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.

Butt-Pirates of the Caribbean

As if we needed it, here is yet another chapter in the seemingly endless annals of withering estimates of male sexuality, which is quite plainly predatory and opportunistic. 

James Hamilton-Paterson (not to be confused with the best-selling mediocrity James Patterson) seems to suggest, in this excerpt from his beautiful book The Great Deep: The Sea and its Thresholds, that piracy - particularly the extreme variety that flourished in 17th-century West Indies - was a consequence of a lack of women.

"A good example of a highly specialized social group living in extreme circumstances is that of seventeenth-century English pirates in the Caribbean. It was described recently [1983] by a scholar who, in default of extensive documentation (for they were not great diarists) elegantly deduced by a series of negative proofs how their lives had to have been. His thesis is that these buccaneers were practically all homosexual and that their piratical activities were sustained by their sexual relationships, much as the Spartans' valor was. He cites as determining factors the generally lenient prevailing attitudes to homosexuality in England at the time and the way in which apprentices were drawn or press ganged extensively from the bands of boy vagrants ('great flockes of Chyldren') who roamed the country and whose group identification, for their own protection, was exclusive. Furthermore, the population of the British West Indian islands was then almost entirely male, an imbalance enhanced by transportation. 'The single certainty is that the only nonsolitary sexual activities available to buccaneers for most of the years they spent in the Caribbean and almost all of the time they were aboard ship were homosexual.' (1) Very few pirates ever married, it seems, and those who did were uniformly unlucky with their women (and vice versa, one would imagine). Blackbeard, William Dampier, Bartholomew Sharp and other pirate captains jealously guarded their favorite boys, while all aboard took advantage of a form of male bonding discreetly named matelotage. It is a great pity there is such a dearth of contemporary documents, although vivid details do emerge. Captain John Avery was known as Long Ben, 'not because of his height.' Add to all this the occasional bouts of derring do and the frequent orgies of drinking when every soul aboard from captain to ten-year-old powder monkey was stone drunk, and by contrast to the solidarity of outlaw life afloat, that of 'straight' life (in both senses) ashore would have seemed dreary indeed. It is strange to think that, but for the lack of a few hundred women in the West Indies, piracy might have assumed quite different patterns or even have been suppressed entirely by privateers."

Strange indeed! Anyone still smiling at Johnny Depp's Keith Richards turn as the pirate Jack Sparrow in the dreadful Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies might now be wondering what plumbing Keira Knightley was hiding under that dress. But maritime history is rich in such anecdotes. Richard Hough suggested in his great book Captain Bligh and Mister Christian that one possible explanation for Fletcher Christian's decision to lead the crew of the HMS Bounty in mutiny was Bligh's unwelcome homosexual advances during the homeward voyage from Tahiti. And it was Winston Churchill who was supposed to have said, "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but run, sodomy and the lash."

Hamilton-Paterson should've read a review that George Orwell wrote of a book called Walls Have Mouths by W.F.R. Macarthey: "The most dreadful chapter in this book is the one entitled 'Notes on Prison Sex Life'. It gave me such a shock when I read it, for it suddenly revealed to me the meaning of a conversation of years earlier. I once asked a Burmese criminal why he disliked going to jail. He answered with a look of disgust and the single word, 'Sodomy'. I thought then that he merely meant that among the convicts there were a few homosexuals who pestered the others, but what Mr. Macarthey makes clear is that in prison, after a few years, almost every man becomes homosexual, in spite of putting up a fight against it. He gives a horrible account of the way in which homosexuality gradually overwhelmed himself, first of all through the medium of his dreams."

I think Orwell, who was a terrible homophobe, got it wrong. It is not that all men are inherently gay, and that only the right (or wrong) circumstances will bring it out. It is not even that all men are bi. Freud may have (famously) pointed out that there is only one libido that serves both men and women, but the message is painfully clear to me: for men, anyone may serve as a sex-object, any orifice may be enlisted to satisfy the libido - depending entirely on the degree of their personal delicacy. This is a far more chilling estimate of male sexuality than either Hamilton-Paterson or Orwell imagined.

