To begin at the beginning, the airplane from Minneapolis in which Francis Weed was traveling East ran into heavy weather. The sky had been a hazy blue, with the clouds below the plane lying so close together that nothing could be seen of the earth. Then mist began to form outside the windows, and they flew into a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires. The color of the cloud darkened to gray, and the plane began to rock. Francis had been in heavy weather before, but he had never been shaken up so much. The man in the seat beside him pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a drink. Francis smiled at his neighbor, but the man looked away; he wasn’t sharing his painkiller with anyone. The plane had begun to drop and flounder wildly. A child was crying. The air in the cabin was overheated and stale, and Francis’s left foot went to sleep. He read a little from a paper book that he had bought at the airport, but the violence of the storm divided his attention. It was black outside the ports. The exhaust fires blazed and shed sparks in the dark, and, inside, the shaded lights, the stuffiness, and the window curtains gave the cabin an atmosphere of intense and misplaced domesticity. Then the lights flickered and went out. “You know what I’ve always wanted to do?” the man beside Francis said suddenly. “I’ve always wanted to buy a farm in New Hampshire and raise beef cattle.” The stewardess announced that they were going to make an emergency landing. All but the child saw in their minds the spreading wings of the Angel of Death. The pilot could be heard singing faintly, “I’ve got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence. I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life...” There was no other sound.......
-John Cheever was known for having a childlike sense of wonder. Somewhere near his desk were the words: “Love! Valor! Compassion!” He wrote with awe about the natural world because, I think, he actually did regard the world with awe. At the same time, he was a classic example of a Divided Self. Trapped in a joyless marriage, he longed to be openly, unapologetically gay. (Am I oversimplifying things? Ah, well.) You see the deep wound within Cheever; you see it in the narrator of “Goodbye, My Brother,” who doesn’t want to acknowledge “the worm in the apple,” and who can’t help but acknowledge that worm. You see it in Francis, in “The Country Husband,” with his attention “divided”--between everyday pleasures and the dark certainty of impending death. Only the child on the plane is open to uncertainty; all of the adults have confidently started to anticipate their own demise in an explosion. Be in the present, Cheever seems to say. Be more like a child.
-Cheever’s eye for detail is on display here. “They flew into a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires.” (A chilling, authoritative detail: Something that makes you feel you’re right there, on the plane.) Cheever spots everyday meanness: A man who won’t share a bit of whisky from a flask, even though it looks as if, very soon, we’re all going to die. (The struggle to be kind in this world is a main theme of “The Country Husband.” Shaken by his near-death experience, Francis will throw caution to the wind. Irritated by a garrulous neighbor, he will say something like this: “Shut up and paint all your windows black and never come out of your house again.”)
-The gap between speech and thought: The ungenerous neighbor can’t articulate his fear of dying, so he reaches for a repressed wish, a dream of owning a cattle farm. A modest, quirky wish: The fact that it surfaces from nowhere is far more alarming than a (hypothetical) scene in which he might say, “We’re all going to die!” The same is true with regard to the overheard song from the pilot: “I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life....” We don’t want to hear our pilot soothing himself with a child’s song. These bits of human behavior have a ringing truthfulness; we feel as if we are encountering lived experience. (A great irony in this story is that Francis’s extraordinary near-death adventure will mean nothing to his family. It will fall on deaf ears. Each family member is caught up in his/her minor inner turmoil. This says a great deal about Cheever’s most despondent thoughts w/r/t suburbia, the nuclear family, domestic life.)
-“The shaded lights, the stuffiness, and the window curtains gave the cabin an atmosphere of intense and misplaced domesticity. Then the lights flickered and went out.” The world turned upside down. An improvised community. It seems to me that Cheever captures--better than just about anyone--the uncertainty we can feel in daily life. How fragile and vulnerable we all are. How can anyone not come away from these kinds of sentences with an attitude of reverence?
