Cheers for Cheever

...Talks by Mr...

...F a l c o n e r near-universal tolerance which I have been describing as the outstanding characteristic of Falconer...

...and she is still more than twenty years away from the next major breakdown, which was to be her last, and the day she entered her element, the gentle releasing waters of the River Ouze in which she drowned herself...

...In this and in his willynilly coupling of the sacred and profane he is reminiscent of John Donne...

...Terrible scenes of cruelty, degradation and lust take place...

...It is true that at first the way Farragut's wife, Marcia, is pictured seems very harsh indeed...

...Strangely mellowed by this experience, Farragut sees Chicken safely across the bar and, in the end, slips back into the outside world in the dead man's shroud...

...Disguised in the robes of an acolyte, the escapee is borne away in a visiting bishop's helicopter...

...An old and very ugly woman dried her tears with a scrap of paper...

...His final word to us is an admonition to "Rejoice...

...she asks in the course of a later visit--"that blonde who never menstruated or shaved her legs or challenged anything you said or did...

...Garvey: Christians and Anti-Semitism: The Sin Committed by Saints Do We Need Saints Anymore...

...But she would genuinely be glad to disabuse him of his wasteful dream, if she could: "Don't you understand that she never existed, Zeke, and that she never will...

...These were their constraints, the signs of their confinement, but there was some naturalness, some unself-consciousness about their imprisonment that he, watching them between bars, cruelly lacked...

...He has a wife, a son named Peter, and a home somewhere on the Eastern seaboard (where, customarily, a bowl of roses sits, mirrored, on a table in the front hall...

...Although Farragut portrays his wife as cruelly mistreating him when he returns home from a drug cure with a seriously weakened heart, we are given this interesting comment as well: "He was in too much pain and fear to realize that the homecoming of a drug addict was not romantic...

...They existed, they were invincible, but the light they threw was, he thought, unequal to their prominence...

...Farragut, a methadone addict, is once heard to cry out, in the midst of a withdrawal agony, for someone to "Get me my fix, for Jesus Christ's sakeS" But no man who describes himself in a letter to his bishop as "a croyant" can be supposed at that moment to be taking the name of the Lord in vain...

...Those who suspend their disbelief will find that, in Falconer, John Cheever has written a stunning meditation on all the forms of confinement and liberation that can be visited upon the human spirit...

...Yet this tolerant spirit is not earned cheaply~ either by us or by Cuckold...

...A Married Man on Celibacy Other Thomas More Lecture Speakers include: Edward K. Braxton Matthew Fox Andrew Greeley John Howard Griffin Edward C. Herr James Hitchcock Eugene Kennedy Candida Lund William McCready John L. McKenzie John Shea Richard Woods For full information, write: John C. Drahos, Director Thomas More Lecture Service 180 North Wabash Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60601 Commonweal: ~5 I _9 I | i n u N R | D i i | n i m owl r | lamal They were free and yet they moved so casually through this precious element that it seemed wasted on them...

...Readers are liable to expect from it either a social document, a protest of some kind over the horrors of our penal system, or, more typically, a Cheerer portrait of an alienated upper-middle-class American simply translated behind bars...

...Harcourt Brace, $8.95 The Church and t h e Homosexual JOHN J. McNEILL, S J_9 Sheed Andrews and McMeel, $I0 SAJRA C. CHARLES, M.D...

...I've always thought they were silly and feeble-minded, but he talked like anybody else...

...On the level of action, nothing very much happens...

...Cheever, as narrator, goes on to note that what is unsavory "only seemed to reinforce Farragut's ignorance, suspiciousness and his capacity for despair...

...Voices of Old Testament prophets reverberate down the corridors of his psyche, while, outwardly, he displays both the polish and the paranoia we have come to expect from Cheerer's heroes...

...There was no appreciation of freedom in the way they moved...

