Beyond the Cheeveresque:
Hunt, George W.
A STYLE BOTH LYRICAL AND IDIOSYNCRATIC Beyond the Cheeveresque GEORGE HUNT ticular, but he enters it; a particular ex- stories were...
...corner of Chestnut and Elm streets and, sans dialect and sentimentality...
...The well a . Cheever has been more religiously hind...
...It hair, putting a fresh piece of Damon Runyon...
...he is artistic how, in his remarkably graceful cause I believe myself to be in some an artist...
...stuffy critic's touchstone when he has tiarium, heard it from the golf links We admire decency and we despise little else to say-is redeemed by excep- and the tennis courts, heard it from death, but even the mountains tional inventiveness, flexibility and ver- the wild-life preserve where the seem to shift in the space of a night satility...
...they are more and less as readers are encountered, willynilly, by cook-outs, drained pools in the winter, than places on a map...
...The tion of being both travelers and pilgrims will follow-but we had better listen or implication is that Cheever is something and "stuck" somehow, trapped by con- else...
...No other short story in will be left for the August tenants of wha ously religious in design...
...his med the whiteness like a sparse hands, and, after their marriage...
...it corresponds less artist, too, begins with the concrete par- read aloud for a sustained period...
...love and personhood...
...their emphasis on logical and linguistic of such knowledge, but rather to lay bare Next comes the foundational part (Chap...
...cellent novels, The Wapshot Chroni- engage our feeling and imaginative re- Cheever's style is both lyrical and cle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, sponse...
...obscene gos- weight, only intensity...
...One critic love...
...The dike and Bellow, though, are difficult to more preposterous...
...He has said in an interview, scrawl, "My father is a rat," hidden on that the truly pompous regard as light- author "The religious experience is very much a comer baseboard...
...Briefly, morality has to do Maguire hopes to correct that shortcom- ranging, remarkably erudite book that is with "all judgments of what befits or ing...
...This technique ous with the suburbs that abut Route 95 names like St...
...presen Books: THE FOUNDATION OF ETHICS BERNARD Lonergan once remarked THE 140RAL CHOICE roughly into four groups...
...Throughout...
...porary writers...
...who begin each morning by exclaiming, last detail a comic climax, a blurring Alone with Peter De Vries's best efforts, '0 Gogol...
...Short stories, by contrast, ences are, almost by definition, statable...
...IV-XII), he elaborates his Commonweal: 22...
...what would you have made a return to the banal...
...Is of organic fictional unity-always the ing with his cassock in the vesnot this Audenesque and Cheeveresque...
...as in among strangers, on planes or trains of a bomb shelter ornamented with four Auden...
...the locales realization of aging and its consequence, shorthand betraying a sensibility less include Italy and Russia...
...Suddenly, Mr...
...Both Up- plaint: "So help me God it gets more and segment of society might emerge...
...riage: stories the Yeatsian long lyric line, iam- Fortunately...
...The recurring place- address to the reader...
...Robert 0. Johann both because of the pressing issues conThe same could be said of most contem- fronting us (Chap...
...hi 19 January 1979:21 work, as his last novel Falconer made light, we are here and not there, yet...
...Cheever continually wide and deep than the author's own...
...mocking favor as "episodic notation" in that his around saying: "I drank too much perspective of facile satire...
...agains botanical-and I mean spiritual light...
...But Yeats was never funny, at least More famous is the opening paragraph deliberately, and it is here that Cheever to "The Swimmer...
...You might have heard Cheever nor Auden expect or desire a linear fashion from one glimpse, one in- it whispered by the parishioners radical change in the human condition...
...The narrator discovers a boy's other risk is the risk to be hilarious, a risk from m specific...
...the rest of him...
...Unlike so many recently in this field...
...the contrast of somely designed and printed edition of magic of John Cheever...
...In exploring its meaning, we are that we do indeed know in such matters, one interested in ethics can fail to learn simultaneously exploring the meaning of that our moral judgments are genuinely from it...
...Here the subtle varparts from Yeats and joins Auden...
...another...
...his absence, his cigar cough Over his shoulder, there 'was a sounded to her like music, and she snow-filled valley, rising into filled a portfolio with pencil wooded hills where the trees dim- sketches of his face...
...0 Thackeray switch from the banal to the shocking and Cheever's fiction is not meant to be read and Dickens...
...attenti4 light...
...Percy listened day...
...Neither narratives move swiftly and almost in last night...
...caches of empty weight...
...And is our sense on the bly untrammeled by life's more sordid reasonable man, has rented a summer of the universality of suffering so tive ph confusions, betray his sincere Episco- cottage for his family...
...I) and because of the porary ethicists...
...This is imagination is extraordinary...
...then, to learn in his charming preface to "Reminiscence, along with the New York...
...analysis, they have never figured out its foundation and develop a methodol- III) in which the author explores the nawhat knowledge is...
...Stylistically...
...FATHER GEORGE W. HUNT...
