read The Stories of John Cheever

This story concerns a husband whose wife and children have recently left him, and his approach to the separation as a “cure” from an addictive substance, which I think is certainly one aspect of ending relationships: The withdrawal symptoms.

He soon finds a man spying on him in the wee small hours.

Like many other Carver stories, I suppose I enjoyed it well enough, the characters and situations, but it’s hard for me to put it all together and say what it means.

I thought this story was so sexually arousing, without being sexually explicit at all. The character Baxter is similar to many “womanizer” caricatures, always presented as completely sleazy (the fellow in The Family Guy comes to mind, but in this story I definitely found myself rooting for him and even kind of inspired by the idea that seducing someone isn’t so much a matter of who you are or what your status is, but rather finding the proper way of relating, of giving the other person what they feel is missing in their life, or of entering into that person’s fantasy of who they want to be.

I appreciate the sadness. I always want more than my life seems to allow. I think in some ways it’s drilled into us here in the USA that anything is possible, and it’s not always emphasized that achieving one goal might require sacrificing something else, something very valuable to us.

Another story about an elevator operator, and I thought quite a strange tale, questioning the true motives of those who give to those they perceive as less fortunate. I’ve always been kind of skeptical about Thanksgiving- and Christmas-specific giving, how people make a point to give to the poor during these two moments in the year, but don’t take any kind of action at other times, perhaps political action that might help eliminate poverty. The story’s not really about that, though, but I don’t want to give away too much in case you haven’t read it and don’t want me to spoil it.

Finally, homosexuality appears. I was kind of surprised it came so early in the collection: I had no idea it was permissible to speak of such things in a publication like The New Yorker as early as 1953. True, the gay character in this story is somewhat cartoonish, but I think the point is more about how Clancy, the “simple” elevator operator, ultimately comes to grudgingly accept this man whose lifestyle disgusts and offends him.

”. . . When you get as old and as rich as I am, it’s hard to meet people. All my old friends are dead – all of them but George. I’m surrounded by a cordon of associates and relatives that’s damned near impenetrable, and if it wasn’t for George giving me a name now and then, I’d never get to see a new face. Last year, I got into an automobile accident. It was my fault. I’m a terrible driver. I hit this young fellow’s car and I got right out and went over to him and introduced myself. We had to wait about twenty minutes for the wreckers and we got to talking. Well, he’s working for me today and he’s one of the best friends I’ve got, and if I hadn’t run into him, I’d never have met him. When you get to be as old as me, that’s the only way you can meet people – automobile accidents, fires, things like that.”

This was such a simple story that I’m tempted to call it “moralistic,” but is it proper to say that about something when you agree with it and like it? But really this does read like a child’s fable for adults, and maybe we need a bit more of that. I think we do work too hard sometimes for questionable goals. I think the longing for “being rich” is a digusting sickness, but I’d be the worst hypocrite if I claimed I didn’t sense it at times lingering down somewhere inside myself.

I’m afraid I have nothing to say about this story. It is among other things a chronicle of a distant friendship over a period of many years in New York City. It is sometimes easier to preserve those more distant relationships than intimate ones. But as for what this story is trying to “say,” and especially what the ending means, I have no idea.

This one more than any I’ve read so far reminds me of what I remember of the Flannery O’Connor stories read a few years ago, which probably remain the stories that have made the greatest impression on me. The theme of a character gradually becoming aware of his or her own hypocrisy as terrible events unfold seems to be more or less a constant in her work, and there are certainly traces of that to be found here in this story, originally published (if my reference is correct, which I’m afraid I’m not at all sure about) in the year 1948.

Which is not to say I thought this was the greatest of the Cheever stories or anything like that. I’m not quite clear on what it means, what the point is, although I think the key relationship in the story is that between Paul (the title character) and his hired helper Kasiak, a Russian immigrant and proud Communist. Because of my considerable ignorance of historical matters, it’s hard for me to know how significant his Communism is, and it’s hard for me to know if this is supposed to be any kind of metaphor having to do with relationships between Capitalism and Communism. I don’t think so, though, or anyway such a theme would not seem like such an important one for me today as it might have if I were reading this fifty years ago.

