Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Seemingly ‘Splendid Summer Morning’)

“When Jim woke at seven in the morning, he got up and made a tour of the bedroom windows. He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city that after six days in New Hampshire he still found the beauty of the country morning violent and alien. The hills seemed to come straight out of the northern sky. From the western windows, he saw the strong sun lighting the trees on the mountains, pouring its light onto the flat water of the lake, and striking at the outbuildings of the big, old-fashioned place as commandingly as the ringing of iron bells….He…went back into the dining room and out onto the terrace. The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn.  It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. Jim looked at the terrace, at the gardens, at the house, with a fatuous possessiveness. He could hear Mrs. Garrison—his widowed mother-in-law and the rightful owner of everything he saw—talking animatedly to herself in the distant cutting bed.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Common Day,” originally published in The New Yorker, July 25, 1947, reprinted in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

With summer beginning, I can think of few American writers, other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who can summon the outward beauty and lurking peril of summer as well as John Cheever.

Christened the “Bard of the Backyard” in this Peter Ronguette article from Humanities, he chronicled the first wave of suburbanites who, in flocking towards their individual Edens, inevitably found worms at the core of their apples.

Jim Brown, the nondescript central consciousness of “The Common Day,” is a visitor from the city who’s wary about buying a home in the country. When he wakes up, there’s something off-putting even about “the beauty of the country morning,” which is “violent and alien.”

One word”—“seemingly”—and two phrases—the “rightful owner of everything he saw” and “fatuous possessiveness”—suggest more powerfully that something will go awry by day’s end.

As I mentioned in this post from two years ago about Cheever’s later, even more famous, short story, “The Swimmer,” the writer used variants on “seem” to imply divergence from reality. “Fatuous” is a downright scornful hint that Jim is delusional to think the beauty he sees around him could ever belong to him.

But the phrase describing his mother-in-law—“rightful owner of everything he saw”—demonstrates the depth of Jim’s delusion about making this country refuge his home.

His landlady and host, while being “indifferent to children,” has also bred dissatisfaction among her foreign-born household staff with her restrictions on their travel back home and her arbitrary demands to move her lilies (“You don’t know anything but kill flowers,” her gardener Nils bursts out).

Just how ineffectual Jim is now and will be comes through as he watches the Irish domestic Agnes Shay with her beloved charge, Mrs. Garrison’s granddaughter Carlotta: “He wanted to help them, he wanted urgently to help them, he wanted to offer them his light, but they reached the house without his help and he heard the door close on their voices.”

Cheever and his family had only barely survived the Great Depression, but not without the shattering of their illusions about where they belonged in American society. 

His short story marked a key signpost as American literature sought to come to terms with the class distinctions still visible despite the New Deal and the egalitarian struggle to defeat Fascism in World War II.

The vision of a better world was as “splendid” as the summer morning Cheever evoked with his characteristic luminosity, but also as illusory.