...It must stand the severe test of watching the hustler at work and the hustler having got mixed up with the wrong customer - - o f going down to the police station to identify his dead body, complete with twenty-two knife wounds in his back...

...Better say it is a new version of an old story form, a parable_9 In this post-Yeatsian stage of things when many of us still feel we are, as the poet says, "turning and turning in the widening gyre," the falcon unable to hear the falconer, how remarkable that John Cheever has found a way to circle back within earshot...

...Virginia had thoughtlessly asked whether she, Lady S., had yet been to Tidmarsh, where Lytton was living with Carrington...

...BOOKS C] BI LS ]'OR CIIEEVER JANET GROTH / r JOHN CHEEVER Knop/, $7.95 Ezekiel Farragut, the hero of John Cheever's new novel, Falconer, inhabits a religious and social topography roughly bounded by the contours of his name...

...It struck me as I read these two works that John McNeill may be mildly displeased that his book, The Church and the Homosexual, as been coupled in the same review with Dr...

...As Cuckold says of the homosexual hustler he once picked up at the One Hung Low Chinese Restaurant on the strip outside Kansas City: All the time he was talking I listened very carefully to him, expecting him to sound like a fairy, but he never did, not that I could hear...

...One particular measure taken by Cheever bears remarking in this matter of the book's strange and winning purity: it represents, I believe, both an instance of legitimate poetic license and a profound theological principle on Cheever's part...

...However, when we look at these fleshly encounters of Farragut's and those of his fellow inmates, Cuckold, Jody, Chick10 Jutw 1977:374 en Number Two and the rest, the quality that distinguishes the greater portion of them is, curiously, purity...

...As the novel opens, the state is in the act of appending something new to Farragut's name--the number 734508-32...

...Yet this is no allegory Cheerer is giving us...

...He is being incarcerated in Falconer Prison for a crime of which he feels himself to be innocent, the murder of his brother...

...Farragut has visitors, writes letters, gets into trouble, is punished, forms a homosexual liaison, and is exhilarated to witness his lover's escape...

...She is perilously close to a caricature of the frustrated suburban wife...

...A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he is the author of two outstanding books: A Contemporary Meditation on Saints and Saints for Confused Times...

...One can only suppose that he considers swearing unsavory, and that he knows---as he tells us that Farragut doesn't--"what importance to give unsavory matters...

...Spirituality in the 70s: Ringing in the Old Living Without Answers or The Danger of Being Saved Turning the Tables...

...Sin is interpreted as a radical failure of love and a consequent enthrallment (a kind of imprisonment) to fear...

...Farragut's is no exception...

...Falconer is truly a parable for our times_9 FamtRar F a c e s , Hidden l a v e s : The S t o r y o f HomoscxRal Men i n America Today HAROLD BROWN, M.D...

...I have this very strong prejudice against fairies...

...She has been, in some sense, a phantasm all along---just as unreal in her implacable selfishness as his dream blonde in her docility...

...The determined air of normalcy, of heterosexuality, in all of the attitudes displayed in this and other passages accounts for much of their appeal, and explain-~ why they are to so large a degree successful in breaking down the reader's own prejudices...

...Both elements are in fact present, but it would be a pity to come away from this book having got no more from it than that...

...Take a second look at that sequence of events, however, and it begins to assume almost allegorical configurations: to prefigure a kind of divine comedy, from Farragut's doom-laden entry into the gates of Falconer, through a time in Purgatory, to a miraculous, grace-bestowed happy ending...

...A man stooped to pull up his socks...

...These heroes have families who--deeply implicated as they are in America's civic and military history--seem always to have fallen, just the generation before, from positions of wealth into reduced circumstances...

...A younger woman, glancing at the overcast sky, put up a green umbrella...

...Harold Brown's recent autobiographical account of his homosexuality...

...Farragut su~umbs, for a time, to the lethargy the prison authorities try to induce in all the inmates, lest they catch rebellious fire from reports of an Atticalike uprising nearby--but, rousing himself, he begins to build a radio...

