See What Can Be Done

  By the end of his life Cheever had won his battle against alcoholism, but to some it seemed too late. “At your age,” the poet Hayden Carruth told him, “I think I’d have gone out loaded.” “Puking all over someone else’s furniture?” Cheever replied. He had salvaged his life in time to write two more novels—Falconer and Oh What a Paradise It Seems—and to see his collected stories win the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. He felt a renewal of affection toward Ossining, took up bicycling, left parties early. And it was then, at the age of sixty-nine, that he fell victim to the perverse timing of disease and was diagnosed as having the cancer that would, a year later, kill him.

  Fitzgerald was the only writer that Cheever ever chose to write about (in a short biography for Atlantic Brief Lives in 1971), and Donaldson, who has also written biographies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, tells us “there is no disputing the fact that in composing his brief life of Fitzgerald, Cheever was writing about himself.” Cheever’s life, however, seems finally a more ordinary and more heartbreaking one than Fitzgerald’s. As Wilfred Sheed once remarked, “Cheever…reminds one of the old story about the patient with the bed next to the window who invented a gaudy world outside to please the other patients, although his window overlooked a bank wall.” One suspects, even feels, Cheever’s intimacy with that wall. Trapped in the alcoholic purchase of oblivion and euphoria, residing within a marital carcass to which he claimed only formal loyalty, hoping somehow to allay the lovelessness he had felt from mother and wife (both women named Mary), Cheever constructed a life of beautiful speech: a voice blended with English and Yankee accents, a prose of ecclesiastical tones, of sadness and lyrical affirmation. So elegant were his spoken sentences that people not looking often thought he was reading. He was at once a “toothless Thurber,” a wicked satirist, and the Chekhov of Westchester; in his work and spirit there was a struggle and division between “the celebratory and the deprecatory.” When he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, he made light of it with the ditty “Root tee toot, ahh root tee toot, oh, we’re the members of the institute.” But he had great respect for ceremony and recognition, and in the years following he proposed nominations and citations for dozens of other writers whose work he admired.

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  Certainly it is in the work that one comes to know an author—his best and essential self—without being able to extricate or explain him. A short story is “the appeasement of pain,” said Cheever, who felt the story form possessed an intensity the novel did not. “In a stuck ski lift, a sinking boat, a dentist’s office, or a doctor’s office…at the very point of death, one tells oneself a short story.” Donaldson lingers in his discussion of Cheever’s great stories—“Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Country Husband,” “The Geometry of Love”—like a gardener caring for them, though in his particular tasks they yield him beauty rather than fruit. Said son Fred Cheever of his father, “No one, absolutely no one, shared his life with him.” Donaldson has this in common with his subject: the impulse to share a life that cannot be shared—though it can be written down a little with a gardener’s care, the words planted like a kiss.

  (1988)

  Bobbie Ann Mason’s Love Life

  Bobbie Ann Mason writes the kind of fiction her own characters would never read. If they turn off the television long enough to look at a book at all, her characters are inclined toward the steamy, gothic romances they themselves refer to as “bodice busters.” “I don’t read,” says one Mason character. “If I read, I just go crazy.”

  This puts the Kentucky-born Mason in that most lonesome and literary position of being neither wholly of the world about which she writes nor of the world to which she writes (most of her shorter work has appeared in The New Yorker). In this middle place, no axes to grind, no self is mythologized, no isms truly suit. She writes from a slight—and only slightly unsafe—distance, a place of friendly irony, and her pen neither condescends nor skewers. She is gentle with her good country people (whose idea of wickedness is to park at the mall in a handicapped parking spot) in a way that Flannery O’Connor (with whom Mason is sometimes, strangely, compared) could never have been. But she hesitates to prettify, to flash the ruby in the rube. Declining to dismantle them, to judge them, to be them, Mason seems to have simply collected her characters, collected the stuff of them, collected—in the insular spirit of the curator or the spy—what she knows, rather than what she thinks.

  Which is why Mason’s strongest form may be neither the novel nor the story but the story collection. It is there, picking up her pen every twenty pages to start anew, gathering layers through echo and overlap, that Mason depicts most richly a community of contemporary lives, which is her great skill. It could be argued that the quiet, cumulative beauty of Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories is rivaled in her oeuvre (which includes the novels In Country and Spence + Lila) only by her new collection, Love Life. There is depth here, in the way the word is used to describe armies and sports teams: an accumulation, a supply. When one story is finished, a similar one rushes in to fill its place. There is also profundity. Mason dips her pen in the same ink, over and over, because her knowledge of the landlocked Middle America she writes about—most of it centered in Kentucky and Tennessee—is endless and huge. Each small story adds to the reader’s apprehension of that hugeness.

