Celebrating a Master

I can hardly believe it: “master” (not a term I use since “mistress” is not a viable alternative for women who have become and are becoming what John Cheever was and is)—the amazing writers who endure and provide us readers and writers with hope.

But “master” is what John Cheever (1912-1982) was, and is, although largely forgotten now in spite of the acclaim and the many awards he accumulated during his long career as a successful novelist and short story writer, once providing the majority of short stories published in The New Yorker during the heyday of that magazine and that form.

So are all writers forgotten, but here I’m going to remember him as the tormented genius he was, nearly destroyed by alcohol and perhaps by the worldly success that seemed to mean so little to him.

I’ve been browsing The Collected Stories and Other Writings by John Cheever in the handsome black hardcover by the Library of America, published in 2009. The stories are uneven as all stories in collections are bound to be, since we don’t write up to our highest standard all the time, and the need to fill hundreds of pages necessitates including some lesser work.

But the one I just read, “The Death of Justina” from this big collection merits high praise. Written late in Cheever’s career when alcohol and bitterness were darkening his world view, necessary because his earlier view was too sweetened by white male privilege and good luck, this story resonates now because of the way Cheever is able to sum up, in 1960, the disillusionment so many of us feel now with our country.

Coming back from his job in New York writing for an advertising agency, the narrator reflects “how like yesterday it was that my father left the Old World to found a new; and I thought of the forces that had brought stamina to the image: the cruel towns of Calabria and their cruel princes, the badlands northwest of Dublin, ghettos, despots, whorehouses, breadlines, the graves of children, intolerable hunger, corruption and persecution….

“I stand, figuratively, with one wet foot on Plymouth Rock, looking with some delicacy, not into a challenging and formidable wilderness but onto a half-finished civilization embracing glass towers, oil derricks, suburban continents and abandoned movie houses and wondering why, in this most prosperous, equitable and accomplished world—where even the cleaning women practice the Chopin preludes in their spare time—everyone should seem to be disappointed.”

We would not describe our world of today as equitable, and the notion of what cleaning women do with their spare time is unintentionally condescending, and yet I do wonder why, even with these dread aspects of modernity, we should all look so disappointed. Cheever’s story provides a tentative explanation.

The narrator goes on to describe his attempts to bury Justina, his wife’s aunt, who has died suddenly in their house, in a suburban town so defined and confined by zoning that it is not permitted for anyone to die or be buried there.

When he calls the mayor to complain—the dead woman is sitting on his couch—he is told, “You see, you live in Zone B—two-acre lots, no commercial enterprises and so forth…It seems that not only can you have no funeral homes in Zone B—you can’t bury anyone there and you can’t die there.”

Enraged, the narrator—who of course enjoys the privileges attendant on living in such an over-protected subdivision—shouts, “Do you mean to tell me I can’t die in one neighborhood?”

He finally buries Justina “in their unexalted kingdom on the outskirts, rather like a dump…where they lie in an atmosphere of perfect neglect.”

Returning to his job at the advertising agency in the city, he writes another commercial: “Don’t lose your loved one because of excessive radioactivity. Don’t be a wallflower at the dance because of strontium in your bones…Elixir can save you—” the fake remedy he is charged with promoting.

Ending the story with a prayer: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Cheever combines the commercialism of our society, the threat of nuclear destruction and our unwillingness to deal with death into the unnamed “disappointment” he sees in so many faces in this rich and powerful country.

Seldom is so much contained in a few pages—a triumph for Cheever and a worthy goal for all of us.

In Writing John Cheever RIP