The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (5 page)

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Christmas in Boston, Quincy, New Haven, etc. It is a tonic for my self-respect to leave the basement room. The plane to Boston was delayed. The flight was through clouds, and rough. My taxi in Boston got locked in a traffic jam in Charlestown and I walked into the city. Dark and rainy. I go out to Quincy, by trolley car, subway, and bus. In inlets, bays, and tidal rivers along the north-Atlantic coast there are many one-room yacht clubs, ramshackle boat liveries, shacks where bait is sol,
oars and dinghies are rented that look as if they had been built, and may have been built, from rubbish salvaged from the sea bottom or left by the tides on the clay banks. The tin chimneys are wired together out of scrap. The crackers and cheese are hung in a basket from the ceiling to protect them from water rats. The signs—B
AIT FOR
S
ALE
, B
OATS FOR
R
ENT
—might have been printed by a child in the first grade. In looking at these enterprises, these shacks and piers, it is impossible to draw a line between human endeavor and the sea. Salvaged out of sea waste again. Along the sinking coastline the temporalness of these bait shacks and boat liveries seems to spread into the towns and cities. The biggest houses—the bank—could be demolished by a wave. The sea is omnipresent. At high tide a lake of brine appears in the parking lot of the paint factory. There is a foot of water in the used-car lot. Etc.

My family, etc. My mother, a woman of eighty, told me that my father had left on his desk, for her to read after his death, a letter excoriating her. She tried then to repair the story. Sitting with her, I feel that I do not have the eyes to see her. To Boston in the morning again by bus and subway; then to New Haven on the train. Innes Young’s cook had dropped dead the previous day. Freddy took me into the library and showed me two antique watchcases. When you remove the velvet backs there is a pornographic painting of a woman with a large and funny-looking penis, etc. P. seemed to me, some of the time, mischievous. I seemed to myself oversensitive. Mary cried before lunch. But taking a walk with Susie on a rainy morning, the day after Christmas, I felt like myself—free—strong—loosed from the sense of inferiority that has given me so much pain and trouble. This is the consequence of having taken a train, of having left the basement room for a day or two. It is the only frame of mind in which it is tenable to live—or write—and I only seem to enjoy it when I leave the room where I work. The contemptible smallness, the mediocrity of my work, the disorder of my days, these are the things that make it, to say the least, difficult for me to get up in the morning. When I talk with people, when I ride on trains, life seems to have some apparent, surface goodness that does not need questioning. When I spend six or seven hours a day at my typewriter, when I try to sleep off a hangover in a broken armchair, I end by questioning everything, beginning with myself. I reach insupportably morbid conclusions, I wish half the time to die. I must achieve
some equilibrium between writing and living. It must not continue to be self-destructive. When I wake in the morning I say to myself I must hit harder, I must do better, I must at least leave a respectable and enlightening record for my children, but an hour later when I sit at my typewriter I lose myself in a haze of regrets and write a page or two about Aaron sitting alone in a room, feeling the walls of his soul collapse. I must bring to my work, and it must give to me, the legitimate sense of well-being that I enjoy when the weather is good and I have had plenty of sleep. Good health is instinctive with me and it can be with literature.

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When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. It is a headache, a slight case of indigestion, an infected finger; but you miss the 8:20 and arrive late at the meeting on credit extensions. The old friend that you meet for lunch suddenly exhausts your patience and in an effort to be pleasant you drink three cocktails, but by now the day has lost its form, its sense and meaning. To try and restore some purpose and beauty to it you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody’s wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning that you were dead. But when you try to trace back the way you came into this abyss all you find is a grain of sand.

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Halloween afternoon; a small town; most of the store windows decorated with gravestones, witches, devils, and ghosts. Childish drawing. A little girl dressed as a rabbit being led across the street by her mother. A little boy in his mother’s skirts and shoes, his face smeared with her lipstick, leaning against a lamppost. The excitement of a holiday. Over the river a beatific sunset. Waiting for the train, for Mary or a cook. The elderly man in a raincoat and tuxedo pants; an unemployed waiter. The secretary; the naked excitement of travel. After dark, children approaching lighted doors. A trick or treat. At ten or eleven a cold rain established itself firmly. I think that I learned to listen to the rain in the lapses of a quarrel. It meant that the quarrel would end. It meant infinity. It fell on the quick and the dead and on the unborn. What a profound pleasure I took in hearing it fall. How clearly I saw the complexit
of the ground where it fell; dry leaves, curved leaves, hair moss and partridgeberry.

