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.

Leaf Season

Reading from an actual book on a September Saturday for no other reason than that my electric co-op decided to be uncooperative and deprived every person on my Philippine island of electricity for 12 hours (which turned into 13), I was attracted to the story "Leaf Season" in my hardback copy of John Updike's Collected Later Stories - because the following day was the beginning of Fall, and because that season (like the others) doesn't exist here in the tropics. This inescapable fact has never prevented me from observing, in the quietest of ways, the passing of the missing seasons from one to the next to the next, as the years of my prolonged sojourn here have gone by. So, in a mood of tender nostalgia, I turned to the story, first published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1986.

T. S Eliot, an American poet who so wanted to be an Englishman that he tried to out-English them,(1) wrote: "A people without history/Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails/On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel/History is now and England." ("Little Gidding V"). One of the things that have always attracted me to Updike's stories was his poetic power to lift almost every part of life, every anecdotal detail, from childhood to young manhood to old manhood, into shimmering language. The most salient aspect of art lies in finding beauty in the unlikliest places. Even if it is only the transformation of a sow's ear into a silk purse, you cannot have one without the other - the mundanest object can be made into a thing of beauty and value by an artist. And John Updike had always, or much of the time, expended his talents in immortalizing moments, even the most trivial, with the power of his words.

In the story, "Leaf Season," the narrator (who doesn't identify himself and seems to float around the action he describes like a revenant) tells us of a long weekend excursion from Boston across New Hampshire to Vermont: "Off we go! Saturday morning, into our cars, children and dogs and all, driving north to Vermont in leaf season to the Tremayne's house on the Columbus Day weekend. It's become a custom, one of the things we all do, the four or five families, a process that can't be stopped without running the risk of breaking a spell." Strangely, the storyteller is a member of the group, he observes the characters, the husbands and wives (and children and dogs) but he takes no part in the action.

He gives specific driving directions, the highways and byways all the way to the Tremaynes' house, until they enter Vermont where, "At once, there is a difference: things look cleaner, sparser than in New Hampshire. . . . And the leaves, whole valleys and mountains of them - the the strident pinks and scarlets of the maples, the clangorous gold of the hickories, the accompanying brasses of birch and beech, on both sides of the road, rise aftet rise, a heavenly tumult tied to our dull earth only by broad bands of evergreen and outcroppings of granite."

It's described like something out of The Enchanted Cottage - a quasi-magical realm that has a geographic location but which is slightly other-worldly, where everything takes on a kind of patina that is doesn't have elsewhere. Everyone arrives, and we meet them one by one. The storyteller continues to describe the enchantment of the place where they have gathered. "How old are we? Scarcely into our forties.(2) Lots of life left to live. the air here is delicious, crisper and drier than air around Boston. We start to breathe it now, and to take in where we are. The sounds are fewer, and those few are different - individual noises: a single car passing on the road, a lone crow scolding above the stubbled side field, a single window sash clicking back and forth in the gentle wind we hadn't noticed when outside unpacking the cars. The smells of the house are country smells - linoleum, ashes, split wood, plaster, a primeval cellar damp that rises through the floorboards and follows us up the steep, wear-rounded stairs to the second floor . . ."

The eating, drinking and the party games commence, they play softball until dark, then bridge indoors. Some stay up late and others adjourn upstairs to their segregated bunks. People awake, still hesitant to let the night before fade entirely fom their memories, and Sunday commences. It's what Updike intended to be a tour-de-force. And as so often in Updike, there are things that remind the reader of the single American writer most beloved by Updike, John Cheever.

Updike's life in letters often mirrored Cheever's, one has the feeling, at certain moments, intentionally. Cheever was twenty years older than Updike, started writing, precociously in more than one sense, when he was a boy. He did not, like Updike, distinguish himself in school, leaving (or being expelled) before he is 18. Heeding e e cummings' advice to get out of Boston, Cheever moved to New York City when he was 22. He published the first of what would eventually amount to 121 stories in The New Yorker in 1935, hired an agent, and never looked back.(3)

Updike, with a much more stable home life, became fascinated from the age of 11 with New York City and The New Yorker magazine, to which his mother had subscribed. He rose steadily and brilliantly through the academic ranks, eventually landing at Harvard. The first things he published were poems, but The New Yorker began to accept his first stories in 1955. Updike said of Cheever: "John Cheever was often labelled as a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia. Only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it." Updike wrote about much the same subject, except his suburbanites lived and married and threw cocktail parties outside Boston.

"Leaf Season" is reminiscent of the Cheever stories, "The Common Day" and "The Day the Pig Fell in the Well." Both stories concentrate on people who come from the city (New York) for a few days or weeks in the country. Here is Cheever in "The Common Day": "He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city that after six days in New Hampshire he still found the beauty of the country morning violent and alien." In Updike's telling, the differences that he notices between city and country are great but they don't strike him the way they strike Cheever's character Jim. Cheever has a story to tell about the people he relocates to the country, and the story isn't pleasant. So, when Jim goes downstairs in his mother-in-law's house and goes out onto the terrace, "The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn." Jim is bewildered by the light and the smell in the air, but also enthralled. For Cheever, the world isn't there to reassure us; it doesn't conform to our efforts of measure. He is moved by its beauty, and his language rises to its celebration, but it's just as terrifying and it is glorious.

In Updike, with notable exceptions, all of creation bears the stamp of its creator. As Jonathan Yardley wrote in his review of Trust Me, the short story collection that contains "Leaf Season," "what most strongly unites these stories is Updike himself, with all his considerable strengths and his no less considerable weaknesses; for better and for worse one is constantly aware in these stories that Updike is at the controls, creating the world in his own terms."

