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Published: Jan 28, 2009
Category: Fiction
Forgive, if you can, the personal history, but I interviewed John Updike in August, 2008, and although age was on both our minds, he seemed robust and forward-looking --- he didn't learn he had lung cancer until November. The news of his death, therefore, took me completely by surprise. I did the interview for Reader's Digest --- here it is --- and my editor asked me to send in something not in my piece, so I wrote this:
I interviewed John Updike twice, a decade apart. Both times he called me "Mr. Kornbluth". I understood that he was Old School, so I addressed him as "Mr. Updike".
Updike spoke as precisely as he wrote. He dropped his guard only once, when I mentioned an affinity between my daughter, an only child, and only child John Updike: Both got psoriasis at age six. "The Italian word for it means 'the disease of the strong' --- she'll be fine," he said. That meant nothing to my young daughter. But to be reassured by John Updike made my week.
Then I turned to The New Yorker tributes and read John Cheever's wrenching 1970s account of a phone call from a reporter who called him at four in the morning to tell him --- incorrectly --- that Updike had been killed in a car crash. Later, Cheever wrote in his journal:
As for John, 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 it not difficult to kiss him goodbye --- I can think of no other way of parting from him, although he would, in my case, have been embarrassed. 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.
What Cheever leaves out: his envy of Updike and all the complications of their relationship. I knew a bit of that firsthand, because, in 1979, I wrote the New York Times Magazine profile of Cheever that accompanied the publication of The Stories of John Cheever.
What a time I had profiling Cheever! That summer, I'd rented a cheap house in Southampton, and with no job to go to, I sat myself down in the yard on weekday mornings and on the beach in the afternoons and had the glorious, once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of reading 700 pages of Cheever stories. And then, because I had read that Cheever loved the Red Sox --- “All literary men are Red Sox fans,” he had said, or words to that effect --- I took him and one of his kids to a Yankee-Sox game.
Cheever, it turned out, knew nothing about baseball. Clearly he had said he cared only because Updike loved the Red Sox, had even written a brilliant piece in The New Yorker about the last home run Ted Williams hit. Once I grasped that, we talked about Other Things; the most memorable moment of the night was when a friend of mine spilled a gallon of beer on Cheever's shoes.
A few weeks later, I went up to Cheever's house in Westchester. He liked to bicycle each morning, so we saddled up and rode around his neighborhood (“Peter Frampton lives there”), and then, over iced tea, we sat and talked on the porch.
Cheever gave good interview (“What did I learn from Ernest Hemingway? Not to put a shotgun in my mouth”). Not surprising; some writers are great talkers. Cheever had another reason to be extravagantly quotable --- he was afraid I'd learn that he was bi-sexual and include that in my piece. In 1979, that would have been a career-ender for a literary titan of Cheever's generation.
Cheever need not have worried. I suspected nothing and heard no gossip --- I was too busy being dazzled by his stories. “The American Chekhov,” the shorthand had it. Yes, in the sense that Cheever, like Chekhov, could take even the smallest moment and turn it into material. But that description seemed unhelpful, because Cheever was so completely American --- so completely New England, really.
Cheever wrote many of these stories in the storage room of his New York apartment. In the morning, he'd dress as if he were going to an office, but he rode the elevator to the basement, where he'd hang up his suit pants and start writing. Some days he'd get all the way to the end of a story; every night, he'd kill a bottle of liquor. Ah, the 1950s....
There are Cheever stories you've probably read in school: “The Swimmer” and “The Enormous Radio”. There are stories --- like “The Hartleys” --- that you wouldn't have loved when you were younger but are oh-so-meaningful now. And there are stories that will make you feel as if you're reading about the characters in Mad Men.
If you want to audition Cheever, seek out the first story in the book: “Goodbye, My Brother”. It's about a WASP family with one of those big houses on the bluffs of Nantucket. Now that family --- three grown sons, a daughter, a mother and various spouses and kids --- have assembled for a late-summer vacation. Swimming, drinking, family dinners, club dances, game nights at home: This reunion should look like a Ralph Lauren commercial. Why it doesn't: Lawrence --- the youngest brother, the one who “looks like a Puritan cleric” --- has arrived.
We all know people like Lawrence, people who try “to spoil every pleasure.” We endure them because we don't see much of them. But to share a house with Lawrence, to have your two weeks of vacation darkened by his omnipresent scowl --- it drives the narrator, an otherwise mild-mannered high school teacher, to spill the blood of his blood.
Lawrence departs in a huff. He leaves on a gorgeous late-summer morning --- not that, from the ferry, he'd see its beauty. And the narrator? The ending of his relationship with his brother is inspiration for a final, balanced look at much more than a family drama. Here's the last paragraph:
Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes 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? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming -- Diana and Helen -- and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.
I ask you: Is not that one of the most beautiful pieces of writing you've ever read?
To buy “The Stories of John Cheever” from Amazon.com, click here.