-Do you see hints of “Mad Men” here? I do. How each bit of dialogue/monologue has “top spin.” How the mundane rubs up against the cosmic: A tingly foot, the “spreading wings of the Angel of Death.” I think of Robert Morse interrupting Jon Hamm in an office hallway; though Morse’s character is dead, the character has emerged from beyond the grave to do some singing. “The moon belongs to everyone. The best things in life are free....” If you’re born outside the mainstream, you might spot things that almost everyone else fails to notice. And if you have some talent and a work ethic, then you can use your time to help the rest of us remember an attitude of proper respect toward the craziness and splendor of the world. That, to me, is a fitting summary of Cheever’s impact on America, on literature: Great things grew out of a troubled life.
-John Cheever was known for having a childlike sense of wonder. Somewhere near his desk were the words: “Love! Valor! Compassion!” He wrote with awe about the natural world because, I think, he actually did regard the world with awe. At the same time, he was a classic example of a Divided Self. Trapped in a joyless marriage, he longed to be openly, unapologetically gay. (Am I oversimplifying things? Ah, well.) You see the deep wound within Cheever; you see it in the narrator of “Goodbye, My Brother,” who doesn’t want to acknowledge “the worm in the apple,” and who can’t help but acknowledge that worm. You see it in Francis, in “The Country Husband,” with his attention “divided”--between everyday pleasures and the dark certainty of impending death. Only the child on the plane is open to uncertainty; all of the adults have confidently started to anticipate their own demise in an explosion. Be in the present, Cheever seems to say. Be more like a child.
-Cheever’s eye for detail is on display here. “They flew into a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires.” (A chilling, authoritative detail: Something that makes you feel you’re right there, on the plane.) Cheever spots everyday meanness: A man who won’t share a bit of whisky from a flask, even though it looks as if, very soon, we’re all going to die. (The struggle to be kind in this world is a main theme of “The Country Husband.” Shaken by his near-death experience, Francis will throw caution to the wind. Irritated by a garrulous neighbor, he will say something like this: “Shut up and paint all your windows black and never come out of your house again.”)
-The gap between speech and thought: The ungenerous neighbor can’t articulate his fear of dying, so he reaches for a repressed wish, a dream of owning a cattle farm. A modest, quirky wish: The fact that it surfaces from nowhere is far more alarming than a (hypothetical) scene in which he might say, “We’re all going to die!” The same is true with regard to the overheard song from the pilot: “I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life....” We don’t want to hear our pilot soothing himself with a child’s song. These bits of human behavior have a ringing truthfulness; we feel as if we are encountering lived experience. (A great irony in this story is that Francis’s extraordinary near-death adventure will mean nothing to his family. It will fall on deaf ears. Each family member is caught up in his/her minor inner turmoil. This says a great deal about Cheever’s most despondent thoughts w/r/t suburbia, the nuclear family, domestic life.)
-“The shaded lights, the stuffiness, and the window curtains gave the cabin an atmosphere of intense and misplaced domesticity. Then the lights flickered and went out.” The world turned upside down. An improvised community. It seems to me that Cheever captures--better than just about anyone--the uncertainty we can feel in daily life. How fragile and vulnerable we all are. How can anyone not come away from these kinds of sentences with an attitude of reverence?
-Do you see hints of “Mad Men” here? I do. How each bit of dialogue/monologue has “top spin.” How the mundane rubs up against the cosmic: A tingly foot, the “spreading wings of the Angel of Death.” I think of Robert Morse interrupting Jon Hamm in an office hallway; though Morse’s character is dead, the character has emerged from beyond the grave to do some singing. “The moon belongs to everyone. The best things in life are free....” If you’re born outside the mainstream, you might spot things that almost everyone else fails to notice. And if you have some talent and a work ethic, then you can use your time to help the rest of us remember an attitude of proper respect toward the craziness and splendor of the world. That, to me, is a fitting summary of Cheever’s impact on America, on literature: Great things grew out of a troubled life.
Comments
Post a Comment