After finally compelling myself to plow through The Collected Stories of John Cheever despite the queasiness that was lodged in my stomach the whole time(Don't you ever get nauseous when you read about something that hits just a little TOO close to home?), I have now been dragging my feet on publishing a blog on the 1979 Pulitzer prize winner. Especially on the heels of an extremely tough conversation with my mother no less than 24 hours after I finished the 693 page tome, my mind has been reeling all week from the process of mental digestion.

John Cheever is arguably one of the best short story writers of all time, or at the very least of modern American literature. I can certainly vouch for his artistic talent; The Collected Stories is everything up to that point in 1979, and it is an incredible body of work. Each story is finely hewn, Cheever uses the pen like a woodworker uses a lathe. What is difficult for me, however, is Cheever's subject matter. John Cheever does an amazing job depicting suburbia and all its MANY pratfalls, hidden secrets, infidelities, mental illnesses and general brokenness. When one reads him, one is reminded of many cliches, the first one to come to mind being, "people who live in glass houses..." When asked what John Cheever writes about(as many people asked when they saw me carrying around a bright red hardcover book roughly the size of your average dictionary), I was rather blunt: "it's about people who have too much money or spend too much money trying to pretend they have it, who drink too much, pay too little attention to their children, and are generally unfulfilled both sexually and intellectually. " Can you imagine 693 pages of that?

Ironically, when I mentioned that I was reading Cheever, two friends of mine who are avid NPR listeners and fans of "This American Life," told me, separately of course, that they had heard something on Cheever in the past few weeks. Apparently, he was a closet bisexual, who had a fairly terrible marriage with his wife, but despite this, held it together with her for over 40 years and had 4 children with her. Another cliche comes to mind, one about an apple falling from a tree??? This cliche applies to me and my reading of Cheever as well. What we have here is WASP families who live on the outskirts of NYC(or sometimes in it), living their shitty, miserable, but overall wealthy existences. Welcome to my mother's childhood life and upbringing. My mother's parents could have stepped out of a John Cheever story...that is why the stories turned my stomach so. It's hard to read about something disturbing and sad that you've witnessed so close at hand. These stories made unhappy childhood memories flood to the surface of my brain, forcing me to choke back a vomit of very depressing thoughts. It was a hump I had to work hard to get over, and about halfway through I decided I had to move past it, and appreciate each short story as it was written and NOT see my family in each one. That was a terrifically hard task, and I can't say I removed myself completely and successfully, but the effort was there, and I began to enjoy the stories more as I refused to allow myself to grow depressed by them. I had to constantly say: "This is not my life now, nor will it be..." From my lips...:)

Okay, not all of the stories are about unhappy suburbanites, though an overwhelming majority of them are...which in and of itself is novel; Cheever was writing in an era when people hid their inadequacies from their neighbors and flitted from cocktail party to cocktail party pretending that their life was PERFECT. The fact that he writes about this hypocrisy so openly is at once sadly autobiographical but also brutally honest. Was America ready for that? I don't know, as I wasn't even born in 1979, and I'm not always sure the general American public is ready for it now. If Glenn Beck can convince conservative America(i.e. FOX NEWS watchers)that another terrorist attack is imminent, then it has become clear to me that fantasy is what most Americans cling to, not the cold hard truth of desperately unhappy neighbors, friends and selves...

61 stories are in this collection, some of which had never been previously published. I don't know exactly what to say at this point, except, READ THE FUCKING BOOK. You don't have to read all of the stories, just a few...There are some that are particularly poignant, like "The Hartleys", and "O Youth and Beauty!", as well as "The Geometry of Love" and "The Swimmer". "Goodbye, My Brother," the first story in the collection, is a tribute to the splintered family; the kind where one sibling just doesn't mesh with the rest of the clan. It is this loneliness and the inability of the family to come to terms with this situation that drives them apart permanently. John Cheever is especially adept at characterizing human loneliness. Perhaps I am just highly sensitive to this, I suppose, because I am recently single, though I can attest to the fact that there were many times while in my last relationship that I felt extremely lonely even while I was with that person; this is something that Cheever's characters also feel quite often. I have, actually, for an overwhelmingly majority of my existence felt lonely; thoughts are not always a comfort, in fact, often they crowd. Reading as much as I do probably does not help my cause much either.

The copy of The Collected Stories that I have is a first edition hardback in excellent shape. It has a bookplate in the inside cover, indicating that it was part of a personal collection, and it was well taken care of; it has a library plastic jacket on the outside, and notably NO Pulitzer Prize stamp on the front. This one is a keeper. Also on the front inside cover, underneath the plate was taped a little bio of John Cheever, complete with a snapshot of his broadly smiling face. For someone who sounded so depressed internally, he surely puts on a good facade.

I'm not sure what most people would want to know about this collection when I publish my work on this project. I do think that Cheever deserves his spot on the Pulitzer list if only because of the subject matter being an integral square in the quilt that is the American literary canon. This is such a dense collection that several essays could come out of it. When I am done, I may have to skim(!!) it again. What I do think, though, is that I like him A LOT better than Richard Ford/Philip Roth...Even though Cheever was most likely a middle-aged white dude when this collection was published, the book doesn't entirely center around the middle-aged white dude experience. Thank G-d!

Whole stories of John Cheever are amazing and worth excerpting. Until I read this collection, I had only ever read one story by him in my poetics class at McGill, called "Reunion". It was in this collection, and remarkably one of his shortest stories in the volume. Interesting to read it again after all these years and since it fell on page 518, also interesting to read it after having read so many others of his stories. I was thinking that I must be one of the only 28 year olds in America to have read all of John Cheever's stories...that could be depressing or interesting, depending on how you look at it I suppose.:). So...short of excerpting entire stories, there were a few quotes that really stood out and are worth putting down...

