There is something feckless about a writer’s journals. They are a
specialist’s document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming
baboons, searching for fleas. Expecting bohemian excess or stoic
grace, we discover instead a life reduced to the fungible poetry of
soiled clothes and closely mown grass. A writer’s journal is “neither
life exactly, nor fiction,” Elizabeth Hardwick suggested, “but like one
of those dreams in which dead friends, with their old crumpled smiles
and grunts, their themes, meet you turning a corner.”
The themes of John Cheever’s journals—God, sex, guilt, and
nature—manage to instill genteel ennui with the anguished moral passion
of a Russian novel. Published in 1990, eight years after his death from
lung cancer, and decades after he had been enshrined as America’s
premiere bourgeois fabulist, the journals shocked in their revelation of
the self-lacerating, booze-addled voluptuary hiding in the fine suit of
a country squire. “Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed
sadder,” a chastened John Updike wrote upon their publication. But
though the gap between Cheever the cultural effigy and Cheever the man
was received with surprise and consternation, the ambiguity of his work
had always betrayed such a fissure. Cheever’s greatest fiction enacts a
kind of doubleness, a yearning for grace darkly marbled with lust and
duplicity. The rapturous moments—one thinks of the beautiful early story
“Goodbye, My Brother,” with its darkness and iridescence, the naked
women walking out of the sea—barely conceal the saturnine streaks.
Beneath his character’s charm and taste is a stratum of secret pain, a
longing that is somehow shameful. They expect more from life, and this
expectation leads them into bafflement and transgression. This is
authentic sin, half created, half siphoned from the brackish estuary of
Cheever’s soul. The pulse of his magnificent storytelling can be found,
vast and inchoate, in the pages of his journals.
Cheever couches his spiritual odyssey in the mundane torment of his
domestic life, a kind of Strindbergian drama set in the deep lawns and
blue afternoons of Ossining. “In church the Epistle is majestic but my
mind wanders,” he writes in a 1959 entry. “Now a clearing wind has
sprung out of the Northwest. I will think about Hell and the family.”
His difficult marriage possessed an elliptical structure: His desire for
physical intimacy, her rejection of that desire, his consolation in
alcohol and hers in bitter recriminations. Particular anecdotes pierce
with the pain of specificity: “Vodka for breakfast. Mary mentions her
mother for the third time in thirty-five years. ‘I wanted a teddy bear
for Christmas, and she said I was too old. She pronounced ‘doll’ with
the same terribly Massachusetts accent you have.’ So we are people we
have never met.” ... [mehr] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/23/vodka-for-breakfast-on-the-melancholy-of-cheevers-journals/
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