The Journals of John Cheever

I love reading diaries, letters, or journals. They always give one a sense of the human experience in a way that can remind us that we are all not so different from each other. Cheever lays it all out here; his alcoholism, his affairs with men and women, his desire to be a good husband and father as well as a great writer. And what we walk away with is an intimate look at someone just trying to live life as best he can - like all of us.

There were many entries that struck me, the following was one of my favorites:

I am most deeply and continuously involved in the love of my wife and my children. It is my passion to present to my children the opportunity of life. That this love, this passion, has not reformed my nature is well known. But there is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living and one 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 — I see this — there is chaos, and we are suspended above it by a thread. But the thread holds. p. 97

This is a book I continue to sip here and there between other books and writing projects. It also inspires my own daily journaling. — MJD

Summary

From The New York Times review, 1991

Cheever's journals, which cover the years from the late 1940's to his death on June 18, 1982, concern themselves, like his fiction, with four main subjects: nature, God, home and sex. He is perhaps the most thoroughly American of 20th-century writers, and his relationship to nature comes straight from his Emersonian forebears. He seemed to veer between visions of human depravity and nobility, but for him nature was always good. Some of the most breathtaking writing in these journals concerns itself with the body in nature, and particularly the physical response to light. Like the Luminist and Hudson River painters of the 19th century, influenced in their turn by transcendentalism, Cheever saw light as having a spiritual and moral quality. "The sky is mixed," he says in a passage about an afternoon at a neighbor's frozen pond, "but there is some blue, and the motion of skating, and the lightness and coldness of the air involve quite clearly for me a beauty -- a moral beauty. By this I mean that it corrects the measure and the nature of my thinking. Space, perhaps, is what I mean, but there is the moral beauty of light, velocity, and environment."

Cheever wanted natural beauty to cleanse him of his own sense of sin, but often it made him feel more defiled by contrast. In the last years of his life, when he would seem to have come to terms with his sexual and alcoholic demons, he says: "The redness of the marshes makes the blueness of the water seem to be a thrusting force, and the splendor of the landscape is emphatic; but I am an old, old man -- and it was so different in my youth -- who finds that the bounty and splendor of the world fail to cleanse the thoughts of his heart. My heart is in some motel room, howling at a consummate lewdness."

Loneliness is at the center of all of Cheever's work. His muse is a mournful adolescent boy: "Walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality." This sense of being outside the lighted windows accounts for Cheever's almost obsessive idealization of home and hearth. In his story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," the narrator says: "We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina's dress . . . or just gazing at the lights of heaven I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life." This kind of idealization created enormous conflicts for John Cheever, and the anguish of these conflicts permeates the journals.

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