Oh What a Paradise It Seemed

Sometimes, when a great artist knows that his days are numbered, his last work becomes, intentionally or not, a farewell. One of the most moving farewells is Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which even incorporates, in its opening bars, the sound of his own irregular heartbeat. John Cheever wrote his last work of fiction, a 100-page novella he called Oh What a Paradise It Seems in late 1980 and 1981. In the summer of 1981, a cancerous tumor was found in his right kidney. Untreated, he was told in November that it had metastasized, and he died the following June. He was 70.

For his final effort, Cheever felt moved to compose a kind of conservationist fable. Set in a fictitious village called Janice (named for a mill-owner's first wife), it centers on Lemuel Sears, a computer hardware executive and widower (twice) and dwells on his struggles to understand the behavior of the people he encounters and to save a pond that is one of the great attractions, for Sears and others, of the village from being obliterated by local politicians in league with the Mob. "This is a story," it begins, "to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night."

Cheever loved ice-skating. According to John Updike, "Ice skating was his exercise, his Wordsworthian hike, his rendezvous with sky and water, his connection with elemental purity and the awesome depths above and below, while he clicked and glided along, in smooth quick strokes (I imagine) like those of his prose."(1) It is due to his passion for ice-skating that Lemuel Sears sets in motion the ecological action of Oh What a Paradise It Seems.

"Swinging down a long stretch of black ice gave Sears a sense of homecoming. At long last, at the end of a cold, long journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires in the hearth. It seemed to Sears that all the skaters moved over the ice with the happy conviction that they were on their way home. Home might be an empty room and an empty bed to many of them, including Sears, but swinging over the black ice convinced Sears that he was on his way home. Someone more skeptical might point out that this illuminated how ephemeral is our illusion of homecoming. There was a winter sunset and in this formidable show of light and color he unlaced his skates and returned to his apartment in the city."

Sears returns to Janice to skate again on Beasley's Pond, only to discover that it has become the target of ill-planned re-zoning and waste material is being dumped into it. "When he returned to the city Sears called his law firm and asked them to investigate the tragedy of Beasley's Pond. He also wrote a letter to the newspaper." The letter was published under the heading "Is Nothing Sacred". It was an emotional letter that was later used against his appeal to stop the dumping:

"I have been skating on weekends on Beasley's Pond, in the company of perhaps fifty men and women of all ages and for all I know all walks of life, who seemed to find themselves greatly refreshed for the complexities and problems of the modern world by a few hours spent happily on ice skates . . . Last Sunday, carrying my skates to the pond, I found that it had been rezoned as fill and had become a heap of rubbish, topped by a dead dog. There is little enough of innocence in the world but let us protect the innocence of ice skating."

What hope for such a bigoted romantic in a world becoming exponentially more unnatural with each passing day? Sears's love life takes up the rest of Cheever's story, somewhat surprisingly for a man of his years. He finds himself in bed, and various other places, with Renee, a much younger woman who attends public meetings in basements about god-knows-what (Alcoholics Anonymous? Flat Earth Society?) and never misses an opportunity to tell Lemuel, "You don't know the first thing about women." Yet she allows this man who doesn't know the first thing about her sex significant liberties, and then leaves him hanging (with his pants down) when he grows too demanding. When she jilts Sears, in a scene too funny to be believed, the elevator man in Renee's building takes him to bed.

By the end of Cheever's tale, there have been two mysterious deaths, and the appeals to save the pond are overruled. But a last, desperate act of sabotage carried out by a concerned married woman brings the planned re-zoning and the dumping to an sudden end. Sears is vindicated and Beasley's Pond, a small but precious piece of his world, of his very being, is preserved for future generations of men and women.

Although he was expert at satirizing suburbia, Cheever never expressed hatred for it, or for the great changes that he watched overtake it as the decades tolled. He had seen great changes in himself as well (his overcoming alcoholism and coming out as bi-sexual), and he greeted them with as much humor and generosity as he could allow for himself. He may have felt a sense of displacement, as his memories of a former age returned to haunt him, but regret or nostalgia weren't Cheever's métier. Kenneth Tynan once remarked that Ralph Richardson had the voice of "a man in a perpetual state of astonishment." Cheever had the same yeast in his voice and it is the same voice I hear in Oh What a Paradise It Seems: "The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!" Although it was impossible for Cheever to remain on that plane of exaltation for very long, how thrilling it was that he would even reach out for it, time and again, in his writing.

Conservationism has finally gone mainstream now that everyone on the planet is dealing with the effects of Climate Change. For most of my life we have been warned of the consequences of our abuse of the planet's resources and our dependence on fossil fuels, and I find it almost tragic that all but the climate change deniers (an unteachable, unreachable minority) have finally accepted the irrefutable evidence. All but the stupidest politicians know the facts, but corrupt motives prevent them from admitting it. And some of us are beginning to think that it may already be too late to stop us from going over the "tipping point" to a planet transformed by higher temperatures, sea levels, and catastrophic weather events. As British poet James Hamilton-Paterson wrote, years before Climate Change was officially identified:

"Conservation is only ever a rearguard action, fought from a position of loss. It is ultimately unwinnable, and not least because there are no recorded victories over population increase, nor over the grander strategies of genetic behavior such as the laws of demand, political expediency, sheer truancy and a refusal to relinquish a standard of living once it has been attained. There can only be stalemates, holding actions and truces uneasily policed. A few affecting species will be saved, a few million hectares of forest, a few tribes of indians; but the world will never return to how it was when this sentence was written, still less to how it was when reader and writer were born. This has always been true and will continue to be so. The mistake is to extend this sequence backward in time and imagine it leads to a lost paradise. It is a safe bet that as soon as the earliest protohominid could think, it invented a legend to account for its sense of loss."(2)


(1) "The Waspshot Chronicle," The New Republic, December 2, 1991.
(2) Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (London: Random Century, 1992.