“Memorial Day.
A new notebook. A man wearing a powdered wig and a tricorne carries a bass drum
past the liquor store. I do not take my younger son to the parade, as I would
have two years ago. I have grown this old, not to say jumpy. Taking Ben to see
`The Bridge on the River Kwai’ I think of X, who, suffering from melancholy, walked
through the city looking for moving pictures that dealt with cruel and sudden
death, torture, earthquakes, floods, and assassinations—with any human misery
that would, briefly, make his own burdens seem lighter.”
You needn’t
be a writing workshop instructor to recognize the voice, the comic pleasure in peculiar
juxtapositions, the all-consuming egotism coupled with a writer’s imaginative empathy,
the booze. The passage might almost be lifted from one of John Cheever’s
stories, one of the busy ones crammed with incident, such as “The Country Husband,” but you’ll find it in The
Journals of John Cheever (1991), the first entry in the section titled “The
Sixties.” In a handful of stories, Cheever is one of our best, but at such a
cost. He was a machine for generating unhappiness in himself and others, and
there were reasons other than alcohol. Even in his final seven sober years, he
was a mess. See Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A
Life (2009) for details. The meaning
of Memorial Day, and much else, is lost in the journal entry. Cheever had joined
the Army in 1942 and serviced in the Signal Corps in Astoria, Queens.
In 1943,
Yvor Winters attempted to enlist in the Army. He was rejected for medical
reasons (Winters had suffered from tuberculosis as a young man and was never
robustly healthy) and volunteered as the Citizens’ Defense Corps Zone Warden
for Los Altos, Calif. In the November 1944 issue of Poetry, Winters published “Moonlight Alert,” subtitled “Los Altos, California, June 1943.” The
poem concludes:
“With
care
I held
this vision, thinking of young men
Whom I had
known and should not see again,
Fixed in
reality, as I in thought.
And I
stood waiting, and encountered naught.”
1 comment:
Mr. Cheever was my writing teacher for his one year at Boston University. He was indeed a mess personally, but I consider him one of the finest writers of American prose.
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