THE STORY OF JOHN CHEEVER
Life is a Storm, Today is Noah, and You, Sir, are Two Animals. ALL ABOARD!
I was going through my books tonight — it’s 3:39 AM — half-organizing them with the fixed focus of a 10-year-old boy sorting his baseball cards out of teams and into positions, and half-determining which ones I might sell to the bookseller later today as a way of, probably, paying for other books (“Life is the farce we all have to lead” wrote Rimbaud in his teens; Rimbaud, whom I’m sure John Cheever would have abhorred and obsessed over) — when I came upon an new but unattractive paperback edition of THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER. It’s a book I own and have previously bought at least four times, a book I’ve sold or given away and bought again and again like Mel Gibson in CONSPIRACY THEORY for one reason: the first story in the book, GOODBYE MY BROTHER, is good and is one I often want to show to people. In general, I don’t care much for Cheever (although I have a very fond memory of fasting for a week at the lakeside cabin of a family friend when I was 20 and reading FALCONER, but that remembered enjoyment — I can feel myself sideways reclining on a sofa with the lake out the window to my left and the built-in bookshelf straight ahead — was probably mostly distraction from hunger.
In his time, Cheever was respected. How far away now that world seems, that world of mid-century white American male supremacy in fiction, how little to me Updike, Bellow, Cheever and Roth have to say these days and how boyish and utterly inconsequential their fascination with their fascinations seem. All those men seem criminally immoral to me now, not for the obvious reasons but for the faith they had in their own preoccupations as worthy subjects of anyone’s attention, espeically their own. That said, I’ve never read WHITE TEETH (the book which, in my mind, fell from the sky like a heavy sky, all at once, on all those rickety satyrs rising creakily in a downpour of heavy books by Toni Morrison and Isabel Allende and finally flattened them for good), and I’m guessing Ms. Smith’s preoccupations are already shrinking in the rear-view mirrors of the people who once thought she was a great writer, maybe now just a writer, maybe now just the maker of something to be sold used.
I think my distaste for Cheever is based on the relationship between his fiction and what I know about his life, my distaste for how much he chose to make out of what I see from here as having been such a solvable problem, i.e., being a closeted homosexual in a heterosexual marriage in the upper-middle-class suburbs of the 20th-century Mid-Atlantic American kingdom. Before you start lecturing me, David — I’m thinking fondly of a gay friend who taught me sharply, as if with a switch, more than thirty years ago, what was wrong, deeply, with calling anyone a “cocksucker” — I admit, David, that I don’t know how difficult it was to be in the jam Cheever was in. But I still feel authorized to gape at the sheer weight of the gold this capitalist scraped out of what was basically one vein. Almost everything Cheever wrote (that I’ve read) can be distilled down to a subject I’ll call “Inauthenticity,” the problem of knowing, and caring abut knowing, which of your selves is the “realest,” of knowing or caring about knowing which of anyone else’s selves is the “realest,” and what makes a self “real” period. My guess is Cheever’s real answer to the question What makes things real? would have been something close to The Velveteen Rabbit’s, and just as cheap — “cheap” as in “easy to get a hold of” — because, after all, what’s “love,” Virginia? A turtle. And it’s turtles all the way down.
I opened the book to a random page and there was the first page of story: BRIMMER. I remembered reading somewhere that BRIMMER was someone’s favorite Cheever story, so I sat down and read it — it’s short, the way a short story should be — and it presented, once I’d finished it, a conundrum. It was yet another story about a hung-up square half-fascinated and half-repelled by someone who either does what they really seem to want to do or is a mess of a person. There’s no way of knowing which is which in Cheever’s world because in Cheever’s world, people can’t be (aren’t allowed to be) sufficiently known. The question of BRIMMER (which, on the surface, is about a fraught minor friendship between two minor men) is (it seems to me) this: What are we to make of someone who doesn’t know what to make of someone who seems to be authentic and authentically happy? So: we have Cheever the inauthentic man creating an inauthentic man who is haunted by a man who, to guess from the way he behaves, has never seen a ghost in his life. To use William James’ typologies, the narrator of BRIMMER is a mildly sick soul and he doesn’t know if Brimmer is a healthy soul or a sick soul but he thinks about Brimmer a lot. Knowing what we know about Cheever’s life, we can read BRIMMER as a story of sexual jealousy and sexual frustration — “Why didn’t he want to fuck ME?” or “Why didn’t I just fuck HIM?” — but that’s not the most generous reading. The most generous reading is the most minimal one which frames Cheever as having invented two people who seem real, or real enough to bear twelve minutes of attention, i.e., as real as anyone we know. No small trick when you remember what small things words really are.
Having dwelt now for two hours, almost against my will, on John Cheever as I see him, I’m feeling myself slowly filling up with sympathy for the old guy. I do this a lot. I feel distaste for something or someone or even just dismissiveness and I plunge into their vicinity until I feel connected enough to be kind. Then I walk away. It’s a practice, I guess, a way of wiping up a mess, treating a stain.
I’m going to sell THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER today, but not because he’s not worth reading. I’m going to sell it because someday soon I’m going to want to tell someone about GOODBYE MY BROTHER and when I do, I want the book I hand them to be more attractive than this one, truer to the beauty within, at least as attractive as a stranger we suddenly find ourselves liking or wanting to like for that reason we call, like suddenly shy girls, “no reason,” a stranger at least as attractive and promising — and real — as we would seem to ourselves if we knew how to look, to be seen, how to love, die and live.