grade-crossing tender--a point where life is lived or endured at the minimum of energy and perception. . . . Such a life has its compensations--solitaire and star-wishing--but it is a life stripped of friendship, association, love and even the practicable hope of escape."
Irishwoman, cook at Clear Haven, tells of her late husband who was "very loving," which led her to miss Lindbergh's crossing and George V's abdication.
Badger, Melissa's 1st husband, whom she pities, trying to overcome depression w/ imagination: "Then whole palladia seemed to mushroom beneath Badger's patent-leather hair, the cities and villas of a younger world, and he made the trip into the city in a hopeful mood. But sitting over his first cup of coffee in the hole-in-the-wall where he lived Badger saw that his marble white civilizations were helpless before invaders."
Leander takes up fly fishing, has dream of elderly saying carnality "is the beginning of all wisdom" (the other extreme of prude Justina at Clear Haven), swims, crosses himself, drowns.
Novel closes with Coverly finding Leander's advice in his father Aaron's copy of Shakespeare.
7. 1957-1959
Bailey, ch. 19
C's comment on a detail in an Updike story, illustrating in miniature (in my opinion) Updike's anatomical crudity and cluelessness: "One should never remark idly on the armpits of ladies."
Incident like "The Country Husband" that happened well after the story was written. C on plane from Rome that had to emergency land. On second plane, he read Lolita. When he returned, Mary, preoccupied with her dying father, didn't pay attention to his plane story.
Journals
Stories
The Trouble of Marcie Flint (1957) B+
Marcie falls for man who spoke up for a town library; husband doesn't blame her but she feels blamed and accuses him of reacting poorly and he leaves, sails for Italy, but decides to fly home: "I will shelter her with the curve of my body from all the harms of the dark."
The Worm in the Apple (1958) B
Observer might think family so blessed as the Crutchmans must have something wrong with them, but . . . "one might wonder if the worm was not in the eye of the observer who, through timidity or moral cowardice, could not embrace the broad range of their natural enthusiasms and would not grant that, while Larry played neither Bach nor football very well, his pleasure in both was genuine."
The Bella Lingua (1958) C
The Wrysons (1958) A-
They want things to stay same, so when her odd dream of nuclear war meets his odd baking (and burning, this time) a Lady Baltimore cake, they don't talk about it, remaining "more interested than ever in a good appearance."
"They led a limited social life . . . although at Christmas each year they sent out about six hundred cards. The preparation and addressing of these must have occupied evenings for at least two weeks. . . . They seemed to experience not distaste but alarm when they found quack grass in their lawn or heard of a contemplated divorce among their neighbors."
The Duchess (1958) B-
The Scarlet Moving Van (1959) B+
Gee-Gee (Greek god) gets drunk ("I have to teach them") and then he and Peaches have to move. His old friend Charlie doesn't drive back through blizzard when Gee-Gee calls, but stays up and drinks, and he and his wife have to move.
Brimmer (1959) B
Brimmer called an old satyr, bedding women on ship. One sends papers (mix of prayer and lewdness) to narrator. Strange ending: While underwater spearfishing, narrator sees news of Brimmer's marriage to Italian actress in magazine at bottom of ocean.
The Golden Age (1959) A-
Television writer Seton, embarrassed, goes to Italy, calls himself a poet, sees many on beach, incl. Roman family (great descrip of anxious father); delegation comes to praise him after seeing his show and realizing he's not "merely a poet."
The Lowboy (1959) B+
Brother Richard wants heirloom that narrator also wanted. It turns out to be famous, gets money for loaning it to museum, but it takes him back to miserable childhood and makes him quarrelsome. Narrator destroys old things in his home. "Dismiss whatever challenges our purpose, sleeping or waking. Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border."
The Music Teacher (1959) B
A Woman Without a Country (1959) B
Anne driving in bathrobe and running out of gas leads to rake Jack Burden sleeping with her and her blaming humidity at trial where parents-in-law sued for custody and being mocked in song: "Oh, Humid Isabella Never kissed a fellah Unless there was moisture in the air." She flees to Italy, comes back to U.S., hears someone humming song at airport, flies back to Italy.
8. 1959-1961
Bailey, ch. 20-22
Journals
Stories
Clementina (1960) A-
Maid comes from Italy with family. Cp. Cheevers' cook Iole.
