The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (60 page)

•

I choose to see the doctor’s suspension of platinum not as the blessing it is but as an admission of the fact that platinum is not working. This puts me into a profound depression, in which I remain this Saturday morning. I think of the courage of my associates, of my closest associates, but the most I seem able to do is to admire their resources. I shall stay warm and read about maps.

•

A very heavy snow begins to fall at a little before midnight. This is the fifth of April. By the next morning, it is a foot or two of powder snow. Legally, it is a legal blizzard. To remember the pleasures of a storm when I was younger, I shovel the stairs and clean the snow off the cars. The snow falls so swiftly that I do this three times in the afternoon. The fall of snow stops about as night falls.

•

In the morning I wake feeling that my illness is a thing of the past. I have not felt so well in weeks. This seems not only well-being but an intelligent grasp of the fact that when I am in the best of health I often suffer profound depressions, random and unsuitable erections, and losses of memory. In any case, I feel that the cancer has been defeated;
and perhaps it has. So, feeling that I have conquered cancer, I stroll happily around the house. A loaf of bread is needed, and I will search for one. What more simple and universal pursuit could there be than a man looking for a new loaf of bread? The last of the unseasonable snow has melted and there is a curious greenness of fragrance in the air that represents what—death! I have not conquered cancer, I have merely worsened. So off I go to the supermarket, which is closed. The sight of this place without lights, without delivery trucks, and without a full parking lot is like some apocalyptic vision. In this society, in this world, at this time of day, finding the supermarket closed is an upheaval. I go to the lesser, and the losing, market and hope deeply that it will not have been forced to stay open in competition; but it too, happily, is closed. Christ the Lord is risen. It is at the bakery that I find the new bread. And how for me a bakery is the heart—and sometimes the soul—of a village! I remember the bakery in the little town north of Rome. I remember stopping at a restaurant in Romania with C. and being told that we could not yet have lunch; the bread hadn’t been baked. One smiles at the girls in the bakery and wishes them a happy Easter.

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say, and Exodus, I think, is what I have in mind. In the speech on the 27th I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess, and that its role as a consciousness must inform us of our inability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. Literature has been the salvation of the damned; literature, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair, and can perhaps, in this case, save the world.

•

The second Sunday after Easter, I attend church for the first time since the doctor declared me dead of cancer. I kneel, hoping to enter a larger realm of humility and gratitude than I might find alone. The altar is a blaze of light. How golden is the light of the candles! G. is bossy and stands determinedly during the collection, although this is not one of the rituals of our church.

•

I claim that illness has kept me from writing here for several weeks. On Monday M. takes his telephone receiver off the hook. He call,
shortly before I employ someone else. He drives us to town in a heavy rain and this is a pleasure. There is a reception at the Locust Club, which is of no particular consequence; and we have dinner at a French restaurant into which the customers seem to have strayed. That is charming. Driving home in the rain is lovely. M. spends the night at the house, and I am pleased to think of him sleeping under my roof. Off we go again in the middle of the afternoon, when I receive a medal and the family is together. M. drives us back, and while I miss the rain we had last time, I deeply enjoy having him as a driver. We part tenderly on Wednesday, and I think it is on Friday that I ask R. to come for a visit. He is a pleasant young man about whose way of life, whose friends, I know nothing and can imagine nothing. Carnally the drive is very ardent, and we end up in a heap of brush before lunch. I find my orgasm very gratifying and very important. We lunch together, chat, and I put him on a train, but I seem in my ardor to have pulled my chest out of line. This is quite painful. On Monday I go to the doctor, who finds nothing serious; but this morning I find my breathing constricted, and I will now take a little rest.

•

For the first time in forty years I have failed to keep this journal with any care. I am sick. That seems to be my only message. I must, this morning, call the broker, order stationery, and have my watch fixed. I will now lie down.

•

I have climbed from a bed on the second floor to reach this typewriter. This was an achievement. I do not understand what has happened to the discipline, or character, that has brought me here for so many years. I think of an early dusk, the day before yesterday. My wife is in the upper garden planting something. “I want to get these in before dark,” she will have said. A light rain, a drizzle, is falling. I can remember planting at this hour and in this weather, although I can’t remember what it was I planted. Rhubarb or tomatoes. Now I am undressing to go to bed, and my fatigue is so overwhelming that I am undressing with the haste of a lover. I have never known anything like this fatigue. I feel it in the middle of dinner. We have a guest to be driven to the train, and I begin to count the number of times it takes him to empt
his dessert plate with a spoon. There is his coffee to finish, but happily he has taken a small cup. Even before this is empty I have him on his feet for the train. It will be for me, I know, twenty-eight steps from the table to the car, and, after he has been abandoned at the station, another twenty-eight steps from the car to my room, where I tear off my clothes, leave them in a heap on the floor, turn out the light, and fall into bed.

