The Pleasures of Cheever
John Cheever, far right on bench, not in California, in front of trees
Some of you might very frequently pick up a book feeling certain that you will like it. This happens to me pretty rarely; usually only when I’ve read the book already, or when it is by Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf. So it was with particular relish when, still feeling the pang of having no more of Middlemarch to read, I opened The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever.
I’d only read Cheever’s stories, which I really love, whether the earlier perhaps more conventional ones or later so-called experiments like “The Swimmer.” Putting aside the question of whether “experimental” is or is not a troublesome descriptor of any art, I don’t think it fits well with Cheever at any stage in his career. One gets the sense with Cheever that he read widely and deeply, probably heavily in Shakespeare and the classics, took what he found useful and then made sentences that were all his own, without giving any thought to fashion and currency.
Sentences like:
We have all parted from simple places by train or boat at season’s end with generations of yellow leaves spilling on the north wind as we spill our seed and the dogs and the children in the back of the car, but it is not a fact that at the moment of separation a tumult of brilliant and precise images–as though we drowned–streams through our heads. We have indeed come back to lighted houses, smelling on the north wind burning applewood, and seen a Polish countess greasing her face in a ski lodge and heard the cry of the horned owl in rut and smelled a dead whale on the south wind that carries also the sweet note of the bell from Antwerp and the dishpan summons of the bell from Altoona but we do not remember all this and more as we board the train.
What Does It Mean to Be a Young Writer Today?
Take our own Ken Baumann. He’s twenty, and already toying with a style, voice, and rhythm all his own–see the newest New York Tyrant for proof. His work is at once strange and familiar, careful and mindful without constraining a sense of freedom which announces the promise of novelty, of a literature which is no longer merely literature. If any of that makes any sense to anyone. What I mean to say is, Ken is a young–very young, college-aged–prose stylist. Perhaps that is a rare feat. Perhaps it is not. But not often does an artist so young fulfill the promise of youth by making it new.
Take Zachary German. He’s twenty-one, I believe, and while he indeed belongs to a certain class of writers, his style, at a very original pace, moves toward a terminal space, a degree-zero. His work has much to say about contemporary art, culture, and values, on both a level of doing and being. In many ways, he walks the talk of a young Camus. He’s twenty-one. How?
I’m nineteen. I strive for an immediate stylism in my work. Whether or not I’m successful I cannot say. READ MORE >
WAYYYBACK MACHINE: Updike & Cheever on the Dick Cavett show
I found this earlier today. Who even knew that Cavett had an NYT blog? Anyway, he somehow got the Times to post a full episode of his show from October 1981, with Cheever and Updike as his guests. I’m not a huge fan of either man–dig Cheever, as far as it goes; basically have never read Updike–but there was something really fascinating about this, and I wound up watching the whole 28-minute clip. Cheever’s voice is amazing. They really don’t make ‘em like him anymore. In the post itself, Cavett writes-
True, but that notwithstanding–or perhaps because of it–Cheever is the one to watch for. I love the part where he talks about church, and Cavett tries unsuccessfully to get him to recite the Apostles Creed.
Updike is mostly quiet, and I think very conscious of his role as the young up-and-coming writer. (How could he not be? Cheever points out “I’m old enough to be John’s father.”) He sits back trying to look comfortable for a few long stretches, while Cheever lavishes praise on him, his work, his talent, etc. They also talk about several things we still argue about more or less daily on this website: can you / should you live and write in NYC? What kind of public profile should a writer have? How does reviewing books fit into writing books? Even though you’re famous, will the New Yorker still reject your story if they don’t like it? (Updike: “they should.”) Etc etc. And plus there’s the sheer joy of watching this kind of televsion, delightfully stone-age, with no commercial breaks, cuts to new segments, and almost no graphics. Nothing but smart, decent people talking about stuff smartly and decently: an idea so out-moded and archaic it might just be revolutionary again.
“Everybody is pink.” An Excerpt from The Journals of John Cheever
God bless Blake for putting up with the likes of me. He truly celebrates diversity of tastes and temperments with letting me be a contributor. I love Cheever. I might love his journals as much as his short fiction. (I like his novels a bit less). Here’s an excerpt, a random one, from near the end of his life, when the world starts changing so fast on us, it dizzies us. I often think about aging and dying and how chaos and destruction eventually win our bodies whole. (Thanks Mom and Dad.) This excerpt is one of many strange and heartbreaking sections from his journals that show his delight in language and confusion as to what our time here actually means: READ MORE >
Cheever, in his boxer shorts, convinces me to continue writing short stories.
From the essay “Why I Write Short Stories,” which is collected in the Library of America’s upcoming John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings:
To publish a definitive collection of short stories in one’s late 60s seems to me, as an American writer, a traditional and a dignified occasion, eclipsed in no way by the fact that a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear.
Another selection from the essay:
A collection of short stories appears like a lemon in the current fiction list, which is indeed a garden of love, erotic horseplay and lewd and ancient family history; but so long as we are possessed by experience that is distinguished by its intensity and its episodic nature, we will have the short story in our literature, and without a literature we will, of course, perish.
May you be correct, Cheever. The rest of this very short essay can be found here.