A good illustration of how Updike controls the universe can be found at the end of "Leaf Season." Two of the couples gathered at the Tremayne's house in Vermont have left at the end of the Columbus Day weekend, but one woman, Linda Taylor, "announces she is going on another leaf walk. Do any of the littles want to go with her?" Three of the children, "all girls," go with her, along with the Tremayne's old dog, Wolf (Updike writes about the dogs with the same attention he gives to the people).

Linda takes them into the woods and holds up every different leaf for them to identify: the maple, beech, oak, and ash. Then she says, "'Girls, look up and around you. Those who went walking with me Saturday, do you notice any difference?'

'More sky,' says Aubrey, her own daughter, who knows what answer she wants.

'That's right,' Linda says, intensely grateful. 'And yet, standing here, who can see a leaf fall?'

No one speaks. A minute passes. No leaf falls.

'Oh, if we stood here long enough,' Linda concedes, 'or if there were a wind, or a hard rain like we had last night; but normally it happens unobserved, the moment when the root of the stem, where the bud once was, decides the time has come to let go. But it happens.' She looks upward and lifts her arms. The widened light falls upon her face and palms, and the little girls grow still, feeling threatened by something within the woman that she is pulling from the air, from the reds and golds trembling around them. 'Nobody sees it happen, but it does. For suddenly, it seems, the woods are bare.'"

A perfectly lovely moment, made perfectly lovely by Updike. But I don't believe it. Updike's use of the word upon is a dead giveaway. It signals that something poetic is happening. But, based on my experience of watching falling leaves, like the Quaking Aspens in the mountains of Colorado, when the wind makes the trees seem as if they're trembling, it happens often enough to make nonsense of Updike's claim. I've seen blossoms fall in spring and seen and heard fruit falling in summer, even in the absence of wind or rain. One particularly long fall season in Iowa, I sat and watched oak leaves, which (according to Updike) are the last leaves to fall, let go and drop fifty feet to the ground around me.

But I should concentrate on the beauty of Updike's prose, which is, as usual, considerable. The evocation of October in Vermont is seductive, especially to someone (like me), a transplanted temperate climate native who is stranded in the tropics where no one has heard of - let alone seen - autumn. But James Wood was right when he reviewed Updike's late novel In the Beauty of the Lilies: "Updike is a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough. At times, his fondness for an expensive phrase obscures, because it marks the moment at which he inserts himself oppressively."

Keats famously wrote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." It's certainly a beautiful thought, and probably all the more beautiful for being so untrue. I suppose that Keats's passionately wanting it to be so made it so for the duration of his short life. But it isn't so. As Vernon Young put it, "Beauty is to protect us from the truth." Updike's beautiful prose, the beauty of which is by now banal, weaves a spell that sometimes illuminated the truth of a moment in time or a particular situation among his characters, but it was the beauty that drew him there and that continues to allure his readers. It is the beauty of a well-turned sentence or a pithily-expressed observation. They rarely provide enough light to illuminate the human soul. It is the beauty that moves us, not the exposed nerve, not the truth of the matter at hand.

All of Cheever's formidable talent as a writer was in the service of something other than beauty, and that something other was the truth about people, which was often dispiriting. His heroes, from the Manhattan elevator operator to the numberless salarymen and women who ride the commuter trains to and from Shady Hill, were somehow always confronted with the truth about themselves and their lives.  

Happy Columbus Day.


(1) Virginia Woolf joked that Eliot wore a "four-piece suit."
(2) Updike was 53 when the story was submitted to The New Yorker.
(2) Updike had Cheever beat - he published 134 stories in The New Yorker.

No More Words

I am always, it seems, so far behind the curve that news of significant events can sometimes elude me for days or even weeks. This is partly by design when one is living, as I am, in self-imposed exile. But it can be aggravating. When I was living here in the Philippines in 1995, I heard about the Oklahoma City bombing at a friend-of-a-friend's birthday party three days after the event. So it did not surprise me, however much it grieved me, to find out on Valentine's Day that John Updike had died on January 27.

Most of the people who marked his passing in print knew him for his novels, which he turned to after becoming celebrated for his short stories. I first encountered his writing in the short form and I must have read every one of his story collections one after another in my middle twenties. I found his first novel, Of the Farm, a comedown from his stories. He got better at novel-writing, but I was never attracted to them. He was much like John Cheever, another great American short story writer and fellow contributor to The New Yorker, to whom Updike was a kind of spiritual successor.

But because writing was as much of an avocation as a vocation for him, he was sometimes guilty of writing too much, of turning his beautifully turned voice, which I would liken to John Gielgud's sonorous speaking voice, to subjects that were clearly beneath him. His essay collections are a disappointing grab bag of sometimes serious, but too often frivolous opinions and arguments. And because he could not seem to avoid striking beautiful poses, some of his more sincere professions of taste were unconvincing. He wrote poetry, which was dutifully published, even if it showed more intelligence than poetic talent.

Increasingly, as he grew older, he used his novels to explore an American scene that, as always, cried out for a literary intelligence to chronicle. But for all the substantial gifts that he lavished on them, and for all that the era, which is also my own era, needed and deserved his loving attention in prose, I feel certain that it will be his stories to which readers will return, time and again, as long as English is still a living language. He was easily one of the finest American writers of the latter half of the 20th century, like Bellow and Roth. I am only sorry that I did not discover him at an age when he could have meant so much more to me.