'Moral Significance, a Continuity That is Heartening'

A reader has read John Cheever’s “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear” and wonders what to make of it. First published in the November 12, 1960 issue of The New Yorker, it originally was titled “Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Novel,” which became the title of his 1961 story collection. Cheever calls it a story. I call it a lark, a good-humored meta-fictional romp with substance before there was such a thing.

 

He lists seven human types or situations banished from his fictional world. The first is “the pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth Rugby game.” She is a cliché – the moody, lonely, spunky coed. The second: “All parts for Marlon Brando.” He’s another cliché – the inarticulate but sensitive hunk. Vito Corleone was still more than a decade away. The third is the most interesting:

 

“All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we – you and I – shall build.”

 

Cheever diagnoses one of several reasons I’ve never cared for The Great Gatsby: the valley of ashes, that landfill in Queens between West Egg and Manhattan. Waste land imagery was already hackneyed and tiresome by 1925. Lazy, cynical novelists insert the pre-fabricated symbols Cheever lists when they hope to represent the purported sterility and emptiness of American life.

 

In No. 4 he dismisses earnest, high-toned pornography, sex described in the spirit of an automotive manual. No. 5 is, obviously, revealing: “All lushes.” Cheever had done primary-source research, knew the subject intimately and ignored his own advice. “Reunion” is one of his best and briefest stories. Cheever was certainly the most conflicted of notable writers. No. 6 is likewise revealing: “. . . out go all those homosexuals who have taken such a dominating position in recent fiction. Isn’t it time that we embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the flesh and moved on?” Another cliché that must be resisted, he says, because it “shed[s] too little light.”

 

Finally, No. 7, “my laconic old friend Royden Blake,” a writer who shares a few qualities with John O’Hara, is guilty of some of the clichés already enumerated and begins telling an unpromising story: “Then he put his head back on the pillow and died – indeed, these were his dying words, and the dying words, it seemed to me, of generations of storytellers, for how could this snowy and trumped-up pass, with its trio of travelers, hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream?”

 

Cheever is too often pigeonholed as the postwar anatomist of suburban woes, a spokesman for the declining days of WASP privilege. I see in his stories and novels a recognition of life’s spiritual dimensions, a capacity he shares with Nabokov, who admired him. Cheever writes in his Journals (Knopf, 1991) in 1959:

 

“My sense of morality is that life is a creative process and that anything that chafes or impedes this forward thrust is evil and obscene. The simplest arrangements -- trees, a line of bathhouses, a church steeple, a bench in a park—appear to have a moral significance, a continuity that is heartening and that corresponds to my whole sense of being. But there are speculations and desires that seem contrary to the admirable drift of the clouds in heaven, and perhaps the deepest sadness that I known is to be absorbed in these.”