Great para. on American household machines--e.g. "you could wash the dishes in a costume for the evening without getting a drop of water on your gloves." Marries older man Joe to stay in U.S., but employer fires her for not marrying for love. She travels through NJ to honeymoon in Atlantic City, she and husband watch TV and go to horse races, but old employer is divorced and unhappy.
Boy in Rome (1960) C+
The Death of Justina (1960) B+
A favorite of Cheever's, which he liked to read for audiences, and which I've taught, but this time it seemed rather aggressively clever, and the references to its own fictionality intrude and confuse rather than adding a layer of metafiction.
A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear (1960) B-
7 things. Number 4 = what sounds like an indictment of Updike's "bad sex" writing--and great use of dashes: "Out with this and all other explicit descriptions of sexual commerce, for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if--jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts--we were describing the changing of a flat tire?" (I watched again interview of Updike and Cheever: Dick Cavett brings this passage up.)
7 things. Number 4 = what sounds like an indictment of Updike's "bad sex" writing--and great use of dashes: "Out with this and all other explicit descriptions of sexual commerce, for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if--jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts--we were describing the changing of a flat tire?" (I watched again interview of Updike and Cheever: Dick Cavett brings this passage up.)
The Chimera (1961) B-
Man invents Olga--and after she goes says he can invent others--as escape from nagging wife
Man invents Olga--and after she goes says he can invent others--as escape from nagging wife
The Seaside Houses (1961) B
in these houses: "wandering, it seems, through the dense histories of strangers"
in these houses: "wandering, it seems, through the dense histories of strangers"
The Angel of the Bridge (1961) B+
Mother fears flying, brother elevators, narrator bridges. Girl gets in his car on Tappan Zee and sings him across: "Her song ended as we got to the toll station on the east bank. . . ."
Mother fears flying, brother elevators, narrator bridges. Girl gets in his car on Tappan Zee and sings him across: "Her song ended as we got to the toll station on the east bank. . . ."
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1961) A-
The Pasterns. Mrs. canvases for medical charities: "every roof she saw signified charity . . . and way in the distance could be seen the slate roof of Ethel Littleton's house, a roof that signified gout." Mr. says to bomb commies. Has affair with Mrs. Flannagan, who gets him to give her key to bomb shelter. Mrs. P finds out, says Mr. P wants world to end. Divorces. Mrs. F walking to Ps and told to go home.9. 1962-1963
Bailey, ch. 23
Journals
A prophetic diagnosis!: "Since we lack a well-defined sense of good and evil, we find it impossible to invent a villain, and villainy is essential to the dynamics of narrative. The lecher is no longer villainous; in fact, his prowess is a virtue. The usurious banker is admirable; the bugger belongs to a minority that deserves our understanding; the murderer merely needs psychiatric help. . . . In the end, we may put horns and a tail on death, that most innocent fact."
Hemingway: "He writes with the galvanic distortion that gives the illusion of a particular vision; that is, he breaks and re-forms the habitual rhythms of introspection."
"As so often in the middle of life, he seemed forced to play a role for which there was no demand. Dressed, so to speak, in a doublet and tights, his well-memorized script in his hands, he seemed condemned to wander forever backstage. Onstage, the characters hurdled sofas and made declarations or erotic love."
"Hemingway shot himself yesterday morning. . . . The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by Scoutmasters and others who made it seem a fraud."
Dream of someone in space rushing to see the world, and then a list of the simple wonders of this world. Used in WS.
Kennedy's assassination: "I was offended at the pride with which the TV announcer described the numerousness of the mourners as if this were competitive, as in a sense I suppose it is."
Stories
A Vision of the World (1962) B+
In Florida, resting from chain of events, and has dreams and wakes exclaiming names of virtues.
His wife had said, "I have this terrible feeling that I'm in black-and-white and that I can be turned off by anybody." He: "My wife is often sad because her sadness is not a sad sadness, sorry because her sorrow is not a crushing sorrow. She grieves because her grief is not an acute grief, and when I tell her that this sorrow over the inadequacies of her sorrow may be a new hue in the spectrum of human pain, she is not consoled."
He thought of divorce but couldn't divorce himself from chains "forged of turf and house paint. . . ."
"Time, I thought, strips us rudely of the privileges of the bystander, and in the end that couple chatting loudly in bad French in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne (Athens) turns out to be us."
Reunion (1962) B
With father, who insults waiters.
An Educated American Woman (1963) B-
Married to dim man: "He had graduated from Yale, but when Melee once asked him if he liked Thackeray he said sincerely and politely that had never tasted any." He has affair; wife neglects son Bibber, who dies. Divorce.
