Guest Post: On Reading John Cheever as a Young Man

When my friend "Z" said he liked my recent (7/22/11) post on John Cheever, and had read a lot of Cheever at one time, I invited him to write a guest post on this author. What follows is his thought-provoking and vivid take on Cheever, in the context of "Z"'s own life, with some comments on what Cheever's work shows us on that so important but seldom openly discussed topic, social class. Thanks, Z!

From "Z":
I began reading John Cheever’s work when I returned to New York after living in New Orleans for a short while. I was glad to be back in New York even though I was broke and a bit dispirited. I’d just gotten a job at a news-photo agency, and I was living with my parents at the time. Riding into the city on the Long Island Rail Road into Penn Station, I would fantasize I was one of Cheever’s characters who lived in the suburbs and rode the train into the city. However, I understood that I lived in the wrong kind of suburbs – the fairly typical ‘middle-class’ one that might be best characterized as Levittown Lite – not quite row after row of identical box homes filling up the landscape, but since my family lived in what was called a “model home”, it was close enough.

There was also the issue of arriving at and departing from Penn Station. As anyone who was alive at the time could tell you, it was a criminal travesty that the city demolished the original structure in 1963. It was an irreplaceable architectural and cultural loss. What I remember of the new Penn Station as a young man was seeing drunken New York Ranger fans after a hockey game finished at Madison Square Garden – which sat on top of the now subterranean Station like some hideous toad – running amok through the ghastly narrow corridors of the Station. Worse was when they boarded the same train as me, full of fan-fueled testosterone and shoving horrible hot dogs and other noxious substances passing for food into their gaping mouths, ready to vomit.

No, this was not the aptly-named Grand Central of Cheever-land, where, albeit similarly inebriated beings also lurched onto the trains – the Metro North (even the name bespoke of its connection to the city unlike the regionally distinct “Long Island Rail Road”) going to the suburbs of which he wrote: leafy green neighborhoods where none of the houses were identical, and many considerably older than the “model home” of my adolescence. These passengers might have been as drunk as those hockey fans, but they held their liquor.

And there it is – the inescapable, the big unsaid in American culture: the issue of class. Not ‘class’ as in ‘classy’, but the real issue of class – the kind which gives lie to the American narrative of equality and opportunity. It was as big a divide as I can remember, seeing those people – the kind Cheever wrote about in his magnificent short stories and the worthy “Wapshot Chronicle.” Those people. You know, them. WASPs. I forgot exactly when I learned of this word and what it meant, but I came to know what it really meant in college. I attended a small, private East Coast one (how and why I ended up there is another story for another time), where I first met people with names like “Prescott” and “Suzanne,” and who played squash but never looked particularly sweaty afterward. They had of course been going to private schools their whole lives, and so by this time, they had figured out the academic and social game a long time ago. I was the interloper, the kid from Long (hard ‘g’) Island (the South Shore of course), not from the City or its leafy green suburbs to the north.

What was it about them that fascinated me, and why did I find similar characters in Cheever’s novels equally fascinating at the time? Besides the quality of his writing and his careful observations of what actually lay beneath those well-worn exteriors, looking back, I can now perhaps attribute it to a perverse kind of longing to belong – a not altogether unexpected desire stemming from my status of being seen as a “stranger from a different shore” despite my having been born here, but also something else: a budding scorn for what I perceived to be their conducting their public lives with a certain style that has been named as displaying “class,” but which kept the rest of us looking in and left out.

I haven’t read Cheever since that time, but I recall an old joke from the Marx Brothers which seems to be a good summary of his work, and why I liked it so much:
“Say I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you, by the name of Emanuel Ravelli.”
- - But I am Emanuel Ravelli!
“Well, no wonder you look like him!”