`A Long Intimacy Between Strangers'

Two of John Cheever’s five novels open with descriptions of small town train stations. The same scene often shows up in his stories, usually as commuters shuttle between Manhattan and the suburbs. Beyond their useful realism, Cheever seems to associate trains and train stations with an earlier, smaller-scaled, more pastoral America. He’s nostalgic but his nostalgia is tempered by his awareness of loneliness and corruption. Here’s the first paragraph of The Wapshot Scandal (1964):

“The snow began to fall into St. Botolphs at four-fifteen on Christmas Eve. Old Mr. Jowett, the stationmaster, carried his lantern out onto the platform and held it up into the air. The snowflakes shown like iron filings in the beam of his light, although there was really nothing there to touch. The fall of snow exhilarated and refreshed him and drew him – full-souled, it seemed – out of his carapace of worry and indigestion. The afternoon train was an hour late, and the snow (whose whiteness seems to be a part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere) came down with such open-handed velocity, such swiftness, that it looked as if the village had severed itself from its context on the planet and were pressing its roofs and steeples up into the air. The remains of a box kite hung from the telephone wire overhead – a reminder of the year’s versatility. `Oh, who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?’ Mr. Jowett sang loudly, although he knew that it was all wrong for the season, the day and dignity of a station agent, the steward of the town’s true and ancient boundary, its Gate of Hercules.”

The next paragraph is even better, but I’ll quote only the first two sentences:

“Going around the edge of the station he could see the lights of the Viaduct House, where at the moment a lonely traveling salesman was bending down to kiss a picture of a pretty girl in a mail-order catalogue. The kiss tasted faintly of ink.”

The omniscient narrator adds to the sense of collective sadness and wonder that hangs over the scene and much of the novel, especially when he briefly shifts into the first-person plural: “part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere.” Here’s the opening of Bullet Park (1969):

“Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a Pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on the platform with a child on his shoulders. They are waving goodbye to some traveler, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying? On a siding beyond the platform there is a lighted dining car where a waiter sits alone at a table, adding up his accounts. Beyond this is a water tower and beyond this a well-lighted and empty street. Then you think happily that this is your country – unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations.”

It might be an Edward Hopper painting, wreathed in darkness, ordinariness turned wistfully sad: “The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter.” Train stations by nature are scenes of departure and leave-taking. They are inherently sad and their anonymity and the transience of the human scenes they witness exaggerate this sadness. I was reminded of this last weekend when my wife and I watched a great noir from 1952, Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin, which begins and ends in train stations. Donald Justice said in a poem, “Sadness has its own beauty, of course,” and Cheever arranges his sentences seamlessly, gracefully shifting person and tense, moving from the specific and mundane (river, lamps, man and child) to the almost-cosmic, threading them into his narrative without breaking the melancholy spell. Prose like this confirms what the English novelist Henry Green wrote in Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait:

“Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself at night, and it is not quick as poetry, but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of stone.”