As in the earlier Field Version, the plot of The Wapshot Chronicle focuses on the father, mother, and two sons in a New England family of four. But there are crucial differences between the novel and what Cheever had sketched out ten years before. Sarah Wapshot, unlike Sarah Field, does not commit a dreadful murder, though she does emasculate her husband, Leander, by turning his beloved boat, the Topaze, into New England’s Only Floating Gifte Shoppe. Sons Moses and Coverly do not, as in the earlier draft, go off in search of their wandering father, but rather to make their fortunes, get married, and produce heirs. And in the published novel Cheever hit upon two stratagems to flesh out the Field Version. The first was creation of the eccentric and willful Cousin Honora Wapshot, who by controlling the family purse strings directs the behavior of all her male relatives. The second was the device of Leander’s journal, a brilliantly laconic document that works to tie past and present together.
“In a drilling autumn rain, in a world of much change, the green at St. Botolphs conveyed an impression of unusual permanence,” the first page asserts, but the impression is false, for the town is declining in population and importance. “Why do the young want to go away?” their elders wonder, though the answer could not be clearer. There is nothing for them to do in the “old river town” of St. Botolphs, nothing for them to become. They leave to make their way in the world. Geographically, Cheever liked to point out, St. Botolphs was a composite location made up of bits and pieces of Quincy, Newburyport, Bristol, New Hampshire, and the geography of his imagination. As to the charge of undue nostalgia for a vanished (or even nonexistent) past, he obviously meant to draw a comparison between the time when a boisterous port like St. Botolphs might prosper and the actual present. “The impulse to construct such a village …,” he explained, “came to me late one night in a third-string hotel on the Hollywood Strip where the world from my windows seemed so dangerously barbaric and nomadic that the attractions of a provincial and a traditional way of life were irresistible.” However, he did not long to return to such a past so much as to seek his identity and establish his values by relationship to it. He understood that every age has its faults, every community its shame: “if we accept the quaintness of St. Botolphs we must also accept the fact that it was a country of spite fences and internecine quarrels.…” Yet we all come from somewhere, and ignore our origins only to our detriment. The headlong changes of modern life threatened to rob us of these roots, to make nomads of us all. “The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure,” he writes in “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” “although in the morning they would all be gone.” So it was with St. Botolphs, its exhausted fortunes, failing businesses, and latter-day eccentrics.
Cheever attempted to bring a measure of universality to the ongoing conflict of present and past by carefully removing references to historical events and personages from the novel. Leander Wapshot does not mention the Civil War nor describe the prospecting trip to the Yukon his brother, Hamlet, would have taken. Cousin Honora is not permitted to rant against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Cheever pointed out, he wished to escape from the “tyranny of modern history.” So time in this novel—and in The Wapshot Scandal as well—is not linear but cyclical. The Wapshot Chronicle ends as it began, with the Fourth of July parade. This has happened before and is happening now and will happen again, and not only in St. Botolphs.
Similarly, the structure of the novel is carefully calculated to suggest a wide sweep of experience. The book was held together largely “by spit and wire,” critics claimed, and yet, according to Cheever’s own testimony, it was “the most deliberately written book I know.” The title provided an obvious clue to what he meant. It is a chronicle rather than a conventional novel. When Moses and Coverly leave home to fall in love and marry and construct their lives elsewhere, Cheever follows first one and then the other as they travel, returning occasionally to recount the continuing misfortunes of their father, Leander, and to print selections from his journal. These threads are not neatly tied together, for contemporary existence does not come in gift-wrapped packages. Moreover, the story is told primarily from the point of view of an omniscient and genially obtrusive narrator who wanders from one character’s thoughts to another without apology and in clear violation of the unities laid down by theorists of the form. To convey the complications of a disordered time, Cheever consciously eschewed the order of the well-made novel. Instead he wrote a book that resembled “a twentieth-century version of an eighteenth-century episodic novel.” Joan Didion, as perceptive a reader of Cheever’s fiction as anyone, summed up the situation this way: “The Wapshot Chronicle surprised some, troubled others, seemed not even a novel to those brought up on twentieth-century fiction. What it was not was a sentimental novel; what it was not was a novel of manners. It was a novel more like Tom Jones than Madame Bovary, more like Tristram Shandy than Pride and Prejudice. (And more like any one of them than like the novels commonly written by New Yorker writers.)”
The dominant theme of The Wapshot Chronicle, as of most Cheever fiction, is love: fraternal love, love between the sexes, and above all filial love. The book was intended as “a loving novel about my father,” the author frequently said. In fiction, he was trying to fashion a bond that he and his own father had been unable to construct. Hence the most crucial relationship in the novel is that between Leander Wapshot and his second son, Coverly. Leander obviously prefers his manly and handsome older son, Moses. He is annoyed by Coverly’s habit of stretching his neck and by his sometimes effeminate ways. But he does perform certain father-and-son rituals that Frederick Lincoln Cheever neglected with his son John. He takes Coverly on a man-to-man fishing trip in the north woods, for example, though the boy characteristically spoils the outing by bringing along his mother’s cookbook. For the most part Cheever is careful to make Leander a sympathetic character. He is painted as the victim of his wife, Sarah, and his cousin Honora, who conspire to take his beloved boat, his only means of livelihood, his only reason for existence, away from him. His journal reveals him as a man who has often been wronged but is rarely bitter, as a philosopher convinced that ceremony gives life its flavor and dignity, as someone who wants, in vain, “to be esteemed.”
