The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) by John Cheever Read Free Book Online Page A

or ten times, a name. The voice was guttural and unlike her waking voice. I went into the room and stood by her bed until she had stopped talking. Then there were many voices and noises hour after hour. There was the illusion of a man’s voice, a little more than a sigh. I think I have never been so frightened before. My flesh crawled. I was subjected to the beating of my heart. Who would the spirit be if there were a spirit? A sickly banker, troubled because he had never been given credit for organizing the Federal Reserve Board? The advertising executive who offered to hang the traitor with his own hands? The impostor?
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    To bring out a collection of short stories this fall: “Torch Song,” “O City of Broken Dreams,” “Emma Boynton,” “The Day the Pig Fellinto the Well,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Season of Divorce,” “The Sutton Place Story,” “The Pot of Gold,” perhaps “The Radio Man,” I mean “The Elevator Man,” and to write a couple of stories to complement the collection, a couple of long pieces with no dying fall. Read at the office yesterday most of the stories I’ve written in the last five years and was, quite incidentally, exhilarated and happy to leave the office for the open streets at five. The stories didn’t seem too good. The war stories are spoiled with chauvinism, a legitimate weakness. I also found pitiful evidences of poorly informed snobbism, an exaggerated wish to impress my knowledge of Army prose upon the reader, and associated with this a tendency to use verbatim conversation rather than the remarks that should be made by my characters. Some of the best of it seems to be the set of descriptions of character: Emma Boulanger had the soul of a housemaid, etc. This I picked up from Flaubert and it is showing signs of turning into a bad characteristic of generalization. I can use these set pieces if they are integrated into a crisis. My interim narrative style needs a lot of work. Love of sorts is reasonably well described. There are too many scornful and fine phrases.
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    On Christmas Eve, a little before dark, I took my son over to see the skating rink in Central Park. Young and made timid by the strangeness of the place and hour, he held my hand firmly and was a model of docile obedience and agreement. In the dark I seized him and kissed him with forlorn love. I can remember when my daughter was younger and could be made by darkness and strangeness to be as docile. He looked to me for everything. What I did, he did. When I exclaimed about the lighted rink and the music he repeated my words. When, waiting for a bus, I crossed my legs, he crossed his legs. I have never seen the city before on Christmas Eve, I think. There were jocular groups on street corners, people going off to parties in evening dress, a young man with a package and a dozen roses hailed a cab—but, perhaps because of my own mood, whole neighborhoods seemed desolate and forsaken and I felt myself sad and alone.
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    The sense of fear—or at least the sense of lacking courage—associated with retracing courses of thought and action is probably linked to the fear that one will destroy one’s usefulness as an artist. But thusefulness of the artist varies from time to time, and since these are hours and days out of one’s life, can there be any other course but to look back into them, even though at times they seem like waste? You have been lost in a wood. You know how the mind works. When you realize that you are lost, the mind is instantly animated with a kind of stoic cheerfulness. How much worse it could be, you think. You have warm clothes, dry matches, and half a cup of water left in the canteen. If you have to spend two or three days out you will surely survive. You must avoid panic. You must keep your eyes and your mind in the most accommodating and relaxed condition. Within an hour your calmness is rewarded. There is the trail! A new kind of blood seems suddenly to be let into your