`Like the Power of Memory'

In our hotel room in downtown Portland I was reminded by John Cheever that for the first time in many years I have not attended a county fair. Early in The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Coverly and his father, Leander, walk to the fair in their (imaginary) town, St. Botolph’s, Mass.:

“It was a summer evening so splendid that the power it had over their senses was like the power of memory and they could have kicked up their heels with joy when they saw ahead of them the matchboard fence and within it and above it the lights of the fair, burning gallantly against some storm clouds in which lightning could be seen to play.”

The Wapshots head for the midway where a barker (Cheever later identifies him as “pimp”) and his lascivious patter lure father and son and dozens of other men into the tent to watch the hootchie-cootchie dancers. Cheever gets the details right – soiled canvas signs, the dancers’ dress of “coarse, transparent cloth,” the stink of the tent’s interior which reminds Coverly of “some mushroom-smelling forest.”

He also captures the mingled lewdness and wholesomeness of a county fair. Agriculture, the celebration of a good harvest, goes on alongside sin and temptation – an unlikely partnership of 4-H and carnies. This is Cheever’s theme, the one he embodied in life, defined by Guy Davenport as Cheever’s “fascination for the slippery tussle between human nature and moral codes.” Coverly flees the hootchie-cootchie tent in a torment of lust and wanders into an agricultural exhibit:

“Squashes, tomatoes, corn and lima beans were arranged on paper plates with prizes and labels. The irony of admiring squashes, under the circumstances, was not wasted on him.”

The next day, a Sunday, after church, Coverly “washed his armpits and emptied his bank,” preparing to lose his virginity with the young hootchie-cootchie dancer:

“He did not stop or hesitate until he saw at the gates to the fairgrounds that all the lights were out. The fair was over, of course, and the carnival had gone. The gates hung open and why not, for after the cakes and squashes, the kewpie dolls and exhibitions of needlework had been removed what was there to guard?”

Cheever’s novel (and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, 1964) is masterful, one I reread every few years, but my favorite evocation of a fair was written by a lesser writer, Sherwood Anderson. “The American County Fair” was published in 1930 as a limited edition pamphlet, and later included by Horace Gregory in The Portable Sherwood Anderson (1949), where I first read it at 16 or 17. Anderson, a native of smalltown Ohio, explicitly identifies the dual nature of a fair -- “In spite of all the talk about improving agriculture, etc., it is a pagan outbreak.” – and suggests its erotic undercurrent:

“See the women going about, the girls from the towns and from the farms. They walk boldly. Now is the time to get yourself a man. They all feel that. It shows in the way they walk. It is in their eyes. They will stay at the fair all day and far into the night. They are tireless.”