Vale of tears
David Hughes
Oh What a Paradise It Seems John Cheever (Cape £5.50)
Here, almost as seductive in bedside manner as Homer himself, is one of the great opening sentences. `This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.' You feel at once in good hands.
The second rarity you notice in John Cheever's latest and last novel — he died about a fortnight ago aged 70— is a biblical serenity of tone and rhythm which seems, in narrative terms, half as old as time or twice as old as Somerset Maugham, whichever is the longer. Though dealing with trendy themes — alienation, the barbarity of America, loneliness — the prose is forged out of ancient traditions of story-telling, bringing the campfire into your bedroom.
What happens is this. Sears, an aged businessman, finds his weekend illusion of freedom when skating on a village pond in upstate New York. At the same time he falls for citified Renee, an estate agent in her thirties whose key quality is `brightness'. Her life is a mystery to him; he, in her annoying view, doesn't 'understand the first thing about women.' Before she dumps him, gauzy love-scenes alternate with the senescent hero's fight against a local mafia which for profit has conspired with the municipal authority to pollute the pond, by dumping therein all the unwanted in- destructible items of our materialist times. Sears fights for purity and for love — of a woman, of an environment, of life — and loses. But the story wins, because there is a great deal more between its lines.
It is a short book, indeed only thirty- eight and a half times longer than this review, a hundred tight-drawn pages. It has lots of short words in it, none supererogatory: each costs you a sixth of a penny. At first you are puzzled by the ap- parent simplicity which seems bland; then,
as Cheever's obsessions clarify, the reverberations begin to boom back and forth. In fact the world about which Cheever. would best like to be writing has already vanished. He wonders if modern life hasn't robbed people of `some intimate beauty that the world possessed.' He wor- ries about `the diminished responsibilities of our society, its wanderings, its dependence on acceleration, its parasitic nature.' The book painfully creates the absence of all the values which the West thinks it respects, and that to Cheever's mind is the most galling of pains: one which lacks any of the attributes of pain. In other words, we're too far gone to realise how lonely we are, how bereft.
Sears is not afraid of flying, only of air- ports. Echoes of airports abound in the book, as do locked doors. At Heathrow his second wife beats her fists on one marked No Admittance in several languages, then bursts into tears. Now Renee sobs in his arms when she can't find the key to a bedroom in a highrise apartment she wants to sell him. Murmuring under the novel is a dirge on our sad lack of world, on all the doors that are shut to us. In one spasm of nostalgia, evoking a void supermarket at night, Cheever refers back to the spirited old market-places that kept ancient history in business. Even when Sears, on his buoyant way to a date, places his genitals with care inside his trousers, he feels he 15 `handling history.' Such risky moments ring a fairly portentous bell in any mind sen- sitive to the ludicrous, yet his simple authority makes them work.
Cheever is always imposing satisfactorY little theories, rather than traits, on his characters. We find Sears judging other people's faces on their capacity to contain light. If someone is lying he always ad- dresses his remarks to the fingers of his left hand. Social punctuality in women is the key to their erotic timing; those turning 1111 early for a dinner date as like as not `climax in the taxi on the way home.' And of course — that opening sentence gives it away — love and rain go hand in hand: you fall in one as the other falls on you, the point be- ing that rain, meant to make things groW, drums up the plenteousness of love. Such nice notions enrich the humour of the novel.
To mark his recent death BBC2 repeated an interview with Cheever from a few years back. Asked to explain what fiction was, he first said that the best definition was Cocteau's 'a force of memory that is not yet understood.' Off the cuff he then went one better with: `the only continuous and coherent history we have of man's struggle to be illustrious.' Then, fighting harder to get it right, Cheever came up with; 'the easiest way to check the quality of freedom is to look at its literature.' And, finallY pushing himself, he said that fiction con- tained 'our sense of what is evil or good, our capacity for choice.'
Not bad. You could apply every word of it, in appreciation, to this tiny but very large story.
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