John Cheever, Miserable Bastard, Shows Us How It’s Done

: Image via Wikipedia

Before we get to Cheever, a question: why have so many wonderful novelists been such miserable bastards? Is it something that’s required?

Wouldn’t narcissism and meanness roughen your sensibilities, blunt your ability to create empathy, sympathy, and true moral judgment on the page?

What do you think? Do nice guys make lousy novelists? Some say Hemingway wrote like an angel and lived like a devil. I did a good bit of secondary research on Papa a while back, and I’d tend to agree.

So then, should MFA Programs be teaching courses in how to humiliate your spouse, sucker punch a weakling at the bar, slander old friends, end love relationships suddenly and brutally?

Silly. But come to think of it, on days when I write badly, my flippant excuse to myself is: “What do you expect? I’m a nice guy.” I laugh it off, because no one would take dumb stuff like that seriously. Yet when I meet a novelist at a party, my first instinct–especially if they seem “nice”–is to start looking for the rough edges, and sooner or later, I find them.

Even the exceptions come with asterisks. My late friend Tim McLaurin, a powerful novelist, was nice to the point of courtliness, but kept poisonous snakes in his house. Kurt Vonnegut was as nice as any novelist I’ve ever known, but he had his edges and some of them were sharp. In my own case, I think I’m a good person–I try to be–but ask those close to me for a thumbnail adjective and “nice” will not be the first word out of their mouths.

Isn’t this post about John Cheever? Yes, and thanks for being patient. Here we go:

What a piece of work was John Cheever! A man whose life was a self-created hell of sexual confusion, snobbery, addiction, phobia, hatefulness, and depression, Cheever was the Paul Bunyan of miserable bastard novelists. Blake Bailey’s new biography, as detailed and full of insight as it is, doesn’t brighten things one bit: it only deepens and darkens the bitter shadow that was Cheever the man.

Yet damned if this same John Cheever wasn’t also a writer so incandescently marvelous that, reading something by him, you’d hardly believe it could actually be the work of THAT guy.

So here’s what I say: forget the “bad” Cheever. This isn’t a gossip blog. Not another word about his, or anyone else’s private life or personal tendencies. Instead, for a moment let’s appreciate Cheever the angel–and learn from him. Look at the quoted lines below. When I saw them in Sunday’s New York Times review of Bailey’s book (reviewer Geoffrey Wolff), they jumped out at me as if they were a living thing:

The narrator, a Cheeveresque suburbanite, observes his aging alcoholic mother drinking herself into a sullen fury (from the story, “Goodby My Brother”)

She stared “at the dark air in front of her nose, moving her head a little, like a fighter. I knew that there was not room in her mind then for all the injuries that were crowding into it. Her children were stupid, her husband was drowned, her servants were thieves, and the chair she sat in was uncomfortable.”

There so many things to say about what he does here, but I’ll just touch on a few:

“the dark air in front of her nose”
This combines absolute spatial precision, in front of her nose, with an almost reckless metaphor, the dark air. Reckless? Well, everyone knows air can’t be “dark.” Yes, but Cheever knows something that trumps that wisdom:

“moving her head a little, like a fighter”
In a fight it’s normal for a boxer’s head to bob, shift, feint so it won’t present a moving target. But in everyday behavior, it will seem oddly deranged. Cheever knew his audience (in the 1950s) would be largely male New Yorker readers who watched the Wednesday and Friday night fights on live TV, and carried macho fantasies to and from the office every day. They’d get it.

“I knew…etc.”
One pitfall of first-person narrative is solipsism: technically you can never leave the narrator’s immediate awareness, meaning drastic limits on what can be legitimately known. How then can he get away with “knowing” in such detail what’s in his Mother’s mind? It’s a little trick I call “surmisal.” Anyone is free to surmise what’s going on in another’s mind, and we do it all the time, as in “I know what you’re thinking. I’m a liar and you’re never going to see this money again, right? Well, you’re wrong.” Surmisal qualifies Cheever’s narrator to “know,” in that sense. He’s then free to unlock Mother’s mind without violating point-of-view.

“uncomfortable”
Whoa–yet another apparent violation of best practices: uncomfortable doesn’t specify. It’s generic. Uncomfortable how? Lumpy? Stiff? Scratchy? So why does Cheever use it? Because he knows it’s exactly what she would say. Weakness, vagueness actually characterize her arrogance, this shrinking empty pit of a woman. Even in despair, she will reach no farther than “uncomfortable” to complain about her chair–and deem it damned well sufficient to make her point, thank you.

A word of warning: be very careful emulating Cheever’s rule-bending double axels–perhaps even shy away from them–unless until your skills are super-mature and you’ve had a good night’s sleep (or stayed in a Holiday Inn Express). Cheever, don’t forget, was a freak–a colossal wreck of a man who was able to write 4 dimensional fiction in his sleep.