Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Mid-Century Duchess in Rome)

“If you should happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Massachusetts, the company of a ranking duchess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Mass, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant' Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today…Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), "The Duchess,” originally published in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1958, reprinted in Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1958)

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.

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Frequent Occurrence in a Suburban Party)

“At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone hours ago and the ten or twelve people remaining seemed powerless to bring the evening to an end although the gin and whiskey were running low, and here and there a woman who was sitting with her husband would have begun to drink milk; when everybody had lost track of time, and the babysitters who were waiting at home for these diehards would have long stretched out on the sofa into a deep sleep, to dream about cooking-contest prizes, ocean voyages, and romance; when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves; when every proposal — to go to the Farquarsons for breakfast, to go swimming, to go and wake up the Townsends, to go here and go there — died as soon as it was made, then Tracy Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair.”—American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “O Youth and Beauty!”, originally published in The New Yorker, Aug. 22, 1953, reprinted in The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958)

Appreciations: John Cheever’s Tale of Midsummer Dissolution, ‘The Swimmer’

“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. ‘I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Swimmer,” originally printed in The New Yorker, July 18, 1964, reprinted in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

In the middle of yet another ungodly heat wave, there’s nothing like a nice, cool swim.

Well, even a good idea can be carried a little too far sometimes. Just how far—and how wrong—that kind of idea can be was conjured up by one of the great chroniclers of postwar suburbia.

A full immersion in the waters of John Cheever is enough to get you drunk by osmosis, and one of his most anthologized short stories, “The Swimmer,” wastes no time doing so, in this first paragraph.

Even on Sunday, a day not just of liturgical but recreational grace, inebriation cuts across vast cross-sections of the New York suburb in which this tale is set. Not only is the phrase “drank too much” used four times in the quoted paragraph above, but “drank” is italicized in each case.

Even before the title character is introduced, the major cause of his ultimate degeneration has been identified, albeit as a characteristic shared with the friends and ex-friends increasingly nettled by his presence.

“Drunk” is not the only word repeatedly employed throughout the story. So are “seemed” and “might,” with each use attached to an associated image indicating that the perceptions of the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, will be fragmented and unreliable.

In a 1971 essay, Cheever hailed F. Scott Fitzgerald for his “acute awareness of the meaning of time,” with characters who “lived in a temporal crisis of nostalgia and change.”

By the end of this story, the crisis that Neddy Merrill has been denying becomes increasingly apparent, despite his impulsive, startling decision to recapture his youth by swimming the eight miles from the Westerhazy’s pool to his own.

I haven’t yet seen the 1968 film adaptation of thisstory, but it’s hard for me to imagine a better actor to portray Merrill onscreen than Burt Lancaster (in the image accompanying this post). 

Two decades into his film career, the Oscar winner still showed the amazing physique he had achieved as a youthful acrobat. But few actors were better at depicting the complexity and insecurity below this kind of magnetic presence than he was.

Almost as soon as Merrill has conceived his almost surreal ambition, Cheever is undercutting him as a figure of epic self-delusion:

“He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda, after his wife. He was not a practical joker, nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.”

The irony will only mount as Merrill stops periodically at one party after another, in the course of which he is not only stopped by one hostess but “slowed by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the hands of as many men.”

Midway through his swim (after, not so coincidentally, about a half-dozen drinks), a storm breaks out, and Merrill’s temporal perceptions become progressively unsure. A neighbor had bought Japanese lanterns “the year before last, or was it the year before that?” It’s supposed to be midsummer, but Merrill finds himself shivering, as if it’s already autumn.

Before long, he is finding a less hospitable landscape: neighbors’ properties overgrown with weeds and the doors locked; jeering by passersby as he crosses a highway barefoot; sneers by another hostess at this “gatecrasher”; and remarks and gossip he doesn’t register about his “misfortune.”

While the story is seen entirely through the consciousness of Merrill, the voice of Cheever slips through at times, as when Neddy wonders if he was “losing his memory” or if 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?” 

By the end, Neddy has been exposed as an alcoholic, a philanderer, and a spendthrift whose financial ruin has destroyed his family and left him friendless and locked out of his suburban paradise.

Like the Lucinda River, alcoholism runs like a subterranean stream in a number of Cheever stories, such as “Reunion” and the novel Falconer. But seldom has the psychological dissolution it unleashes been rendered with such irony and phantasmagorical brilliance as in “The Swimmer.”

Cheever shared far more than a thirst for liquor and an equally desperate quest for grace with Fitzgerald: Both also have tempted filmmakers to create on-screen visual counterparts to prose whose shimmering effects are felt primarily in the imagination.

So it was with The Great Gatsby, and so it was in the late Sixties when the husband-and-wife screenwriter-director team of Eleanor and Frank Perry tried to adapt Cheever’s tale of altered consciousness. 

