August 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Vodka for Breakfast: On the Melancholy of Cheever’s Journals By Dustin Illingworth Detail from the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of Cheever’s Journals There is something feckless about a writer’s journals. They are a specialist’s document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming baboons, searching for fleas. Expecting bohemian excess or stoic grace, we discover instead a life reduced to the fungible poetry of soiled clothes and closely mown grass. A writer’s journal is “neither life exactly, nor fiction,” Elizabeth Hardwick suggested, “but like one of those dreams in which dead friends, with their old crumpled smiles and grunts, their themes, meet you turning a corner.” The themes of John Cheever’s journals—God, sex, guilt, and nature—manage to instill genteel ennui with the anguished moral passion of a Russian novel. Published in 1990, eight years after his death from lung cancer, and decades after he had been enshrined as America’s premiere bourgeois fabulist, the journals shocked in their revelation of the self-lacerating, booze-addled voluptuary hiding in the fine suit of a country squire. “Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder,” a chastened John Updike wrote upon their publication. But though the gap between Cheever the cultural effigy and Cheever the man was received with surprise and consternation, the ambiguity of his work had always betrayed such a fissure. Cheever’s greatest fiction enacts a kind of doubleness, a yearning for grace darkly marbled with lust and duplicity. The rapturous moments—one thinks of the beautiful early story “Goodbye, My Brother,” with its darkness and iridescence, the naked women walking out of the sea—barely conceal the saturnine streaks. Beneath his character’s charm and taste is a stratum of secret pain, a longing that is somehow shameful. They expect more from life, and this expectation leads them into bafflement and transgression. This is authentic sin, half created, half siphoned from the brackish estuary of Cheever’s soul. The pulse of his magnificent storytelling can be found, vast and inchoate, in the pages of his journals. Cheever couches his spiritual odyssey in the mundane torment of his domestic life, a kind of Strindbergian drama set in the deep lawns and blue afternoons of Ossining. “In church the Epistle is majestic but my mind wanders,” he writes in a 1959 entry. “Now a clearing wind has sprung out of the Northwest. I will think about Hell and the family.” His difficult marriage possessed an elliptical structure: His desire for physical intimacy, her rejection of that desire, his consolation in alcohol and hers in bitter recriminations. Particular anecdotes pierce with the pain of specificity: “Vodka for breakfast. Mary mentions her mother for the third time in thirty-five years. ‘I wanted a teddy bear for Christmas, and she said I was too old. She pronounced ‘doll’ with the same terribly Massachusetts accent you have.’ So we are people we have never met.” Read More
August 22, 2018 Arts & Culture V. S. Naipaul, the Man Versus the Work By Cynthia Payne V. S. Naipaul. Photo: Chris Ison. During the long hot summer of 1978, I found myself living in a small town in New Hampshire. My parents had moved there from suburban Boston six months before, and I felt marooned. Before or since, I have never known such an overpowering depression. I worked nights as a waitress at a Ramada Inn off the highway, where I wore a Swiss milkmaid uniform and plaited my long hair into a crooked bun. The long days I spent wallowing in my discontent. The only thing keeping me above water was that in the fall, I would return as a junior to the academic wonderland of Wesleyan University. Of utmost interest to me was a course in fiction writing that was to be taught by V. S. Naipaul. I ordered several books of his from a small bookstore near the Ramada Inn, which in my despair seemed to be possibly the only such store in the state. The owner hadn’t heard of Naipaul, but he dug up a copy of India: A Wounded Civilization and The Mystic Masseur. It was the first time I had ordered a book—except for schoolbooks and used paperbacks, I rarely bought new ones. Despite the fact that my parents intended my waitress earnings to go to school tuition, not incidentals, I felt I had a right to these books. I hadn’t studied with an actual writer before, never mind one of Naipaul’s breadth, accomplishment, and evident fame. Of course, I hadn’t heard of Naipaul at all until my writing professor that past spring had told me of his pending arrival. Naipaul was a literary lion—that was made clear. The English department—most specifically my professor—had captured him, perhaps having little idea what it would mean to keep him fed for a year. What I remember now is being told he had written an important piece on Conrad. Of his novels and journalism, my professor gave only the most general gloss, and I wonder now how much she knew of the writer beyond his fame. I was interested in Conrad—I had read the major novels—and I shyly confided this. What I didn’t say was that I struggled with Conrad’s contortive prose, feeling I never entirely grasped his intent. Read More