Metamorphoses (1963) C+
(See Ovid.) Larry Actaeon. Orville Betman (Orpheus, with hints of Dis/Proserpina). Nerissa (Narcissus). Mr. Bradish (?).
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin (1963) B
The writing on the wall (Daniel 5). Writing near/in bathrooms (including Union Station, Indianapolis) is literary. "What had happened, I supposed, was that, as pornography moved into the public domain, those marble walls, those immemorial repositories of such sport, had been forced, in self-defense, to take up the more refined task of literature."
Ends with finding Keats's "Bright Star" on tile. (See also Keats in WS.)
Montraldo (1964) B-
In Italy, servant is cruel to woman; woman takes it because she knows servant is her daughter.
In Italy, servant is cruel to woman; woman takes it because she knows servant is her daughter.
The Ocean (1964) B
Bailey says this is one of his best; don't agree. Setting in Bullet Park. Man thinks wife might be trying to kill him (lighter fluid and pesticide on food.) Daughter Flora living with Peter; they stick butterflies to a skeleton.
Peter: "He had a beard, a mustache, and long dark curls that reminded me of some minor apostle in a third-rate Passion Play."
Renewed feeling for wife; vision of writing "luve" everywhere.
Bailey says this is one of his best; don't agree. Setting in Bullet Park. Man thinks wife might be trying to kill him (lighter fluid and pesticide on food.) Daughter Flora living with Peter; they stick butterflies to a skeleton.
Peter: "He had a beard, a mustache, and long dark curls that reminded me of some minor apostle in a third-rate Passion Play."
Renewed feeling for wife; vision of writing "luve" everywhere.
Marito in Citta (1964) B
Title = Italian song about plight of a man alone. Estabrook with time alone, thinks will devote to solitude, but chores, dealing with dirty dog (turns furniture upside down to keep dog off), sleeps with Mrs. Zagreb, neighbor Doris Hamilton invites over to dinner, but then gets letter from wife and awaits her return.
Title = Italian song about plight of a man alone. Estabrook with time alone, thinks will devote to solitude, but chores, dealing with dirty dog (turns furniture upside down to keep dog off), sleeps with Mrs. Zagreb, neighbor Doris Hamilton invites over to dinner, but then gets letter from wife and awaits her return.
The Swimmer (1964) A-
Impressive conceit, with very long time passing as Neddy Merrill swims 8 miles south to home in Bullet Park along "river" of pools he names for his wife Lucinda. C said he would not make this about Narcissus. More like Odyssey. Also like "Childe Roland," in the sense it could be allegory of Everyman's life. But not as rich as Browning's poem certainly. Something a little thin about it."He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague."
10. 1964
Bailey, ch. 24
Journals
Novels
The Wapshot Scandal (1964) B
Brilliant sections, but too much is incredible--e.g. Keats's computer concordance with list of most-used words forming a rhymed poem, hijacking of Coverly's plane, Honora meeting the Pope, their conversation.
Starts with various people in St. Botolphs at Christmas: Miles Howland serving Communion and looking at his girlfriend in congregation, Honora reciting Emerson's snow poem, boy who calls (overheard by operator) and asks, "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?' Mr. Spofford with kittens no one will take so drowns them in river and falls in and drowns.
Coverly and Betsey in Talifer, CO, where atmosphere of nuclear security keeps people from knowing each other. Coverly develops habit of talking like a fortune cookie. Has new job, security clearance one day taken away, goes to Washington, where sees hearing that leads to boss Dr. Cameron getting his clearance suspended.
Moses and Melissa in Proxmire Manor. Gertrude Lockhart who hanged herself when couldn't get repairman to fix her house (the number of things that go wrong is incredible) is on train back to Indiana. Melissa is on that train. Melissa falls for grocery boy Emile. Emile hiding plastic Easter eggs with prizes. Car gets stuck; boss Mr. Freeley gets mugged and tied up; Emile puts egg for Rome on Melissa's lawn. Melissa and Emile live together in Italy. Melissa at supermarket cp to Ophelia, gathering garland of products, singing fragments of tunes (from commercials). Moses drinks.
Honora to Italy--waves/shouts goodbye to people on shore though she knows no one there, overhears Sheffields talk about locations in Europe in terms of ease of doing laundry, speaks of going to Jaffrey, NH, (where Cather is buried) for a rest, reads Middlemarch again, befriends stowaway. She is fleeing tax evasion charges. Gives money away on street. Comes back and starves herself.