Frank Perry was fired midway through, and even a young Sydney Pollack, hired to complete filming, couldn’t steady a production that had become as uncertain as Neddy’s nautical journey home.

Despite a pleasant on-location experience in Westport, CT (where Cheever made a cameo appearance at a poolside cocktail party, where, Neddy-like, he marveled at a “terrific 18-year-old dish”), the author loathed the finished product of the troubled production. (I’ll have to wait till the next time it comes on TCM to assess the merits of his complaints.)

In a way, Cheever is the missing link between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mad Men (just a few of the many literary references on the late, great series examined in Jenny Tighe's post on the "Bloomsbury Literary Studies" blog). It’s apparent symbolically even in the opening credits of the classic AMC series, in the vertiginous fall suffered by its main character.  

Mad Men’s showrunner, Matthew Weiner, took his time (seven seasons) showing how ad man Don Draper hit rock bottom, just as Fitzgerald took an entire novel to detail the warped promise of its once-dazzling protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver.

In contrast, Cheever compressed the story of Neddy Merrill, but the result is the same in all three cases: men fooled by the shimmering surface of the American Dream, with not enough intestinal fortitude to survive the loss of their illusions.

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, Defining Art)

“Art is the triumph over chaos.” — American short-story writer and novelist John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Death of Justina,” in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Female Terror)

“It was a Sunday evening; he had left a cocktail party in a Washington Square apartment and had decided to walk a few blocks up Fifth Avenue before he took a bus. As he was passing the Brevoort, Joan called to him. She was with a man at one of the tables on the sidewalk. She looked cool and fresh, and the man appeared to be respectable. His name, it turned out, was Pete Bristol. He invited Jack to sit down and join in a celebration….They had dinner and drank champagne with their dinner. They drank more champagne afterward and then went over to the Lafayette and then to two or three other places. Joan had always been tireless in her gentle way. She hated to see the night end, and it was after three o'clock when Jack stumbled into his apartment. The following morning he woke up haggard and sick, and with no recollection of the last hour or so of the previous evening. His suit was soiled and he had lost his hat. He didn't get to his office until eleven. Joan had already called him twice, and she called him again soon after he got in. There was no hoarseness at all in her voice.”—John Cheever, “Torch Song,” from The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

This being Halloween, it’s appropriate to discuss this elegant exercise in Jamesian horror and ambiguity. Along with the usual notes of beauty and wistfulness associated with John Cheever, there’s a sense throughout that something more is deeply wrong here. There’s a dead giveaway even in the second sentence: “She always wore black, and he (Jack) was always given the feeling, by a curious disorder in her apartment, that the undertakers had just left.” Over a year later, when he comes to the apartment of the woman he nicknames "The Widow" again, there is “a death rattle in the lock” when he rings the doorbell.

The dominant impression of a John Cheever short story is of a mid-20^th century suburbanite seeking elation and grace at a party that inevitably ends with someone, usually the male protagonist, getting drunk, flirtatious, stupid and even violent. Jack Lorey, a WWII vet who knows Joan Harris from their Midwestern small town, could be a kind of literary counterpart to Mad Men’s Roger Sterling in his surface charm, serial marriages and slow-dawning realization that he has let his life slip away. Except that Roger does not come within the sights of an emotional vampire after a series of debauches.

In the preface to his Library of America horror anthology, American Fantastic Tales, Peter Straub identifies an instinct associated with terror and the uncanny dating back to the Puritans: “the surrender or collapse of the individual will.” Particularly in its latest season, Mad Men has shown how this collapse has undermined Roger, Don Draper, and other males on the show. That psychic deterioration has been a long time coming. So does the unraveling of Jack Lorey.

You might think it entirely coincidental that Roger’s secretary on Mad Men shares the same name as the big, healthy woman who may well be far more in Cheever’s much-anthological story. But remember that, as the seminal series about the Sixties begins, Don Draper lives in Ossining, the town at the heart of Cheever Country.

Cheever has been labeled “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” but the other nickname for him, “the Ovid of Ossining,” sounds, in instances such as “Torch Song,” more appropriate—testimony to the astonishing metamorphoses experienced by his characters when they are fully in the grip of desires beyond their control.

The heartache underlying so much of his fiction derives from the vast distance between the states of grace sought by his men (and they are, overwhelmingly, men) and the circumference of everyday life. That distance also accounts for the element of the fantastical in his work. No less than “The Enormous Radio” and “The Swimmer,” “Torch Song” mixes the real and the surreal.

At the same time, the mounting terror in the story also results from an ambiguity at its heart: how much of Jack’s final lashing out against his longtime female friend as a “lewd and searching shape of death” comes from an actual realization of her true nature versus the distorted psychological understanding of a diseased man?

