Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [99]
Cheever put the manuscript aside and looked over his journal notes from that summer—perhaps he'd find something cheering there—but no: all was sadness and bitter mockery. The way his neighbors in West Chop had carried on at the yacht-club dance—recounting old football triumphs and larky bonfires and such—was simply pathetic, or so he'd seen fit to perceive it (“The lights and passions of youth have gone down and having been replaced with no other lights and passions they are like people who have suffered a loss of faith”); indeed, such childishness was a universal failing in this country and class (“how the nation like a miserable adult, turns back to the supposed innocence of its early life”). The only whisper of happiness in the whole petulant account was the line about his wife and Florrie walking out of the sea. “I had spent the summer in excellent company and in a landscape that I love,” he later wrote, describing the genesis of one of his greatest stories, “but there was no hint of this in the journal I had kept.” Cheever reflected that the worst side of his nature—the dour, conscience-haunted Yankee who considered all forms of earthly pleasure “merely the crudest deceptions”—was getting the better of him and his work, and he felt a sudden impulse to exorcise this dreary spirit. Thus he contrived the image of “a despicable brother”—himself, in effect—and wrote the words “Goodbye, My Brother.”
The story that followed was even longer than his intricate narrative about the Nudd family, but this time he finished in a joyous, week-long burst of inspiration (“I think it is myself, writing with the fewest obstructions”). Though Cheever almost never wrote in the first person—wary of lapsing into garrulous imprecision—he sensed a measure of “ambiguity in [his] indignation” and so required a slightly unreliable narrator, a soidisant “good brother,” to describe the “despicable brother,” Lawrence. At the outset this narrator announces, a little defensively, that he is a teacher: “I am past the age where I expect to be made headmaster … but I respect the work.” As for Lawrence, he is a bleak prig who has been something of a misfit in his own family ever since childhood, when he was dubbed “Tifty the Croaker” and “Little Jesus.” Still, the Pommeroys “are a family that has always been very close in spirit,” and when Lawrence pays a rare visit to their summer home at Laud's Head, everyone is eager to make amends. Lawrence, however, is unchanged, and loses no time alienating himself. “Is that the one she's sleeping with now?” he says of his sister Diana's latest affair, and also points out that the family house “will be in the sea in five years”: “The sea wall is badly cracked. … You had it repaired four years ago, and it cost eight thousand dollars. You can't do that every four years.” Such remarks are obnoxious, but not inaccurate: arguably the sister is “a foolish and a promiscuous woman,” and probably it is folly to keep wasting good money for a sea wall that will only continue to crack, and certainly (apropos of another mean remark) the mother does drink too much.
That said, most of Lawrence's opinions are only attributed to him by the narrator, who distorts his brother's pessimism in order to make it seem more fatuous and nasty than it is. When, for example, Lawrence watches the family play backgammon for money, the narrator imagines the man's absurd indictment of them all, as follows: “I may be wrong, of course [my italics], but I think that Lawrence felt that in watching our backgammon he was observing the progress of a mordant tragedy in which the money we won and lost served as a symbol for more vital forfeits.” This, of course, is an idea lifted from Cheever's own abortively portentous story, “The Backgammon Game;” the fact is, Lawrence's only explicit comment gives little hint of such dark musings: “I should think you'd go crazy … cooped up with one another like this, night after night.” Likewise when the narrator imagines Lawrence's cynical view of a yacht-club party with a “come as you wish you were” theme (which results