The Stories of Cheever by John Cheever

First published:The Way Some People Live, 1943; The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, 1953; The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, 1958; Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, 1961; The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, 1964; The World of Apples, 1973; The Collected Stories of John Cheever, 1978

Critical Evaluation

John Cheever is an important short-story writer for a number of reasons, not the least of which is sheer staying power, longevity. His first stories appeared in print in the early 1940’s, and they appeared regularly throughout his career. This is a remarkable record of continuous creativity and undiminished quality. Though he has won prizes and widespread popular recognition for his two novels, THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE (1957) and THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL (1964), and high critical acclaim for his next two novels, BULLET PARK (1969) and FALCONER (1977), Cheever has always been primarily a story writer. There are any number of his contemporaries equally well-known and distinguished for their work in the short-story form, but none who has written stories regularly over such a span of time, a time which includes portions of at least three separate literary generations. Part of his success must be considered in terms of his long-standing position as one of the stable of contract writers for THE NEW YORKER, a magazine that has always encouraged the short story, or a certain kind of short story, with high payment and the advantages of a large audience with definite expectations and conventions. This fact alone, however, cannot explain how Cheever managed to keep his gift for the short story alive and breathing while other, perhaps equally gifted writers for that magazine, though remembered and honored in short-story anthologies, became less vigorously productive. It is entirely possible that, weighing everything, Cheever was the finest story writer to have emerged from THE NEW YORKER.

To place his work and to understand its development, it is first of all necessary to understand as clearly as possible what a NEW YORKER story is, for the vintage product has become to a great degree the accepted model for the modern American short story. Briefly, it is the maximum exploitation of a single, dramatically presented incident while more or less strictly observing the conventional unities of time and place, designed in its condensed form to gain by a richness of implication and by depth of characterization. Plot, in the old-fashioned sense, is absent and so are the moral dilemmas, middle-class, of slick fiction. In setting, the stories are usually regional—the East of suburbia and the City, the far and uncorrupted West, an updated version of the magnolia South and, often, foreign, aristocratic, and exotic. The stories have reflected the general moral views of the magazine and its audience. Its moral keystone is a gracious secular humanism coupled with a gentle intellectual skepticism. The virtues celebrated are all civilized virtues, sedentary, sophisticated, and rational, gently draped or camouflaged in veils of irony. The mortal sins are vulgarity without redeeming eccentricity, self-pity, stupidity, hypocrisy, bad manners, complacency, awkward excess of passion, and the absence of good health or physical beauty. In short, THE NEW YORKER fiction has been a fiction of manners. The political orientation has been generally liberal, of the noblesse oblige variety, and as a magazine of manners, the aim has always been progressive. No matter how dark the present, how fraught with peril the future, or how quaint the past, the fiction and verse of THE NEW YORKER have always gone hand in hand with the plentiful advertisements, the fine cartoons, and “The Talk of the Town,” advancing toward a vaguely discernible horizon, the glow of which indicates a Jerusalem of “The Good Life” somewhere up there among idyllic Delectable Mountains, just beyond the reach of the clean, trimmed fingernails of the Ideal Reader.

To expect a great deal more than the competently second-rate from such a milieu would be folly, and to imagine that working in it a writer with the creativity of Cheever could emerge would demonstrate the gift of blind and pure prophecy. Readers have had enough fiction over a sufficient period of time to see that his stories, within the context of THE NEW YORKER milieu, are original and independent. From the beginning with THE WAY SOME PEOPLE LIVE, the stories of Cheever in THE NEW YORKER exhibited some independence of form. This may have been inevitable, for even then, the “single event” story was widely anthologized, beginning to be taught in schools, and becoming somewhat less than chic. Cheever’s originality manifested itself in subject and treatment. Though part and parcel of the credible and suburban world, stories from THE WAY SOME PEOPLE LIVE and THE ENORMOUS RADIO occasionally broke that orderly universe with the introduction of what used to be called “fantasy” but, more accurately, might be described as the introduction of some supernatural event or condition into an otherwise perfectly rational and realistic situation. In this sense, his fiction is often analogous to that of Marcel Ayme in France. Technically, the stories range rather freely and widely in time and space and point of view—even in tense, which is sometimes past, sometimes present, occasionally even future and conditional. There is often a cheerfully direct and open use of the narrator-writer of the story. He appears in the open like the chorus in an early Elizabethan play. As a narrator, he does his best to establish an air of intimacy and rapport with the reader, and then from time to time, he reenters, stopping the action, to point out significant aspects or to make intelligent comment. Like a cultivated and slightly condescending museum guide, this narrator is bright, clever, witty, yet always somehow sympathetic to the reader, perhaps because of his slight but pleasing smile, his habit of ironic self-deprecation, and his wry, worldly-wise shrug. The teller of the tale is always exact and up-to-date in his references and allusions, his knowledge of the things and habits of this world; and he can, when it is necessary, but never without a shared wink of misgiving, summon up a soupcon of the latest slang. The language of the stories is always a model of lucidity and decorum, free from the unrefined excess and extravagance of poetic frenzy, yet still able from time to time to climb toward a modest altitude on the slopes of Olympus, far below the sweaty chaos of the laughing and imperious gods and muses, but at least a place with a good view near the timberline, a place where a good gourmet picnic might be laid out and enjoyed.