...in Cheever there is al- Percy and Abbott Tracy met in bic in rhythm, merging the abstract im- ways more to tell, and the fertility of his some such place, and she fell in pulse with the concrete detail...
...The range possible with this techof a sociologist in disguise, a wry and flicting aspirations above and below...
...terpiece, "The Country Husband...
...What is sacrificed here in terms lips of the priest himself, strugglnot piecemeal, despite a knowing eye...
...Instead, he is what Kier- over but a more fundamental, universal kegaard called a "humorist," one whose experience of misgiving that is beyond compassionate understanding of the all genteel excuse...
...and the emo- death...
...Cheever's prose edges closer to the for his fiction, but the praise and order that the humanly universal, not the cadences of modern poetry than that of prizes have been reserved for his four statistically general, might emerge and any of his contemporaries...
...They are, as someone grabbing us by the lapels...
...cident, one snippet of conversation to leaving church, heard it from the they are content to embrace it, whole and another...
...When lyrical, it is remiand Falconer...
...that, accumulatively, a general pattern and versatile stylists, John Updike and "The Death of Justina"-a comfor understanding the behavior of some Saul Bellow, inside our heads...
...Like iations on the repetitiveness of human Auden, Cheever is not a satirist, though it excuses capture not only a specific hangmight seem so...
...human comedy with its absurd en- It was one of those midsummer thusiasms and low-life urgencies fore- Sundays when everyone sits stalls in his heart the easy...
...this collection that a good deal of these cheeseboards and ugly pottery someCommonweal: 20 times given to brides, seems to have a shifting of stylistic gears from fantasy to sets him apart from the genial accuracy of manifest destiny with the sea...
...those emotions of tent with the cliches "Cheever country" class...
...the narrator's voice is ever de- where suddenly laughing out loud might plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and corous, detached, urbane...
...It seems to be that one's total experi- ends with this reflection of his in another than our random understanding of death so, is ence is the drive toward light...
...A social scientist's concern is to and lucid prose...
...First, there is that the reason why even good histo- Daniel C. M aguire an introductory section in which the aurians are often confused about the nature thor stresses the contemporary need for a of historical knowledge is because they Doubleday, $10.95 [477 pp...
...Its first sentence, "presents a theory of thing philosophers have been turning out foundation is "the experience of the moral knowledge...
...Then in great decognitive...
...a particular ex- stories were composed that way and perience is thus transformed by his im- tested with his family as critical audiOHN CHEEVER has won many awards aginative and compassionate feeling in ence...
...said Donald is more significant than the lovely places him firmly in the American tradi- Westerhazy...
...niscent of the later poetry of W.B...
...The Stories of John guage...
...The whiteness of soon the narrator begins to dream other of the myriad of human sensations...
...theory and method of moral discernment lack a decent general theory of cognition...
...questi( sympathy with his characters' fallen state gians have called the mystery of Original Are we truly this close to one need ti together with their vague yearnings for Sin than his excellent "Seaside Houes...
...His central characters range from manic desperation that accompany one's and "Cheeveresque," a reviewer's elevator man to well-digger...
...A STYLE BOTH LYRICAL AND IDIOSYNCRATIC Beyond the Cheeveresque GEORGE HUNT ticular, but he enters it...
...sense of humor can deeply enjoy any "hazai experienced love...
...as he The One not only needs it, one struggles for counterpart, he divorces, and the story has said, "We can cherish nothing less quite i it...
...Here, for three composition gnomes with long never "tsk-tsk," rather it is "well, what example, is one narrator's summary acbeards and red mobcaps...
...It comes as no surprise, "Percy" -quaintly philosophical: leave from Le'Ncn_ •ne College in Syracuse...
...ogy for more surely acquiring it...
...And yet...
...It seems wood's dreams...
...I drank too cage...
...A parties that begin "Oh, do come" and Cheever has said, "metaphors for human good number of his stories begin this end with forlorn or frantic goodbyes, a confinement," whether the confinement way: the voice announces that he is a place peopled by an upper crust, now be that of nostalgia or tradition, or erotic writer and the variations in his tone of moldy or pulpy with desperation, fits of entanglements or of our universal percep- voice prepare us (or so we think) for what sexual tension, or mere silliness...
...Green- acolytes o. er not mystery but endless moods to me that man's inclination toward light, wood's presence begins to infect him, mystification...
...Green- sadly, for those without, humor and its relatiN ways represents the Holy Spirit...
...It was late in the saying their prayers...
...and seemed unacquainted in any Up through the dimness of his way with sentiment, although I remind rose the image of the moun- call that he liked to watch children tain deep in snow...
...Greenwood has become his Cheever does this again and again...
...mains true to our realistic ear, it is always much of that claret...
...This apparently loose structure leader of the Audubon group was and perhaps the exhibitionist at the gives his stories the qualities of a yarn suffering from a terrible hangover...
...We respond to the verbal danger and because I have no other way so concentrate on particular instances rhythms of our other two most elegant of recording my fears...
...We all drank too woman with a bar of sunlight in her tion of Mark Twain, Ring Lardner and much," said Lucinda Merrill...
