Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [150]
IN SEPTEMBER, Cheever published his third collection, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, a slender volume of eight stories that yet included some of his best work: “The Country Husband,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” “O Youth and Beauty!,” and “The Sorrows of Gin.” Cheever had reservations about the book (“it is a nothing, turkey warmed over in some instances, four times”), though it stands as an important artifact of the postwar era—as Jonathan Yardley would observe some forty-six years later, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill is the work of a great writer at the height of his powers, who at the time had “rivals but no superiors in the national literature.” Contemporary reviewers also had a sense of Cheever's growing significance. Herbert Mitgang praised his “beautiful control” in the daily Times, while William Peden observed in the Book Review that Cheever “is one of the most urbane moralists of our times; he is also one of the most entertaining story tellers.” A few reviewers, however, suspected there was something a little vapid about the work—most insistently Richard Gilman, calling Cheever (in Commonweal) a “culture-hero to the barbecue and Volkswagen set” who was, whatever his satirical gifts and fine prose, “essentially a sentimentalist”: “It is all adolescent at bottom and not simply because Cheever is portraying a world of adolescent values,” Gilman concluded. “In the end he shares them.” This is harsh and simplistic, though not entirely without justice. In his lesser stories, at least, Cheever was more and more apt to finesse his own ambivalence—toward almost everything, but especially traditional suburban values—with a lot of mystifying irony. In “The Worm in the Apple,”* for example, Cheever appears to mock his own occasional pessimism. Examining the case of the (seemingly) contented Crutch-mans—who engage in all the trite, neighborly diversions—the narrator looks for unsavory truths but finally suggests that the “worm” may be “in the eye of the observer who, through timidity or moral cowardice, could not embrace the broad range of [the Crutchmans’] natural enthusiasms.” The story concludes with a line that might be interpreted one way or the other, echoing the final line of that bottomlessly ambiguous novel, Bullet Park, published ten years later: “they got richer and richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily.”
The tone is a bit shrill, perhaps reflecting the exasperation of a man who (at least for a while) wanted to write about something other than the suburban middle class—or not at all: “I seem unable to get my hands on anything,” he noted almost six months after returning from Rome. “It may be a question of discipline but why write about things that bore and disinterest me.” More than anything, he wanted to get on with another novel, but at the moment he was completely out of ideas and couldn't afford it besides: The Wapshot Chronicle had sold better than expected, but it wasn't enough “to keep a family of five in shoe-leather,” as he remarked to Herbst. Writing for money as opposed to pleasure, then, he regurgitated more Italian material into a long story titled “Boy in Rome,” about a young American who remains in Rome because his father is buried in the Protestant cemetery there. At one point the narrator breaks frame and makes his own boredom explicit with a rambling parenthetical digression: “(But I am not a boy in Rome but a grown man in the old prison and river town of Ossining,† swatting hornets on this autumn afternoon with a rolled-up newspaper. … But my father taught me, while we hoed the beans, that I should complete for better or worse whatever I had begun and so we get back to the scene where [the boy] leaves the train for Naples.)” This curious bit of metafiction seems less a formal innovation