  In Mason’s new collection her themes of provincial entrapment and desire are present again, but here she has given them a new improvisatory sprawl. Though a few of the fifteen stories in Love Life (such as the title one) repeat the figure-eight structure found in Shiloh—a narrative that loops gracefully through several combinations of characters, then arches back to the original one—many of the stories in Love Life splay out unexpectedly, skate off, or in, at odd angles, displaying a directional looseness. “Midnight Magic” introduces the dramatic thread of a town terrorized by an unknown rapist, but then ends off to one side of it, with the moral dilemma over the reporting of a hit-and-run accident. “Piano Fingers” begins with a husband’s sexual boredom and ends with a father buying his daughter an electric keyboard from the piano store. Certainly the beginnings and endings do illuminate each other, but only indirectly, diffusely. Along the way elements are seldom developed in a linear fashion and are often, once introduced, abandoned altogether.

  But this unexpectedness keeps Mason’s stories breathing and alive. Her writing is naked-voiced, without vanity. In “State Champions,” a memory of small-town adolescence, the middle-aged narrator is made to understand belatedly and obliquely the significance of her high school basketball team’s state championship. Twenty years after the fact someone not from her community recollects for her.

  “Why, they were just a handful of country boys who could barely afford basketball shoes,” the man told me in upstate New York.

  “They were?” This was news to me.

  Which leads, circuitously, to one of Mason’s strongest stories about the emotional illiteracy of the provincial heart. The narrator recalls her teenage crush on a boy who gives her an “eight-page novel,” a slightly off-color Li’l Abner comic strip. “It was disgusting, but I was thrilled that he showed me the booklet.” When her best friend’s sister dies, the narrator remembers avoiding her.

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say anything, for we weren’t raised to say things that were heartfelt and gracious….We didn’t say we were sorry. We hid from view, in case we might be called on to make appropriate remarks, the way certain old folks in church were sometimes called on to pray. At Cuba School, there was one teacher who, for punishment, made her students write “I love you” five hundred times on the blackboard. “Love” was a dirty word, and I had seen it on the walls of the girls’ rest room—blazing there in ugly red lipstick. In the eight-page novel Glenn had showed me, Li’l Abner said “I love you” to Daisy Mae.

  What can and cannot be said is always at issue in Mason’s sma
ll towns. “If you don’t want to hear about it, why don’t you say so?” begins the story “Private Lies.” Psychological inarticulateness is everywhere. A conversation about death can quickly become a conversation about shoes. In “The Secret of the Pyramids,” the fatal car accident of the protagonist’s former lover is discussed this way:

  Then Glenda says, “Oh, wasn’t that awful about Bob Morganfield?”

  “I know. I heard about it on the news last night.”...

  “But he was so nice. Everybody liked him.”

  “I got these shoes at his store this spring.”

  “I just love those. I wish I could wear spike heels.”

  In “Big Bertha Stories,” a man tells his wife about a young woman he knew in Vietnam. “What happened to her?” asks the wife.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that the end of the story?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Later, the wife, thinking of her husband, realizes that her own sympathies have gone mute from neglect and inexpression. “She hasn’t thought of him as himself. She wasn’t brought up that way, to examine someone’s soul.” Says a character in another story, “On Moonlighting they just talk-talk-talk….It drives you up the wall.”

  For an edifying word on their troubles, Mason’s characters watch the Phil Donahue show, where they find the various problems of their lives formulated for them. A woman in the story “Hunktown” says, “I can’t stand watching stuff that’s straight out of my own life.” They seem to share a startling belief that their lives correspond to the television culture that has descended on them. But it is more hope than belief, a desire to refashion and locate themselves, to medicate their feelings of exile with cheap understanding.

  For a good time they go to Paducah or Gatlinburg. “At a museum there, she saw a violin made from a ham can.” They work in mattress factories, or plant tobacco, and when they brush up against glamour and wealth, it is in the form of people who own hot tubs or their “own bush-hog rental company.” For spirituality there is the local Christianity—“He opens the Bible and reads from ‘the Philippines’ ”—which may also include speaking in tongues. “He is speaking a singsong language made of hard, disturbing sounds. ‘Shecky-beck-be-floyt-I-shecky-tibby-libby. Dabcree-la-croo-la-crow.’ He seems to be trying hard not to say ‘abracadabra’ or any other familiar words.” Only one Mason character ventures off to a therapist, whom she calls “ ‘The Rapist,’ because the word therapist can be divided into two words, the rapist.” When he tells her that perhaps she is trying to escape reality, she says, “Reality, hell!... Reality’s my whole problem.”

  Mason’s women tend to be practical, disillusioned, self-preserving. They belong to cosmetics clubs, wear too much makeup, have names such as Beverly or Jolene. They are trapped mostly in their desire for Mason’s men, who tend to be feckless, dreamy, drunk, between jobs. The sexes are a puzzle to each other here, and longing and distraction pervade their lives. Divorce seems the only remedy for a life where a couple “stayed married like two dogs locked together in passion, except it wasn’t passion.” Mason’s use of the present tense in the majority of her stories serves as the expression of this trapped condition, but also as a kind of existential imperfect: the freeze in time suggests the flow; the moment stilled and isolated from the past and future is yet emblematic of them both, of the gray ongoingness of things.

