Ruth Suckow, The John Wood Case

Ruth Suckow, Iowa novelist, recorded the lives of people on the farms anf in the small towns of Iowa in the 1920s and 1930s. Her best known book is The Folks.

The John Wood Case is her last novel, published in 1959, a year before she died. Set in the early years of the 20^th century, it shows us the reactions of middle class, church-going folks in a small Iowa town to a serious misdeed by one of their own. The story is not really about John Wood – who steals from the employer who trusts him – but about those around him who must address the financial and psychological consequences.

The story opens slowly and shifts from character to character, as Suckow introduces each, one by one.

 The minister stood a little aside during the singing, not wanting to look at Mae too obviously – thinking also of his Sunday-school lesson, which dealt today with the Book of Job, with which he himself had had much trouble when he was the age of the boys in his class. He was not afraid of sharp questioning, believed in giving his Sunday-school class his “best thinking,” and could not have answered in the rigid and sonorous stereotypes with which his father and grandfather had often silenced him. Yet he had been raised in the iron grip of those stereotypes and could not help feeling himself to be a sinner even though he did not believe that he was sinning when he spoke the truth as he saw it, quite otherwise.

As my writing instructor often said, “too much telling, not enough showing.”

The person we learn the least about is John Wood himself; his is the only interior life we are never shown. The story mostly centers on Philip, the son of John Wood, about to finish high school where he has been a well-liked leader. The family is not particularly well off and his mother is a semi-invalid, but they love each other and great things are expected of Philip, not least by himself. How he and the family friends and acquaintances react was believable enough. It’s carefully constructed, but had little emotional impact on me. I found the story rather detached, partaking of some of those stereotypes that the young minister tried so hard to escape.

What I Read in May 2012

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Two teen-age boys are sent to the remote countryside during Mao’s cultural revolution. Their “re-education” there comes not from the hard work in field and mine, but from secretly reading the French classics which have been translated into Chinese. They also educate the little seamstress, but what she learns is not what they expect.

Stendahl, The Red and the Black. The classic French novel from 1830, read by me in translation. The story begins as a tale of poor but ambitious young man on the make, moves into high-flown romance and ends as melodrama.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Translated into Modern English by Nevill Coghill. I started this in a four-session class, where we only read selections, and then finished it on my own. It was a long slog, seemed like. I found many delightful patches, but as a whole it wearied me. I am not the person who can fully appreciate literature from this period.

Alison Lurie, Love and Friendship. After the heavy going in Stendahl and Chaucer, this light-weight academic social comedy was just the ticket. All is not well on the idyllic but isolated campus of Convers College, but then, why should it be?

Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter. The long subtitle accurately describes this affectionate but honest account of John Cheever’s life. After reading Cheever’s published Journals and Blake Bailey’s detailed biography, I thought I knew all I needed — or wanted — to know of this teller of suburban tales. I knew too much. Susan Cheever does it better in this sympathetic telling of her father’s story.

The Canterbury Tales (by Geoffrey Chaucer), adapted by Seymour Chwast.  The whole thing is too long to read? You want a version more entertaining than Cliffs Notes? This graphic interpretation is probably right for you. It’s complete — all the tales and the prologues and the epilogues — but just the good parts, happily interpreted.

Patricia O’Brien, The Glory Cloak. In this historical novel, we meet and mingle real-life figures like Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton with fictional characters. The time is the Civil War, when Alcott served briefly as a nurse in the Union Hospital in Washington.

Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. It was not a quick trip from the Galapagos Islands to The Origin of Species and Darwin did not make the trip alone. He followed along behind Smith and Lamarck and Lyell and all the others who were trying to make sense of the discoveries of science.

Treetops: A Family Memoir

I can’t seem to leave the Cheever family alone. After John Cheever’s Journals and, more recently, Blake Bailey’s biography, I have moved on to daughter Susan Cheever’s memoir, Treetops.

