Escape Within Walls

...Therefore it is either infinite good or infinite evil...

...Gifted with a talent for inventive, capricious, emasculative cruelty, she has somehow gained a hold over her husband from which he cannot free himself...

...A mental patient need not be consistent...

...He says that "what Farragut didn't know was what importance to give unsavory matters...

...And by the time we reach the escape of his lover (disguised as an acolyte and helped by a visiting cardinal), we are tempted to take it as pure fun, a Horatio Alger story in reverse...

...It is hate...

...This does not stop Farragut...

...As only he could, he drops small, perfect tales drawn from his hero's and the other prisoners' memories?grim, droll, some with snob appeal—during Farragut's initiation, kicking of the drug habit, fulfillment in homosexual love, bereavement, and never-never-land escape...

...But could everybody, in a real prison...

...They existed, they were invincible, but the light they threw . . . only seemed to reinforce Farragut's ignorance, suspiciousness and his capacity for despair...

...The two have come from very different directions, and seem on their way to very different destinations...

...Only in prison can a man be safe from that baneful figure in so many Cheever stories, the vixen wife...

...Cheever goes further: Without freedom, life is still infinitely precious...

...Lancelot's wild words can be taken as the ravings of a madman or inspired utterance of a prophet possessed...

...But the prison talk is for the most part what Cheever calls "unsavory...

...Falconer is in another country altogether, yet its story is told by our own nonchalant, witty Cheever...

...There is no sexual tyranny or homicidal jealousy, no gang rapes...

...He can never decide which...

...And I will not...

...God preserve me from the camaraderie of commuting trains," he might be saying with his fugitive husband in the story "The Troubles of Marcie Flint...

...Another time, seeing the wind whirl leaflets in the prison yard, he is reminded "of the enormous and absurd pleasures he had, as a free man, taken in his environment...

...Now, though, there are "alternative life styles...

...Jody explains that "Everybody's got to have a hideout...

...Looking at the author's photograph on the jacket of Lancelot—urbane, handsome, holding his beautiful grandson in the window of his stately mansion—one finds it hard to take seriously the novel's message of total destruction...

...But it is very wasp indeed, as the name suggests, and the books chant a mournfully comic litany of the eccentric weaknesses and ;fatal strengths of an old New England blood line...

...Cheever has always been accused of writing too much as an insider, as a veteran of the same frolics that scarred his wonderful Wickwires—the pair of "celebrants" in the novel Bullet Park—and the others who play hide and seek with horror in his six volumes of funny, terrifying short stories (most of them from the New Yorker...

...he shows off his new vocabulary to his wife, who responds, surprisingly, with the only warmth she has ever offered him in all his trouble...

...Farragut's quick assimilation, his eager adoption of the speech, call for all Cheever's offhand professional brio...

...Farragut slips into his romance with the greatest of ease, despite a prejudice against "queers" unlikely in a traveled professor...

...Falconer cannot be taken as a serious attempt to bring light into the hidden hellhole of our criminal justice system, for neither the prison nor the circumstances of Farragut's confinement seem quite real...

...But Cheever's Farragut, literally "inside" Falconer prison, doing time for killing his brother, is really an outsider there—a wealthy professor trying to win acceptance as a fellow-convict...

...Though temporarily locked up in a mental hospital, he tells his priest-psychiatrist Per-cival a story of savage violence, and proves a far more forthright murderer than Farragut: "I cannot tolerate this age...

...A writer of his subtlety must have found the portrayal of grossness rather tedious, even troubling...

...Between harangues Lancelot gradually confesses his crimes...

...Once a civil-rights fighter, he had slipped into the life of a recluse, drinking and reading Raymond Chandler in his pigeonnier while his wife acted in a movie being made on his estate...

...I'll take war rather than what this age calls love...

...I would have felt at home at Mont-saint-Michel, the mount of the Archangel with the flaming sword...

...Farragut's own flight is more sombre and symbolic, since he is borne away in place of the corpse of the saddest, most sordid murderer of them all...

...Now suddenly his Lancelot Lamar leaps into the thick of the action...

...Percy's Lancelot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 257 pp., $8.95) has deeply disappointed reviewers' great expectations, while Cheever's Falconer (Knopf, 211 pp., $7.95) has surprised them into hailing it as a masterpiece...

...At first glance his need seems to have been to break out of his familiar milieu...

...In Walker Percy's early novels, especially The Moviegoer (winner of the National Book Award in 1962) and The Last Gentleman, his protagonist was the ultimate outsider, an "abstainer" or at most a pawn moved by others who knew the rules of the game...

...Lancelot rants one minute against "hot cunts" and worships them the next: "The orgasm is the only earthly infinity...

...c ^^Xheever's message—or cluster of messages?in Falconer is very different, but in the end almost as disturbing...

...He rambles for pages about the perplexing lack of "Evil" in society, his quest for the Unholy Grail, his plans for the Third Revolution and the new world he will create (where women will know their place) when he has destroyed the present one...

...Mustering willpower for the purpose, he planned and executed an ingenious avenging holocaust, timed to coincide with a hurricane...

...As he was about to kill his first victim he learned yet a new "truth": "I discovered the secret of love...

...Percy won a cult following because he wrote so effectively about the tragic plight of people whose lives were without purpose, who could find their only reality in the illusion of film...

...Marriage was so universal a state that its unhappiness could be taken as a metaphor for the sadness of the human condition...

...The simple phenomenon of light—brightness angling across the air—struck him as a transcendent piece of good news...

...The message was not immediately apparent in Cheever's earlier work, partly because it fitted into what was thought to be the New Yorker formula: First dig your pit, then push your character into it...

...He liked to walk on the earth, swim in the oceans, climb the mountains and, in the autumn watch the leaves fall...

...The 48-year-old Farragut, encountering young Jody in the shower, is led—like Jesus by the Devil to the mountain-top—up to an abandoned water tower with a tremendous view...

...In one scene Farragut peers down from his cell window at the two steps leading out of the prison and marvels at the unmindful way visitors emerge into the open...

...But the discovery that his daughter is not his own galvanized him into action...

...Confinement may, in fact, be a sort of wish-fulfillment...

...Botolphs, the home village of the family he wrote about in his big, rich novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, is far from suburban...

...The sex, like the food, is of varying quality, mostly low, but it is easy to come by...

...The dying Chicken II, totally friendless, about to leave the emptiest existence on earth, says that it has been "like a party, even in stir —even franks and beans taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep . . ." The life Cheever is celebrating—make no mistake about this—is a life strictly without women...

...Still, it is just as much a fantasy...

...True, St...

...Make love not war...

...Percy seems to have forgotten some of his own wisdom...

...Since Cheever clearly did not intend his Falconer to be realistic, perhaps he was using the prison walls to make us feel fully what it is to be free...

...Convicts at Falconer seem free to go almost anywhere they like...

...Cheever, in his own sly way, may be offering one...

...The affair is presented as an idyll unmarred by the awkward actualities of love that Cheever has made so poignant elsewhere—though the scenes here are graphic, not to say pornographic...

...And the guard Tiny, after his one obligatory scene of sadism—he tears pet cats to pieces—is reliably benign...

...He blasts away at the sexual revolution, at religion, at the corruption of the old South by Texas millionaires (one of whose daughters has married him and restored his ancestral home), and at filmmakers who spout nonsense and cuckold their host in his own house...

...One of the early essays of his collection The Message in the Bottle concluded that there cannot be a literature of alienation, since alienation is transformed by the very act of writing...