'Ballgames and Fourth of July Parades'

A little nervously, I think, a friend told me she was reading John Cheever’s first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). She seemed relieved when I told her I love both Wapshot books. The party line is that Cheever was not by nature a novelist. Rather, he was a short story writer who strung together stories to flesh out loosely organized novels. That’s rubbish. Not every novelist is Henry James, with an unfailing gift for tight, resonant organization. Part of Cheever’s charm is his picaresque spirit and love for his people. In his hands, a novel might go anywhere, held together by style, theme, intimacy of tone and sheer good storytelling.

On February 21, 1983, William Maxwell writes to Eudora Welty, recalling the time in 1958 when he served as a judge in the National Book Award fiction category. According to his account, Maxwell persuaded his colleagues to give the prize to Cheever for The Wapshot Chronicle. Another judge, Francis Steegmuller, at first lobbied for Malamud’s The Assistant, which Maxwell also admired. Other nominees included Nabokov’s Pnin and Wright Morris’ Love Among the Cannibals. We’ll never see another fiction lineup like that again. Maxwell writes to Welty:

“The other day I found a long, intelligent letter from Francis explaining – at the time – why The Assistant was a novel and The Wapshot Chronicle was not. The distinction didn’t interest me much, and doesn’t now, really. I feel a novel is a long piece of prose narrative with the breath of life in it.”

Now I’ve remembered that The Wapshot Chronicle begins on the Fourth of July during the annual parade in the fictional town of St. Botolph’s, Mass.: “On Independence Day in the morning, when the parade had begun to form, the place looked prosperous and festive.” In a 1981 entry in his Journals, a year before his death, Cheever writes:

“I wake terribly blue, and try to remember how often I have written about the man who cries at ballgames and Fourth of July parades. I think of how substantial is the gift of prayer; and I am on my knees. And I think of the susceptibility and loneliness of youth, of how this contributes to youth’s drive and youth’s beauty.”

[You can find Maxwell’s letter in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (ed. Suzanne Marrs, 2011). The Journals of John Cheever was published in 1991.]