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By Root 3857 0

in the men dressing mostly as football players and the women as brides), Cheever paraphrases his own caustic remarks in the journal: “And I knew that Lawrence was looking bleakly at the party … as if in wanting to be brides and football players we exposed the fact that, the light of youth having been put out in us, we had been unable to find other lights to go by and, destitute of faith and principle, had become foolish and sad.” Again, whatever the relative truth of this observation, the narrator is actually projecting on Lawrence his own suspicion that he and the others have “become foolish and sad.” To be sure, Lawrence is a “gloomy son of a bitch” (as the narrator calls him), but ultimately he's little more than an abstraction—an embodied point of view that is “elegiac and bigoted and narrow” and that the narrator, confronting the disappointment of his own life, wants desperately to reject. The famous last paragraph, then, is a moving affirmation that yet seems to protest a little too much:

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

Malcolm Cowley pointed out to Cheever that the story's irony is so extensive that it is “troublingly uncertain” what the author means to say. Cheever replied: “The brother story, in its bare outline, was the story of one man. There was no brother; there was no Lawrence.” In other words, it was to be the story of one man struggling with his demons—a struggle that would never quite be resolved in Cheever's life or work, such that his use of irony would, if anything, become even more elaborate, the better to have it both ways, light and dark (or neither). As for the ultimate “meaning” of “Goodbye, My Brother,” Cheever was determinedly subtle: “I had hoped that the women—dark head and gold—coming out of the sea, would clear away any ambiguity,” he explained to Cowley with characteristic diffidence. “I seem to have failed.”

“GOODBYE, MY BROTHER” was promptly accepted by The New Yorker, though almost a year would pass before it appeared in the magazine, and Cheever was rather surprised it was accepted at all. He wanted to go on writing stories of greater length and complexity, to take a break from the soul-killing grind of writing “saleable” stories or, for that matter, his recalcitrant novel (“a form with which I seem unable to cope”). Explaining his decision to apply for a Guggenheim, he remarked, “I would like to write some stories that would not be inhibited in their length by the pages of a magazine nor in their content by the fact that the magazine might, after all, fall into the hands of a child.” Though “Goodbye, My Brother” and “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well” existed only in typescript at the time, he chose to submit them (with “Torch Song”) as samples of his best work, while writing “None”—again and again—in reply to such prompts as “College,” “Degrees,” “Accomplishments,” and “Positions Held.” “I'm not sanguine about getting a fellowship,” he told Cowley, who'd written an urgent recommendation in his behalf (“He really should have a chance to develop his talent, which is now at a turning point”), along with Wolcott Gibbs (“one of the four or five ablest and most original [New Yorker] contributors”), S. J. Perelman (“I cannot think of anyone who has as exact and meticulous a knowledge of middle-class behavior and psychology”), and others. When Cheever was informed a few months later of his three-thousand-dollar fellowship, nobody was more surprised than he.