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I heard the wind come around on Tuesday night. A cold rain began before dawn and the season changed. The gloom and the cold and the rain continued until late Saturday afternoon, when the wind came directly out of the north and the sky cleared. I walked down to the post office. The leaves, yellow and green, lay thickly everywhere, like bank notes. I looked up the river into the mountains. They were covered with snow.

To a party Saturday night; here is the visible grain of sand, here is the instability that conquers me, here is the question put and evaded as, in another connection, my mind shies and wanders when it is confronted with a sequence of hard facts. Interest rates, bank balances, batting averages, political statistics seem to induce in my mind a kind of shyness. I turn to the theatrical section. I remember that I am uneducated.

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Last night to see some old newsreels of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. A young man, whose nerve seems to be that of a young man; of one who looks on the natural world as an easily met challenge. Like B.M., bold and stupid. The transcendent flight, the feeling that this puts him into a nearly supernatural position. His reception at Le Bourget. The adulation of the city of Paris. Pictures of him on the balcony of the Embassy. Self-possessed, direct. Pictures of him on the cruiser that brought him home. Coming into New York Harbor and the celebration here that was greater than the celebration that signified the end of the war. The impulsive storms of paper that were never seen again.

He falls in love with Elisabeth Morrow. Her death. Her death. But well before that, Anne; he falls in love with her. She must have been shy. Their marriage.

Their flying trips. Their first child. The German pervert. Almost a perversion of the times. An insanity. He steals their child and murders it senselessly and cruelly. Then the moving pictures shown of the child for identification. A beautiful child. The trial. L.’s impassive testimony,
his determination to kill the pervert. The curious division of sympathy in the press. Anne’s misery. The death of Hauptmann. The birth of another child.

Their sequestration. Their unhappiness together. Their inability ever to divorce. The deepening of this misery. The man preserves the nerve and directness of youth, although he has grown old. His sympathies lie with Fascism, with an élite. How differently she feels; how little she dares to say. Talking with her today: her pleasant eyes, her crooked mouth. Her face ravished with strain. The sense of talking with Antigone. To make it an obscene tragedy, the situation could be one where she fell in love with a man who resembled the man who had murdered her firstborn son.

The story would be cruel and indiscreet; in some ways impossible, since it is difficult to find something, anything, to compare with his flight of the Atlantic. But, to speak to no great purpose, it seems that here we part company with Flaubert, for unlike the France of his time we have a hierarchy of demigods and heroes; they are a vital part of our lives and they should be a vital part of our literature. If I could only align the fields with some newspaper tragedy. These are public people. This is public tragedy. They are known. They view publicity and privacy with the values of a reigning king and queen. When they close the doors of the house in Englewood, it is like the closing of the doors in “Oedipus” and “Medea.” We are shut out.

   As a part of moving I have had to go through some old manuscripts and I have been disheartened to see that my style, fifteen years ago, was competent and clear and that the improvements on it are superficial. I fail to see any signs of maturity, of increased penetration; I fail to see any deepening of my grasp. I was always in love. I was always happy to scythe a field and swim in a cold lake and put on clean clothes. I was more exuberant and naïve about both this and love than I am now, but this is not a change for the better. There are thousands of notes, thousands of pages of description, thousands of striking conversations, and because they all lack an inner logic, because they lack passion, they are of no import.