Christmas time again at end.
Of encouraging lies to people with cancer (cf. optimism in general): "Most maladies have their mythologies, their populations, their scenery and their grim jokes. . . but here was the grappling hand of death disinfected by a social conspiracy of all its reality."
Mr. Cosden, only person in Proxmire Manor who walks: "He had never had any occasion to straighten his back in self-esteem. Stooped with shyness as a child, stooped with loneliness as a youth, stooped now under an invisible burden of social disregard. . . ."
Reference to Keats's "Bright Star." (90--see also "Mene, Mene")
Bar where family members talk about their food in lines from commercials, a family joke.
Easter egg episode: "The scene was apocalyptic." Different apocalypses link brothers: Coverly (large/nuclear war) and Moses (absurd/wife obsessing over prize in plastic egg).
11. 1964-1969
Bailey, ch. 25-30
Letter to Exley, of Updike: "I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart."
Journals
"I dream that I am walking with Updike. The landscape seems out of my childhood. . . . Updike juggles a tennis ball that is both my living and my dying. When he drops the ball I cannot move until it is recovered, and yet I feel, painfully, that he is going to murder me with the ball. . . . In the end I do escape."
What he perceives as Mary's insult she insists isn't one: "there does seem to be some dreadful incompatibility between the sharpness of her tongue and my oversensitive, not to say childish, nature."
On train home, next to two men talking: "The conversation does not shift, for an hour, from the subject of [their lawn] mowers, excepting to go briefly to fertilizer. Warfare, love, money--the natural concerns of men--are barred from their talk."
Of "literary titans who have destroyed themselves" and why it happens (213).
Of reading Lolita (222).
"Her attitude toward me does not seem to parallel the facts, to shift and change as events shift and change. She seems prejudiced, and her prejudices seem to come from a time of life before we met."
His dream, in 1966, of "having a homosexual escapade, unconsummated, with Ronald Reagan."
Sees Italian men during train trip who seem enviable: "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 get back and find this moment that was lost?"
Of "subtle effect computers have on our sense of life. . . invincible, unseen, and antic."
Stories
The Geometry of Love (1966) B-
Imagining lines and shapes to cope (includes making Gary, Indiana, disappear; includes the sentence, "Indiana had disappeared."). Dies. Cleaning woman informs his neglectful wife Mathilda.
The World of Apples (1966) A-
Title = Asa Bascomb's most popular book of poetry. Called (imprecisely) "the Cezanne of poets."
(Think C being called "the Chekhov of the suburbs.") Memory failing (cannot remember Byron's first name). In Italy, sees couple making love, sees man's hairy backside, starts writing obscene things.
Offers medal (with fake, Communist gold) to angel at Monte Giordano. Prays "God bless [various authors]." Remembers seeing father undressing to swim. Cured--begins "long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air. . . ."
Another Story (1967) B+
"Paint me a wall" opening is like BP. Italian man marries American woman, moves to U.S., experiences racism, feels that wife is mad because she wants to sing opera rather than be just his wife.
She asks him to change his name, he goes back to Italy. Narrator tells "another story," of wife who wanted to be an actress but who is on speaker at Newark airport and starts using her announcer voice at home.
Percy (1968) B
Aunt Florence (calls herself Percy) paints, resorts to doing sentimental pictures for magazines, son Lovell wastes his piano talent when lives with girl with great hair.
Novels
Bullet Park (1969) B+
See John Gardner praising book. His insights:
Two fortunes, while they are similar (N--tranquilizers to take the train; H--need for yellow room to keep depression away, room he finds by accident in farmhouse near Blenville in eastern PA, where he has a cat named Schwartz--see C's named Delmore, after Delmore Schwartz): Nailles, with wife he loves and child her cares about, even though at mini-golf course (a little mechanized world) they fought and he was going to kill him with his putter, then Tony is depressed for days. Hammer, a bastard, a name randomly given him, with abusive wife, Marietta Drum, and no children.
Two kinds of craziness, of magic: Swami who cures Tony Nailles, who says after "cheers" that it might be "crazy" but he feels better. Hammer deciding after hearing evangelist that he'll take his Socialist mother's advice and crucify Tony to wake suburbia up.