Joan has a habit of picking one drunk, drug addict, consumptive, and general abuser after another. Yet, for all her bad luck, she hardly seems to have aged.

“Torch Song,” like so much of Cheever’s fiction, clearly reflects the author’s misogyny. If Joan Harris is, in fact, a psychological vampire who drains her male victims of their energy and life essence, if not of their physical blood, then the violent ways they act to expunge her from their lives become justified, in their twisted way of thinking. Thus, “Torch Song” has become anthologized not just in horror anthologies, but even at least one on domestic violence (Mark Spilka’s ironically titled Eight Lessons in Love: A Domestic Violence Reader).

Posthumous revelations about Cheever’s private life have led some to see this tale as a manifestation of his sexual orientation. By this reckoning, the numerous lovers of Joan that keep dying are, symbolically, fellow homosexuals that the closeted Cheever would have regarded as sick. An interesting, but probably too reductive, take on a tale that mounts in ambiguity and dread from first to last.

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."

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on the Need to Write)

“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness. For me, it’s the most intimate form of communicating about love and memory and nostalgia."—Novelist/short story writer John Cheever, quoted in Michiko Kakutani, The Poet at the Piano: Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, and Other Artists at Work (1988)

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on Mankind’s Loneliness and Confusion)

“How lonely and unnatural man is and how deep and well-concealed are his confusions.”—John Cheever, “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish, and the Bear,” quoted in John Updike, “Basically Decent: A Big Biography of John Cheever,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2009

Twenty-eight years ago, in an interview for my college newspaper, Frank MacShane puckishly told me he had been nicknamed “the biographer of the stepchildren of literature.” That’s a natural label, I suppose, when you’ve written about the lives of Raymond Chandler, John O’Hara and James Jones, all critically undervalued at the time of that writing.

I was surprised to find out this past week that Blake Bailey appears to have taken on that mantle for a new generation. First came his biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty, five years ago; now comes a life story of another Fifties chronicler of suburbia, Cheever: A Life.

To my surprise, I learned from Charles McGrath’s article on the novelist-short story writer this past weekend in The New York Times Magazine, “The First Suburbanite--the man who claimed post-World War II suburbia as his distinct literary province before Yates, John Updike, or the writers of Mad Men—has fallen into something like neglect. I write “surprise” because you never dream of this happening to a Pulitzer Prize winner acclaimed as a modern master of the short story at the time of his death.

And yet, that’s precisely what has befallen Cheever—ironically enough, because of the work that contains much of his most painful yet lyrical prose: his Journals. The revelations in that posthumously issued work—not just of his alcoholism but of his guilt-ridden homosexuality—have overshadowed the luminous words in which they were disclosed. The writer—so careful to maintain his image, as McGrath calls it, “of burgher and family man”—would be horrified to discover that his sexual secrets had even become fodder for a 1992 Seinfeld episode. (That’s another thing he has in common with Yates, besides a biographer—as I noted in an earlier post, Yates served as the model for Elaine’s crusty writer dad on the long-running sitcom.)

You can feel the distaste for the seeminess of the life revealed at such length in Updike’s posthumous review of Bailey’s biography of his old friend in this week’s New Yorker, in the article from which I’ve quoted above.

To refocus attention on what really matters—his work—Cheever’s surviving children have authorized Bailey’s biography, and the Library of America is reissuing Cheever’s short stories and novels. Good. Maybe then readers will re-discover—or find out for the first time—that Cheever is a not-unworthy successor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, another fiction writer whose wistfully romantic prose contrasts so sharply with a tortured, drunken daily existence.

Both men’s works, I think, should be looked to by anyone tortured by addiction and depression. The joy Cheever feels to be inside a church on Sunday, for instance, feels so much sweeter after a long weekend of fighting off the urge to run for the bottle by noon. His work and life recall the Leonard Cohen lines from “Anthem”:

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

The Brightness and Darkness of John Updike

“As for John [Updike], he was a man I so esteemed as a colleague and so loved as a friend that his loss is indescribable. He was a prince….I think him peerless as a writer of his generation; and his gift of communicating—to millions of strangers—his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition. John, quite alone in the field of aesthetics, remained shrewd….One misses his brightness—one misses it painfully—but one remembers that his life was dedicated to the description of enduring—and I definitely do not mean immortal—to enduring strains of sensuality and spiritual revelations.”—John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

For me, this 1976 entry from John Cheever’s journals was more startling than his battles with the bottle, his wife or his bisexuality. Someone identifying himself as “C.B.C.” called him requesting a comment on “a fatal automobile accident” involving Updike. 

