Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
The Journals of John Cheever
And some other literary references. Substack latest.
8 thoughts on “The Journals of John Cheever”
Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was simply punishment. Neither were part of the English department curricula but everyone was reading them along with Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, etc. And as near as I could tell, the lives of department faculty were mostly living examples of what they (Updike and Cheever) depicted. For me at least, mainstream literary fiction of that era was as wasteland of chic ennui. I briefly got immersed in some of the more outlandish works such as Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” but even these were mostly just elaborate trinkets. There was real, unpolished life in the beats and some of the counterculture of the time, which is much more interesting to re-read today. There was an immediacy to it, with no mediating bullshit, that made its uneven quality beside the point.
I did start reading Cheever’s journals but unfortunately it’s been stalled by my other reading and lots of summer work on my little mountain domain. Winter should bring more opportunity.
Thanks for dropping by my new cyber pad. I like your phrase, “chic ennui.” It supplies part of my reason for preferring to read the biographical and autobiographical writing about and by these literary lions. I too read “Gravity’s Rainbow” in the ’70s. What impressed me was Pynchon’s seemingly deep grasp of arcane subject matters such as the Poisson distribution and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. By contrast, Saul Bellow struck me as a superficial name-dropper. I am thinking of Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift” whose main subject was Delmore Schwartz.
I like your comment about the Beats. A short book you may enjoy is John Clellon Holmes, Gone in October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac, Limberlost Press, 2022. October will soon be upon us. I should blog some of Holmes’s final offering.
If you find time to read more of Cheever’s journal, I’d like to hear your thoughts. I found Cheever’s letters much less interesting. Since you have a daughter, I expect you will resonate to Susan Cheever’s Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter, Washington Square Press, 1984. It kept me in its grip for 243 pages.
Just now read the two topmost articles on your Substack. I’m a Kant scholar of sorts and I recall that he took a dim view of Swedenborg. I’m tempted to review the philosopher’s complaints. In the following post on poetry and revelation, what you say about the former shows a better grasp of it and its demands on the would-be poet than I’ll ever have. As for (divine) revelation, I’ve been thinking hard about it recently in connection with Karl Jaspers’s critique of Rudolph Bultmann in Myth and Christianity.
Thanks so much for the references to work by Cheever’s daughter and the Lucas Thorpe article on Kant and Swedenborg. So far in my reading of Swedenborg I’m mostly struck by the persistence of the hermetic/Cabalistic/gnostic framework for the universe in Western thought, and it’s attractiveness in spite of the way it flirts with (or jumps right into) Gnostic heresy. Among other things, it provides an explicit schema for slotting any number of transcendental things be they angels, demons, ideal and symbolic forms, mysterious energies, etc. that the Biblical gospel explicitly warns us away from or gives no cognizance to. The gospel thwarts the Faustian while hermeticism extends open arms. I’ll be interested to see if Thorpe’s article sheds any light on this with regard to Kant.
Gravity’s Rainbow was fascinating. I read it at a time when I was preeminently fascinated by works that had a reputation for being unusually difficult and obscure: Gravity’s Rainbow, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (which I never finished by may return to one day), James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. But GR didn’t survive a second reading 30 years later, whereas Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake opened to wider vistas and more mature appreciation–particularly Finnegan’s Wake, which I first read as a cypher to be cracked but later read as I would a nonsense poem like “Jabberwoky” and it really opened up though in some strange way it was more like hearing a piece of music than reading a literary text. I’m still not sure what it means or to whom it is addressed, and frankly I’ve completely lost interest in the huge critical literature that surrounds it.
Yes, and I think I’m using in roughly the same sense that Jaspers means, which is why reading a work “as a cypher to be cracked” is so wrong-headed–you don’t “crack” a cipher as if it were a Rubik’s cube, although I did regard the work as a cipher of some undefined sort. But I’m not positive about my understanding here. Jaspers is someone I need to go back to eventually on the topic of revelation. As I recall the notion of “cipher” is mostly contingent on his concept of Existenz, which I could not begin to explain without a very careful re-review of his work. I suspect these are these are things you’ve well mastered however!
Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was simply punishment. Neither were part of the English department curricula but everyone was reading them along with Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, etc. And as near as I could tell, the lives of department faculty were mostly living examples of what they (Updike and Cheever) depicted. For me at least, mainstream literary fiction of that era was as wasteland of chic ennui. I briefly got immersed in some of the more outlandish works such as Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” but even these were mostly just elaborate trinkets. There was real, unpolished life in the beats and some of the counterculture of the time, which is much more interesting to re-read today. There was an immediacy to it, with no mediating bullshit, that made its uneven quality beside the point.
I did start reading Cheever’s journals but unfortunately it’s been stalled by my other reading and lots of summer work on my little mountain domain. Winter should bring more opportunity.
Hi Ed,
Thanks for dropping by my new cyber pad. I like your phrase, “chic ennui.” It supplies part of my reason for preferring to read the biographical and autobiographical writing about and by these literary lions. I too read “Gravity’s Rainbow” in the ’70s. What impressed me was Pynchon’s seemingly deep grasp of arcane subject matters such as the Poisson distribution and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. By contrast, Saul Bellow struck me as a superficial name-dropper. I am thinking of Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift” whose main subject was Delmore Schwartz.
I like your comment about the Beats. A short book you may enjoy is John Clellon Holmes, Gone in October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac, Limberlost Press, 2022. October will soon be upon us. I should blog some of Holmes’s final offering.
If you find time to read more of Cheever’s journal, I’d like to hear your thoughts. I found Cheever’s letters much less interesting. Since you have a daughter, I expect you will resonate to Susan Cheever’s Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter, Washington Square Press, 1984. It kept me in its grip for 243 pages.
Ed,
Just now read the two topmost articles on your Substack. I’m a Kant scholar of sorts and I recall that he took a dim view of Swedenborg. I’m tempted to review the philosopher’s complaints. In the following post on poetry and revelation, what you say about the former shows a better grasp of it and its demands on the would-be poet than I’ll ever have. As for (divine) revelation, I’ve been thinking hard about it recently in connection with Karl Jaspers’s critique of Rudolph Bultmann in Myth and Christianity.
The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought.
https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12
Hi Bill,
Thanks so much for the references to work by Cheever’s daughter and the Lucas Thorpe article on Kant and Swedenborg. So far in my reading of Swedenborg I’m mostly struck by the persistence of the hermetic/Cabalistic/gnostic framework for the universe in Western thought, and it’s attractiveness in spite of the way it flirts with (or jumps right into) Gnostic heresy. Among other things, it provides an explicit schema for slotting any number of transcendental things be they angels, demons, ideal and symbolic forms, mysterious energies, etc. that the Biblical gospel explicitly warns us away from or gives no cognizance to. The gospel thwarts the Faustian while hermeticism extends open arms. I’ll be interested to see if Thorpe’s article sheds any light on this with regard to Kant.
Bill,
Gravity’s Rainbow was fascinating. I read it at a time when I was preeminently fascinated by works that had a reputation for being unusually difficult and obscure: Gravity’s Rainbow, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (which I never finished by may return to one day), James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. But GR didn’t survive a second reading 30 years later, whereas Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake opened to wider vistas and more mature appreciation–particularly Finnegan’s Wake, which I first read as a cypher to be cracked but later read as I would a nonsense poem like “Jabberwoky” and it really opened up though in some strange way it was more like hearing a piece of music than reading a literary text. I’m still not sure what it means or to whom it is addressed, and frankly I’ve completely lost interest in the huge critical literature that surrounds it.
Your use of ‘cipher’ struck me. It is a key term in Karl Jaspers.
Yes, and I think I’m using in roughly the same sense that Jaspers means, which is why reading a work “as a cypher to be cracked” is so wrong-headed–you don’t “crack” a cipher as if it were a Rubik’s cube, although I did regard the work as a cipher of some undefined sort. But I’m not positive about my understanding here. Jaspers is someone I need to go back to eventually on the topic of revelation. As I recall the notion of “cipher” is mostly contingent on his concept of Existenz, which I could not begin to explain without a very careful re-review of his work. I suspect these are these are things you’ve well mastered however!