T
HE
EXTENDED
PORTIONS
of John Cheever’s journals that ran in
The New Yorker
and that now, with additions, make up this book were taken from what I estimate to be between three and four million words. That is, perhaps a twentieth of the entire journal appears here. My basic editorial impulse in choosing what to print was, naturally, to represent this vast body of material fairly—to follow the line of Cheever’s inner life as he wrote it down day after day, year after year; to reflect, in proportion, the conflicts and the satisfactions of the thirty-five or so years that these journals represent; and to reveal something of how he worked. Repetitions were kept to a minimum, except where they seemed to reflect obsessions that had to be acknowledged. Passages were omitted that required explanation or annotation, or that did not seem complete in themselves. Earlier journals—from the forties, and some scanty passages from before the Second World War—seemed considerably less consistent in their intensity and quality than what was to follow, and I excluded them completely, just as, with Cheever’s fervent agreement, I had omitted the fiction of this period from the large “Stories of John Cheever” that appeared in 1978. And there were, of course, scores of entries in each year’s journal of little compelling interest, and other entries too fragmentary or obscure to convey much to the reader. (On the other hand, there were many passages of such beauty and force that they demanded automatic inclusion.)

Journals, even if written with an eye toward eventual publication, have no deliberate shape—they simply accrete—and any editor making a selection from such an immense body of work is imposing a shape on the material. Undoubtedly a different editor, making other choices, would have produced a book of considerably different particulars, and perhaps with a somewhat different emphasis. Yet Cheever’s journals i
any given period are so consistent in theme and tone that I comfort myself with the assumption that
any
extensive selection from them, despite variations in shape and emphasis, would end by revealing the same life and the same talent; in fact, the same man. In other words, I believe that although I had to make rigorous and, I suppose, personal choices in order to provide the journals with a workable structure, their essential truth has resisted my intervention.

The actual editing of the text was made easier by the fact that I had worked with Cheever on his last five books, three of them novels, and so knew exactly the kind of help he expected from an editor, from copy editors, and from fact checkers. In matters of spelling, punctuation, and grammar, he was less than reliable, and he depended on both
The New Yorker
and Knopf to assist him in these areas. Probably my colleagues and I interfered less on the text of the journals than we would have if he had been alive to supervise their publication, since if we were in any doubt as to how he might have reacted to a suggested change, we didn’t make it. The individual entries run as written—that is, there are no cuts within given passages (except in less than half a dozen places, where an indecipherable phrase, or a short mundane remark—“Had lunch with D., S., and X at the Oyster Bar”—was too obtrusive). The space breaks between passages may represent a cut inside a long entry or the passage of days, even weeks, between entries, but each passage within the space breaks is complete. The sequence of the entries is Cheever’s, with one exception: the opening pages have been moved forward several years because they seemed an appropriate introduction to the journals as a whole. The journals as written are inconsistent in their use of names; people are referred to indiscriminately by both their full names and their initials. I made the decision to use full names for family members and public figures, and initials for everyone else.

The original journals are small, looseleaf notebooks, approximately one to a year, into which Cheever typed his entries (badly), although there are also some passages written in longhand. He did not date most of the entries, which is why we didn’t. In this volume there are running heads on every page spread to indicate the year of the entries; these dates come from the covers of the original notebooks, and occasionally from deduction. The final entry in the book is the final entry in the journals themselves—made only days before Cheever’s death, on June 18, 1982.

Although John Cheever’s three children—Susan, Benjamin, and Federico—gave
The New Yorker
selection their generous support and approval, the responsibility for it was completely mine: they very remarkably refrained from commenting even on passages in which their father spoke of them in momentary anger or disappointment. They then proposed additional entries for this book, most of which I agreed with entirely, and many of which I would have added to the magazine excerpts had there been room. This book, then, has been a happy collaboration, and I thank my collaborators for their acumen, their enthusiasm, and their forbearance.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB

ALSO BY
J
OHN
C
HEEVER

OH WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS

John Cheever’s last novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears’s paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever’s accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73785-8

BULLET PARK

Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror. In these exemplary environs John Cheever traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and Paul Hammer, a bastard named after a common household tool, who, after a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective—to murder Nailles’s son. Here is the lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb—and to all the dubious normalcy it represents—delivered with unparralled artistry and assurance.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73787-2

ALSO AVAILABLE
Falconer
, 978-0-679-73786-5
The Stories of John Cheever
, 978-0-375-72442-8