When John Cheever speaks, I feel his turbulent spirit directly, but experience the rest of the family dimly. In Treetops, Susan Cheever  illuminates the other players in the drama. Treetops was the family summer place in New Hampshire, acquired by her grandfather Milton Charles Winternitz and enjoyed by his and subsequent generations of Winternitzes, as well as the Whitney stepchildren of his second marriage. The two groups shared and contested their experiences at Treetops.

Each summer there has a name: 1982 was the summer the chicken coops burned down, 1971 was the summer I had my last birthday there, 1969 was the summer the flood washed out the road, 1959 was Winter’s last summer, 1948 was the summer the pig fell into the well. They all form a continuum of family ties and feuds and swimming in the transparent green water of the lake and sleeping under the fragrant pinewood roofs of the cottages, and remembering the past.

Against this background the person of Mary Winternitz Cheever, John Cheever’s wife and Susan’s mother, stands out. If the short stories and the Journals are John’s books, this is Mary’s book. Surely, I had thought, this dreadful and uncaring woman against whom John is protesting in his journals cannot be real. She was certainly real to him, at times, and it could make a good story, but others found in her a different reality.

My mother kept her private life private; my father’s private life was as embarrassingly public as he could make it. He was covering his tracks, of course. What he was keeping private were his affairs with men. Maybe it was just a matter of style. My mother was obviously caught in the ancient feminine struggle between self and family. My father was just telling stories.

Her necessary efforts to develop her own interests, her separate existence, were interpreted as cruelty, abandonment and rejection. Susan sees this but is inclined to forgive him because the resulting stories are so great. Her brothers are not so sure.

What I Read in March 2012

The Journals of John Cheever (edited by Robert Gottlieb). Cheever, as we meet him in these Journals is impossible to like, but equally impossible not to admire as a writer. I read on, almost against my will, but fascinated by a life with so many years of unhappiness turned into art.

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk. Free at last! After over 700 pages of this World War I Czech classic in which our hero never fires a shot. For my comments, see here, and here, and here.

Eileen Bigland, The Indomitable Mrs. Trollope. Appreciative biography of the author of Domestic Manners of the Americans and the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope. Frances Trollope led three of her children off to seek their fortune in the American wilderness of the 1820s and returned to write a best-selling book about her travels.

Rumer Godden, The Battle of The Villa Fiorita. Two children pursue their divorced mother to Italy. They “battle” to bring her back to their former family life in England. Godden’s touch with fictional children and foreign places is light and sure. As for the battle, it may be that when you win, you may lose.

Anthony Trollope, The American Senator. I love to treat myself to a new Trollope from time to time. I enjoyed this one greatly, as Anthony Trollope reverses his mother’s trip to the United States with the fictional visit of an American senator to England. Fox hunting and husband hunting dominate the action.

Natsume Soseki, Kokoro. This Japanese novel was published in 1914, and “kokoro” means “the heart of things” or “feelings.” I had trouble engaging with this story of a young man and his feelings for his contemporary friend and his somewhat-older sensei, or master. I had just come from reading Trollope, with its characters so specifically described that you know their income, the furniture in their houses, their professions, and the names of their horses. Here we have people who attend the university and have different fields of study, but we don’t know what they are. They have ambitions, but we don’t know what those are either. And they have secret pasts which, when revealed, had very little impact on me, the reader, although clearly important to the characters in the novel.

Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life. I can’t seem to let John Cheever go. After reading The Journals of John Cheever, I moved on to Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, a full-bore biography of the short-story writer and novelist. The two books complement each other wonderfully.

Barbara Pym, An Academic Question. This novel, by the writer of Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn, was assembled from two unfinished drafts after Pym’s death. It was a worthy effort, but the book misses the quiet assurance of her other books. The social humor seems strained and obvious. Sorry.

Cheever: A Life

I read a lot of New Yorker fiction during my high school years but, if I read John Cheever’s stories, I don’t remember any of them, probably because I didn’t understand them. His accounts of life in Westchester County were too far removed from the southern Ohio suburb that I knew. When, a few years ago, I started in on the 1978 collection of his short stories I was hooked.