The fraudulent report—perhaps, Cheever’s daughter Susan suggested, started by an overambitious stringer, “who saw the name on a police blotter and decided to cash in”—sent the older novelist on a crying fit until he learned the truth later in the day.

John Updike, of course, lived for another three decades, much honored—including two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards—before dying of lung cancer in a hospice in Massachusetts this past Tuesday, at age 76. 

Cheever’s premature retrospective has been echoed in the obituaries and appraisals that have flooded the conventional media and the blogosphere these last couple of days.

Elsewhere in his journals, Cheever admitted to envying Updike—and who can blame him? Leave aside the latter’s unbelievable productivity, a roughly book-a-year pace that served as an inspiration and rebuke to other published writers, not to mention poor bloggers like myself.

Something more territorial, though, probably nagged at Cheever: Updike was exploring much of the same turf that Cheever had claimed as his own—suburbia, depicted with a similar lyrical sensibility even as it looked askance at its desires. 

When they don’t obsess over every line, writers worry incessantly about their reputations, wishing success for their friends but not too much, if that means that their own worth is overshadowed in the process.

Neither writer needed to worry. Following his novel Falconer, his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, and the journals that divulged his private torment in exquisite detail, Cheever’s place in the mid-century American pantheon, as a successor to F. Scott Fitzgerald in his quest for elusive grace, is secure.

Likewise Updike’s, in a different way: as a man of letters on more of a European model. Imagine Edmund Wilson, only with somewhat less focus on nonfiction—and considerably more success with fiction.

I can’t think of another major American author who worked in so many different genres—the novel, short short, poetry, drama, literary and art criticism—or on so many different subjects: the small town, suburbia, baseball, golf, art. 

Few were ready to dare more, whether through a fictional trilogy inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, another novel suggested by Hamlet, a late-Seventies satire on an African dictator (The Coup), or a first-person narrative of a 21st-century American who becomes hooked by Islamic fundamentalism (Terrorist).

And I haven’t touched on the decades-long tetralogy that is probably his best-known work, on Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, which won him his two Pulitzers.

Not that Updike didn’t misfire occasionally. You would, too, if you put out so much work. For me, at least, his sentences sometimes went over the line from baroque to rococo. 

As for his sex scenes: As recently as this past fall, he won Britain’s Lifetime Achievement for Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. I think that should be renamed in his honor, in much the same way that the winner of America’s Super Bowl now receives the Lombardi Trophy

When all is said and done, though, I suspect that his reputation will rest most securely on his massive output of short stories. Most of it sticks to the milieu of his own life, which he knew intimately. 

As a massive record of American life, they will be ranked along with Cheever’s. The high quality of the prose exceeds that of another great New Yorker short-story master, John O’Hara, though not his range in characters.

In particular, I think his fictional couple Richard and Joan Maple, whose marriage he charted from its hopeful beginning to painful end over two decades—roughly the period of his own first marriage. Those stories formed the basis of a fine TV film, Too Far to Go, starring Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner, with Glenn Close in an early, supporting role.

Back to Updike and Cheever. They resembled each other in one other way: Their belief, increasingly unfashionable in an age hailing “The Death of God,” in their sense of the powerful, immanent presence of God. 

No matter how guilt-ridden Cheever felt over his addiction to drink and lust, he seldom if ever felt separated from God. Particularly at an Episcopalian service, he felt God almost as a physical presence, as real as the sunlight coming through the windows of his church.

By the end of his life, Updike had upset some liberals for his belief in God, as well as Vietnam War critics for his reluctant backing of the conflict and later feminists for what they deemed sexist treatment of his female characters. (The earlier criticisms had a good deal more justice than the later ones.) 

James Wood, whose atheism sometimes warps his critical faculties (sample essay titles: “Sir Thomas More: A Man for One Season" and "Knut Hamsun’s Christian Perversions”), took off after “John Updike’s Complacent God,” attacking in particular the novelist’s belief, influenced by theologian Karl Barth, that God confers grace through the gift of creation.

Contra Wood, Updike’s belief in the world’s governing divinity is anything but “complacent.” Particularly in his early years, he had a real affinity for the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard. 

A terror more powerful than that afflicting the physically tormented Cheever lay not far beneath the surface of Updike’s sex-and-death-drenched world. In his poem “Religious Consolation,” originally published in The New Republic and reprinted in Best Spiritual Writing 2000, Updike notes:

“One size fits all. The shape or coloration
Of the god or high heaven matters less
Than that there is one, somehow, somewhere…”

Why do we need more worlds? he asks rhetorically. The answer: because “This one will fail.”

More precisely than Wood, who fixated on Updike's almost sensual delight in the sentence, Cheever identified the best elements of his younger friend's work: the connection to "his most exalted and desperate emotions" that informed his faith and his understanding of weak but striving humanity.