Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [65]
One is reminded a little of Chekhov snatching up an ashtray to explain his writing method—that is, forming a story around the kernel of an object, an image, an emotion, and letting one's intuitive gift take over from there. Indeed, Cheever may well have had Chekhov in mind as he faced the challenge of writing stories at such a demanding pace and yet imparting, each time, some fresh glimpse of the world. Certainly Chekhov was becoming a greater influence on his work. The laconic mannerisms of Hemingway were giving way to a more discursive, playful style, the banality of incident suggesting—but lightly—an underlying sadness. “Read [Chekhov's] the Black Monk for perhaps the 100th time,” Cheever noted in 1954, “all different times of life. I found it as clear and forceful as if I had looked up into the blue sky and seen a hawk strike a pigeon. … How precisely he brings a group into focus.” Such an affinity was fostered all the more by Cheever's association with The New Yorker, whose slice-of-life fiction was nothing if not Chekhovian. As the young Irwin Shaw pointed out, a typical New Yorker story occurred in a single time and place, and all the dialogue was “beside the point.” A virtual model of the form is Cheever's “The Happiest Days”*: Suggested by Katherine Mansfield's “Bliss” (and hence by Chekhov), the story consists of a long, frothy dialogue in which a man discovers—implicitly—that his wife is having an affair with a man named Borden: “ ‘I'm going to be a war profiteer,’ Borden said. He was lying with his face on the grass and his voice was indistinct. Each word added to the weight of the hatred Tom felt for him.”
Sometimes Cheever was too Chekhovian even for The New Yorker, which rejected “I'm Going to Asia” as lacking “direction or focus.”† The story, in certain respects, is almost a rehash of “The Happiest Days”: both feature a family group (give or take the odd neighbor/ lover) sitting around having a random chat about the weather and whatnot, with here and there a bit of innuendo about the war or some private sorrow. In “The Happiest Days” the exposition is supplied by an omniscient narrator: “ ‘Oh, look at that cloud!’ Mrs. Morgan exclaimed. Her husband had hanged himself from an apple tree on a suburban golf course in 1932, and since his suicide she had supported herself, first by teaching contract bridge and then by running a dress shop.” In “I'm Going to Asia,” however, the narrator is almost wholly effaced, and readers are left to negotiate the oblique dialogue on their own. The title refers to a game in which each member of the Towle family says, “I'm going to Asia and I'm going to take” some object (an anesthetic, a trunk, a dress), which—if it satisfies some mysterious requirement known only to one player (but not the reader)—will enable the person to “go to Asia.” (An anesthetic enables one to go to Asia; a dress does not.) Meanwhile a cynical son, Freddy, grouses about the war: “You just sit around here as if nothing had happened. Well, something has happened. Our world has ended.” So it goes, until finally the two threads are brought together at the end, when old Mrs. Towle complains about losing the “Asia” game because of the dress she wanted to take: “ ‘I'd like to go to Asia. … There isn't any war in Asia, is there? Or is there?’ “
Racking his brain for story ideas—let alone a novel—didn't leave energy for much else, and Cheever found himself becoming “something of a recluse”: “My daily activity has been limited to bathing, shaving, watering the hyacinth Mary bought me, and smoking two packages of cigarets.” At such times his main companion was his journal, where he stored the sights and sounds and smells which might prove useful as story fodder, as well as the private sorrows which he was all but incapable of sharing with the world, at least in raw form. Cheever would later claim that he'd begun keeping a journal as a much younger man, but the earliest surviving pages were evidently written toward the end of 1939* —that is, shortly after meeting Mary (and making