I followed up with The Wapshot Chronicle and, recently, The Journals of John Cheever. Here I encountered a complicated and unhappy man, constantly complaining about his wife and his children — when he wasn’t declaring how much he loved them . He was constantly looking for the gin bottle in the pantry and reporting on the state of his penis, excuse me, “cock.” It was tedious and offputting, leaving me disappointed in a writer I had admired until then.

Let’s be fair. Blake Bailey’s full-scale biography, Cheever: A Life, goes far to reconcile me to Cheever the man, as well as Cheever the writer. “You are a Cheever!” he would say to his sons to remind them to shape up. John Cheever spent his life trying to be a certain Cheever, spending a great deal of emotional energy denying those parts of his own nature which did not fit. Did this make him the writer that he was — observant, able to wonder at the peculiarities of life, ironic about the good and bad in all our natures? Bailey takes us into Cheever’s world and lets us see not only what he made of it in his years of journal writing, but also what others made of him. Most of them admired them, knowing little of his inner life. Yet, as Bailey makes clear in his astute critical comments, that inner life is there, in the stories. He takes us through the life, year by year and detail by detail. That could be boring, but it’s not because there really is someone alive in there, and we get to know him.

This lengthy account of one writer’s life cannot be undertaken lightly but, the end reached, it seems well worth the journey. His younger son, Frederico, expressed his reconciliation with a difficult father at his funeral:

When I would return home from school after some athletic fiasco or other he would tell me ‘Fred, remember you are a Cheever.’ I would ask what that meant and he would say ‘It means knowing who you are’ … What I have discovered is that part of what I am is John Cheever.

The Journals of John Cheever

John Updike says it well in his review of John Cheever’s book in The New Republic:

To speak personally, this old acquaintance and longtime admirer of Cheever’s had to battle, while reading these Journals, with the impulse to close his eyes…. His confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the dark gulf between outward appearance and inward condition; they present, with an almost unbearable fullness, a post-Adamic man, an unreconciled bundle of cravings and complaints, whose consolations — the glory of the sky, the company of his young sons — have the ring of hollow cheer in the vastness of his dissatisfaction.

A few years ago, I greatly enjoyed the 1978 collection of Cheever short stories. Those were just snippets of the dissatisfaction Updike observed. Taken through year after year of loneliness and discontent in the published journals, the vastness and repetition of the unhappiness moves out of art and into pathology. Constantly involved with reporting his own thoughts and surveying his own skin, Cheever shows little sense of a similar set of concerns within other human beings. After years of conflict, John and Mary consult a psychiatrist:

The gaze of his golden eye is vast and steady. His face might be described as soft. The picture, as I saw it, was that I, an innocent and fortunate creature, had married a woman who suffered from deep psychic disturbances. The picture, as it was presented to me, was of a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless and so deeply involved in my own defensive illusions that I had invented a manic-depressive wife.

Cheever rejects this analysis and the psychiatric consultations are discontinued.

Cheever came to understand and to acknowledge that he was bi-sexual. He was attracted to men, but he he also dreams of beautiful and loving young women. If a woman is not up to his standards of beauty, he questions why would anyone reward her with sex. In MacDonald’s:

There is a couple–a mother and son, I think. She is one of those women of such exhaustive plainness that you wonder about the moment of conception. What could have compelled anyone to penetrate her?

Women must be unmistakably female, or as he says elsewhere “wifely”:

There was a genre of imperious women in the twenties whose hell-for -leather manner made them seem slightly mannish. They were sometimes beautiful, but their airs were predatory and their voices were sometimes quite guttural.

But no real wife can be wifely enough. The marriage fluctuates between good, bad and merely tolerable. Even during a good period, Cheever is confused about cause and effect.

So on my knees in church I am grateful for the present turn of events in my marriage, and I pray it may continue, although I do see that some of the difficulties seem to be part of my immortal soul and that these difficulties were at times made tolerable by my drunkenness.

Tolerable? For whom?