...I drank too much...
...do u'e know" and "wait, there's even count of his eccentric Aunt Percy's marIn addition, there are throughout these more to tell...
...realism, a seeming solemnity of tone that a John O'Hara or Philip Roth...
...Few of his stories, apart from clev- committed to religious faith or other- accrual of happiness or misery that hub an erly inserted Biblical allusions, are obvi- wise, begins here...
...But humor, certainly as distort toward brightness, is very nearly destroying his relationship -with his wife often as tragedy, shocks us into truth...
...Must we impose our bur- before personal rebirth, for a virtuous life possi- In the story, the narrator, a gentle and dens on strangers...
...Botolph, Shady Hill, Bul- brings to a story a unique dramatic force...
...Furthermore, a Cheever must have been the wine...
...The task of the ethicist, as he The chapters of The Moral Choice fall tail (Chaps...
...ST, is on sabbatical be read aloud...
...Cheever since the art of fiction, at its best, en- W.H...
...He had already begun a forFrancis Weed's vision in Cheever's mas- has described Cheever's style with dis- midable and clinical sexual career...
...his eyes...
...Wherever his eyes looked, he for his footsteps, she languished in saw broad and heartening things...
...The findings of the social sci- idiosyncratic...
...resour( pal beliefs...
...but its tone is be thought unseemly or worse...
...Like Auden, Cheever's comic tech- heightened beyond realism to a peculiar Just as Cheever is not a strict satiris nique will entail: a continual and abrupt brand of poetic speech-and it is this that he is not a moralist either...
...Gradually, he inescapable...
...The ture, grounds, and meaning of the moral With The Moral Choice, Daniel upshot is a brightly written, wide- enterprise...
...seaside house with another wife: and the earth-shaking love that draws us erial tt Unfortunately, despite that inviting The shore is curved, and I can see to one another...
...Every artist's endeavor de- 'realizes that the Greenwoods who had Perhaps those last lines sound faitly son, a mands an implicit faith-commitment to a rented the cottage the previous summer cosmic or even pompous, but it is a indivic world he hopes will reward it, but have left ominous moral baggage be- generous risk that Cheever takes...
...nocence in the face of the drowning of Cheever (Knopf, 695 pp, $15), a hand- These twin mysteries are the key to the decay and disruption...
...Like life itself, humor has no tragic my concern, as it seems to me it is the whiskey bottles are found...
...0 Checkhov...
...This book," he writes in its very light years away from practically every- does not befit persons as persons...
...As this collec- man's urge for the "higher" beauties of 61 stories, represents his greatest tion demonstrates, the thematic what of the artistic and natural order with his achievement...
...Auden...
...nique is remarkable and Cheever exploits macabre David Riesman who delights in it at the beginning of the following counting the olives in drained martini THAT thematic what, of course, stories: glasses or the soggy shards of charcoal Cheever shares with many contem- "The Ocean"-a conspiratorial at aborted cook-outs...
...They don't know what prevailing mood of negation and reducmoral knowledge is because, with all sees it, is not to vindicate the possibility tionism in the realm of value (Chap...
...It is, to be sure, not value of persons and their environof today's intellectuals, he has no doubt without serious flaws (see below), but no ment...
...No one without a is a cai legitimate concern ot any adult who has sip is later heard about the Greenwoods...
...from New York to Boston, a let Park are imaginative constructs not the voice is unabashedly personal and we homogenized landscape of semi-elegant social symbols...
...Yeats rarely win important prizes, and collec- The results of art elude such definition and, when idiosyncratic, of the later tions of stories do not sell well...
...But Cheever's my memory captures better w:iat theolo- or the people who come next' year...
...his fiction is far broader than that of the lower impulses like the sexually chaotic For too long critics have been idly con- vicissitudes of megapolis's upper middle and the murderous...
...Cheever's stories, in fact, persists nonetheless in this neglected gages mystery, the mystery of the human engage many Yeatsian themes: the pasgenre, which he terms "the literature of and its corollary, the mystery of lan- sion for decorum and ceremonies of inthe nomad...
...his distinction lies in the voice: "I am keeping this journal beBut Cheever is not a sociologist...
...and less to what I remember and what I Cheever's prose almost demands that it expect...
...the lights of other haunted cottages methoc evident, is deeply Christian in sensibil- Cheever, like all great artists consciously where people are building up an his mei ity...
...tions are rhapsodic and celebratory as uses the later Yeats technique of direct Cheever country has become synonym- often as sad...
...coat of hair...
...said cuttlebone in the nightingale's dialogue is unique in that, while it re- Helen Westerhazy...
...and family...
...In the church, you know, that al- dreams that he realizes are Mr...
...The Brigadier and the Golf suddenly issues in the mock-heroic Widow"-apologetic and inquisitive: "I catching us unawares, the old juxtaposi- F INALLY, the acid test of the comic: would not want to be one of those writers tions of different items in a list, with the Cheever is consistently hilarious...
Vol. 106 • January 1979 • No. 1
