'I Dream of a Better Prose Style'

We can’t know with scientific rigor what others mean when they speak or write. They could be toying with irony or ambiguity, lying, joking or incoherent, purposely or otherwise. We settle for approximate translation, hoping we’ve understood something of their intent, and usually that suffices. Even the eloquent can fail to articulate, perhaps for artistic reasons, and that’s not always a failing. Here is John Cheever in his journal in 1953: “How the world shines with light.” 

Like Henry James in his late-period novels, Cheever is a writer with a consistent but unorthodox religious sense. Creation is charged with meaning and grace. Nothing is inert, cast-off, without worth. In this, Cheever reminds us of the Metaphysical poets, among whose favorite metaphors was light. Hear how the sentence quoted above recalls Vaughan:

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright . . .”

 

Likewise, I hear Traherne and Herbert. In his review of Cheever’s final book, Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982), Guy Davenport writes: “Cheever the optimist with a wicked smile and sheer joy at the shamelessness of his incurable brightness [italics added] insists that things right themselves and turn out all right, or as all right as we can expect, given the nature of our folly.”

 

Here is the next paragraph in Cheever’s journal: “I dream of a better prose style, freed of expedients, more thoughtful, working closer to the emotions by both direction and indirection, feeling and intelligence. A pleasant dream, and I feel like myself.”

 

He got his wish. That year, 1953, he published “The Sorrows 0f Gin” and “O Youth and Beauty!” in The New Yorker. The following year, “The Country Husband,” “The Day the Pig Fell in the Well” and “The Five-Forty-Eight.”

 

[See The Journals of John Cheever (1991) and Davenport’s The Hunter Gracchus (1996).]