  Nevertheless, the characters in Love Life seem determined to amuse themselves. In “Private Lies”: “He liked to clown around, singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in a mock-operatic style; he would pretend to forget the words and then shift abruptly into ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.’ He was a riot at parties.” In “The Secret of the Pyramids”: “The last time he took her out to eat, they had to wait for their table, and Bob gave the name ‘Beach’ so the hostess would call out on the microphone, ‘Beach Party.’ ” In “Memphis”: “ ‘I’m having a blast, too,’ Beverly said, just as an enormous man with tattoos of outer-space monsters on his arms asked Jolene to dance.” Their days are punctuated with attenuated joys and generosities. The large gestures of life are reduced by Mason to the smallest scale, inflaming them with meaning. “Steve’s friend Pete squirts blue fluid on Steve’s windshield—a personal service not usually provided at the self-serve island” (“Midnight Magic”).

  If such living is morally hemmed in, strewn with the junk of our culture, it is all that Mason’s characters can avail themselves of. Buried in the very gut of America, feeling deeply the lock and cage of the land, they send up antennae and receive what they are able to, what there is. If they are mocked and demeaned by what they consume, they do not know it; to mock and demean are coastal pastimes, of which they haven’t the spiritual or material means to partake. “Liz wished she could go to the ocean, just once in her life,” one narrator says. “That was what she truly wanted.” Despite the immodest imperative of its title, this wonderful collection is less about the optimist’s advice to love life than about the struggle and necessity of some ordinary and valiant people to like it just a little.

  (1989)

  V. S. Pritchett’s A Careless Widow

  Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett is eighty-nine years old this year, bringing to a close the seventh decade of a huge literary career: over three dozen books—biographies of Turgenev and Balzac, volumes of criticism, novels, travel writing, autobiography, and now yet another collection of short fiction, A Careless Widow. Such an event might be construed as literary miracle or professional reproof—instead of what it more likely is: the natural happening of a life of letters lived totally, without ever being faked.

  The son of lower-middle-class parents, V. S. Pritchett grew up in a rough neighborhood of London, the setting of a somewhat Dickensian childhood: at times he and his brother lived as street urchins, the family home next to a loud mechanized bakery and a clattering roller-skating rink. As a young man wanting to write, he languished briefly in the leather trade before escaping first to France, then to Ireland and Spain. Almost an exact contemporary of Hemingway, Pritchett, too, was in Paris in the 1920s and Spain in the ’30s, and he might have sought out and joined the other writers gathering in those places. But he didn’t. Instead he went his own way (receiving, in 1975, a knighthood for distinguished services to literature), outliving, outproducing them all.

  Although critics wrangle over whether he has written a major novel, debating in particular the merits of Mr. Beluncle (1951), there is no question as to the power and accomplishment of Pritchett’s memoirs—A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971)—nor of the greatness of his short stories. It was always the short-story form to which Pritchett returned most inspired. He has compared writing stories to ballad making, and one thinks of a Pritchett story not only as an orchestration of ironies but as a place where the author’s sentences can do their humble, musical dazzle: “I have always liked the hard and sequined sheen of London streets at night,” he wrote in the famous story “Handsome Is as Handsome Does.” “The cars come down them like rats.”

  Pritchett has confessed to whittling many of his stories down from hundred-page novellas, and one can sometimes feel in his narratives the effect of that shrinkage: a strolling gait abruptly tensing, then relaxing again; a pulse in the prose. His stories have been called traditional, and he is often and aptly compared to Chekhov and Maupassant. Classically, a Pritchett story uses visitors or trips to disrupt the neatness or presumption of neatness in a character’s life. His is a very English fiction of irony arrayed, hypocrisy exposed, eccentricity embraced. He captures the frustration and strain beneath the moral order of the average citizen, and he is nothing if not funny. Yet his humor never stiffens or distorts. His prose is always limpid—amused but not muddied by bemusement.

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  A Careless Widow is a collection of six stories, quiet and deceptively simple, like walks. In “A Trip to the Seaside
,” a widower makes a futile journey to court his former secretary, only to be confronted with portions of their past he has selectively set aside. In “Things,” an older couple is paid a visit by the wife’s witchlike and recalcitrant sister, whose improvised life rebukes their own (now congealing around the comforts and objects of bourgeois retirement). In “A Careless Widow,” a solitary hairdresser takes a holiday to escape the dreary routine of his professional life: “Women came to him to be changed, to be perfected. They arrived tousled and complaining and they left transfigured, equipped for the hunt again. They were simply top-knots to him. When they got up he was always surprised to see they had legs and arms and could walk. He sometimes, though not often, admired the opposite end of them: their shoes.” Such escape is possible for less than a day, before he discovers his London neighbor—the widow of the title—staying at the same hotel: “That was too much. She was ordinary life and ordinary life always went too far.”

  In all these stories, the past figures as a kind of character: a foil, a catalyst, a wise fool. Pritchett’s people are well on their way out of middle age—but they do not feel old. Their relationship to the past is often unformed, unclear, yet to be negotiated. “It’s a mistake to go back to the past. I mean at my age. Our age,” says the careless widow. Appetites still abound—“She looked at him greedily, intently.” The refrain “even now” is sighed like an old and bittersweet joke.