{"id":172687,"date":"2026-01-22T08:00:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172687"},"modified":"2026-01-22T14:27:58","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T19:27:58","slug":"cheating-with-john-cheever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/01\/22\/cheating-with-john-cheever\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheating with John Cheever"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Nancy Crampton.<\/p><\/div>\n

Over a morning cappuccino in a small but lively European caf\u00e9 that spilled onto the central square of a town near the sea, I first read \u201cThe Country Husband,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Country Husband<\/a>\u201d was, at least by reputation, so exactly what I\u2019d been avoiding that I\u2019m not quite sure why I chose to punish myself by reading it. The story concerns a man, Francis Weed, who lives in Cheever\u2019s invented Westchester town, Shady Hill, with his wife and children. Weed falls in love with the babysitter, the most clich\u00e9 thing a married suburban father can do. She doesn\u2019t love him back, and he doesn\u2019t change his life for her, and that\u2019s the story. He must learn to live past this rupture in his heart.<\/p>\n

When I read the story, I was convalescing from an affair with a married person. I did love him back, and he didn\u2019t change his life for me, and since you can\u2019t 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 \u201cThe Country Husband\u201d held up to me, I appeared a little less broken than I felt. Writing from Francis Weed\u2019s 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\u2014even 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\u2019s quelling the need for violent revolution. But the impulse to escape, resist, defy; the flirting with destruction, complete overhaul, change\u2014this doesn\u2019t go away just because one container for it has gone licit.<\/p>\n

Cheever lived with his wife and children in the real Westchester, during a time when, as Susan Cheever\u2019s new memoir reminds us, you could pay for your daughter\u2019s braces by publishing a short story. (She cites the cost of her orthodontia as the impetus for her father to write \u201cThe Country Husband.\u201d) His journals are full of that impulse, the desire for more, <\/em>the demand for better,<\/em> of which affairs, at their best, are only one manifestation. Cheever drinks, wrestles with his drinking, and drinks again. He cheats on his wife, often with men, wrestles with his sexuality, and cheats again. He loves sex and literature and writing and family and is devastated by them. He keeps banging his head on the ceiling, his shoulders on the walls, and his knees on the floor of his own life, trying to expand himself to fill it. In one section of the journals, he wakes in the middle of the night in a state of profound physical discomfort: \u201cI am soaked with sweat and shiver convulsively at any touch of the night air.\u201d From this position, he has a vision:<\/p>\n

\n

I see my family\u2014Susie, Rob, Ben, Linda, Mary, and Federico\u2014and how much I love them, how perfect is my contentment! This seems to be not love but a perfect equation in which light is exchanged. And, half asleep, I think I see some way of getting back into my work. It is the old image of spatial arrangements\u2014not tables and chairs but abstract form. The light is sombre but not dim, not soft, a strong, pure gray light. By moving the forms, by changing the spaces between them, something seems to be accomplished. A voice from somewhere says, This is neither erotic nor spiritual. I see a rock pool in Maine, filled at high tide. I wonder if there is any erotic cause for my excitement. I think not. The pool seems beautiful and serene.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How beautiful and serene and painful and psychedelic life was for Cheever, like a Renoir retrospective in which, from certain angles, all the girls might be boys. Life as rock pool, no matter the tide. Submitting yourself to the fundamental earthliness of life, \u201cstruck,\u201d as Cheever writes in \u201cThe Country Husband,\u201d \u201cby the miraculous physicalness of everything,\u201d you gain access to a higher, purer experience even than what we call love: \u201ca perfect equation in which light is exchanged.\u201d And \u201cgetting back into my work\u201d is related to it, as if you had to be in love to write well, when I had always thought it was the opposite.<\/p>\n

What I loved about \u201cThe Country Husband,\u201d in addition to its perfect final sentence, was that it captured, in ways recognizable to me, how Francis Weed\u2019s illicit love allows him to touch what, elsewhere, Cheever describes as \u201cthe harsh surface beauty of life.\u201d \u201cHis spirits were feverish and high,\u201d he writes of Weed. \u201cThe image of the girl seemed to put him in a relationship to the world that was mysterious and enthralling.\u201d In the midst of such feelings, Weed runs into a tedious neighbor, \u201cold Mrs. Wrightson,\u201d on the train platform. She drones on about how she must repeatedly descend into the city to repair her curtains until Weed tells her to paint her windows black on the inside and shut up. She walks away \u201cso damaged in spirit that she limped.\u201d Weed feels wonderful, \u201cas if light were being shaken about him.\u201d His secret love has given him the courage and the energy to liberate himself from bullshit. This passage has come to my mind nearly daily since I read it:<\/p>\n

\n

Among his friends and neighbors, there were brilliant and gifted people\u2014he saw that\u2014but many of them, also, were bores and fools, and he had made the mistake of listening to them all with equal attention. He had confused a lack of discrimination with Christian love, and the confusion seemed general and destructive. He was grateful to the girl for this bracing sensation of independence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What Cheever speaks of here is the freedom to access your true capacity for discernment. It is the freedom to know what you really think, to determine for yourself the worth of prevailing social values. This sense of discovering my own deepest discernment is what led me into an affair in the first place, a kind of access that, when the affair failed to manifest a livable relationship, I feared I\u2019d never have again.<\/p>\n

