John Cheever, R. I. P.
Burns, Keith
JOHN CHEEVER, R.I.P. HE wrote: "The contents that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being." John Cheever found both, and often in dimly lit places,...
...Antiquated words seem new and athletic when rejuvenated by Cheever's vision...
...Rejoice...
...I have heard (and I hope that it is true) that he would slip outside church for a cigarette during the homily at daily Mass...
...But beyond his boundless sense of gratitude, which echoes Georges Bernanos ("all is grace"), Cheever offered no exposition in written or in spoken word of his religious faith...
...He was glad I liked the book...
...KEITH BURRIS (Keith Burris, a previous contributor, teaches at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania...
...John Cheever found both, and often in dimly lit places, where most of us lead unexamined lives...
...He said in an interview with his daughter: "I go to church to make my thanksgivings...
...Hope in the capacity of men to learn civility and kindness...
...Or that the work forever remains...
...That he lived seventy good years and produced those stories, hymns to man and to God...
...By their fictions shall we know men...
...Admire the world," a father commanded his son in one of Cheever's novels, and this, I believe, was his own steady theme...
...Cheever was perhaps the last great and true optimist of Western letters...
...I had read Falconer and was swept up and astonished by its lyrical power, its love for imperfect men and women, its abiding sense of praise...
...In this sense he was a religious writer...
...Readers of fiction are exempt from the knowledge and manipulation of public opinion data and research...
...What shall we say then of the passing of John Cheever...
...Great, because in Cheever's stories about homelessness, sexual desolation, alcoholism, and upper middle class poverty, such values as honor and love are made to seem sensible, necessary, and resilient...
...In the modest passions and disappointments of ordinary men and women he saw, and helped us to see, the tragic and sublime...
...Cheever was an Anglican...
...One is sustained by one's readers...
...John Cheever's literary lineage can be traced to Walt Whitman...
...Cheever's life and work seem, unconsciously perhaps, devoted to the recovery of old-fashioned virtues and values...
...Nay, more...
...But his love for the world, and his awareness of grace, is the heritage of Saint Paul...
...Perhaps storytelling will keep personal communications alive in a mass age...
...The level of introspection I enjoy on my knees is something I enjoy nowhere else...
...Period...
...To my great surprise Cheever wrote back...
...I once wrote a fan letter to John Cheever...
...He had faith in the sweetness, the pure wonder, of life...
...One cannot know who they are...
...Thomas Merton said of Flannery O'Connor that she did not remind him of Hemingway or Katherine Anne Porter but of Sophocles...
...For these things and for all John Cheever sought to celebrate, his own words at the close of Falconer: "Rejoice...
...True because he was neither a sentimentalist nor an innocent...
...And charity to find what was meant to be noble in awkward, everyday gestures of affirmation...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 15
