I have written about many fiction journals over the last few months. I’ve written about Esquire, where Gordon Lish began his process of reshaping Raymond Carver’s voice. I’ve written about Weird Tales and The Saturday Evening Post and the Western pulps and the Sunday edition of The New York World. But there’s one journal I haven’t really mentioned.
There is one journal that, almost from its inception, has defined the American short story. For most of its existence, this journal wasn’t the highest-circulation fiction journal in America (that honor usually belonged to The Saturday Evening Post or McCall’s or Playboy). And it certainly was not the highest-paying fiction journal—its contributors frequently complained about its stingy rates. Nor was this journal particularly easy to work with: their editors were quite hard on their writers, often rejecting stories by past contributors and by famous writers.
Roger Angell rejected a story by Shirley Jackson, after her death, explaining to her agent, “The writing is admirable, of course, and the setting unusually interesting, but the conclusion, for some reason, lacks the surprise and chilly sense of semi-reality that is so necessary to this kind of story.”
Angell was also happy to reject Hemingway:
And here’s Angell’s reaction—in a memo circulated within the fiction department—to a late story from Hemingway: “Then you have the great leftover fish the redolent ancient dead fish who are always with us trailing their scaly manuscripts and spoiling our midwinters and our childlike trust of them with their expectations that whatever is left of them will find its way surely into the pages of the good magazine no matter how stinky and tired their trail . . . the same old tiresome later Papa stuff to me . . . please, please, please let’s not put this in the magazine.”
But despite this journal’s extremely annoying habits, writers continue to send their best work there, because sometime in the 1940s this journal became the most prestigious fiction journal in America, and it has not since relinquished that title.
As The Cambridge Companion To The American Short Story puts it:
Of the 1,700 stories selected for the Best American Short Stories (BASS) since 1942, 269 were originally published in the New Yorker, far exceeding the number in any other journal or magazine. And this dominance is sustained and consistent, with The New Yorker publishing the most stories selected for BASS in every decade since the 1940s.
There have definitely been literary short story writers in the last 80 years who were not strongly associated with The New Yorker—Raymond Carver and Grace Paley come to mind, but there are also a number of writers who’ve had a very strong association with the journal—sometimes publishing dozens of stories in its pages—in a way that’s proven to be a major driver of their literary reputation.
The First Among Johns
One of these writers is John Cheever. I think it would be pretty fair to say that Cheever wrote the archetypal New Yorker story. He generally wrote about atomized couples—suburban and small-town middle-class people without much regional identity or strong kinship ties to an extended family—who experience some kind of mild sadness or disappointment. Cheever published 120 stories in The New Yorker between 1934 and 1979, but he wasn’t only person writing New Yorker stories—John O’Hara published 220 stories in the journal and John Updike also published over a hundred stories in The New Yorker during roughly the same period as Cheever and both those two guys also wrote on similar themes.
In 1961, the New Yorker published a combined 24 stories by the three Johns (Cheever, O’Hara, and Updike) out of a total of 117 stories.1 This seems like an astonishing number of stories about unhappy middle-class people in the suburbs. Surely it would get tedious after a while?
But I’ve now read through the 700 pages of The Stories of John Cheever, a career-spanning collection that appeared near the end of the author’s life and won the Pulitzer in 1979. And...it’s really good.
I know! It’s inexplicable! How could it be good?
Believe me, I am as confused as you are. I am fairly certain that the last thing you want to do is read a seven hundred page short story collection that is about unhappy middle-class people in the suburbs.
There’s a little variation: sometimes the people live in New York City or a small town in New England. And sometimes the people aren’t entirely middle-class. There’s a story about a doorman. There’s a story about a building superintendent. But...even these stories mostly revolve around the upper-middle-class inhabitants of fancy New York apartment buildings. There’s also a fair number of stories set in Italy, but they’re usually about American expatriates.
How could this possibly be worth reading?
One answer, I think, is that Cheever published many of these stories in one venue, The New Yorker. And he knew that the readers of this magazine were not only getting a lot of Cheever (oftentimes five or six stories a year), they were also getting a lot of stories on similar themes from other authors. Thus he needed to make his stories exemplary enough to please these readers (i.e. if you like stories of suburban alienation then you’ll enjoy reading these stories) but different enough that the readers would still get excited about reading another one.
And then, from the over 120 stories he published in his life, he just picked the best ones for this collection. But he was quite ruthless about it. Over half of his stories were published before 1950, but he only picked a few of these stories for the collection. There are at least 50 stories that were good enough for The New Yorker, but not good enough to be collected.