The book does cohere, certainly much better than some reviewers said. And one can look at the whole book synchronically and see major themes. But the reading process (diachronically) is not as rich as WC was, and reviewers were right about the silly ending (Hammer telling swami, delaying the killing by smoking a cigarette, which gives Nailles time to save his son).
The Ridleys, their marriage having a "commercial quality": "They presented their handsome children to their guests with the air of salesmen pointing out the merits of a new car in a showroom."
Hammer, on beach alone, feeling out of place: "We traditionally associate nakedness with judgments and eternity and so on those beaches where we are mostly naked the scene seems apocalyptic."
Hammer's mother Gretchen read all of Galsworthy at public library in her teens in Indiana: "This left her with a slight English accent and an immutable clash between the world of her reveries and the limestone country." Graduates from IU. Tells Hammer: "When I was in the Socialist Party with your father I said again and again that if American capitalism continued to exalt mercenary and dishonest men the economy would degenerate into the manufacture of drugs and ways of life that would make reflection--any sort of thoughtfulness or emotional depth--impossible. I was right."
12. 1969-1975
Bailey, ch. 31-39
Journals
"Mary mentions her mother for the third time in thirty-five years. 'I wanted a Teddy bear for Christmas, and she said I was too old. She pronounced "doll" with the same terribly Massachusetts accent you have.' So we are people we have never met."
Stories
The Fourth Alarm (1970) C
Wife in naked play in which audience invited to join. Man taunted with "Put down your lendings" when tries to carry wallet, watch, and car keys with him.
Artemis, the Honest Well-Digger (1972) C+
When Mrs. Filler tells Mr. about affair with A, A goes to Russia, meets Natasha, Russians make him leave, Americans read things into their innocent correspondence, she stops replying.
Three Stories (1973) B+ / C+ / B
1. Narrated by belly of Lawrence Farnsworth; after L's attempts to shrink belly, gives up. Truce.
2. Implication that Marge Littleton is shooting people on highway where her three children and first two husbands were killed. Marries third time and lives "where the sound of traffic is as faint as the roaring of a shell."
3. Man on flight sits next to uncommunicative woman who is nice to others. He accompanies her into cab: they've been married 30 years.
The Jewels of the Cabots (1972) C+
Mrs. C's daughter Geneva steals diamonds, marries, goes to Egypt, gets fat. (Narrator's mother criticizes private school for admitting Jews. Narrator points out he is married to Jewish woman. Narrator says how he leaves much unpleasantness, incl. more details of woman in Rome screaming at her husband.)
Mrs. C poisons husband who is having affair with Mrs. Wallace. Narrator goes to Luxor to see Geneva, then goes to airport and leaves Cs behind him.
13. 1975-1977
Bailey, ch. 40-43
Journals
Of not liking Borges but admiring the tone of passages quoted in Updike's review.
Of prank call, saying Updike has died, asking if C would care to comment. Bailey says a writer (he knows who it is but does not name him) did it when drunk, also calling Updike relatives.
Novels
Falconer (1977) B
A narrower focus than in previous novels (all related to Farragut, who struck his brother Eben with a fire iron when he said their father, like C's father, invited an abortionist to dinner when he was in the womb) but amid main plot of two escapes (F's "friend" Jody by helicopter as acolyte, and F in Chicken Two's body bag) much seems like filler, with dreams and flashbacks and other prisoners' stories.
Joyce Carol Oates's review: "This much-praised novel is finally quite disappointing: its victories are far too easy, its transcendence of genuine pain and misery is glib, even crude."
"'You know,' his son had said, 'I can't talk to Mummy when there's a mirror in the room."
F writes letters on a sheet to governor (saying he can bear sound of toilets flushing because he has known fountains in cities, "especially Indianapolis"--731), bishop, girlfriend.
"Hanging plants, F thought, were the beloved of the truly lonely"
Memory of F going to nursing home where Eben reads Romola, ch. 5 (because they asked for this book) to the blind
Eben's only son is serving two years in Cincinnati after peace demonstration arrest (C's son Ben spent much less time there, when he was a student at Antioch)
Eben's story of going on TV to catch TV-obsessed wife's attention and getting the wrong show
F in body bag: "How strange to be carried so late in life and toward nothing that he truly knew, freed, it seemed, from his erotic crudeness, his facile scorn and his chagrined laugh--not a fact, but a chance, something like the afternoon light on high trees, quite useless and thrilling. How strange to be living and to be grown and to be carried."
