Writing Was Everything

Yesterday, in my three cheers for the arts in America in the 1950s, I mentioned, in passing, John Cheever. His inclusion seems obvious. His prose is impeccable, his stories are funny and sad, and I carry some of them around in my head – “The Swimmer,” of course, “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Country Husband,” “The Sorrows of Gin,” “The Superintendent,” and that little gem “Reunion.” I’m also fond of most of his novels, especially the Wapshot books and Bullet Park. One reader, however, was incensed by Cheever’s presence. He sent a brief e-mail accusing me of being “middlebrow” and “bougeois” [sic], among other things. He dismissed Cheever as “a typical New Yorker writer” – a meaningless complaint I’ve heard for decades. What does Cheever have in common with Isaac Bashevis Singer, J.F. Powers, Peter Taylor, John O’Hara, John Updike, Eudora Welty, William Maxwell, Donald Barthelme and Vladimir Nabokov? Who among them is typical of the magazine’s fiction writers?

Cheever needs no defense. Among his admirers have been Saul Bellow, V.S. Pritchett and Guy Davenport – an unlikely triumvirate. The late Alfred Kazin knew Cheever from 1937, when both were contributing to The New Republic, and he remained an admirer of the man and the writer. In Writing Was Everything, his book based on the Massey Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1994, Kazin called Cheever’s work “sultry and lyrical at once,” and wrote:

“What struck me in Cheever’s stories was the personal suffering of characters firmly embedded within the most bourgeois of circumstances, which were quietly unsympathetic and, at worst, discreetly hostile. It didn’t seem to matter that the always clever protagonist was internally dying in suburbia or that his melancholia had been advanced by too many martinis.

“The style was verbally irreproachable too -- `almost perfect,’ as the editor William Shawn liked to say about a story he particularly like….He wrote in this style and tradition as if he never had to learn it. Still the stories were wryly serious, desperately ironic, full of that special distrust of postwar American hedonism felt to the point of hysteria by those who had seen the depression end, but only with the war. And they were funny, in Cheever’s politely macabre way.”

It’s telling that Kazin resorts to qualified characterizations, near-oxymorons – “quietly unsympathetic,” “discreetly hostile,” “wryly serious,” “desperately ironic,” “politely macabre.” They hint at Cheever’s characteristically mixed tone of jolly desperation and pained bonhomie, of men too polite and well-bred to scream, like the drunken father in “Reunion.” Kazin goes on:

“Cheever was always in crisis, and it was a crisis never resolved in any of his stories, left hanging in the air after the story is done.”

Then Kazin adds a general observation, one that goes well beyond Cheever, and that I think is profound:

“In his pages, literature and life are necessarily intimate. The one lesson as a critic I seem to have been born with is that no storyteller can escape that intimacy.”

It occurs to me that the tone of voice I find most attractive in fiction is the intimate, whether it is genuine, faux or some hybrid of both. Look at such varied works as Tristram Shandy, David Copperfield, The Ambassadors, Kinbote’s notes in Pale Fire, Humboldt’s Gift, Richard Stern’s Natural Shocks and Stephen Dixon’s Phone Rings. The voice is conversational, seductive, authoritative even when shaky or uncertain, and we find it convincing because we agree to be convinced, soothed by the assurance of the voice. When Cheever interpolates in the middle of a story –“Why, in this half-finished civilization, this most prosperous, equitable and accomplished world, should everyone seem so disappointed?” – we nod our heads and ask the same question and find no adequate answer.