The organization is roughly chronological, so as you read the collection, the characters grow up. His stories from the 1940s and early 50s are usually set in New York, with characters who are newly-married or have young kids. The protagonists are often very in love, very fresh-faced--oftentimes there’s some disillusionment, but not always. These stories surprise you with how optimistic they can be.
For instance, one story early in the collection, “Pot of Gold”, is about a couple who are looking to get rich:
YOU COULD NOT SAY fairly of Ralph and Laura Whittemore that they had the failings and the characteristics of incorrigible treasure hunters, but you could say truthfully of them that the shimmer and the smell, the peculiar force of money, the promise of it, had an untoward influence on their lives. They were always at the threshold of fortune; they always seemed to have something on the fire.
And if there’s one thing you know about a middle-class couple who loves money, it’s that if they’re in a New Yorker story, they’re not gonna get it! But what’ll happen instead? Well...they fail in their endeavors and realize they are doomed to be poor working stiffs forever. But then the man looks at his wife and suddenly, he feels better:
Desire for her delighted and confused him. Here it was, here it all was, and the shine of the gold seemed to him then to be all around her arms.
It’s so wildly sentimental, and so different from almost all the other stories that’d come before! That’s how he keeps you guessing, this John Cheever! That’s how the sauce is made!
There’s so many stories in here. And while they start from that initial seed—an atomized couple, with lots of aspirations and few family ties, is cruising towards disappointment—you still just never know where they’ll end up.
For instance, there is one story, “The Hartleys”, about this couple that’s on a ski vacation with their tween daughter, and there is this undercurrent that this couple is quite unhappy:
The family talked quietly. Mr. and Mrs. Hartley spoke oftener to Anne than to each other, as if they had come to a point in their marriage where there was nothing to say.
Eventually, the couple gets very frustrated with the daughter, Anne. They really want her to ski, but she’s too timid. She’s afraid something will happen to her. But then they finally coax her out onto the slopes and...she gets crushed to death by the motors that power the ski lift! It’s so grisly and unexpected.
There’s always something like that, which keeps it fresh. I think that’s what makes the stories so entertaining: they’re set in this very narrow, constrained life—bourgeois domestic middle-class life—that is the same life which many readers of The New Yorker are intimately familiar with. But when Cheever starts working with this life, there arises some sense of boundless possibility, some freedom from constraint. You just keep reading and reading—he’s like an Icelandic skald, using a limited array of elements (blood-feuds, witches, Norwegian adventures) to tell an unlimited number of stories.
There’s a lot of different themes in the collection. There’s a few stories about children and children dying and the uncertainties of childhood. I liked one called “The Sorrows of Gin” about a girl who realizes her nanny is an alcoholic, so after the nanny gets fired, the girl starts pouring out all the alcohol in the house, which makes her dad think the other servants are stealing alcohol, and they all get fired too. And the daughter gets so upset by all the chaos that she tries to run away from home, and the dad, finding her, thinks:
Travel—and who knew better than a man who spent three days of every fortnight on the road—was a world of overheated plane cabins and repetitious magazines, where even the coffee, even the champagne, tasted of plastics. How could he teach her that home sweet home was the best place of all?
That story has such a sense of the frailty of life. These servants lead precarious lives and are easily fired, but there’s also something precarious about the masters, about their life. Beneath their seeming control, there’s sadness and chaos that constantly threatens to spill out.
In Cheever’s stories there are sometimes very bizarre, inexplicable episodes. For instance, in “The Sutton Place Story” a girl disappears from the care of her babysitter, and her parents search frantically for her. She’s found on a stoop, eating some bread--she claims the bread came from her friend, Martha. And in the last lines of the story, her father asks:
“What lady gave you the bread, Deborah? Where have you been? Who is Martha? Where have you been?” He knew that she would never tell him and that as long as he lived he would never know.
There’s a sense of progression through the collection.
As we get towards the midpoint, we move out of New York and move into the suburbs. There’s more stories about suburban drama, for instance there’s one called “The Wrysons” about a woman who, for some reason, is dead-set against building a library in her town. There’s a lot of stories about economic uncertainty and the difficulty of getting along in the managerial economy. For instance, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” is about a guy who gets fired and starts breaking into houses. There’s several stories about men on the make who have difficulty with their demanding, peremptory bosses.
But really I could just go on and on. You could write a whole book about this book (in fact Cheever’s daughter, Susan, has done exactly that, in a book that came out a few weeks ago).
