This is one of my favorite things

As I said in a slightly earlier post I'm far too lazy at the moment to write something new so I will share something old. Again from my recent college days, this is a "literary research" paper. It's about the concepts of illusion and contradiction in the life and works of the author John Cheever. This paper, along with my review of "Hell's Angels", are really the only two written works of mine toward which I feel something akin to pride. (I promise that everything I write from now on in this blog with be a lot shorter and a lot less intellectual. Strictly fart jokes and Bush bashing from here on in.)


A Real Mirage: Illusion and Contradiction in the
Life and Work of John Cheever
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Illusion

He was, as a young man, expelled from high school for poor grades and then published his first short story in a major magazine at the age of eighteen. He was a middle aged man, youthful looking and filled with optimism, but he hadn’t yet come to grips with the fact that all that was good in his life was lost. He loved his wife but committed adultery. He loved his family, yet his actions could have been cause to lose his family. He was of Puritan ancestry but was intemperate in his drinking habits. He enjoyed time with his family every summer in a summer home his parents had built by the sea, a place where he visited with the brother he loved, and yet he committed an act of violence against that brother. He knew depression. He knew happiness. He was heterosexual. He was homosexual.

Some of those descriptions are of the author John Cheever, and some are of the fictional characters in the short stories he wrote, and some apply to both. All exemplify some sort of contradiction or some mode of behavior that makes living everyday life a sort of illusion.
Benjamin Cheever wrote in The Letters of John Cheever that his father was “a man of massive and fundamental contradictions.” (18). He loved his wife Mary deeply, once writing to her, “the only idea I have of life is life with you” (75). He did indeed love Mary and enjoyed the physical intimacies of marriage with her; according to Benjamin, John Cheever would make his wife breakfast in bed, bring the tray to her and “then he’d try to get in after it” (18). Yet he admitted to his biographer of having had one hundred fifty affairs (Donaldson ix). While this sounds a tad exaggerated, his one time mistress, the actress Hope Lange, thought Cheever “the horniest man” she’d ever known (238). To further the paradox of the loving yet adulterous husband, Cheever did not limit his extra-marital activities to women. He had sexual encounters with men throughout his life, possibly beginning in 1931 with his own brother Fred (49).

One would think appearing to be a happily married man while living on the down low would be the biggest illusion in one’s life, but it wasn’t in Cheever’s. For Cheever and his family, it was his alcoholism. His addiction to booze was a visible yet never spoken of reality in the family. His daughter Susan referred to the drinking as “a secret that we kept from ourselves” (S. Cheever 187). Cheever wished to maintain a myth of himself as a “shabby country squire” (186), and there was no room in that myth for the reality of a man who would risk the lives of his wife and children by drinking vodka at eleven-thirty in the morning while driving them through Connecticut (J. Cheever 210).

Aside from the alcoholism and the bisexuality I think there are two other factors that caused Cheever to lead a life of illusion: fear of loss (of money or respectability or a place to live or family) and fear of exposure that he was pretending to be something he was not; Cheever was always concerned about social status and referred to himself as a “social impostor” (J. Cheever 207). In some instances these fears were two sides of the same coin. Cheever’s father had lost his job and because of his age (and probably his increasing use of alcohol) found himself unemployable. This was never spoken about amongst Cheever’s young friends nor did their families speak of it, at least not in front of the children (Donaldson 28). Never speaking of the family’s troubles allowed the Cheever family to maintain an illusion of prosperity and cozy middle class comfort/security/stability. Later in life, in 1951, John Cheever moved out of New York City with his wife and children and rented a house (that had once been a tool shed!) on the grounds of an estate in Scarborough, New York. The estate owners would occasionally bring rich acquaintances through the house if they had expressed an interest in the place as a little getaway shack. This caused Cheever to drink and brood and say, “I don’t know where we’ll go” (S. Cheever 20-21). I think that not only did he fear the loss of a place to live but he feared the exposure that his father endured, of being the breadwinner who could no longer win the bread; writing short stories for the New Yorker magazine “didn’t pay much” (S. Cheever 102) so Cheever simply didn’t have enough of an income to move his wife and children again nor to buy a place of his own where he would not be subject to the whims of the landlord.

While Cheever’s bisexuality did not manifest itself in his fiction, the need to maintain the illusions of success and happiness and stability did. No one character embodies these illusions more so than Neddy Merrill, the protagonist of “The Swimmer.” Arguably Cheever’s most famous short story, it was made into a movie in 1968 starring Burt Lancaster. The writer Michael Chabon, in an a Salon.com article, calls it “a masterpiece of mystery, language and sorrow.” In the story Merrill begins his day at the home of his friends, the Westerhazys; he decides to swim home, traversing eight miles of the county he lives in by going from one pool to another, swimming in each.

