Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [381]
* I'd venture to suggest that Gottlieb's advice is reflected only in the book's last three sentences, where the narrator acknowledges some loose ends and decides to let them be: “But, you might ask, whatever became of the true criminals, the villains who had murdered a high-minded environmentalist and seduced, bribed and corrupted the custodians of municipal welfare? Not to prosecute these wretches might seem to incriminate oneself with the guilt of complicity by omission. But that is another tale, and as I said in the beginning, this is just a story meant to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.”
* In the opening scene, for instance, Cheever had indicated some dogs playing with what appears to be a ball but on closer inspection proves to be a human head. “What are you trying to tell me?” Bogart asked. Cheever thought about it, shrugged, and the scene was cut.
* A byproduct, perhaps, of Cheever's abandoned novel about “cosmic loneliness.”
* Name omitted, though the man died in 1996. Unlike Marvin Schulman, he deserves, I think, the posthumous benefit of a doubt.
* According to a family ledger, Max was paid $4,806 for his services from January to June 1982.
* Appearing in the May 1982 issue, shortly before Cheever's death.
CHAPTER FIFTY
{1982}
CHEEVER DESCRIBED Oh What a Paradise It Seems as an “ecological romance,” in which an old man comes to terms with a sense of his own corruption by purifying a pond that has been rezoned as a garbage dump; thus he succeeds “in loving usefulness,” as Cheever would have it. Searching for purity, Lemuel Sears is searching for nothing less than an idea of home in all its metaphysical grandeur: “Home might be an empty room and an empty bed to many … including Sears, but swinging over the black ice [of Beasley's Pond] convinced Sears that he was on his way home. Someone more skeptical might point out that this illuminated how ephemeral is our illusion of homecoming.” Home, ideally, is a place where one feels loved, safe, at one with creation, and no wonder it proves ephemeral; yet a yearning for at least some simulacrum of home is part of the human predicament, more so for Cheever than most. Having spent the better part of his life in exile—from a beloved brother, a river, a beach, a fragrance of wood smoke and salt marshes, a village where people knew him and his family—Cheever would pursue this illusion, in art as in life, to the day of his death. His fictional surrogates ache for home, and so, in this final novel, the narrator begins and ends with a wish that the reader be, if nothing else, cozy “in bed in an old house on a rainy night.”
To be estranged from home is to be lonely and frightened, and of course the only remedy is love, the pursuit of which is problematic. “Sears's sexual demands had given him a great deal of pleasure, some embarrassment and a painful suspicion that the polarities in his constitution were acutely incompatible and that the only myth that suited his disposition was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Sears fancies himself akin to Jekyll, on the one hand, because he's a benign, romantic old man “with loads of friends;” but he is also Mr. Hyde, because women, to him, are little more than lovely abstractions—the “sunny side of the street”—whom he can't begin to fathom except through the direct method of knowing as prescribed in the Bible. “You don't understand the first thing about women,” his lover Renée tells him, again and again, though Sears's mystification in her case would seem to be understandable. Renée is unfathomable. As a character she hardly attains two dimensions, much less three: we are given only the faintest idea of her appearance or personality, and she coyly refuses to discuss even her most telling behavior (attending what are evidently AA meetings). Not that Sears is particularly curious about her or any