Above all, Leander is a creature of the sea. Like his legendary namesake who perishes while swimming across the Hellespont to his beloved Hero, Leander drowns in the sea. But he leaves behind a last word in the form of “Advice to my Sons,” secreted in his own father’s copy of Shakespeare. In part the advice is merely practical—“Never put whisky into hot water bottles crossing borders of dry states or countries. Rubber will spoil taste.” In this fashion he instructs his sons how to drink and smoke and dress and behave in the great world beyond St. Botolphs: “Never hold cigar at right-angles to fingers. Hayseed. Hold cigar at diagonal.” “Bathe in cold water every morning. Painful but exhilarating. Also reduces horniness. Have haircut once a week. Wear dark clothes after 6 P.M.” Then in the final words of the novel, Leander’s advice rises to a kind of epiphany. “Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord.”
Leander is an unequal match for the energy and enterprise of his wife, Sarah, who—like Mary Liley Cheever—had been a leading benefactor of the town before opening her gift shop. There is no doubt whose side the novel takes in this battle between husband and wife. In the opening chapter the narrator makes sport of all of Sarah Wapshot’s good works, in a passage exactly opposite in rhetorical construction to Leander’s final message. His advice begins with the mundane and rises to the magnificent. With Mrs. Wapshot, standing behind the lectern on the Woman’s Club float in the Fourth of July parade, the language runs the other way around. It is fitting that she should ride through the streets, we are told, for there was no one in St. Botolphs who
had had more of a hand in its enlightenment. It was she who had organized a committee to raise
money for a new parish house for Christ Church. It was she who had raised a fund for the granite horse trough at the corner and who, when the horse trough became obsolete, had had it planted with geraniums and petunias. The new high school on the hill, the new fire-house, the new traffic lights, the war memorial—yes, yes—even the clean public toilets in the railroad station by the river were the fruits of Mrs. Wapshot’s genius.
Leander, we are informed, “did not mind missing his wife’s appearance in the parade.” And her dignity is punctured when someone sets off a firecracker under the rump of the old mare pulling her float and the horse bolts.
He could not publish The Wapshot Chronicle, Cheever said, until after his mother’s death. “Independence Day at St. Botolph’s,” a preliminary version of the opening chapter that he revised after she died, provides supporting evidence for that remark. This story, which appeared in the July 3, 1954, New Yorker (while Mrs. Cheever was alive), paints a far less derogatory picture of Sarah Wapshot than that in the actual novel. Significantly, her husband is here named Alpheus, a legendary river god of greater potency than the ill-fated Leander. Alpheus is characterized as a rake who has been amusing himself with various women of the town as a consequence of sexual incompatibility within the marriage. He has stolen Sarah’s jewelry and, his tearful wife is convinced, plans to sell it and run away with Mrs. Wilson. This turns out to be incorrect—Alpheus has pawned the jewelry for fifty dollars’ worth of fireworks—but nonetheless Sarah Wapshot is immediately presented as the injured party in the marital relationship.
In the revised opening chapter of the novel, Alpheus becomes Leander, much less of a rake, much more of a victim. As it happened, one surviving relative took this fiction literally and was permanently offended. Aunt Annie Armstrong, recognizing herself in Cousin Honora and her sister Mary Liley Cheever in Sarah Wapshot, never spoke to John Cheever again.
The women of St. Botolphs, Coverly tells a psychiatrist, are very powerful. But so are the women from other regions—the beautiful and inconstant Melissa, the lonely and perverse Betsey—that Moses and Coverly marry. Like their father before them, the Wapshot brothers are dominated by their wives and confounded by their moods. During one of Betsey’s periodic absences, Coverly is pursued by a fellow worker named Pancras and begins to worry about his own sexuality. Cheever treats the subject humorously. “And now,” the narrator warns, “we come to the unsavory or homosexual part of our tale,” one that genteel readers may want to skip. Coverly does not succumb to Pancras, though he is sorely tempted by the trip to England Pancras arranges for both of them. “I can’t go to England with you,” Coverly finally declares. “I have to go and see my brother.” Thus the bond between brothers provides Coverly with an excuse to avoid Pancras’s overtures. In addition, a letter from his father advises him not to worry about his longings. “Cheer up,” Leander tells him. “Writer not innocent, and never claimed to be so. Played the man to many a schoolboy bride. Woodshed lusts. Rainy Sundays.” In maturity, Leander had been pursued by a persistent homosexual, and calmed his ardor by dumping the contents of the commode on him. Still, Leander concludes, “Man is not simple. Hobgoblin company of love always with us.… Cheer up my son. You think you have trouble. Crack your skull before you weep. All in love is not larky and fractious. Remember.”
