Tributes by Bradford Morrow & Martine Bellen & Lee Smith

Author:Bradford Morrow & Martine Bellen & Lee Smith [Morrow, Bradford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6389-9
Publisher: Conjunctions

John Cheever. Ossining, New York, 1976. Photograph by Nancy Crampton.

John Cheever and Indirection

Rick Moody

I FIRST HEARD THE NAME at boarding school. What better place to learn of the bard of the suburbs, if that’s who he really was. Creative writing at St. Paul’s School—as at many of your private schools—was frowned upon. It wasn’t considered a discipline. I enrolled two semesters anyhow, along with five or six other kids like me: marginal types who didn’t write realistic fictions about their teenaged lives or their elegant hometowns. They wrote of their melancholies.

Mr. Burns, our instructor, read to us from Cheever’s collection The World of Apples, and also from the novel called Bullet Park. The novel is noteworthy for the nomenclatural coincidences of its protagonists: Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer. This conceit seemed too easy to me. In fact, since I was writing science fiction at the time—and not even the Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard kind of science fiction, the good kind—I didn’t really understand Cheever at all.

For graduation, my dad gave me a trip to Europe—to Paris, London, Rome and Geneva. He also gave me a copy of The Stories of John Cheever. Foreign travel made me homesick, though, and I did nothing in London and Paris but read the Cheever stories. I lurked with my bulky red tome in the various parks near the hotel, in case Dad should permit me to fly home. In recognition of my afternoons spent reading, I decorated my hardcover copy of the Stories with a sticker (nontransferable) that allowed me to sit in a chair in Hyde Park. This luxury, back then, cost fifteen pence per diem.

I don’t remember thinking much of the stories. I thought they were neither good nor bad. Fiction was narcotic, the way I saw it, and that was what I liked about this particular book, though I also remember admiring one piece, “Three Stories,” in part narrated by a protagonist’s stomach (“The subject today will be the metaphysics of obesity, and I am the belly of a man named Lawrence Farnsworth”), as well as a catalogue-story entitled “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear.”

Next came the punk rock years, during which I threw out most of my dinosaur records (Genesis, E.L.P.) and replaced them with totems of a new orthodoxy, the bands of CBGB’s and of King’s Row. As part of this dislocation, I began to bristle at aspects of my biography. I began, for example, to refer to St. Paul’s as a high school— as if, like other people’s alma maters, it was just down the road and had a prom night. I began to avoid certain garments (Oxfords with button-down collars, tartan boxer shorts, loafers, tweed jackets), and to ridicule writers or artists or musicians or anybody else who seemed to have anything to do with the upper middle class or station wagons or cocktail hour or golden retrievers or show tunes or tennis lessons or backgammon or the Episcopal Church or ambitions for success in the world of finance.

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