The Brigadier and The Golf Widow: John Cheever

Bullet Park is rife with marital drama in John Cheever’s 1964 collection of stories, The Brigadier and The Golf Window. If the affluent couples of this collection aren’t weathering their nuptial storms in Nantuckett, they’re seeking refuge in alcohol and adultery. Neither these, nor the divorce that usually follows, provide the characters with any relief, as evidenced by “The Seaside Houses”, the story of a family who always summers in a different house, and is affected by the residual atmosphere of the house they're renting. By the end of the story, this is the point the husband and wife have come to:

“Oh, God, you bore me this morning,” my wife said.
“I’ve been bored for the last six years,” I said.
I took a cab to the airport and an afternoon plane back to the city. We had been married twelve years and had been lovers for two years before our marriage, making a total of fourteen years in all that we had been together, and I never saw her again.

Should have picked a different house. One element that sets these stories apart from other tales of cocktail swigging parties in 1950’s New York, is that they are often more surreal and mystifying than the straight forward narratives of authors like Raymond Carver. The most famed example of this surrealist style is, of course, "The Swimmer," the story of Neddy Merrill, a man who decides to journey home from a party by swimming across eight miles of his neighbors’ pools.

The image of Neddy at the beginning of the story is one of wealth and vitality. Neddy slides down a banister and smacks the rear end of a statue of Aphrodite. Cheever writes that, “He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather.”

As Neddy sets out, his whimsical quest is easy—the neighbors are delighted to see him, and after a cocktail at each stop (He's had four or five by the time he’s halfway through the trip.) he resumes swimming. But as Neddy progresses, the neighbors are less and less pleased to see him. It seems he’s fallen into some sort of social disfavor, and can’t remember why. Mrs. Halloran cryptically remarks that, “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about your misfortunes, Neddy.” But Neddy has no idea what she’s talking about. As he continues, he begins to tire and move as slow as an old man, and by the time a storm rolls in, the season has transitioned from summer to autumn. After an exhausting journey, Ned arrives home, only to find his family gone, his house long abandoned.

On some instinctive level, the reader senses what’s happening: Neddy’s swim is a kind of allegory for the passing of time. But why Neddy is the target of so much misfortune, or what he’s done to deserve it, perhaps, is slightly unclear. We’re given hints that he is arrogant and a philanderer. Is this why he’s left with nothing? Is Cheever so moralistic? Several of Cheever’s stories, packed dense as poetry, were enjoyable, but left me with a set of questions, or the sense that I was missing a major facet of the story. And while I can love a story simply for the pleasure of good writing and interesting characters, many times I was still nagged by questions:“Why this particular moment? What is Cheever trying to convey?” Sometimes it helped to push forward and discover what obsessions of Cheever’s floated to the top: after reading “The Swimmer,” for instance, this passage of “The Music Teacher” struck me as something of an ah-ha! moment:

“The night was dark, and with his sense of reality thus shaken, he stood on his own doorstep thinking that the world changed more swiftly than one could perceive—died and renewed itself—and that he moved through the events of his life with no more comprehension than a naked swimmer.”

So, while the “The Music Teacher” wasn’t exactly meant as a companion piece to “The Swimmer,” (though both were collected in the same volume, linking them in some basic way) something similar in Cheever’s ideology surfaces in both tales, made manifest in the image of the swimmer. This passage also sheds insight into why Neddy suffers like the biblical Job, losing money, respect, his home, and ultimately his family—it happens not because Lord God Cheever hated affluent old Neddy and the corruption he stood for--though that may play a less significant role--but instead because, life, as Cheever writes of the night, is dark. It is as violent and quick as a river, and man fares no better in its swirling riptides than a naked swimmer.