Cheever’s fame rests on two stories that are very atypical of his ouevre
Before I read this collection, the only stories of Cheever’s that I’d read were his two most widely-anthologized stories. In “The Enormous Radio” a couple’s new radio allows them to tune in and listen to the home lives of other people in their apartment building, while in “The Swimmer”, a man ages and sees his life fall apart as he swims through all the pools in his suburban town.
The funny thing about these stories is that they’re both essentially non-realist stories. Call them fantasy, call them magical-realist, call them interstitial or whatever—but they’re not domestic realist. Cheever does have a few other stories in a non-realist mode, in “The Music Teacher” it’s implied that a man is taking music lessons from a witch, in “The Death of Justina” a couple are haunted by the dead body of their elderly cousin, which can’t be buried because of their town’s weird zoning laws, and in “Torch Song” a guy encounters a friend who he thinks is unfortunate in her choice of men, only to realize at the end that she’s actually some kind of Angel of Death that’s drawn to people who are suffering and down-and-out.
But none of these stories are as overtly magical as “The Swimmer” or “The Enormous Radio”. I kept expecting Cheever to have some kind of magical phase: I expected a bunch of stories about weird objects or other Twilight zone phenomena, but it never quite got there.
Which is a bit fascinating. Obviously, Cheever had a very wild streak, and his stories are full of odd phenomena, as in “The Fourth Alarm”, where a man’s wife joins a local theatrical company that performs in the nude, or “The Brigadier General and the Golf Widow”, where a bunch of people in the neighborhood start scheming with each other and sleeping with each other to gain access to a bomb shelter. But...if it wasn’t for these two stories (”The Swimmer” and “The Very Enormous Radio”) I don’t think Cheever would be known as a writer who broke with straightforward realism.
As it is, his reputation is built so entirely upon these two stories that it really obscures what most of his writing was like!
It’s kind of a funny situation, very similar to Raymond Carver, who is known primarily for a short story “Cathedral” that is really not in the minimalist style for which Carver is the most famous.
How does this kind of thing happen? It’s so weird! It’s like if F. Scott Fitzgerald was primarily known for “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (his adventure story about a fantastically-rich slave owner in contemporary America) or if Shirley Jackson was mostly known for one of her humorous essays about parenting in a little town in Vermont.
John Cheever slept with men
I’ve gone this far and I haven’t talked about Cheever’s life. Hmm...he was born in 1912, and, as seems to be very common for American writers, he came from a family that had some money, but when he was in his teen years, they lost the money. This story is so common! It recurs so often in author’s biographies: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, it was the same thing--when they were young, their families lost their money.
Cheever never went to college: at age eighteen, he sold an essay to The New Republic (it was about his experience getting expelled from a private day school). Over the next few years, he intermittently lived with his brother in New York or at Yaddo, the artist’s colony. In 1935, he sold his first story to The New Yorker. He worked for The Works Project administration for a while. Then he served in World War II. He didn’t see combat, but many of his stories contain off-hand mention of the war. He has many protagonists who are haunted by it, in vague ways that they don’t talk about.
For instance, in “The Country Husband”, the protagonist briefly has a vision--he comes across a woman that he thinks is the same as this French woman he saw once, who had her head shaved for collaborating with the Germans. In “The Day The Pig Fell Into The Well”, there’s a break in the action, and when the characters come back, there’s only a glancing mention of the son who died (drowned) during the war.
Reading this collection, you get a feeling for the way the war hung over this life, barely repressed. Everyone had gone. Everyone had been affected. Most just tried not to think about it.
John Cheever was married to a woman until he died, but he also had sex with men on the downlow. Some accounts say he was bisexual, because he had affairs as well with women. Others, including his daughter, say he was gay. It’s definitely considered a big part of the Cheever story, but...at the same time...most of these stories are not about that. I did not detect much homoeroticism, if I’m being honest, and the few mentions of queer people tend to be negative (as in the story of the elevator operator who almost loses his job because of his feud with a gay couple in the building).
Cheever also had a novel, Falconer, that is largely about a married man who goes to prison and has an affair with another man, so it’s not like he didn’t write about gay erotic desire—I just don’t know that it made a huge appearance in his short stories. The stories in this collection are mostly from the 50s and 60s—he doesn’t include many from the 70s. Falconer came out in 1977.
Yes, you can detect hints of homoeroticism in some of these stories, but no more than you can in Hemingway or Fitzgerald: if you didn’t know Cheever had sex with men, you wouldn’t guess it from these stories.
