At least once every day, I’m thinking about Dorothy Parker. This week I’m also thinking about Cheever. Reading a man’s biography will have that affect. Very well crafted biography, by the way.
Naturally, I’m also flipping back and forth between his stories on the side and I’m just effervescent with the thrill of all this subcutaneous nuance. Earnestly. Though I’m never sure if it’s a good or bad thing to know the exact circumstances in a writer’s life that informs his work.
It’s so funny to me hearing about writers who didn’t hate every word they ever said. Cheever was one of those whose gift was simply fact. He wrote quickly and then sent it off to sea without too much terror, reasoning that a good story moved along like a brisk walk or something and it was his lack of preciousness which imparted that same quality in his work. f u.
Something dark in me says, “How nice that must be for you.” Of course, then I should understand how his self-loathing was just anatomically different than mine; I’ve got the brain and he’s got the crotch. And when I think about it that way, I even feel a drip of gratitude for my condition.
Did you catch that? How I just likened myself to Cheever? Normally I’d do anything to obscure that lack of humility, but it’s fun to try ‘writing like a man.’ Hopefully my hubris, should I really let it soak up some sunlight over this experiment, is more Cheevy and less Kerouac. Though I guess this is quite literally “typing, not writing.”
Anyway, Dotty and John. There is a lot of silence in their stories, the heavy kind, but they’re very different, these silences. Dot has this surging ache running just under the surface like little capillaries. The shape of her words makes me think of a fit man with a clean shave and a white undershirt, but the way they feel to read is like watching from across the street a man chase after a bus. He runs after it waving, frantic enough to manage only gestures and no shouting, abruptly losing his clip as the thing turns a corner up ahead. (That is Kartina‘s ‘saddest thing,’ and it is sooo good.)
Elsewhere, the Cheev exists in a universe where everyone must anesthetize themselves away from the yawning void of an aesthetic life lived mediocrely. The world ends when some consequence of their mechanized inattention comes to head. Bummers, all around.
Obviously, they both loved Flaubert. That’s something if you do not implicitly understand, I cannot explain to you why.
I was thinking about this because of the enormous similarities between Parker’s “Mr. Dumont” and Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight.” I have to admit to you that their central character, whatever kind of limpid, impassive devil this is, is not someone I think I’ve ever met in person. On the other hand, I’m the only person I know with health insurance and that’s because my parents pay for it out of love and terror. It’s possible that I’ve just never toured their natural habitat of adulthood. Or, alternately, he represents a stark coldness you will sometimes get startled by in some people, people who appear to be deeply loved by those around them. The kind of man who does not appreciate complexity.
I am exhausted by the incessant, noisy drunk-talk inside my own head, though. This is the sort of boring vanity that muscles all practical thought out of its way, so I am unhappy giving it any more space or time. The point is this: if Dorothy Parker had allowed herself the certainty which she envied in the men who surrounded her, would she have haunted us with her gravity the same way Cheever does?
Wouldn’t you like to know?
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