Category: Literary Matters

I'm sure family life has its compensations. But it is not for everybody. I live with an angelic wife and two black cats.  All four of us will die without issue. My contact with relatives is minimal. Blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and in some cases the former seems to exclude the latter. * I can relate to Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation, somewhere in his Journal, “I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone.”

The goods of family life I am missing, in a second sense I am not missing: one cannot miss what one never had.  But the bad things I am missing in the first sense I am happy to miss in that same sense.  The following from The Journals of John Cheever:

My daughter says that our dinner table is like a shark tank. I go into a spin. I am not a shark. I am a dolphin. Mary [Cheever's wife] is the shark. Etc. But what we stumble into is the banality of family situations. As for Susie [Cheever's daughter] she makes the error of daring not to have been invented by me, of laughing at the wrong times and of speaking lines I have not written. Does this prove I am incapable of love, or can love only myself? (282)

Well, John, it doesn't prove it, but it is pretty good evidence of it. You would prefer your daughter to be your own creation, a creature of fiction, who does not laugh at the wrong times and speaks only the right lines, a fictional object rather than the subject she is, an ipseity resistant to, and  in adolescent rebellion against, the will of pater familias.  You sired her; you did not create her.**

"Every craft makes crooked" as German folk-wisdom has it,*** and so it is with the novelist. He invents and gets carried away.   Here is an entry on family life illustrating the manipulation of memory by invention:

I think of my father, but nothing is accomplished. The image of him is an invention, not a memory, and an overly gentle invention. There was his full lower lip, wet with spit; his spit-wet cigarette, his hacking cough; the ash on his vest; and the shabby clothes he wore, left to him by dead friends. "Let's give Fred's suits to poor Mr. Cheever." I find in some old notes that my mother reported that he had, just before his death, written a long indictment of her — as a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and a woman. I never saw the indictment. I suppose, uncharitably, that the effect on her would have been to fortify her self-righteousness. She had worked so hard to support a helpless old man, and her only reward was castigation.  Sigh — how deep were her sighs. I have no idea what their marriage was like, although I suspect that he worshipped her as my brother worshipped his choice and as perhaps I have worshipped mine. In my brother's case there was, I think, that rich blend of uxoriousness in which praise has a distinct aftertaste of bitterness, not to say loathing. I think that Mary was wounded years before I entered her life, and who is this ghost whose clothes I wear, whose voice I speak  with, what were the cruelties of which I am accused? (275)

From Blake Bailey's biography of Cheever, I take it that the ghost who wears Cheever's clothes and speaks through him, and haunts Mary, is the ghost of Mary's father, the formidable Dr. Milton Winternitz, "the legendary dean of the Yale School of Medicine" (as Bailey puts it in Cheever: A Life, Vintage, 2010, p. 102).  Winternitz was an oppressive and domineering presence who beat Mary as a child with a belt. One moral to extract from this is that one ought not marry a woman until one understands the relation she had with her father, lest you suffer through a marriage as bad as Cheever's. A girl's attitude toward men is formed in large part by her relationship with her father.  A recurrent theme of Cheever's journal is his rotten marriage to the woman he often refers to as Mary maldisposta. The Italian adjective is in the semantic vicinity of unwell, hostile, unfriendly, ill-disposed, and disinclined.

The topic of uxoriousness and the related one of putting women on pedestals beg to be ruminated upon. Romantics are prone to these related errors. Italians are well-represented among romantics, not that Cheever was of Italian extraction, but he had a thing for Italy and swotted up a lot of the lingo. According to G. M. Hopkins' biographer Robert Bernard Martin, Coventry Patmore was ". . . one of the most flagrantly uxorious men of the [19th] century, one who quite seriously worshipped women and all they stood for." (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1991, p. 355.)

Finally, you can see that Cheever is a good writer. How do I know that? It takes one to know one. Like alone knows like. (I recall this principle's being referred as the homoion theorem. But Google turns up nothing. Paging Dave Lull!) 

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* This is evidence of a sort for our dual status. If we were animals merely, why would some of us find the spiritually affine only among the non-blood-related?  And why would be feel spiritually alienated from the blood-related?

** Can we understand divine creation in analogy to the creation of fictional characters by a novelist?  Hugh McCann makes a brave attempt in this direction in his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God. I bring up some weighty objections in my review article Hugh McCann and the Implications of Divine Sovereignty, published in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2014, 88 (1):149-161.

*** Jeder Handwerk zieht krumm. I picked up this folk phrase from Nietzsche, The Gay Science [Die fröhliche Wissenschaft], 1882:

Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.…Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery.…For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise—cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable—isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, [you get] the “man of letters,” the dexterous, “polydexterous” man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back—not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the “carrier” of culture—the man of letters who really is nothing but “represents” almost everything, playing and “substituting” for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.

No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the “men of letters” and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus—to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training.

Could old Fritz write or could he write? He puts us all to shame. He and his century-mate Kierkegaard, a prodigious engine of literary productivity if ever there was one. He lived for a scant 42 years (1813-1855); Nietzsche a mere 56 years (1844-1900).