(1) B.R. Burg, Sodomy and the Perception of Evil. English Sea-Rovers in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean (1983)

[Postscript: The new dispensation explains the behavior of pirates (and prisoners) as "Situational Homosexuality" - not homosexuality at all, but the male response to a situation in which vaginas are conspicuously absent.] 

Some Friends - From a Distance

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. -Genesis 32:24-26


One of the sadder consequences of the internet is that the better part of an entire generation will probably never write a letter. Now they only send and receive email, without ever having to add their signatures. Handwriting - the ability to write legibly or even elegantly with pen and paper - is being abandoned. Nobody bothers any more about the notion that a handwritten letter is a personal creation passed from one hand to another. Now such personal contact is deemed unnecessary or even unsanitary.

Since I left the States, probably the last thing I expected was finding - or being found by - old friends. And yet three people put forth the effort necessary, two of them on the internet and one by telephone, to locate me - without, of course, expecting to find me here in the Philippines. I had not seen or heard from two of them in fourteen years. It was not exactly as miraculous or moving a reunion as it might have been if we had bumped into one another in the street somewhere, but it was just as good to have them back.

Coincidentally, I seem to have been lost, purposely or neglectfully, by several other friends. And two of the ones who found me last year have since drifted away. I still have the means to communicate with them, which is better than nothing, I suppose. But their willingness to reach back has somehow evaporated into extremely thin and inhospitable air - the same dead air one might hear on the other end of a telephone line when the person one has called puts down the phone to fetch something . . . and never returns. For some people, it seems, even the internet is too far to go after a change of heart or of mind. Too much water under the bridge, or over the dam, or just the ocean of water between us.

Somewhere Leonardo Da Vinci wrote that "nothing can be loved unless it is first known." I used to think that Leonardo, being an invert, had got it backwards, that nothing can be known unless it is loved. Now I know that there are few things more irreconcilable than love and knowledge. But it is a beautiful thought - and perhaps all the more beautiful for being so untrue.

At the end of his book, The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds, James Hamilton-Paterson takes his leave by ship:

"The departure of a ship is slow, celebratory, mournful. It gives time to think and the proper space in which to let fall one's lesser salt into the greater below. Something of moment is happening, part of whose subtext is a fear or resentment of the sea as the agent of long absences, slow letters and terrible news. Whoever they are, down at the docks one windy afternoon - friends, lovers, siblings - they are already separated. There are those on the quay and those already on board, though both are watching. The ship is about to sail. Gangways are lowered, ropes cast off. Heavy nooses splash into the slot of oily scum between truck tire fenders and iron cliff. Cries go up. The siren's blare, of such low frequency it shakes the stomach and jars loose fresh tears, sounds once, twice. Yet an illusion of unparting is preserved by the streamers, cheerful strips of paper sagging and twirling between the thousand pairs of widely separated hands.

"Over the whole scene hovers loss looking for somewhere to settle. Is it in the already spoken good-bye? In the last touch of bodies? In the cries of the gulls? Or does it now pulse along that thin paper nerve? It parts; they part. Yet still they remain visible to each other while loss fills up the space opening between them, stretching out between ship and shore, between hull and headland, dot and smudge, before spreading across the face of the globe.

"Travel is like death in that it requires mourning. The light melancholy of watching a coastline recede is a necessary observance. The caves sucked into the water's surface by the turning of invisible propellers - each subtly different, each marbling a dissipating track which stretches back, an elastic streamer - becomes hypnotic. They set us adrift on inward voyages where we barely have enough sarcastic energy left to stop ourselves seeing our frail barks upon the vasty deep as paradigmatic. Behind us the ocean is crisscrossed with thousands upon thousands of multicolored streamers, a planet festooned with farewells."