Cheever wrote five novels. I really do not like his novels. I really, really do not like them. His novels were well-respected during his day: his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the National Book Award. Nowadays most people would say that his true talent was for short stories, but I’d go a bit further: I’d say these novels are baaaad!
They are so boring! They are intolerably dull!
Whatever made his short stories good, it’s not present in these novels. Everyone says his best novel is Falconer. I read this book fifteen years ago and hated it!!! I found it so intolerable.
This time, I gathered myself together and re-read the book. I enjoyed it somewhat until the halfway point (it’s a very short book), where the main character gets left by his male lover, Jody. After that, the book becomes very dreamy. There’s a lot of dreams and visions and weird occurrences (for instance, there’s a room where the men gather in front of a trough and jack each other off). It all just feels very pointless, very detached from anything human.
The novels just feel like...like...like a guy was trying to write a novel. Honestly if they hadn’t been written by John Cheever, an acclaimed story writer who we know is a genius, we’d say these novels were bad. Like, distinctly less good than the average novel.
That’s because they’re so meandering, and the characters are so lifeless. There’s no sap in them, no vigor, no desire. They’re just words on a page. I hated these novels so much!!!!!!! Believe me, I tried them all: Wapshot, Bullet Park, Falconer, even the last book, the novella whose name I forget. I’ve spent many hours over the past month trying to read these novels.
They are bad. Do not read them. I am angry at them for being so bad.
The style is very straightforward
The stories are told in relatively plain diction, and the telling is very straightforward—not a lot is held back. Whatever the narrator knows, you know. There are few descriptions, few striking images in most of the stories. The best stories are told by all-seeing narrators, omniscient, who are capable of leveling judgements about the characters.
Some of the stories are first-person, and these tend to work less well. It can feel weird when the Cheever narrator has suddenly become an embodied person who for some reason says things like, “My wife has brown hair, dark eyes, and a gentle disposition. Because of her gentle disposition, I sometimes think that she spoils the children. She can’t refuse them anything.”
It’s not that you couldn’t have one person who spoke this way, but there’s at least fifteen separate stories in this volume that have first-person narrators who speak in this register.
The best retrospective collection I’ve read
Personally, the biggest lessons I’ve learned from this book are about the construction of this kind of volume. This year, I’ve read a number of career-end retrospective collections, including volumes of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Raymond Carver, Robert E. Howard, Ernest Hemingway, Ann Beattie, and now John Cheever. And this collection, by Cheever, is unquestionably the best collection. Although it’s a very long volume, it provides an extremely pleasant and engaging reading experience.
With every other collection, it felt like there were a lot of duds. Even with Hemingway, there were a fair number of stories that felt like early efforts and didn’t really speak to the other stories in the collection. Here, everything is arranged so subtly that you don’t notice, and you’re just transported through the collection.
Although this collection is roughly chronological, the stories are not in complete chronology—any given story might’ve been published before the story that precedes it. They’re clearly being organized according to some kind of scheme. For instance, the two stories about lost kids, “The Hartleys” and “Sutton Place Story” are right next to each other. And then there’s a cycle of stories, about halfway through the book, that are all set in the fictional New York suburb of Shady Hill.
And the book benefits, I think, from the fact that most of these stories were written to entertain the same audience, the readership of The New Yorker. As a result, even though the collection spans almost thirty years of work, it feels like a conversation that gets picked up and continued with each story. It’s really hard to overstate the feeling of cohesion and rightness that surrounds this collection—I have read nothing else like it, at least in a career-end collection of this type.
I enjoy New Yorker stories
As I said, many of these Cheever feel like archetypal New Yorker stories. When I use that term, these stories are basically what you’d conjure up. Not “The Enormous Radio” or “The Swimmer”—those are too weird to be New Yorker stories. But something like “Pot of Gold” or “The Hartleys” or “Sutton Place Story” or “Torch Song” or “The Scarlet Moving Van” or “The Day The Pig Fell Into The Well”—they’re domestic-realist stories about thwarted middle-class people.
And it feels like this kind of story was probably the major product that the fiction section of The New Yorker retailed to its readers. I enjoyed reading these stories one after another—sixty-one of them in a seven-hundred-page volume. I imagine I’d enjoy them even more if I was only seeing them once every few weeks.