The first quote is from a story called "The Sorrows of Gin" in which a young girl, named Amy, runs away from her family because she is afraid that she will be in trouble because she clears her father's house of all the gin so that he won't become an alcoholic (even though he pretty much is).

"The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant. But as the voices went on and she heard the cry 'Police! Police!' she was frightened. She did not see how they could arrest here, although they could find her fingerprints on the empty bottle, but it was not her own danger that frightened her but the collapse, in the middle of the night, of her father's house. It was all her fault, and when hse heard her father speaking into the extension telephone in the library, she felt sunk in guilt. Her father tried to be good and kind--and, remembering the expensive illustrated book about horses that he had brought her from the West, she had to set her teeth to keep from crying. She covered her head with a pillow and realized miserably that she would have to go away. She had plenty of friends from the time when they used to live in New York, or she could spend the night in the Park or hide in a museum. She would have to go away." (207-208)

Another quote that I loved was from the story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" in which a suburban husband, terrifically low on funds, steals from his very wealthy friends in the middle of the night, and spends the entire story dealing with the psychological consequences of his actions.

"I walked around the streets, wondering how I would shape up as a pickpocket and bag snatcher, and all the arches and spires of St. Patrick's only reminded me of poor boxes. I took the regular train home, looking out of the window at a peaceable landscape and a spring evening, and it seemed to me fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sand-lot ball players and lovers unashamed of their sport and the owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world that were made by men like me." (262-3)

This next quote is from "The Bus to St. James" in which a husband has an affair with a married woman who is the mother of some children that go to his daughter's school. This particular quote comes after his wife has found out about the affair and he and Mrs. Sheridan(his mistress) are watching their children at their dance lessons. It is from the man's point of view, as the whole story is.

"From the sidewalk in front of the dancing school they could hear the clatter of the piano. The Grand March had begun. They moved through the crowd in the vestibule and stood in the door of the ballroom, looking for their children. Through the open door they could see Mrs. Bailey, the dancing teacher, and her two matrons curtsying stiffly as the children came to them in couples. The boys wore white gloves. The girls were simply dressed. Two by two the children bowed, or curtsied, and joined the grown people at the door. Then Mr. Bruce saw Katherine. As he watched his daughter doing obediently what was expected of her, it struck him that he and the company that crowded around him were all cut out of the same cloth. They were bewildered and confused in principle, too selfish or too unlucky to abide by the forms that guarantee the permanence of a society, as their fathers and mothers had done. Instead, they put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies." (284)

From "The Country Husband," about a man who is dissatisfied with his life and lusts after the teenage babysitter, but this quote is in reference to a neighborhood girl Gertrude who is always hanging around when she is not supposed to be(at everyone's houses):

"There are times when the lines around the human eye seem like shelves of eroded stone and when the staring eye itself strikes us with such a wilderness of animal feeling that we are at a loss. The look Francis gave the little girl was ugly and queer, and it frightened her." (338)

Another great quote is at the beginning of "The Death of Justina."

"...Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos(no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency and we despise death but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale's cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can't find a comparable experience..." (429)

Only two more, I promise! This one is from "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" in which the Brigadier is a man named Charlie who has an affair with a Mrs. Flannagan, who claims to have never had an affair before, but Charlie is blinded by his lust...

"Of course she was right, he thought. She had her self-esteem to maintain. Her pride, he thought, was so childish, so sterling! Sometimes, driving through a New Hampshire mill town late in the day, he thought, you will see in some alley or driveway, down by the river, a child dressed in a tablecloth, sitting on a broken stool, waving her scepter over a kingdom of weeds and cinders and a few skinny chickens. It is the purity and the irony of their pride that touches one; and he felt that way about Mrs. Flannagan." (503)

The last quote I liked was the first paragraph in "The Geometry of Love" one of the aforementioned stand-out stories. In this one, Charlie Mallory(a different Charlie from the previous story) uses Euclid's geometry theorems to make sense of his crappy life, and to make himself feel better when in moments of panic about the downward spiral of certain situations he finds himself in. In this paragraph, though, he has not yet discovered the power that Euclid will hold in his life.

"It was one of those rainy late afternoons when the toy department of Woolworth's on Fifth Avenue is full of women who appear to have been taken in adultery and who are now shopping for a present to carry home to their youngest child. On this particular afternoon there were eight or ten of them--comely, fragrant, and well dressed--but with the pained air of women who have recently been undone by some cad in a midtown hotel room and who are now on their way home to the embraces of a tender child. It was Charlie Mallory, walking away from the hardware department, where he had bought a screwdriver, who reached this conclusion. There was no morality involved. He hit on this generalization mostly to give the lassitude of a rainy afternoon some intentness and color. Things were slow at his office. He had spent the time since lunch repairing a filing cabinet. Thus the screwdriver. Having settled on this conjecture, he looked more closely into the faces of hte women and seemed to find there some affirmation of his fantasy. What but the engorgements and chagrins of adultery could have left them all looking so spiritual, so tearful? Why should they sigh so deeply as they fingered the playthings of innocence? One of the women wore a fur coat that looked like a coat he had bought his wife, Mathilda, for Christmas. Looking more closely, he saw taht it was not only Mathilda's coat, it was Mathilda. 'Why, Mathilda,' he cried, 'what in the world are you doing here?'" (594)

With these quotes one can see how marvelous a writer John Cheever is, but also how well he captures human sentiment and emotion, I think. Though he is quite depressing, it is also inspiring to read his work. He clearly took his potentially terribly lonely and debilitating personal life to write terrific fiction that can speak to a wide audience and remind us that we actually are not alone when our fervent and sometimes dark desires and thoughts threaten to consume us...And that's all I'm going to write about him for now.