Unlike his author, Francis Weed never really cheats. I would say that Cheever might have admired his character\u2019s restraint, only Weed\u2019s restraint is forced on him by the girl\u2019s lack of interest. It\u2019s as though Cheever wants to say: There are limits to what adultery can do for you, and trust me, I know what they are, but what kind of story would this be if the protagonist were so morally upstanding that he would choose not to find out what they are for himself? What is moving about Cheever is how he lived in the tension between whim and obligation, freedom and restraint, celebrating (and suffering from) both. Despite his personal foibles, he had no patience for people who lived by whim alone, and he was especially critical of those who seemed to think that because they were writers, they weren\u2019t subject to the same rules of behavior as everyone else. In a passage of his journals where he lays into Jack Kerouac, he notes how his life and Kerouac\u2019s meet at \u201calmost no point,\u201d since Cheever is \u201cmost deeply and continuously involved in the love of my wife and my children.\u201d He sees Kerouac\u2019s whole way of being as neglectful of the fact that there is \u201csome wonderful seriousness to the business of living\u201d from which \u201cone is not exempted by being a poet. You have to take some precautions with your health. You have to manage your money intelligently and respect your emotional obligations. There is another world\u2014I see this\u2014there is chaos, and we are suspended above it by a thread. But the thread holds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cheever repeats this language at the end of \u201cThe Country Husband\u201d when the force of Weed\u2019s established, pre-babysitter life has swallowed him back up: \u201cThe village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light.\u201d I suppose this is the only kind of optimism that makes sense to me: the hope or, better, the conviction, that the thread will hold.<\/p>\n

I used to write poems from convictions. I lay them out now in cover letters. I talk about how poetry is a place that relieves me of my complicity in narrative\u2019s conspiracy, as Robert Creeley\u2019s poem \u201cThe Pattern\u201d expresses so well: \u201cAs soon as \/ I speak, I \/ speaks.\u201d What at first feels like a conjugation issue points us to a worldview that sees the self as divided into the part that tries to say something cohesive and a new part, birthed in language, that is entirely separate from the first part\u2014so separate, in fact, that verbs hit by its force field are conjugated in the third person. To write, one must surrender one\u2019s I to that other I, the \u201cI speaks\u201d one, who is subject to the rules of language, not the rules of biology, psychology, and physics.<\/p>\n

If I no longer quite believe any of that, what I do still believe is that the activity of writing poetry is a calling, and that to heed it cultivates a kind of mystical access, a relationship to forces working through me to shape my life into its truest form. Sometimes it is easiest to recognize a calling when you are called to do something you wouldn\u2019t normally do, like break a rule, whether of grammar or society. When I wrote poems that interrupted narrative continuity, when I used enjambment to suspend and call attention to the default grammatical flow of sentences, and when I gave someone else\u2019s husband a key to my house, I saw myself as heeding my calls.<\/p>\n

In that European caf\u00e9, where, after what felt like losing everything, I found John Cheever, I was hit over the head with a hard truth. My refusal to engage with narrative was the kind of blindly totalizing rejection that in some circles might even be called a limiting belief. I guess you could say that Cheever showed me what my life\u2019s events were already trying to show me: just how unexempted I was from the business of living. He planted in my head a thought that would have been so threatening to the version of myself that existed before the affair that, back then, I wouldn\u2019t have even been able to think it: What if I just care more when I\u2019m reading about people? Forbidden companion thoughts also surfaced: Why am I not writing more about people? Why am I not writing about myself?<\/p>\n

I had big theories to protect me and a big secret to avoid talking about, but I also had to wonder if I wasn\u2019t writing more about myself simply because I felt the way most of us feel about ourselves, the way Cheever felt about the title character of his story \u201cBrimmer,\u201d which begins, \u201cNo one is interested in a character like Brimmer because the facts are indecent and obscene, but come then out of the museums, gardens, and ruins where obscene facts are as numerous as daisies in Nantucket.\u201d I had to do that. I had to leave the museums, gardens, and ruins.<\/p>\n

I left the affair because I knew it would never end, that if I stayed it would go on, as an affair, for as long as I was stuck there. And as long as I was stuck there, I was stuck in a value system in which the truest love and therefore the truest expression of ourselves cannot happen out in the open. Had I stayed in it, I would have continued to believe that such truths cannot be contained in narrative, in a life made comprehensible to others, one in which others can partake.<\/p>\n

At the end of \u201cThe Country Husband,\u201d all the sounds and sights of Shady Hill are as usual, and our protagonist, like so many sexually frustrated men, has taken up woodworking: \u201cFrancis finds some true consolation in the simple arithmetic involved and in the holy smell of new wood. Francis is happy.\u201d Has the door shut on his mystical access to the path most truly his own? Or is there liberation in the capacity to go on as he was, to \u201csurvive pleasure,\u201d as the poet Robert Hass has put it?<\/p>\n

Francis Weed, of course, seems to map onto my lover, but this is me, woodworking, or at least finding true consolation in walking my chihuahua, Ruthie, and in the holy smell of my neighborhood after the heat of the day has made everything fragrant. The sun is setting over Glendale, where I live now, blue above, orange and pink below the overpass. Coyotes are out. Boris is closing his auto shop for the night and we wave as usual. Ruthie and I round the corner. There\u2019s the film editor\u2019s Lexus and the MAGA<\/small> guy\u2019s truck\u2014retired air force, he\u2019s smoking meat outside his apartment again. There\u2019s the pomegranate tree and turf lawn and the sinfully ugly new home that is, finally, not under construction. The hills above my house come into view, hulking and dark beneath the emerging moon. Nina and Alec are playing in their yard, and I can hear Tashi, practicing piano. It is warmer inside, where Ruthie buries my socks in a blanket. The kettle is on. I can\u2019t remember what I\u2019m teaching tomorrow. Someone must be waiting for a text from me, just as I am waiting for one from you. I pull down the shade and pick up a book\u2014fiction. \u201cThen it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jessica Laser\u2019s most recent collection of poetry is<\/em> The Goner School. Her poem \u201cConsecutive Preterite<\/a>\u201d appeared in issue no. 247 of <\/em>The Paris Review.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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