After escape, before boarding bus, a laundromat: "The doors to most of the machines hung open like the doors to ovens. Opposite were the bull's-eye windows of drying machines and in two he could see clothes tossing and falling, always falling--falling heedlessly, it seemed, like falling souls or angels if their fall had even been heedless."
14. 1977-1982
Bailey, ch. 44-50 & Epilogue
Journals
"This is the sort of seaside hotel about which people used to write romances": alludes to Chekhov's "The Lady with the Toy Dog" and Mann's "Death in Venice."
"The lack of custom has left the clerks either embarrassingly overanxious or bored and rude."
"If we are hungry there are a dozen places to eat and the food is, without exception, that barbarous holiday fare that has been fried and enjoyed at ceremonies and festivals since the beginning of civilization. This is the food one ate at the execution of the first of the kings, the quartering of the traitor, the hanging of the witch, and the crucifixion of the Saviour. It is not all fried, but much of it is, and you can eat it with your fingers, picking it out of a cornucopia of leaves or a cone of paper while you ride a horse, or paddle a canoe; while you drive a car, or walk up a mall or rialto with your arm around the waist of your beloved."
Of going into McDonald's with coffee so as have no delay in getting caffeine. (B says C drank a gallon of coffee/tea a day.)
Of Verdi. Of "the sense of being with some sleeping person--one's child or one's lover--and seeming to taste the privilege of being alive."
"Reading Calvino, who is very close to Pirandello--a master--I find him unsympathetically cute. . . . I finish the Calvino book, which I think one should read although I find it terribly arch."
Other Writings
On Saul Bellow
Speech at the presentation of the Gold Medal of Honor to B at the National Arts Club, 1978.
Of jealousy: "If Saul was as gifted as he appeared to be, then it was my manifest destiny to return to the South Shore of Massachusetts where I was born and pump gasoline at one of those service stations on the way to the Cape. I was determined to diminish the book. I read Augie March dead drunk in a heated room. I read it backwards. I read it upside down in a bucket of water. The clarity of the voice and the music he sang remained peerless. I then moved my family to Italy where, on a winter afternoon, I saw a woman on a Roman bus reading with great intensity an Italian translation of Augie. I wanted to kill her."
But: "This is the only continuous and eloquent evidence we possess of our struggle to be loving and illustrious. To bring the thrill of competitive sport to such a chain of being would be ignoble. We do, of course, upstage one another from time to time and I will cough loudly and rattle my chair when Saul accepts his prize."
Novels
Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982) B
Plot
Lemuel Sears had two wives, Amelia and Estelle (who claimed to be prophetic, but stepped in front of a train). Here he is in love with Renee and has an episode with her elevator operator Eduardo, which send Sears to a psychiatrist, Palmer, who has suppressed his own homosexual urges.
Sears and lawyer Chisholm try to save Beasley's Pond; Chisholm found baby Betsy and Henry Logan left beside road when they changed drivers; after Chisholm is run down after a meeting, Betsy takes up his cause, leaving note saying she will poison food in Buy Brites if pond isn't saved; this (incredibly) works.
Quotations etc.
Opening: "This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night. The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses--Dombey and Trey--can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyond the orchard." [love that he names the horses]
Town of Janice, w/ Beasley's Pond at north end (cf. C living at north end of Ossining and walking north to Croton Dam)
Cf. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium": "An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless he sees the bright plumage of the bird called courage--Cardinalis virginius, in this case--and oh how his heart leapt."
"Most men have bought for their beloved an electric toaster or a vacuum cleaner and have been rewarded with transports of bliss. To see these souvenirs of our early loves spread-eagled, rusted and upended by the force with which they were cast off can be a profoundly melancholy experience."
Of joggers at end of the day (34).
Of neighbors' annoying wind chimes (36ff).
"Betsy was of that generation for whom the air was, oftener than not, filled with music. . . . In some ways this had left her imperceptive. She would never have noticed that morning that the air of Buy Brite was filled with some of the greatest music of the eighteenth century. . . . There is no irony, of course. The capital of Brandenburg was a market village and on a summer's day when the doors of the cathedral stood open the great concertos must have been heard by the grocers and merchants."
"In a lonely fantasy of nomadism he imagined a world where men and women communicated with one another mostly by signal lights and where he proposed marriage to some stranger because she turned on her parking lights an hour before dusk, disclosing a supple and romantic nature."
Mayor's speech at the meeting--not believable.
Closing sentence same as opening.