I sense that the alcoholic sister is here for a reason, or I feel like she must be, but I have no clue why and can only speculate blindly that she represents in some way the “shameful debauchery” of a wealthy nation.

He would offer him a drink. He would settle him in the wing chair and play out that charade of equality between vacationist and hired man that is one of the principal illusions of the leafy months.

Maybe the point is that the story ends with an abuse of power which possibly proves that the Capitalist society is unfair, that Paul without ever realizing it, has turned into something of a tyrant. I don’t know. Like I said, and unlike some of the stories in this collection, the meaning here isn’t at all clear to me.

Thinking about this as I carried Lawrence’s heavy suitcases up the stairs, I realized that our dislikes are as deeply ingrained as our better passions, and I remembered that once, twenty-five years ago, when I had hit Lawrence on the head with a rock, he had picked himself up and gone directly to our father to complain.

. . .

The Pommeroys were ministers until the middle of the ninteenth century, and the harshness of their thought - man is full of misery, and all earthly beauty is lustful and corrupt - has been preserved in books and sermons. The temper of our family changed somewhat and became more lighthearted, but when I was of school age, I can remember a cousinage of old men and women who seemed to hark back to the dark days of the ministry and to be animated by perpetual guilt and the deification of the scourge. If you are raised in this atmosphere - and in a sense we were - I think it is a trial of the spirit to reject its habits of guilt, self-denial, taciturnity, and penitence, and it seemed to me to have been a trial of the spirit in which Lawrence had succumed.

I’m not sure if these excerpts do it justice, but I was taken in and wrapped up by “Goodbye, My Brother” by John Cheever in a way I haven’t been in a very long time. His writing is pretty much exactly the kind of writing I want to read, which is not to say this story wasn’t deeply disturbing and troubling for me, because there’s no question that the character Lawrence, the narrator’s brother, is presented as being such a drag and a burden and you can imagine that one so overly sensitive to potential sleights or attacks as I seem to be was quick to realize this story was possibly an extended attack on me personally, and it cuts so deeply and so well, it is unnerving to read, I feel like this must be exactly how I appear to some people, especially my family. And I think this story is saying they’re all right and I’m all wrong, or I’m going about things in my life in the wrong way, I’m too hopelessly and pointlessly negative and really everyone would be better if I were out of the picture. To which I can only respond by hiding out here in my room reading more stories that will also possibly hate me.

On second thought, I think this may be me sort of tending toward mental illness of one kind or another. But even at my most paranoid and panicky, I think my concerns at least start off as valid concerns.

Oh I wish mental health evaluations were quick, easy, inexpensive, and free of feelings of shame and regret. I wish my family would understand and believe the results I showed them.

I had at one point intended to read a new story from The Stories of John Cheever each day until I completed it, but I forgot all about that after the first two stories. So I put it down for a long time. But tonight I picked it up again and read the third story, “The Enormous Radio,” and I’m excited about this project again, especially now that I’ve located a website with what appears to be a date of initial publication for each story. If my source is correct and I am correct in interpreting the information presented there, “The Enormous Radio” was first published in 1947. You might think reading something written then is far too dated to be enjoyed, but really it feels like a big step forward in time after Joyce and Chekov. I’m excited because the stories in the book are presented in roughly chronological order, and will focus mainly on middle class suburban life in times between the 40s and the 70s. I have only broad stereotyped notions of what it might have been like to be alive in those times (unless of course you happened to be a rock star in the 1960s) and it’s thrilling in a way to go back to that time and enter into a slightly but significantly alien world to see how it looks and feels.

“The Enormous Radio,” though: Brilliant idea for a story, I think, and one that greatly extends my ideas or expectations of what a John Cheever story can be like, and even in a way broadens my ideas about what is acceptable in literary short fiction. Clearly I haven’t read too much (Chekov, Joyce, Fitzgerald, then I think nothing until the 1980s). But this is the kind of thing I try to write, when I try to write: A novel idea and with a very clear and obvious point to it, written with venom. None of the “slice of life” business for me, thank you. Which reminds me: I’ve also read a book of short stories by Flannery O’Connor, my fellow Georgian and fellow miserable curmudgeon with similar bizarre religious issues.