Chabon, in the same Salon.com article, describes Merrill’s journey as a trip from “boundless optimism to bottomless despair.” “The Swimmer” is Cheever’s most abstruse (again, I’m looking for extra credit by using a word like that) tale, one that is subtly bizarre in the way that it plays with time and memory. The story doesn’t jump back and forth in chronology as does Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” but seems in one afternoon to proceed from a lovely, warm summer day to one that is autumnal:

The rain had cooled the air and he shivered. The force of the wind had stripped a maple of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and the water. Since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn. (J. Cheever 717)

As the end of the story nears, there is a sign of winter: “No one was swimming and the twilight, reflected on the water of the pool, had a wintry gleam.” (722)

Harold Bloom thinks most critics fail in their perception of Neddy Merrill in that they do not realize that he “is dead, an earthbound ghost.” (Bloom 97) Perhaps he believes Merrill to be a ghost because of the rapid weather changes and the lapses in Merrill’s memory: “Was he losing his memory, had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill?” (J. Cheever 721) I don’t buy into that at all. John Cheever was not a writer of ghost stories. I do think that Neddy Merrill was a representation of some facets of Cheever’s personality. Neddy was a fictional embodiment of what Benjamin Cheever said were his father’s “depths of unhappiness and uncertainty” (J. Cheever 22). Neddy Merrill is a man so oblivious to the facts of his life that he believes everything to be right with the world; he will be welcome wherever he goes, he will perform an extended act of physical prowess (swimming eight miles worth of pools) despite his middle age and return to his comfortable home where his wife and children and servants await him.

The reality is that he is not exactly welcome, much less invited, to any of the homes and pools he enters. The greetings of those Neddy meets range from friendly to slightly antagonistic and dismissive. Among the first homes he enters there are jovial (and, apparently, marvelous) expressions of surprise. At the Grahams : “ ‘Why, Neddy,” Mrs. Graham said, ‘what a marvelous surprise’” (Cheever 715). At the Bunkers: “As soon as Enid Bunker saw him she began to scream: ‘Oh , look who’s here! What a marvelous surprise’” (715-16)! But all is not so marvelous. The Hallorans express their sympathy to Merrill: “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy.” They mention the sale of Merrill’s house and the plight of his “poor children”. Neddy replies that he doesn’t know what they mean, he hasn’t sold the house and the girls are at home (720). Neddy is dismissed as a gatecrasher at the Biswangers, who treat him rudely and talk openly of how Merrill lost all his money overnight (722). Neddy walks away from them and into their pool. He is rebuffed even by his former mistress, who won’t even give the poor guy a drink: “’I could but I won’t’” (723). Looking back at the bathhouse of his ex-mistress he sees a younger man (723-4). He finally arrives home “miserable, cold, tired and bewildered” (724). The handles of the garage door are rusted, the rain gutters are loose and, worst of all, there is no one waiting for him. The house is dark and empty.

No other character in Cheever’s fiction is as fully involved in an illusion as is Neddy Merrill. Nothing that he believes to be reality even exists anymore in the way he thinks it should. His home is gone, his friends pity his misfortune, his children are God knows where and his marriage is over.

(Interesting side note/question: At the beginning of “The Swimmer” Neddy’s wife Lucinda asks him where he’s going as he walks toward the Westerhazys’ pool. He tells her he’s going to swim home. [714] Is this an indication that Neddy has dropped in, unannounced, on his possibly ex-wife as she’s socializing with friends they once shared, thereby starting a journey amongst a social set he is no longer a part of?)

In “The Swimmer” John Cheever takes his deepest fears and writes a piece of fiction to see how they could play out. It is, I think, his bleakest story, one where the author looks in the mirror, sees a man past his prime and fears a lonely end is near. There is no salvation for Neddy Merrill, but there is one for Johnny Hake, the protagonist in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” In this story the main character loses his job at a parablendeum manufacturer. (What is parablendeum? I found no entry for this word in any of the dictionaries I searched. Judging by Cheevers’ description on page 304 it is some type of plastic food wrapping. I do like the fact that Cheever apparently made up this word just as so many marketers in the mid-twentieth century were making up modern sounding words for their products. But I digress.) He certainly does not discuss with his wife and family his job loss or his intent to go into business for himself. That would be a crack in the façade of stability. Not allowed. Thus begins Hakes attempt at illusion management. Everyday he commutes from the suburb of Shady Hill to New York City, renting an office where the phone never rings. No money is made and the outlook for Hake is grim. His checks will begin to bounce soon. His thoughts turn to crime. He decides to pilfer money from the sleeping residents of Shady Hill. Hake “must steal from his neighbors in order to keep himself and his lovely wife installed in their nice suburban house” (Donaldson 207).

