Inescapable Conclusions

By -- Paul Gray

THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER by John Cheever; Knopf; 693 pages; $15.95

Although fame came to him as a novelist, John Cheever has been writing and publishing short stories for nearly 50 of his 66 years. Knowing this is one thing; finding and reading the stories has been something else again. Over the decades, magazines carrying Cheever's stories fluttered past, destined for the attic or remote stacks in public libraries. At intervals, hardbound collections of some of Cheever's short fiction appeared, sold tastefully and then went out of print. A few pieces survived the drift toward transiency to which most stories are prone: The Enormous Radio became a standard inclusion in fiction anthologies; The Swimmer inspired an inadequate Hollywood film. The continued existence of other tales, though, came to depend chiefly on word of mouth or hearsay. Cheever's reputation as a master American storyteller seemed rooted in the memory of admirers.

There are colder, less hospitable places, of course. The tricks memory plays are usually flattering. But one of the surprises to be found in The Stories of John Cheever is that the stories are almost always better than people remember. Never before has it been possible to see so much of his short work so steadily and so whole. Never before has the received notion of a "typical" Cheever story--a satire on suburbia, based on fading Protestant morality --seemed further from the more complex and entertaining truth. This massive retrospective of 61 stories (selected by Cheever) is not only splendid from beginning to end paper; it charts one of the most important bodies of work in contemporary letters.

Those who have denied Cheever this stature argue that his characters are too narrow and too much of a piece, that their sheltered lives yield up only hothouse malaise or gilded exaltations. Such complaints put Cheever in excellent company; the work of such different writers as Jane Austen and Henry James has suffered and easily endured similar cavils.

But Cheever deserves a defense. Unquestionably, his wealthy New Yorkers and suburbanites have much in common. The author describes them in one story as "the company of those people who were most free to develop their gifts." These fortunate few are much more significant than critics seeking raw social realism will admit. Well outside the mainstream, the Cheever people nonetheless reflect it admirably. What they do with themselves is what millions upon millions would do, given enough money and time. And their creator is less interested in his characters as rounded individuals than in the awful, comic and occasionally joyous ways they bungle their opportunities.

The best Cheever stories act like fulcrums: they translate considerable social weight into emotional power. The art is one of indirection, of inescapable conclusions drawn from shadowy evidence. Describing people watching in The Summer Farmer, Cheever captures his own method: "It is true of even the best of us that if an observer can catch us boarding a train at a way station; if he will mark our faces, stripped by anxiety of their self-possession; if he will appraise our luggage, our clothing, and look out of the window to see who has driven us to the station; if he will listen to the harsh or tender things we say if we are with our families, or notice the way we put our suitcase onto the rack, check the position of our wallet, our key ring, and wipe the sweat off the back of our necks; if he can judge sensibly the selfimportance, diffidence, or sadness with which we settle ourselves, he will be given a broader view of our lives than most of us would intend."

The railroad imagery is appropriate, not only because so many of Cheever's characters are commuters. A good many others are suddenly discomfited by journeys of the body or spirit that they had not meant to take. In The Seaside Houses, a husband takes his family to the beach for the summer and begins sensing sour emanations from his rented house; before he realizes why, his marriage of twelve years is over. In The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, a man with money troubles is appalled to find himself burgling his wealthy neighbors and friends.

No Cheever character endures more shocks than the hero of The Country Husband, perhaps the best story he has ever written. Things begin going wrong for Francis Weed when he survives a plane crash and goes home to find that neither his wife nor his children seem interested. In short order, Francis recognizes the maid at a neighbor's party as the same woman he had seen, years before, being shaved and stripped at a Normandy crossroads for collaborating with the Nazis. Rattled, Francis falls in love with the teen-age babysitter. Seeking psychiatric help, he is detained by police who think he is the one who has been making threatening phone calls to the doctor. Francis eventually winds up in the cellar of his house doing woodwork as therapy. Cheever paints a scene of dusk falling over the suburb of Shady Hill and concludes: "Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains."

This stroke is audacious and illuminating. What is a fairy-tale line doing in a story filled with accidents and misfortunes? It is alerting everyone to the presence of magic that was there all along, dogging the hero but also yanking him out of the rut of predictability. Cheever does not often introduce direct trappings of the supernatural; The Enormous Radio and The Swimmer violate physical laws, and a woman in The Music Teacher acts suspiciously like a real witch. But an aura of wonder bathes even those stories most absorbed in everyday details.

This radiance is Cheever's unique achievement. It does not stem from easy optimism, as some have charged. For every story in this collection with an up beat ending there is one that puts ice at the back of the neck. Black magic is here, as well as the redemptive kind, and in explicable happiness can be every bit as astonishing as inexplicable misery. Cheever has never tried more or less than to get this sense of mystery down. At the end of one story, he wonders how mere fiction could "hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream." As consistently as any of his contemporaries, Cheever has done just that.

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Once upon a time, John Cheever fled the country when one of his books was due for publication. Now he is staying put, cheerfully weathering the appearance of The Stories of John Cheever in the old house in Ossining, N.Y., an hour's commute north of Manhattan, where he moved with his wife Mary, two sons and daughter some 18 years ago. "I don't get much pleasure from reading my own work," says Cheever, stubbing out a cigarette and lighting another. "I'd like to rewrite all the novels." Going over his short stories, though, turned into a happier experience. "I'd totally forgotten some of them," he recalls. "I couldn't tell you how they ended."

Cheever's own story has had some harrowing moments, but the hero seems to have come through handsomely. After a serious heart attack five years ago, he underwent a rigorous cure for alcoholism. He speaks candidly of the downward spiral his life had taken and of the connection between writing and drinking. "If you are an artist," he says, "self-destruction is quite expected of you. Orphic myths popped up early, showing singers being torn apart by Harpies to the infinite satisfaction of society. The thrill of staring into the abyss is exciting until it becomes, as it did in my case, contemptible."

Outside the ground-floor dining room where he sits, the weather is Cheeverian, all high sky and searching sunlight. The author finishes a glass of iced tea and stands up, instantly alerting Edgar and Bathsheba, two adoring golden retrievers. An afternoon walk in the nearby woods is part of the daily routine. Cheever confines his writing--on "a long book"--to the mornings. He recently finished an original 90-minute play for public television, but fends off invitations to dramatize his stories for the home screen. "You can't adapt a story any more than you can adapt a baseball game," he says, gesturing. "There it is."

As the dogs romp ahead, Cheever acknowledges that he is more accessible, more willing to appear in public than in the past: "I began getting out more when I realized that I'm not only dependent on readers, I rely on their response." He was especially pleased by the mail he received after Falconer was published last year. "A book about a homicidal, fratricidal drug addict," he says, shaking his head. "I got perhaps two crank letters. The rest were thoughtful comments from concerned, well-informed men and women."

The walk describes a long circle and Cheever's house comes into view again. It seems a natural outcropping of the hill on which it was built 179 years ago. In his stories, Cheever has satirized the obsession to collect and preserve old things. "It represents inertia, lack of enthusiasm, everything I detest in life." Then the curator of his own stories laughs outright: "However, if you want to see my grandmother's fan..."

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