That’s what Cheever thinks, anyway, and the manner in which the lives of his characters are presented as weary, the way temporary happiness is torn suddenly away—at times it left me feeling somewhat deadened myself. But it’s passages such as the above example from “The Music Teacher” that both depress and inspire me. Yes, the overwhelming tone of the section, the first impression, is crushing, and hopless—but Cheever takes care to remind that the world renewed itself. This too is a recurring theme in the collection, such as in “Just One More Time,” when the Beers, after weathering a series of social and financial hardships, are praised because they “…appear to be smart, for what else was it but smart of them to know that summertime would come again?” The moments of hope in these stories are precarious and rare, but Cheever never lets the completely topple from the edge of the horizon. The world renews itself. Summer will come again.

On a bit of an academic note, Cheever’s treatment of gender relationships is fascinating, and it’s difficult to discern when he’s being ironic, and writing from a male narrator’s point of view, and when he’s simply operating as a misogynistic product of his times. To use the example of “The Music Teacher” again—the story of a man in a rough patch because his golly darn wife is always burning dinner, letting the kids run wild, and being unsocial—is a good example of the first, I think.

The narrator, Seton—a likably guy—hints that though it would be his final contingency, he’s considering divorce. When a friend gives him the number of an older woman who teaches piano, I initially thought the same thing Seton did—this lady is going to be some sort of shared neighborhood mistress. Instead, the piano teacher gives him one simple piece of music to practice. And Seton practices this piece for weeks. The teacher won’t let him practice anything else, until it begins driving his wife crazy, and she finally pleads that she’ll do anything, if only he’ll stop. Ultimately, although Seton doesn’t realize it, he uses the music to subjugate his unruly wife, and beat her back into line.

It’s a good story, and doesn’t come off as moralistic as this summary makes it seem. Again, what makes “The Music Teacher” so interesting is the nature of the parable. Is this simply a 50's fable of husband oppressing wife? Or is something more going on? The capping Cheeveresque moment is the ending, when the piano teacher is suddenly found murdered, and the police pick up Seton for questioning. For me, this came completely out of left field. The police want to know if Seton's ever seen any young men around the teacher, and although the reader was pointedly told he had, Seton says no. The story ends, “They were satisfied with this explanation, and they let him go.”

But least the reader believe that "The Music Teacher" can be taken at face value, at the other end of the spectrum is “An Educated American Woman,” the story of Jill Madison and her unintellectual husband Georgie. Jill is well-bred and intelligent, but she’s also portrayed as a real bitch, whereas Georgie is pretty much a martyr—just a good guy trying to keep the peace at home. He does the dishes and polishes the silver until late at night because Jill doesn’t do housework, and Georgie is also the one taking care of their son, Bibber, who acts as though his parents are divorced.

One night, as Cheev- I mean, Georgie, is going about his household duties, and being trampled on by Jill, he ruminates on how gender roles are shifting in society:

“He did not like to polish silver, but if he did not do this, the silver would turn black. As she had said, it was not her style. It was not his style, either, nor was it any part of his education, but if he was, as she said, unintellectual, he was not so unintellectual as to accept any of the vulgarities and commonplaces associated with the struggle for sexual equality. The struggle was recent, he knew; it was real; it was inexorable; and while she sidestepped her domestic tasks, he could sense that she might do this unwillingly.”

The way I read this passage is that Jill might actually be resisting some part of her nature that is nurturing, and caretaking (which includes the little household chores), because she’s caught in this inexorable tide of feminism. And in short, Jill is kind of a bitch because she’s an educated American woman. It’s hard to believe something like this isn’t somehow satirical, or facetious, but as far as I can tell—it isn’t. Cheever wrote a story about how education makes women bitchy, and not want to perform their household duties.

Now, I don’t like to rely on biographical information to sort out stories, but I had to laugh at this anecdote from Cheever’s life via Wikipedia. To summarize, so you don't have to read the whole page: Cheveer went to a therapist about his wife and her “needless darkness,” (!) but after the therapist had Cheever bring his wife along for a joint counseling session, the therapist told Cheever that his wife wasn’t the problem—he was. Cheever found a new therapist. Take that with a grain of salt.

Unsurprisingly, Jill and poor Georgie also end in divorce, although again, divorce is rarely presented as any kind of a solution in Cheever’s stories. It never seems to bring more happiness. Instead, it’s simply another consequence of the age and social circle the characters inhabit.