Meador Manor

A decade ago I purchased Kindle edition of The Stories of John Cheever, a collection which won a Pulitzer. I knew The New Yorker had published over 120 of his short stories, and I knew that The Swimmer, a 1968 movie with Burt Lancaster which used to be advertised in UHF television promos, was based on one of them.

I had never watched the film, but I read Cheever’s tale of Neddy Merrill’s journey through a chain of neighborhood swimming pools, an allegory for the aging process, the fading of the American Dream, and the consequences of self-delusion.

I enjoyed the story and another famous story of his, The Enormous Radio, but then I was distracted by something and time marched on. I got married, my teaching career ended, and nine years farther along, with my administrative career drawing to a close, I asked Google Gemini, What are the most joyful and optimistic books in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century? It acknowledged those are rare, but one of its answers was a novel by John Cheever.

The Wapshot Chronicle was his debut novel in 1957 and reportedly was the first novel selected for The Book of the Month Club to include the f-bomb in the narrative. That’s an interesting distinction.

The novel opens in New England, just north of Boston, in Cheever’s fictional town of St. Botolphs. It had undergone historical decline in its economic and spiritual vitality since the mid-19th century and was populated with eccentric characters. A young adult man’s hookup with a traffic accident victim is witnessed from a bedroom closet by his first cousin once removed, who holds the family pursestrings. She has him ejected out into the world “to prove himself” which in turn inspires his less capable younger brother to also self-deport himself from New England.

Interestingly, the two brothers follow separate tracks. In transitioning from short stories to a novel, Cheever wrote three narratives, linking them intermittently, centered on a father and his two sons. This facilitates his shifting prose style as he crafts a discursive and episodic narrative structure. However, it does read as a novel, unlike my previous read from the Modern Library list, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which was really just a linked set of short stories.

The father’s tale is distinguished by staccato rhythmic jottings in his journal and some epistles. They reveal deep-seated psychological struggles, including feelings of emasculation and sexuality. It is more cohesive than , but it certainly could be as choppy as the waters of the bay plied by the father’s doomed ferry.

The older son, whose illicit lovemaking prompted his banishment from St. Botolphs, initially landed in Washington, DC. There he continued his licentious ways while his inept younger brother landed in New York City and has a series of slapstick adventures. He gets married, only to be shipped off to a remote island in the Pacific as a “taper” or early computer programmer, later being relocated to a suburban hellscape at an east coast military base.

What time is it?

I am unfamiliar with New England, having only been in downtown Boston for a conference in 1999. My other visits to the east coast have been confined to the mid-Atlantic states, with brief visits to New York, Wilmington, Atlantic City, and Baltimore, plus three visits to Washington, DC and three to Philadelphia. New England strikes us Okies as quite old, so for much of the novel I lacked sufficient familiarity with context clues to judge the timeframe. Over 2/3 of the way through the novel, there was mention of an “old DC-4”, which was a plane manufactured in the 1940s, so I finally figured out that The Wapshot Chronicle was set close to the timeframe in which it was published. It is thus somewhat a tale of the 1950s, albeit with frequent flashbacks and plenty of mythic realism and nostalgia.

Writing what he knew

It is said that the characters in the two Wapshot novels were based on Cheever’s family members. The father figure reflected his own father’s career in shoes which collapsed in the Great Depression, leaving him an embittered alcoholic, living alone in a decaying farmhouse on the South Shore. The mother is like Cheever’s strong-minded and pragmatic wife. The cousin once removed is an amalgam of various family elders. The older brother was based on Cheever’s own older brother, Fred, whom he idolized, and the younger brother represents Cheever himself, with his own conflicted bisexuality. He imbues both of the brothers in his first novel, as well as the father, with his own voracious sex drive and confusions.

A biographical parallel was how his own mother, like the one in the novel, opened a gift shop to make ends meet after her husband lost his income. In the novel, the father’s little ferry boat sank, but that rather obvious metaphor was saved by Cheever’s prose:

She took the waves head on, like an old rocking horse. Waves broke over the glass of the wheelhouse so that Leander had to keep one hand on the windshield wiper to see. The water pouring down the decks began to come in at the cabin. It was dirty weather. Leander thought of the passengers—the girl with the rose in her hair and the man with three children, all wearing shirts cut of the same cloth as his wife’s summer dress. And what about the passengers themselves, sitting in the cabin? Were they frightened? They were, nine times out of ten, their fear clothed lightly in idle speculation. They fished for their key rings and their small change, gave their privates a hitch and, if they had some talisman, a silver dollar or a St. Christopher medal, they rubbed it with their fingers. St. Christopher, be with us now! They readjusted their garters if they wore them, tightened the knots in their shoelaces and their neckties and wondered why their sense of reality should seem suspended. They thought of pleasant things: wheat fields and winter twilights, when five minutes after the lemony yellow light in the west was gone the snow began to fall, or hiding jelly beans under the sofa cushions on Easter Eve. The young man looked at the girl with the rose in her hair, remembering how generously she had spread her legs for him and now how fair and gentle she seemed.