Creeping through an unlocked front door in the wee small hours Hake does indeed steal nine hundred dollars from his neighbors, the Warburtons. (Cheever was lucky enough to live in a time when, apparently, the doors of far away suburban homes were not locked and there were no high tech security systems installed.) His crime is successful but Hake is wracked with guilt. His remorse causes his health to decline and makes him short tempered with his wife, children and friends. So difficult is Hake to have around that his wife asks him to leave, which he does, if only for a very brief time. She comes to fetch Hake as he is walking to the train station. (The role of women in Cheever’s fiction can’t really be touched on too deeply here; Cheever’s resentment of his strong willed mother and his “rigid and old-fashioned” [S. Cheever 120] views of women in general and how those views affected his writing of female characters would take up at least an 8 to 10 page paper in and of itself.)

Johnny Hake attempts another burglary but is foiled by his inability to find the homeowner’s wallet. On another night Hake awakens and is walking toward a different neighbors home when it starts to rain. Water plays a role in many Cheever stories, be it the pools of Westchester County in “The Swimmer” or the violence of the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean that stir the narrator’s soul in “Goodbye, My Brother” (we’ll be getting to that in a minute, just hold on), and in “Housebreaker” it is rain that brings about a change of heart and thought in Hake. John Dyer writes in “’The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ and Nakedness: Cheever’s Puritanism and the Pastoral”, (nice title…for me to poop on! How juvenile. I apologize. I keed…):

This baptism seems to be the end of Hake’s problems with his conscience. He apparently has won out over the anxiety of relinquishing his suburban way of life. Perhaps at this point in the story he has transcended his fears of dropping down on the suburban social ladder.

Yeah, maybe, but I prefer to think it was the natural beauty of a summer rainfall that reawakened the decent human within Hake. “…[I]t was no more than the rain on my head-the smell of it flying up my nose-that showed me the extent of my freedom” to solve his problems in ways other than thievery (J. Cheever 319). In real life nature had just as profound an effect on Cheever: “…in sheltered places where the sun shines we can smell the earth and leaves and oh, I am very happy here with all of this, the valley, my wife, my children, and the sky” (J. Cheever 88).

After this baptism of sorts Hake returns home. The next day he is offered his old job back and he gets a nine hundred dollar advance on his salary. He replaces the money he stole from the Warburtons, bringing to an end the need to steal to maintain the illusion of prosperity. However, the story ends with one last illusion. After Hake has returned the money, placing it on the kitchen counter of the Warburtons’ home in the middle of the night, a policeman asks why Hake is out at that hour. “’I’m walking the dog,’ I said cheerfully. There was no dog in sight, but they didn’t look. ‘Here, Toby! Here, Toby! Good dog!’ I called, and off I went, whistling merrily in the dark” (J. Cheever 320).

I believe that ending points out that Cheever may have felt that a little illusion is not such a bad thing and can help alleviate the stress of life rather than be the cause of stress. Certainly in “Goodbye, My Brother” I think the light of illusion wins out over the dark of reality.
In “Goodbye, My Brother” the Pommeroy family gathers, as they do every summer, at the vacation home they all help maintain at “Laud’s Head…on the shore of one of the Massachusetts islands” (1). In addition to the unnamed narrator and his wife Helen there are his sister Diana, his brothers Chaddy and Lawrence with their spouses and children and the matriarch of the Pommeroys, referred to only as Mother.

The Pommeroys were, and perhaps to a certain extent still are, a family of some means and status and so there is a type of decorum required (most especially by Mother) for most every circumstance throughout the day. Though the Pommeroys are not a rigid nor overly formal people they still feel some sense of propriety must be maintained. The Pommeroys overall seem to be happy, except for Lawrence, who is still referred to by his childhood name of Tifty, a sign that perhaps the rest of the family doesn’t take Lawrence as seriously as he takes himself. The need for decorum extends even to the cocktail hour. (Alcohol makes an appearance in almost every Cheever story.) On the first evening the family is together, Mother asks Lawrence what he would like to drink. He replies, “Whiskey, gin-I don’t care what I drink. Give me a little rum.” This indecisiveness that Mother had taught the children to avoid as well as the irregularity of drinking straight rum rankles the mother as it conflicts with her ideas of propriety (3). This is the first sign that Tifty will be causing some problems.

Lawrence is the family member they see the least of due to what seems a mutual dislike. The narrator makes him out to be a dour man who sees only imperfection and illusion in everything around him. As a teenager he decides his mother is frivolous, among other things, and sees less and less of her as he goes off to school. (6) He finds fault with college roommates and ultimately with college in general. In the working world he finds fault with his bosses and leaves their employ. It is Lawrence who points out that although their summer home is only twenty-two years old, the shingles are two hundred years old, bought from area farms to make the house appear venerable, and the doors are treated to make them appear old; this offends Lawrence’s sensibilities. (9) It is Lawrence who watches the family playing board games, not looking disparagingly at the idleness of the games themselves but rather casting a critical eye upon the family members: “…it seemed hideously wrong that he should have sat on the edge of the board and concluded that we were playing for one another’s soul.” (14) And it is Lawrence who refuses to dress up for a costume party at the boat club.