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Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont remind me of three apples: a russet, a McIntosh, and a pippin. New Hampshire, my favorite, is
the russet; a golden winter apple, with a coarse flesh and a strong flavor. I can’t say why this country seems to me incomparable. I have seen many hills that are just as green, and bigger trees and mountains. The Helderbergs seem as high as the mountains near Franconia. But it is the highest land on the eastern seaboard, these are the oldest escarpments on the earth’s crust, and the winds that blow across it are mountain winds. The quality of the air is omniscient. In the morning the air is cold and dark and as clear as glass. The darkness in the clear air seems nearly visible, as if it were made up of fine particles of silt, and yet you can see for fifty miles. At this hour the air is too cold to have a distinctive fragrance. You smell mostly coffee, sausage, the salt pork for the chowder at lunch. By eleven o’clock the sun has warmed the air. It smells now of the garden, the pines, the weeds and wildflowers in the pasture behind the barn. The air is warm, but it is still light and changeable. It will not be heavy until after lunch. Then the air smells like sugar and spice, but as it grows heavier and warmer the weeds in the pasture dominate. Their smell is stronger than spice, they smell like drugs. During all this time the air on the mountain has remained cold and changeable, and at five or six when the children come in to get their supper the cold air mushrooms down through the woods like a cloud (feel the mountain air). The smell of spice and drugs is lost, but the cold air spreads unevenly, and on the terrace or walking out to the woodshed you can feel the eddies of coolness and warmth, clearness and fragrance as distinctly as the currents in the lake. After supper the air on the terrace is cool and dark again and too light to hold many smells (unless it should rain), but sitting on the terrace or in the house you are still conscious of the changeable air. The window curtains move. The smell of cold stone from the massive pieces of granite on the open chimney is flattened against the wall and falls to where we are. Then this is gone again and we smell the heavy odor of cut flowers. It rains somewhere in the neighborhood—in Hebron or Alexandria—and for ten minutes the air smells of the pungency released by a rainfall. Then the permanent smells of the room, panelling and ashes and flowers, are still. It is this continuous play of light and air and water that makes my response to that country so keen. It is also the sense of summer and youth. Driving down the parkway, through Ossining and along River Road, I felt the proximity of the city, I felt that I was driving into an increase of ugliness.

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Into Ossining to buy a loaf of bread, a can of Spam, and the Salinger book. I felt the way I used to feel when I was a soldier. The sky was gray. It was muggy. Ossining looked like an Army town. I felt sad, but it was a useless sadness. I miss Mary and the children. I hear their voices upstairs. I come back here every year to work hard and establish my independence from them, but I never really leave them, and away from them I feel maimed and foolish. I call up everyone I know. They are away. I leave messages with maids. I drink a Martini. I wait for the phone to ring. When I’m unlucky I get drunk and go to the movies and return to Bristol. The idea is to get away from one place, but I never get away, I never reach another place. I try to struggle with the things that bind me, but I forget the nature of the bonds. I go to the movies. I get up at four and read until dawn. I do everything but the work that I came here to do.

   Tense last night. We had been talking earlier about the presence of the dead in this place. I do not believe in the supernatural. I despise it. There is a sense of unrequitedness here, or rather the evidence of unrequitedness: the run-down buildings, the overgrown garden. Read some Turgenev, took a bath, got into bed. As I was going to fall asleep that nervous reflex that is usually the last thing I remember before sleep seemed to rebound—I heard some noise from the children’s room—and I was wakeful and frightened. Then suddenly my daughter spoke hoarsely in her sleep, eight or ten times, a name. The voice was guttural and unlike her waking voice. I went into the room and stood by her bed until she had stopped talking. Then there were many voices and noises hour after hour. There was the illusion of a man’s voice, a little more than a sigh. I think I have never been so frightened before. My flesh crawled. I was subjected to the beating of my heart. Who would the spirit be if there were a spirit? A sickly banker, troubled because he had never been given credit for organizing the Federal Reserve Board? The advertising executive who offered to hang the traitor with his own hands? The impostor?

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To bring out a collection of short stories this fall: “Torch Song,” “O City of Broken Dreams,” “Emma Boynton,” “The Day the Pig Fell
into the Well,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Season of Divorce,” “The Sutton Place Story,” “The Pot of Gold,” perhaps “The Radio Man,” I mean “The Elevator Man,” and to write a couple of stories to complement the collection, a couple of long pieces with no dying fall. Read at the office yesterday most of the stories I’ve written in the last five years and was, quite incidentally, exhilarated and happy to leave the office for the open streets at five. The stories didn’t seem too good. The war stories are spoiled with chauvinism, a legitimate weakness. I also found pitiful evidences of poorly informed snobbism, an exaggerated wish to impress my knowledge of Army prose upon the reader, and associated with this a tendency to use verbatim conversation rather than the remarks that should be made by my characters. Some of the best of it seems to be the set of descriptions of character: Emma Boulanger had the soul of a housemaid, etc. This I picked up from Flaubert and it is showing signs of turning into a bad characteristic of generalization. I can use these set pieces if they are integrated into a crisis. My interim narrative style needs a lot of work. Love of sorts is reasonably well described. There are too many scornful and fine phrases.