Clearly, the form goes against the grain of the more typical, “dramatic” pattern of THE NEW YORKER story, for most of these devices work to call attention to the story not as a happening but as artifice. The meaning of this relative freedom of form is equally clear. Cheever wants to say more, not only about persons, places, and things but also about what these may mean and the subtle patterns they make. Even in the earliest stories, for example, Cheever made frequent use of dreams. His characters dream and do so matter-of-factly. He has also permitted them and the narrator to digress, to reminisce, to imagine. Naturally this makes for a much more inclusive kind of fiction, at once deeper and more complex than the conventional dramatic method of telling a tale. It is one of his special gifts and artistic triumphs to be able to lead his characters and his readers with ease from an apparently realistic situation into realms of absurdity, nightmare, and farce. Perhaps this is what one reviewer meant when he tried to describe the singular qualities of Cheever. He was deeply interested in character, and he gave his characters depth and dimension, providing veils and layers of experience and being, and all the loose ends and untied laces of living, breathing human beings. Compared with most of his contemporaries, in or out of THE NEW YORKER, Cheever had, as a result of his interest in and understanding of character, a good deal more sympathy and compassion for the people he created.

It is not easy to be a serious and, in a certain sense, an experimental writer and yet, at the same time, to share without much questioning the standards, rules, laws, and by-laws of a literary club as exclusive and cozy and proud as THE NEW YORKER. It is more than difficult to make meaningful fiction, which was, after all, his aim, in the context of a moral world as bogus as a carnival and as insubstantial as cotton candy. For people do not live like characters in THE NEW YORKER, try as they will, and its moral world is unique. In the world there may well be a system of election and damnation, but the elect are not necessarily immediately identifiable because they are charming, gifted, well-born, intelligent, eccentric, or even innocent. Nor are they children, cripples, blacks, or victims. The God that is predicated by THE NEW YORKER and, so, in part accepted by Cheever, turns out to be a wise, well-to-do, old grandfather with a twinkle in his eye and stylish manners, lovable but a snob and not very likely of much help in times of trouble. Sheep and goats merge together in a glossy, nineteenth century pastoral scene.

Cheever’s short fiction developed not in stages, in trials, and renunciations but in a fairly straight line. The stories of THE BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW differ from the earliest stories only in a slightly freer form, a swifter move toward moral allegory, and a shade more impatience with the rules he was breaking; but after many years of considerable success, he was entitled to such liberty. The remarkable thing is how little he had changed over his long career. It appears that very early, he staked a claim, fenced it, and ever since had been exploring and exploiting it. This creates an apparent sameness about his work which might be called a disadvantage except that it must be balanced against the undeniable appeal of reliability. He did not, like some great writers, hit home runs or strike out. He was marvelously consistent and on a high level. Moreover, he did not, and did not need to, offend the reader. He wrote from conviction and certainty and—not the least of his virtues for his time—from a sense of contentment. The effect is at once entertaining and restful. Every sane human being is for courage and honesty, in favor of blue skies, trout streams, butterflies, and fine old houses full of lively and amusing people. Every sane person is against suffering, pain, hypocrisy, ugliness, and sordid behavior. No one speaks out in favor of sin, and no one, no matter how reactionary, is against progress or reform, though definitions may vary widely and deeply and behavior vary even more.

Cheever’s fiction is, then, classical in orientation. (It is no wonder that he so frequently employed the great and timeless classical myths to heighten the implications of his stories.) He was a professional writer with an acceptable and decent point of view. If he had a dream, it was a dream of restoration and innocence, not a revolutionary and romantic vision. He conveyed no desire to run for public office or to be accepted as one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world. This attitude was important, for his long and distinguished career and the undeniable artistry of his short fiction give the lie to the notion that an artist must be a rebel, an outsider, and a boat-rocker to validate his claim to art. After all the qualifications are weighed and sifted, Cheever stands in the front rank, among the best of the short-story writers of the twentieth century. When all is said and done, for better or worse, it seems likely that his humane, graceful, and wistful stories will stand, if not for the best that artists have been able to achieve, then for the best hopes of civilization, its long dream of life and liberty, its aim and pursuit of human happiness.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. John Cheever. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004.

Bosha, Francis J., ed. The Critical Response to John Cheever. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Byrne, Michael D. Dragons and Martinis: The Skewed Realism of John Cheever. Edited by Dale Salwak and Paul David Seldis. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1993.

Cheever, Susan. Home Before Dark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Coale, Samuel. John Cheever. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977.

Collins, Robert G., ed. Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Donaldson, Scott. John Cheever: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1988.

Donaldson, Scott, ed. Conversations with John Cheever. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

Meanor, Patrick. John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1995.

O’Hara, James E. John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne, 1979.