August 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Ode to Gray By Meghan Flaherty Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust motes dancing in sunbeams), 1900. The color gray is no one’s color. It is the color of cubicles and winter camouflage, of sullage, of inscrutable complexity, of compromise. It is the perfect intermediate, an emissary for both black and white. It lingers, incognito, in this saturated world. It is the color of soldiers and battleships, despite its dullness. It is the color of the death of trees. The death of all life when consumed by fire. The color of industry and uniformity. It is both artless and unsettling, heralding both blandness and doom. It brings bad weather, augurs bleakness. It is the color other colors fade to once drained of themselves. It is the color of old age. Because I have no style, I defer to gray. I find it easier to dress in gray scale than to think. I buy in bulk, on sale, in black and white and shades between—some dishwater desolate, some pleasing winter mist. I own at least five cardigans in grandpa gray. My mother always called me plain. She saw this as a flaw to be corrected. She wanted the whole world dressed in dazzling color—even me. I never quite complied. I have the fashion sense of Vladimir and Estragon and the panache of my New England nana. When left to my devices, I choose to be unobtrusive. I choose gray. It suits my diffidence and soothes my extroversion. It is the color, rather than the sound, of silence. It sits with monkish, folded hands and asks for nothing. It never shouts. It never pushes. As the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres said, “Better gray than garishness.” I’m drawn to gray, as to a dream, but not to any old gray. Not storm-cloud gray or corporate monolith. I prefer tranquil gray: the undyed wool of sheep in rain, the mood inside a Gerhard Richter painting, the mottle of an ancient cairn. I don’t mean any one gray either but the entire underrainbow of the world, the faded rose and sage and caesious. Liard, lovat, perse. The human eye perceives five hundred—not a mere fifty—shades of gray. Paul Klee called it the richest color, “the one that makes all the others speak.” Read More
August 17, 2018 Arts & Culture The Dharma Girls By Blair Hurley Still from the 2012 film adaptation of On the Road. Dad gave me a copy of On the Road for Christmas when I was sixteen. At thirteen, it had been The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, then The Catcher in the Rye the year after that. In our house, there was a wall of impressive hardcover books in the den, all the important works of the twentieth century displayed with the curated cool of a record collection: giant tomes like Freedom at Midnight and The Executioner’s Song, great novels like Portnoy’s Complaint and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Naked and the Dead, with glossy white jackets, seventies fonts, and enormous black-and-white photos of authors on the back covers. I was going to work my way through that wall someday, I thought. By my senior year of high school, I was ready for the Beats. I read The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac’s wild romp through American Zen Buddhism, and the great headlong rush of voice swept me along in its current; I read without coming up for air. What drew me in particular was the flirtation with the spiritual. I was a reader endlessly fascinated by how writers used the symbologies and stories of religion to ask existential questions and demand answers of their gods. I was bored by the whiny angst of The Catcher in the Rye, but I read the more spiritual Franny and Zooey over and over, carrying it in my book bag like some sort of talisman. I couldn’t get enough of Frank Herbert’s philosophical, messianic Dune. But with The Dharma Bums, I fell in a new, complicated sort of love. Whenever I encountered a story about religious quests, I went through the same arc of raised hopes and crushing disappointment. In Bums, Ray Smith encounters the Buddhist poet and adventurer Japhy Ryder, a close simulacrum of the real-life Zen scholar and poet Gary Snyder. Ray, an alcoholic, semihomeless wanderer, finds purpose in Ryder’s exhilarating, whirlwind leap through centuries of Zen mystical tradition. They climb the Matterhorn, get drunk, compose poetry, throw wild San Franciscan parties, and eventually part regretfully; Ray Smith still wants to be a lost boy of America, riding the rails, while Ryder is moving to Japan to study his religion in a more serious and authentic way. Read More
