Excerpts from Cheever’s Journals

As I had written earlier, I began the year with John Cheever’s Journals. I’ve never read any of his works before and only knew him as the master chronicler of the American suburban life. ‘Chekov of the suburbs’ was how the literary world tagged him.

After reading his journals, I now see him as someone who navigated a turbulent marriage, combated depression, was plagued by alcoholism and more poignantly, as someone who was constantly troubled and triggered by his bisexuality. Through moving prose, he records decades of his life in these journals – which were initially published by the New Yorker. Excerpts that caught my attention:

On the Middle Class

I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

On the suspicions that homosexuals triggered:

That was the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality. They were worried about other things, too, but their other anxieties were published, discussed, and ventilated while their anxieties about homosexuality remained in the dark: remained unspoken. Is he? Was he? Did they? Am I? Could I? seemed to be at the back of everyone’s mind. A great emphasis, by way of defense, was put upon manliness, athletics, hunting, fishing, and conservative clothing, but the lonely wife wondered, glancingly, about her husband at his hunting camp, and the husband himself wondered with whom he shared a rude bed of pines. Was he? Did he? Had he? Did he want to? Had he ever? But what I really mean to say is that this is laughable.

On the mundaneness of marital life:

The struggle to sustain a romantic impulse through the confusions of supper, the disputes, the television, the baby’s bath, the ringing of the telephone, the stales of the dishpan, but I have in the end what I want and I want this very much.

On sexual shame while reminiscing:

By a loss of weight I mean that I will have recouped some of that youthful beauty I never possessed, that I will be kissed and caressed and worshipped. I see how far all of this is from the realm of common sense. Anyone who caressed and worshipped this old carcass would be someone upon whose loneliness, fear, and ignorance I preyed. This would be the exploitation of innocence. This I see as I swim so briefly through that part of the stream that represents common sense. I will get into other, more seductive, waters, but there is always the chance that I will return to this.

On genitals:

As deeply rooted as they are in our sentimental and erotic lives, we must consider that our genitals can be quite thoughtless. They count on us for discretion, cleanliness, and gratification. Without our considered judgment they wouldn’t have the life span of a butterfly.

A perplexing but a powerful take on eros in the doldrums of a long marriage – the exhausted middle-aged ‘domesticated’ wife as an ‘elusive nymph’

A. rolls his eyes at his wife and groans, significantly. Well, all right, she says. He strips off his clothes and waits at the side of the bed. She goes down to the kitchen, puts four blankets into the washing machine, blows a fuse, and floods the kitchen. “But why,” he asks, standing in the kitchen door, naked and unaccommodated, “why when I ask you for tenderness do you wash blankets?” “Well, I was afraid I’d forget them,” she says shyly. “Moths might get into them.” She hangs her head. Then he sees something touching and pitiful here, some irresistible wish to be as elusive as a nymph, but she, being much too heavy to sprint through the woods, is reduced to putting blankets in a washing machine. But he would understand that her determination to seem elusive was as strong as the drive in his middle; he would put his arm around her and lead her up the stairs.

On the seductive allure of the ‘other’ on the street:

The girls on the street are a joy. A girl with bare arms by the St. Regis; a girl with bare shoulders on Fifty-seventh Street; dark eyes and light eyes and red hair and above all the wonderful sense of dignity and purpose in their clear features. But there is the imperfect joining of the carnal world and the world of courage and other spiritual matters. I seem, after half a lifetime, to have made no progress, unless resignation is progress. There is the erotic hour of waking, which is like birth. There is the light or the rainfall, some ingenuous symbol by which one returns to the visible, perhaps the mature world. There is the euphoria, the sense that life is no more than it appears to be, light and water and trees and pleasant people that can be brought crashing down by a neck, a hand, an obscenity written on a toilet door. There is always, somewhere, this hint of aberrant carnality. The worst of it is that it seems labyrinthine; I come back again and again to the image of a naked prisoner in an unlocked cell, and to tell the truth I don’t know how he will escape. Death figures here, the unwillingness to live. Many of these shapes seem like the shapes of death; one approaches them with the same amorousness, the same sense of terrible dread. I say to myself that the body can be washed clean of any indulgence; the only sin is despair, but I speak meaninglessly in my own case. Chasteness is real; the morning adjures one to be chaste. Chasteness is waking. I could not wash the obscenity off myself. But in all this thinking there is a lack of space, of latitude, of light and humor