Photograph by Nancy Crampton.

Over a morning cappuccino in a small but lively European café that spilled onto the central square of a town near the sea, I first read “The Country Husband,” my introduction to John Cheever, on a website I later discovered was inaccessible in the U.S. The website, all in Arabic except for the stories, was an arsenal of midcentury American fiction, a canon I had resisted knowing anything about.

I was, at the time, in a phase of my development as a poet that I would call fiction-averse. I thought poetry was what you discovered, like a rare ore, when you unbuckled the artifice that contained language in narrative. Naturally, then, I tried to write poems that rejected anything that might pass for fiction: smooth, grammatical sentences, captivating or manipulative plotlines, and, most egregious, the implicit desire to wrangle language into utter invisibility while the reader watches a movie in her head.

“The Country Husband” was, at least by reputation, so exactly what I’d been avoiding that I’m not quite sure why I chose to punish myself by reading it. The story concerns a man, Francis Weed, who lives in Cheever’s invented Westchester town, Shady Hill, with his wife and children. Weed falls in love with the babysitter, the most cliché thing a married suburban father can do. She doesn’t love him back, and he doesn’t change his life for her, and that’s the story. He must learn to live past this rupture in his heart.

When I read the story, I was convalescing from an affair with a married person. I did love him back, and he didn’t change his life for me, and since you can’t heal at home from a heartbreak nobody knows about, I had gone abroad. Nothing in my life seemed to be working, and I must have searched up Cheever as part of my attempt to try the opposite of everything I had been doing. I had to admit that in the mirror “The Country Husband” held up to me, I appeared a little less broken than I felt. Writing from Francis Weed’s point of view, Cheever had, at a time when I really needed it, validated my experience of how powerful and real and obliterating extramarital love can be—even and especially for the married party. This, by the way, was years before the ubiquity of open marriages made moot the need for affairs, the way de Tocqueville has described the democratic election’s quelling the need for violent revolution. But the impulse to escape, resist, defy; the flirting with destruction, complete overhaul, change—this doesn’t go away just because one container for it has gone licit. Read More