In the middle of the bay Leander turned the boat toward Travertine. It was the worst of the trip, and he was worried. The following sea punished her stern. Her screw shook the hull at the crest of every wave and in the hollow she slipped to port. He set his bow on Gull Rock, which he could see clearly then, the gull droppings on top and the sea grass fanning out as the waves mounted and swallowed the granite pile. Beyond the channel he would be all right with nothing ahead of him but the run up the calm river to home. He put his mind on this. He could hear the deck chairs smashing against the stern rail and she had taken in so much water that she heeled. Then the rudder chain broke with the noise of a shot and he felt the power of the helm vanish into thin air beneath his hands.

Cheever was gentle in that instance — the little ferry boat was no RMS Titanic, and no one perished. In the excerpt you will note how Cheever, ahem, inserted sexuality into his writing. There is an entire chapter addressing homosexual arousals in the two sons, albeit without any form of consummation. Cheever opened that chapter with a warning: “And now we come to the unsavory or homosexual part of our tale and any disinterested reader is encouraged to skip.”

The final part of the first book has a bizarre escapade in a variation of Manderley from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, populated by an aged distant cousin and her beautiful ward in a relationship that reminds one of Miss Havisham and Estella from Dickens’ Great Expectations. Cheever notes how the grand old mansions of the robber barons days had been altered:

…nothing was any more what it had aimed to be or what it would be in the end and the house that had meant to express familial pride was now a funeral parlor, the house that had meant to express worldly pride was a rooming house, Ursuline nuns lived in the castle that was meant to express the pride of avarice, but through this erosion of purpose Moses thought he saw everywhere the impress of human sweetness and ingenuity.

I appreciate how he lightened the observations with that final phrase. One of the sons remains a horndog who cannot distinguish love from lust. He is incurious and willing to tolerate the bad food and unhappy lodging with his aged distant cousin so long as he can bed her ward, a previously married woman in her late 20s. He scrambles across the roof of the crumbling mansion of Clear Haven, like previous paramours, to travel from a guest room to the woman’s bed. Cheever’s prose is masterful:

…it was the roofs of Clear Haven, to be seen only by the birds or a stray airplane, where the architect had left bare the complexity of his task—in a sense his defeat—for here all the random majesty of the place appeared spatchcocked, rectified and jumbled; here, hidden in the rain, were the architect’s secrets and most of his failures. Peaked roofs, flat roofs, pyramidal roofs, roofs inset with stained-glass skylights and chimneys and bizarre systems of drainage stretched for a quarter of a mile or more, shining here and there in the light from a distant dormer window like the roofs of a city.

The tale is somewhat comedic, with no one living in the estate having the least bit of sense, but it is also a tale of a wife’s embittered transformation into an asexual being who emasculates her husband. This is clearly drawn from Cheever’s lifelong marriage in which he was repeatedly subjected to the silent treatment, as mentioned in a great 2009 article on him and his family by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. He was mystified by his own wife and the different personas she could inhabit, while he was a bisexual drunkard who was unable to form a deep, lasting, and mutual romantic bond with another person.

In du Maurier’s Rebecca, the mansion of Manderley burns in a fire that is the culmination of secrets and guilt. Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle ends similarly, and its burning releases the ward and her horndog husband from the spell of his old cousin, but we can infer that the marriage, like the estate, will not endure. In fact, in the sequel, it is her sexual needs and the poor choices she makes to fulfill them that dominate the narrative.

One positive theme in the book is of the value of communities. However, Cheever also portrays the oppressive control of older generations and repeatedly conflates physical and romantic love. The first book is not a triumph, but it was certainly interesting. A weakness in the Clear Haven segment is the introduction of an ex-husband of one of the son’s brides. This strange interloper provides comedy, but he would fit better into a short story than suddenly appearing 9/10 of the way through a novel.

The Sequel

The 1958 National Book Award and Book of the Month Club selection spurred Cheever to publish a sequel in 1964: The Wapshot Scandal. It is darker and more cynical and satirical than the first book. The Wapshot boys and their wives are living in archetypes of suburbia and the Cold War, with the drinking, betrayals, and sexual misadventures that one would expect given Cheever’s own history, but his cynicism is again leavened:

The village, he knew, had, like any other, its brutes and its shrews, its thieves, and its perverts, but like any other it meant to conceal these facts under a shrine of decorum that was not hypocrisy but a guise or mode of hope.

The sequel garnered the 1965 William Dean Howells Medal, which is awarded every five years to a distinguished American novel. I’ve only heard of five of the past winners. Over Winter Break in 2012, I happened to have read the 1930 winner, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is a far cry from The Wapshot Scandal.

In the meta-analysis at The Greatest Books, that sequel is rated lower than the first Wapshot book and two of his subsequent novels, while his Pulitzer-prizewinning short story collection outranks them all.

Year Published	Title	Rank (June 2026)
1957	The Wapshot Chronicle	1,152
1964	The Wapshot Scandal	16,993
1969	Bullet Park	7,810
1977	Falconer	4,525
1978	The Stories of John Cheever	680
1982	Oh What a Paradise It Seems	–

That did not deter me from reading The Wapshot Scandal, to find out the ultimate fates of his characters and note the progress in his ability to write a novel. However, before tackling the sequel, I did make an aborted attempt at reading Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson. It felt awkward and strange after Cheever’s smooth prose.