...He sits at the deathbed of the least likable of his fellow-prisoners, a wretch named Chicken Number Two...

...Cheerer says nothing directly that would explain his decision to delete this prominent feature of the vernacular...

...Farragut, thinking about his prison lover, a youth named Jody, is prompted to see that 'Wo embrace one's self, one's youth, might be easier than to love a fair woman . . . . . " "And then there was time to think upon the courting of death and death's dark simples," he goes on, musing that "in covering Jody's body he willingly embraced decay and corruption...

...She shows a sharp eye for Farragnt's weaknesses, as well as a sharp tongue: "Do you still dream about your blonde...

...We remember that she has seemed deliberately cruel only when Farragut is involved in justifying himself in her regard...

...There is even a kind of metaphysical wit in evidence: Dante is evoked, appropriately enough, except that we read his "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," not over the prison gates but in a tattoo on Chicken's backside...

...A great deal more goes on before that soul's progress is complete, but it will be apparent from what has been said so far that this is no ordinary novel...

...More than anything else, this accounts for the softening light that washes over so many of the prison scenes...

...Love casts out fear, as the evangelist tells us, and one of the processes Farragut is undergoing in the Falconer "Correctional Facility" is nothing less than the rehabilitation of his ability to love...

...A woman rooted through her handbag to make sure she had the keys...

...Brown, on the other handmwere he alive todaymwould probably be quite pleased not only to have his work asI0 June 1977:J76...

...I was really very interested in what he had to say because he seemed to me very gentle and affectionate and even very pure...

...The Church "s Real Problems...

...At Falconer the flesh is always being aroused or abused, subdued or gratified, either in reality or in recollection...

...Rather, he has incorporated into the novel a symbolic richness usually associated with densely imaged poetry or the best crafted short story...

...A rare prison visit finds her responding to Farragut's solicitous inquiry about the house with a curt "Well, _9 . . it's nice to have a dry toilet seat...

...Farragut himself, having turned white-collar worker, makes his living as a college professor...

...The soul whose progress we are following throughout Falconer is Farragut's...

...To say that the novel proceeds in symbolic or metaphysical terms is not to deny that the flesh is invol~,ed...

...Neither the possibility that these encounters are mere lonely substitutes for heterosexual love, nor the sense in which they manifest themselves as brotheHy--or, at least on some level --familial feeling is allowed to obseure their darker components of narcissism and, even, necrophilia...

...it is, and often in the grossest way...

...She became perfectly glum and stony: and said at length, to L: 'Well, what d'you think of it all?' L: thinking she meant the relationship between Lytton and Carrington was beginning a long account of his views on buggery, when we realized that she was changing the conversation to the food famine[" At this point she is writing Night and Day (in which Vanessa figures prominently as a character) and is soon to begin lacob's Room, the first of the "Virginia Woolf" novels and the gateway to the great years...

...But all is bathed in a mysteriously detoxifying lighL The theology here and throughout the novel is interesting and sophisticated...

...By daring to eschew that kind of unsavory matter here, Cheever may actually be striving for the oppccdte--a salutary effect upon all of u s . Some readers may find it di~eult to place Cheever's treatment of his women characters in the context of The Thomas More Lecture Service presents JOHN GARVEY John Garvey is an editor and critic whose work has appeared frequently in The Critic and Commonweal...

...Though most readers will not consciously notice that it is miming----4here is more than enough obscene and scatological language to produce convincing replicas of prima argot--Falconer contains not a single instance of blasphemy...

...She never tires of blaming Farragut for her disappointments, never stops kicking him when he is down...

...And when he is reliving his climactic scene with his brother, Eben, Marcia appears in it as a warm and sympathetic figure...

...With this fact Cheever takes his laigest risk, for aside from the sheer implausibility of it, two other problems arise out of a Cheever novel with such a setting and such a theme...