On this ambivalent note, the topic of homosexuality is dismissed. As to love between the sexes, the evidence of The Wapshot Chronicle—like that of most of Cheever’s subsequent fiction—seems to argue that men and women are fundamentally irreconcilable. The act of sex itself, though not described (“Why describe, as if you were changing a tire, the most exalted human experience?”), is celebrated for its inspirational and restorative powers. Aside from that, Cheever’s men and women rarely get along, usually because his female characters behave in cruel or irrational ways. What Coverly decides he needs is instruction in a school of love. The curriculum would include “classes on the moment of recognition; lectures on the mortal error of confusing worship with tenderness … symposiums on indiscriminate erotic impulses.” Special courses would deal with the matriarchy and the hazards of uxoriousness. There would be scientific lectures on homosexuality. “That hairline where lovers cease to nourish and begin to devour one another; that fine point where tenderness corrodes self-esteem and the spirit seems to flake like rust would be put under a microscope.… There would be graphs on love and graphs on melancholy and the black looks that we are entitled to give the hopelessly libidinous would be measured to a millimeter.” It would be a hard school for him, Coverly knows, but he would somehow graduate and henceforth conduct his life with increasing contentment and success. Unhappily, no such school existed.
Things are not what they used to be, Cheever’s first novel proposes. Marriages are seldom happy. Clouds often obscure the sun. Yet, as anyone who has read it can testify, The Wapshot Chronicle is basically a blue-sky book, full of high spirits, comic passages, and the wonder of creation. Above all it pulses with life. It is as if Cheever distilled in one book the accumulated vitality of two decades. As Stephen Becker puts it, “The Wapshot Chronicle is a first novel in the sense that Brahms’s First Symphony is a first symphony”: wonderfully prepared for. Even those reviewers who found fault thought the novel invigorating. And the jury of peers who awarded it the 1957 National Book Award for fiction agreed. The novel, they concluded, “records with humor, with candor, with complete originality, a variety of emotions and experiences. It conveys human qualities so intensely that they seem to rub off on everything else—furniture, houses, animals, the weather even.” William Maxwell, who served on that jury, was particularly delighted with the “gaslight quality” of Leander’s journal, and plumped hard for Cheever’s book against such fine competitors as Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant and James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed. (Malamud won the following year for The Magic Barrel.)
With The Wapshot Chronicle out to generally good notices and selling well, and with the children’s school year drawing to a close, the Cheevers made plans for an Italian summer away from the heat and bustle of Rome. John bought a car, and they spent spring weekends touring the countryside. They were in Venice for the festa of San Marco, when the bells rang all day long. They traveled to the medieval hill town of Anticoli, where farmers fished for trout from the bridge. They drove to La Rocca, the ruined fortress at Port’Ercole with a mountain above, and the sea all around. It was, Cheever thought, the most beautiful place he had ever seen, which was just what the Warrens had said. They arranged, through Eleanor Clark, to rent it for the summer.
At Susie’s graduation from convent school, the girls wobbled down the aisle in their high heels to the slowest rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance” Cheever had ever heard. For two weeks thereafter, the move to La Rocca was delayed because of rumors of polio in the vicinity. On a scouting trip, Cheever talked to a doctor who said there was no sickness in Port’Ercole. Carrying the good news back to Rome, he stopped at the Alan Mooreheads’ house in Albano to meet Bernard Berenson, ninety-three. By July 4 the Cheevers were settled at the fortress, where the sea was purple and the fishermen were golden. John could not seem to write there, but he hadn’t been working in Rome either, and at least he continued studying la bella lingua with their tiny landlady. Aside from the signorina everyone was beautiful, the views were glorious, and on Saturday nights there was dancing on the beach. The place seemed like paradise, and then there was servant trouble.
By this time the family entourage included two maids, Iole and Vittoria. They did everything except “shave me and lace my shoes,” Cheever said. Moreover, they were mortified when he performed any task—taking in the wash from the balcony, for instance—they regarded as beneath his dignity. At such times he presented a brutta figura, and they hung their heads for shame. Cheever was willing to get used to this kind of pampering, but unprepared to cope with the battle that was soon joined between Iole and Ernesta, the servant who with her husband, Fosco, took care of La Rocca year-round.
Ernesta was in charge of La Rocca, Iole was in charge of the Cheevers, and neither would willingly submit to the domination of the other.
After a month of cordial detestation the feud erupted. Iole emerged as victor, having persuaded the Cheevers that Ernesta was cheating them financially and mistreating the children. Ernesta was serving them food fit for peasants, Iole insisted. Fosco was siphoning gas from the new car and charging admission to show German tourists around the fortress, she maintained. The final blow came on August 9 when Ben and Susan picked some figs from the tree near the lighthouse. The children were busily filling their Venetian straw hats with the fruit when Ernesta started screaming at them. At this point Iole—who had been minding Federico—began to yell at Ernesta, and the two women shrilled insults at each other until the Cheevers intervened, collected the children, and left the most beautiful place in the world within the hour.
Three weeks later they left Italy as well, sailing from Genoa on the Constitution. Mary wanted to remain overseas another year, but John thought such an extended stay might be bad for the children, and so back they came to Scarborough. Iole came with them, and Ben brought back his two mice, Giuseppe and Pepe le Moko.