I enjoyed multiple vignettes from Cheever’s sequel. Consider his description of a young wife’s discontent:

Betsey had not rallied from the failure of her cocktail party. She hated Talifer and squarely blamed Coverly for making her live there. She avenged herself by sleeping alone and by not speaking to her husband. She complained loudly to herself about the house, the neighborhood, the kitchen, the weather and the news in the papers. She swore at the mashed potatoes, cursed the pot roast, she damned the pots and pans to hell and spoke obscenely to the frozen apple tarts, but she did not speak to Coverly. Every surface of life—tables, dishes and the body of her husband—seemed to be abrasive facets of a stone that lay in her path. Nothing was right. The sofa hurt her back. She could not sleep in her bed. The lamps were too dim to read by, the knives were too dull to cut butter, the television programs bored her although she watched them faithfully. The greatest of Coverly’s hardships was the breakdown in their sexual relationship. It was the crux, the readiest source of vitality in their marriage, and without this her companionship became painful.

The critique of suburban conformity that I recall from childhood was the dystopian planet of Camazotz in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Another I am aware of, but have not yet read, is Richard Yates’s debut novel of 1961, Revolutionary Road. I was glad to find that The Wapshot Scandal was not limited to suburbia, wandering episodically through other realms as well, although yet again Cheever’s tapestry had thin spots, with too few threads weaving the parts into a whole. It is far more satisfying to me when seemingly unrelated storylines are eventually pieced together. Examples of that in film would be Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

Cheever’s characters find happiness elusive, their existences shot through with pangs of sexual desire that lead them to destructive decision-making. They tranquilize themselves with alcohol, and their tales are most satisfying when they are comic, frantic, or both. Cheever could still compose brilliant paragraphs.

He thought he saw on the beach the change from one form of life to another. The sea grass dies, dries, flies like a swallow on the wind and that angry-looking tourist will make a lamp base out of the piece of driftwood he carries. The line of last night’s heavy sea is marked with malachite and amethyst, the beach is scored with the same lines as the sky; one seemed to stand in some fulcrum of change, here was the barrier, here as the wave fell was the line between one life and another, but would any of this keep him from squealing for mercy when his time came?

Cheever pours into them his existential crises, depression, and ennui, alongside his lusts for sex and liquor. The sad tale of one of the wives, with her on-again off-again trysts with a beautiful, stupid, and ever-hungry 19-year-old supermarket stockboy, concludes with her in a foreign supermarket. Cheever evokes the tragedy of her existence as she shops for her hungry boy toy.

Here she disengages one wagon with a light ringing of metal from a chain of hundreds and begins to push her way through the walls of American food. Grieving, bewildered by the blows life has dealt her, this is some solace, this is the path she takes. Her face is pale. A stray curl hangs against her cheek. Tears make the light in her eyes a glassy light but the market is crowded and she is not the first nor the last woman in the history of the place to buy her groceries with wet cheeks. She moves indifferently with the alien crowd as if these were the brooks and channels of her day. No willow grows aslant this stream of men and women and yet it is Ophelia that she most resembles, gathering her fantastic garland not of crowflowers, nettles and long purples, but of salt, pepper, Bab-o, Kleenex, frozen codfish balls, lamb patties, hamburger, bread, butter, dressing, an American comic book for her son and for herself a bunch of carnations. She chants, like Ophelia, snatches of old tunes. “Winstons taste good like a cigarette should. Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean,” and when her coronet or fantastic garland seems completed she pays her bill and carries her trophies away, no less dignified a figure of grief than any other.

There is power in Cheever’s writing, but like so many of the Modern Library selections, it can be quite gloomy. The old cousin in his tale, who began the sons’ banishment, goes on a comical sea voyage to Europe as she flees the consequences of income tax evasion, but in the end she dies miserably, with the modern world driving her, like so many other characters, toward alcoholism and despair.

Epilogue

Cheever’s own alcoholism became severe in the 1960s, and in the early 1970s he nearly drank himself to death, ending up straightjacketed with delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal after being hospitalized. In 1975, he was admitted to the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center in Manhattan and finally sobered up for his final seven years of life.

By then his brain had already atrophied, leading to minor hallucinations, although he managed to finish Falconer, which told of a university professor and drug addict serving time in Falconer State Prison for the murder of his brother. The convict reportedly struggles to retain his humanity in the prison and begins an affair with a fellow inmate.

Cheever himself embarked on a years-long sexual relationship with a young male writer, who lived with Cheever’s family for some time. His wife was quite aware of his bisexuality and various trysts, but his son and daughter seemed oblivious until he confessed to them shortly before his death in 1982 at age 70.

I’m glad I read Cheever’s first two novels, although I plan to stick to his short stories after this. I’ve heard him called the “Chekhov of the Suburbs” and while on vacation in the Pacific Northwest I purchased The Portable Chekhov and read three of his stories. They were melancholy and almost without plot, so I’ll need to be in the right mood to return to Chekhov or Cheever.