Hanif Kureishi: Collected Essays

The Cheever of The Journals appears to be a thin-skinned loner who loved both men and women. This confused him and at times made him crazy to be with, since it was conventional, when he was a young man, to make a choice. But for a writer such a broad range of sympathy could only be an advantage.

Cheever wrote about the most important things. You might think, turning to the stories, that you would be hard pressed to learn much about a wider America, of black and Hispanic lives, of post-slavery trauma, inequality, political struggle, or poverty. But you do learn about the shabby hard lives of elevator operators, of janitors and the respectable poor.

In The Journals Cheever called his work ‘confined’ and worried about his limitations. And yet, far from being an elitist WASP with little knowledge of life outside of the evergreen and affluent suburbs, a wasteland of Saturday night parties and post-martini despair, where all the men are commuters and the women feel they have wasted their lives — not unlike the swimming-pool world satirised later by Charles Webb in The Graduate — Cheever’s writing is right at the centre of things. His subjects are not freaks, losers or marginals, but children, work and the central idea of Western literature, what Cheever calls ‘the bitter mystery of marriage’, and the way marriage can make passion seem improbable, if not impossible. And while he is fascinated by what he sometimes describes as ‘carnal anarchy’, he is wise enough to know that it is status, self-respect and work, rather than sexual passion, which drives us: we live money, while dreaming of a complete love.

I guess you might want to characterise these stories as Chekhovian, if only because of Cheever’s facility for capturing significant moments in ordinary lives with humorous compassion and without condescension, and because of Cheever’s ability to write a breath-taking last elegiac paragraph which both encompasses and transcends the story, as though the whole thing at last is thrown in the air in a kind of bacchanalic celebration. You might also want to say that Cheever is less bleak than Carver, and more capacious, ironic and jaunty than Hemingway. But in the end he is always entirely himself, with every sentence weighed and balanced until it says the right thing and often more, rising until it unites the daily train with the wider political railway.

Cheever speaks of a society in which people are ‘united in their tacit claims that there had been no past, no war — that there was no danger or trouble in the world’. How vast and important America was at that time, with his characters sharing a general American post-war hope for prosperity and peace while all the time undermined by the fear that it is all too new, and can be taken back. And with regard to the political scene, it is almost impossible to read these stories without some knowledge of what was to follow, that these shallow, narrow lives would be shattered by ‘the 60s’ — that uprush of excitement, cussedness and rebellion which changed everything. He makes us see it coming: his innerly divided people wish for ease and security, but they want love and unrepression too; they are engaged by desire of a very pressing kind, which breaks up most attempts at contentment and leads often to disaster.

You would, therefore, expect to find only ordinariness and the cleanest dull rectitude in the suburbs; that, presumably, is why people choose to live there. But on closer examination there are extraordinary human passions and weaknesses, an awful restlessness. At its most moderate this is sensible. ‘In order to see anything — a leaf or a blade of grass — you had, in think, to know the keenness of love.’

But when was loving anyone simple? There are, as Bascomb the wise poet in ‘The World of Apples’ confirms, occasions when ‘obscenity — gross obscenity — seemed to be the only factor in life that possessed colour and cheer.’

Further along then, desire becomes a destructive passion, a perversion even, which cannot be satiated. This is shown in ‘The Country Husband’, one of Cheever’s best stories, and one of the finest ever written, where a man who narrowly escapes disaster in a plunging aeroplane returns home to find his wife and children not only indifferent to his narrow escape but perhaps to his entire being. Madly, he seeks solace with his young baby-sitter. As a result he goes to a psychiatrist, which was what many Americans did in the 1950s, where, after memorably saying to the doctor, ‘I’m in love, Dr Herzog,’ he finds more disappointment and a recommendation to take up woodwork. Where then, might a suffering person turn, if not to the bottle?

The complexity of Cheever’s own character — and what today would be described as a ‘struggle with alcohol and sexuality’ — enabled him to see that a good deal of his characters’ misfortunes are due to their weakness and their history rather than to social forces or the malevolence of others. The eternal puzzle of why people do that which is not in their interest, and have a desire to lose what is most precious to them, makes Cheever fascinated by the deepest destructions.

Sometimes this is comic, with a gay man putting his head in an oven three times, only to be rescued by an annoyed homophobic janitor. But ‘Reunion’, a fine story only a couple of pages long, concerns a father who can only repeatedly sabotage a meeting with his estranged son, leaving both lacking the thing they most want, some connection and authentic exchange.

John Cheever was born in 1912 in Massachusetts. After serving in the army, he became a full-time writer in the early 1950s. In 1948 he wrote, ‘We are as poor as we ever have been. I can write a story a week, perhaps more.’ He succeeded, writing novels and stories until his death in 1982. He lived in Rome and wrote many brilliant stories set in Italy. Working in the commercial world, mostly for the New Yorker , Cheever managed to support his family with his writing. As half-artist, half-entertainer, his work is not only in the top range with that of Maupassant and Flannery O’Connor and the other great Americans, it is not conventional but experimental in the most interesting sense. In The Journals there is very little about his actual process of writing. Cheever is reluctant to talk to himself about what he is doing when he isn’t doing it. Nor is he compelled to: this was before authors went on lengthy book tours, gave huge numbers of readings followed by signings, and were interviewed until their own voice horrified them. But he does give us something significant, once more in the Paris Review , ‘Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before in such a way.’

The chief problem for the story writer however, particularly when it comes to a collection, is of variety, especially if the reader wants to consume the stories in one go; it could be like gobbling too many oysters, rather than taking them one by one at intervals, the ideal way. But there is immense range and variety here: this is a life’s work, and it was a life of curiosity and renewal.

Oddly, Cheever never created a character as talented, intelligent or cultured as himself; these are all smaller people than he seemed to be, but they are scraps of him. The creation of character, the novelist’s main work, wasn’t his primary concern, but the putting together of it all at once. As he said, ‘I don’t work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts. Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap.’

His ability to see and describe is startling: an ‘unclothed woman of exceptional beauty, combing her golden hair’ in the sleeping car of a passing train; a neighbour playing the ‘Moonlight Sonata’: ‘He threw the tempo out of the window and played rubato from beginning to end, like an outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity — of everything it was Beethoven’s greatness not to know.’