August 17, 2018 Arts & Culture My Withered Legs By Sandra Gail Lambert Barbara Stanwyck’s black belt on The Big Valley. Early on in my writing life, which for me was in my forties, I wrote a thinly disguised as fiction piece about a woman who needed to make immense changes in her life and how she was going to build the courage to live through the consequences. The story explored themes of independence and isolation, of disability and desire. The woman used a wheelchair. She was a lesbian. It was unusual for me to have feedback from people whom I thought of as “real” writers, and as I was becoming more serious about writing, this lack of access to knowledge was exasperating. It seemed impossible to make what I wanted to say work on the page. I’d read Dorothy Allison and yearned to write dialogue as effectively. How did Alice Walker structure a story like that? I wanted to twist the reader’s brain like Joanna Russ. And Beloved—it was absurd to think I could ever lift my writing into such rarefied layers of the atmosphere. But I wanted to try. The next step, it seemed to me, was to show my work to people outside of my friendly hometown lesbian writer groups. A writer I knew—who was a college professor and had actually been published—offered to take a look at my story. She read my piece and told me having a character who was both disabled and a lesbian was too messy, too complex for a short story. She thought that since there was no tension or plot development around being a lesbian, I should leave that part out. Here it was, right in my first foray into a wider (straight) writing world: lesbian erasure. My lesbian-feminist self was outraged. I thought, Not enough lesbian content—I’ll show you lesbian content. I added a part about my character noticing the hands of a waitress at Shoney’s. How strong the fingers were, how competently they handled the heavy plates. Her thumb gripped into the sweaty glass of ice water like a rock diverting the flow of a creek. I dyked up that story all over the place. I even gave my character a Barbara Stanwyck obsession and had her fantasize about the thick black leather belt Ms. Stanwyck wore cinched above her jodhpurs on The Big Valley. Read More
August 16, 2018 Arts & Culture The Capacity to Be Alone By Anna Moschovakis A lyric essay on shame, shamelessness, and writing a novel under duress. I don’t like novels. I love a few novels and brought some of them with me: The Hour of the Star, Woman at Point Zero, Forever Valley, Maud Martha, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I also brought a few novels, or novel-like books, that I had not yet read but that I thought I might love: Suite for Barbara Loden, Ban en Banlieue, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights. The rest of the reading I planned to do was, directly or indirectly, about shame. * I first heard the term good-enough mother in a conversation with a poet friend who was training to be a psychotherapist. This was years ago; I had just begun to feel what I think is meant by a maternal instinct, or to suspect that my desire to parent might be stronger than my suspicion of that desire—stronger even than my fear of ruining my life. Good-enough seemed possible, seemed right. * I read about the difference between guilt and shame in an essay written about Odysseus by a literary critic long ago. I forget the argument, but I remember the difference, or the fact of there being a difference. Odysseus’s palm tree made an appearance, too—though that might have been in a different essay, one about nostalgia, or was it grief, possibly by someone else. * In my novel, the main character—Eleanor—is a woman who does not want to be a mother. I sent a draft to a new friend, a writer I admired, who said she could relate. I thought of writing back to clarify but was ashamed. The family next door appeared two days ago: a woman and a man, two small children, and an older man, probably a grandfather. Everyone is very busy, coming and going to and from the car, bright clothing and little backpacks, ready for summer adventures. Except the grandfather, who sits on the porch, softly playing the banjo. I think it’s a banjo, though it may be a mandolin. Read More