John Cheever's Two Styles of Journal-Writing

John Cheever (Photo from Bettmann / Getty)

David Remnick, in “Sunday Reading: Writers’ Journals” (newyorker.com, January 5, 2020), says, “Writers’ diaries and journals often provide fascinating glimpses into the creative inspiration behind great works of literature.” This is true, but I wish he’d gone further and pointed out that some writers’ diaries and journals are themselves great works of literature. For example: The Journals of John Cheever (1991), a section of which (“The Sixties – I”) is included in Remnick’s post. Geoff Dyer calls Cheever’s Journals his “greatest achievement, his principal claim to literary survival” (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, 2011). But we don’t have to take Dyer’s word for it. The writing speaks for itself. Consider this passage from “The Sixties – I”: 

I bucket around the village. Cash a check; buy liquor, a dog collar. The new hardware store is vast and empty and seems to have been empty for months. They will not have the paint you want, the nails you want, the screws you want. “We expect the orders in next week,” says the clerk. He used to work at the hardware store on Spring Street, worked there for twenty years. I ask him if he doesn’t miss the village. He waves his hand toward the window and the view of the river, but his face is suspiciously red. This empty store, this red-faced man with nothing much to do is a piece of life. I go from there to the greenhouse, where the warm air smells of loam and carnations, and everyone, even the dog and the cat, seems very happy. The Z.s seem to have quarrelled. That’s my guess. I buy her a dozen eggs. “That’s all I’ll need for the rest of the week,” she says. But after dark her smallest son comes down the hill with his flashlight to ask for a cup of flour. It is like running up a flag, a call for sympathy, a declaration of the fact that her husband has remained in town for dinner while she bakes biscuits to save the price of bread. The little boy is keenly aware of the importance of this hour, this task. “Did you have a very pleasant Christmas?” he asks as I walk him home in the dark. “Did you receive many gifts?” he asks, thinking himself for a moment a full-grown man. “Thank you very much,” he says when we part at the lighted door. “Thank you very much.”

That “I go from there to the greenhouse, where the warm air smells of loam and carnations, and everyone, even the dog and the cat, seems very happy” is beautiful. 

Cheever’s journal contains a number of such brilliancies, glinting amongst his many expressions of anxiety, melancholy, and sexual longing. Here are four more examples from “The Sixties – I”:

If we do not taste death, how will we know the winter from the spring? I paint shutters, cut a little wood, light a fire. The clear light of the fire is appealing; this, and the sound of water, is what I want. 

Weeding the peony hedge I hear the windfalls in the orchard; hear them strike the ground, hear them strike against branches as they fall to the ground. The immemorial smell of apples, old as the sea. Mary makes jelly. Up from the kitchen, up the stairs and into all the rooms comes the smell of apples.

I skate; I knock a puck around with my son—the pleasures of this simple fleetness, this small prowess. The light on the snowfields, and I see it as I move, all purple and gold.

Snow lies under the apple trees. We picked very few of the apples, enough for jelly, and now the remaining fruit, withered and golden, lies on the white snow. It seems to be what I expected to see, what I had hoped for, what I remembered. Sanding the driveway with my son, I see, from the top of the hill, the color of the sky and what a paradise it seems to be this morning—the sky sapphire, a show of clouds, the sense of the world in these, its shortest days, as cornered. 

I quote these sentences not only for their beauty, but because I want to contrast them with the journal-writing Cheever did in his The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). In three chapters of this novel, Cheever had one of his characters, Captain Leander Wapshot, write a journal. It’s a wonderful piece of writing. John Updike, in his Picked-Up Pieces (1976), called it “magnificent.” It appeared in The New Yorker as a short story, “The Journal of an Old Gent” (February 18, 1956). Here’s a sample:

Labor pains began at seven. Wet bed. Broke waters or some such term. Writer unfamiliar, even today, with obstetrical lingo. “Our Father who art in heaven,” said Clarissa. Prayed continuously. Pain arduous. First experience with such things. Held wife in arms when seizures commenced. Sallow-faced landlady waited in next room. Sound of rocking chair. “Put blanket over her mouth,” she said. “They’ll hear her up at the Dexter place.” Most violent seizure  at eleven. Suddenly saw blood, baby’s head. Landlady rushed in. Drove me away. Called henpecked husband to bring water, rags, etc. Much coming and going. Sallow-faced landlady emerged at 2 A.M. “You have a little daughter,” says she. Magical transformation! Butter wouldn’t melt in mouth. Went in to see baby. Sleeping in soapbox. Clarissa also sleeping. Kissed brow. Sat in chair until morning. Went for a walk on beach. Clouds shaped like curved ribbing of scallop shell. Light pouring off sea into same. Form of sky still vivid in memory. Returned to room on tiptoe. Opened door. Clarissa in bed, smiling. Masses of dark hair. Baby at breast, swollen with milk. Writer cried for first time since leaving West River. “Don’t cry,” Clarissa says, “I’m happy.”

That “Clouds shaped like curved ribbing of scallop shell. Light pouring off sea into same” is superb. The whole passage is delightful. Note the lack of articles and pronouns, and the use of sentence fragments. The rhythm is quick, choppy, staccato. This short-hand style is distinctly different from the more fluid, full-bodied syntax of Cheever’s own journal. Both styles are vivid, vigorous, and particular, reflecting Cheever’s taste for what he called, in The Wapshot Chronicle, "the grain and hair of life."