Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on Hard-Won Grace)

“Kneeling, I am too deeply moved to shape a coherent prayer. I would like my daughter's happiness, some largeness of my comprehension, but my feeling is inchoate and close to tears….The candles, the fires, are countless, and much of the force of this ritual is ancient and bold. I believe in God the father. What a courageous declaration! The movements of the priest, the acolyte, and the communicants are like some vestige of a pavane. It is the tower bell that rings as we approach the mystery of the Eucharist…..Leaving the church, I greet the priest…`Good morning, John,’ he says. He is the same priest—unnamed and uncalled-for—who gave me Communion when I was last thought to be dying. I’ve not seen him since. There is no mention of God’s will. We settle for an ardent handshake and loud laughter.  We are both crying.”—John Cheever, mid-year diary entry for 1975, The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Man’s natural inclination is for the light, believed John Cheever, who was born on this date 100 years ago today in Quincy, Mass. When his journals were published nine years after his death, critical attention focused on his late-night terrors over his bisexual leanings. Yet an equally powerful cross-current in his daily jottings is the connection to God he felt through Sunday Episcopal services.

Cheever’s life resembles F. Scott Fitzgerald's in a number of ways (notably, difficult relationships with alcohol, class and his wife), but even if you knew nothing about either writer and confined yourself strictly to the reason we honor them in the first place—their stories—you’ll find a shared quality: an ability to elevate ordinary experience into extraordinary epiphanies that shed light on Edens lost and forever re-sought.

Perhaps the foremost chronicler of postwar suburbia, Cheever created characters who have come into a world they once could only have dreamed of. Of course it can't last, and somehow or other--usually through one too many drunken fights at parties, a furtive extramarital fling, or some combination of the two--The Fall comes. If the scenario sounds like some recent television work, it should: Don Draper, the magnetic but conflicted advertising creative director in the cable TV series Mad Men, lives, when that series first opens, in Ossining, N.Y., a very self-conscious nod to Cheever's longtime home.

The journal entry above was written at an inflection point in Cheever’s life. Three years before, he had had a heart attack, and at the time of this entry he had only recently finished a stint at a rehabilitation center for his acute alcoholism.

To read Cheever’s journals around this time is to grasp a man who emerges from a dark, dank cave, blinking at the light—grateful to emerge back into the world at all, and astounded that--through no effort of his own weak will, only God's help and mercy--he’s been delivered from despair. The novel he wrote after his release from the rehab center, Falconer, ends with an escape from the titular prison (like Cheever's rehab center, a setting of confinement) and an affirmation of faith: “Rejoice, he thought. Rejoice."