The invitations for the party inform guests that they should come as they wish they were. The narrator dresses in an old football uniform and his wife as a bride. When they arrive at the party there a number of men dressed in football uniforms and at least ten brides. This is Cheever portraying illusion in a harmlessness manner, for that’s what a costume party is, a chance for people to temporarily escape the everyday of their lives by being something other than what they are.

Tifty, however, arrives at the costume party dressed as…Tifty. Neither he nor his wife is in costume. The narrator imagines what Lawrence must be thinking:

And I knew that Lawrence was looking bleakly at the party as he had at the shingles on our house, as if he saw here an abuse and a distortion of time; as if in wanting to be brides and football players we exposed the fact that, the lights of youth having been put out in us, we had been unable to find other lights to go by and, destitute of faith and principle, had become foolish and sad. And that he was thinking this about so many kind and happy people made me angry, made me feel for him such an unnatural abhorrence, that I was ashamed, for he is my brother and a Pommeroy. (17)

The narrator here, and throughout the story, assumes a lot about what Lawrence is thinking, but these assumptions are based on the observations Lawrence has made all along. The narrator of course disagrees with theses observations and thinks that Lawrence mistakes “circumspection for character” (20). Lawrence may indeed be right that the party goers are sentimental to the extent of foolishness, he may be right about the house and how it’s “disfigured” (8) in an attempt for its inhabitants to live in the past.

Lawrence may see the realities of people and how they live, but to the narrator that doesn’t make him right. To the narrator’s thinking Lawrence misses out on the beauty in life, even though some of that beauty is based on illusion. He wants to help Lawrence and they go for a walk on the beach. Bad idea. Lawrence lashes out and states his thoughts on the family realities: his sister is a promiscuous fool, Mother is an alcoholic, Chaddy is dishonest, the house is going to fall into the sea and last, but not least, his brother, the narrator, is a fool. (21)

“Oh, what can you do with a man like that” (23)? Whack him upside the head with a big root you pick up on the beach, that’s what. The narrator knocks his brother down, not injuring him seriously, but causing him to bleed. Lawrence eventually makes his way back to the house and leaves with his wife and children early the next day. Only Mother gets up to say goodbye to him. It is a fine day, the heat making the roses in the garden smell like strawberry jam (23).
The narrator wonders what you can do with someone like Lawrence?:

How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand: how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? (23)

The story ends with the narrator watching his wife and sister emerging from the sea after a swim, “naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace” (23).

This is Cheever speaking. He knows there is illusion in his own life, unhappy illusions where his alcoholism is not spoken of and, without the money to really afford it, he lives in wealthy Westchester. In “Goodbye, My Brother” I think Cheever is the narrator and he is Lawrence; they are the two sides of Cheever, light and dark, reality and illusion, and, in this instance at least, illusion wins out. Here is not the totally blind to reality illusion of Neddy Merrill nor the guilt ridden, thieving to maintain appearances illusion of Johnny Hake that Cheever defends but it is the everyday illusions of everyday beauty that he is championing. The Pommeroy summer home may only be two decades old and meant to look two centuries old, but it is beautiful nonetheless and brings joy to the family (at least most of them). The costumed partygoers are no longer youthful brides and footballers, but still they are still handsome and they are kind and decent people. These are the kinds of illusions that hurt no one and indeed, can be beautiful and help point out the “inestimable greatness of the race” (23).


Works Cited
Bloom, Harold, et al. John Cheever. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004.
Chabon, Michael. “Personal Best: ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever. Salon. 13 March
2006. < http://www.salon.com/weekly/cheever960930.html>.
Cheever, John. “Goodbye, My Brother”. Cheever, The Stories 1-23.
---------“The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” Cheever, The Stories 300-320.
-------- The Journals of John Cheever. Ed. Robert Gottlieb. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
--------The Letters of John Cheever. Ed.Benjamin Cheever. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1988.
--------The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980.
--------“The Swimmer.” Cheever, The Stories 713-725.
Cheever, Susan. Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.
---------Treetops: A Family Memoir. New York: Bantam Books, 1991
Donaldson, Scott. John Cheever: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1988.
---------The Suburban Myth. New York: Columbia UP, 1969.
Dyer, John. “ ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ and Nakedness: Cheever’s
Puritanism and the Pastoral.” American Studies at The University of Virginia Home Page. 1995. 10 March 2006.
< http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA95/dyer/houseb.html>.