With these stories, there’s a certain workmanlike quality. It feels like there’s some awareness that these tales are a product. Indeed, one other prolific writer of these stories, John O’Hara, used to complain that the stories he wrote for The New Yorker were so specialized that if they didn’t publish them, nobody else would. With these stories there’s a kind of precision. You create an everyman protagonist, and then you give the story some precisely-calibrated hook. From the moment you start reading the story, you know it’s going to shake and rattle and fall apart somehow, and the fun comes from seeing exactly how the protagonist will wriggle around, become unhappy, and then grow resigned to his life.
It’s unclear why this should be so pleasurable. I think basically they’re just very relatable stories. I, the reader of these stories, lead a bourgeois domestic life not essentially different from that of the characters in these tales. I too feel various vague pricklings and disquiets. I too have conflict with my neighbors, with domestic help, with people at my kids’ school, with my wife. These conflicts rarely rise even to the level needed to anchor a New Yorker story, but it’s fun to imagine what it would be like if they did. What if I was a dreamer, obsessed with my college days, like Cash Bentley in “O Youth and Beauty”, what if I got suddenly laid off by my job and my adult daughter hated me, like in “The Ocean”? What if my security vanished? What would I do? How would I live?
After you read a collection by Cheever, you think, well…I’d find a way. Something would happen. Life would continue. Perhaps not happily, but it would continue. Somehow, very unaccountably, reading these stories is a pleasant experience.
What I am saying is that these stories are entertainment, in exactly the same way that Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories were entertainment. These kinds of stories meet some psychological need on the part of the upper-middle-class reader. They provide some relief from the tension and the tedium of our life. There’s something about seeing ourselves reflected back in this oftentimes-tragic but always-meaningful way...that is just...it’s good fun. It’s enjoyable.
Surely The New Yorker still publishes stories like this. When I went trawling through their recent posts, I found a number of stories that feel like New Yorker stories.
Now, you can argue that perhaps this kind of story should not be so highly-praised. Perhaps it’s not good that after a lifetime of producing these workmanlike and entertaining tales, Cheever was awarded the Pulitzer, while sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein’s equally entertaining and well-constructed retrospective collection The Past Through Tomorrow (1967) was certainly never considered for the Pulitzer.
But…in the end who cares? Ultimately I respect the fiction section of The New Yorker more now that I understand it wasn’t just an empty vehicle for conferring honors—it was also a journal that cared about entertaining its readers.
A Recommendation
For the last year I’ve been reading a newsletter called
, which is written by someone named . I do not know how I started reading this newsletter. It has under 100 subscribers and it is the most baffling mix of high and low effort. What I mean is that Jessica puts no effort into gaining subscribers, this newsletter uses the default icons and makes no effort to brand itself or gain/retain readers. But on the other hand the posting is so good!Basically, this newsletter is just Jessica’s thoughts. But she’s made a specialty out of reading these Trump World books (which she called Trumpslop). You know, Michael Wolff books and that kind of thing. And she has quite an amusing way of writing about various Trump-related phenomena. I have no idea where she stands politically: the tone of this newsletter is so hard to place. It’s morally serious, but also somewhat amused. Mostly it’s just very sharp: she really seems to get to the heart of things.
For instance, here was her take on the Jimmy Kimmel controversy:
I’m not saying that it’s a good thing to yank our nation’s emcees off the air. Going after targets like late night hosts is incredibly stupid, in that everybody likes a late night host, even if that doesn’t translate to sitting down and watching them. They’re harmless in a cute way, like a fuzzy caterpillar or a golden retriever. But I don’t think Trump can help himself, he goes after these men because he’s a performer himself, and his wishes are carried out because the easiest way to please him is to further his catty vendettas towards his rivals. It’s less Stalin than Phantom, specifically the bitchy old diva who throws a tantrum when she hears another woman sing. You can just imagine the president relaxing in a late-night bubble bath with his three boxy television sets turned on, dumping chocolate into his mouth and raging when one of the hosts cracks a joke at his expense.
I personally am horrified by Trump and hate everything to do with him, but there is something very relaxing about reading Jessica’s much more measured takes. I don’t know, it’s hard to put into words, but it’s just a very good product that she puts out. Truly, there’s nothing else like it.
Anyway, I had assumed, because of the extremely low effort she puts into branding or self-promotion, that she was content to fly under the radar, but I was talking to her recently and realized she actually wants more readers! So please consider subscribing to
.P.S. I have a standing offer, if you write a book that I’ve recently covered, please send me a direct message and I’ll link to it here on my blog. When I covered Larry McMurtry a while back, Detlev Fischer mentioned he’d soon be blogging about a McMurtrie novel as part of Fischer’s ongoing project to write 100 short posts about different novels that came out in 1982. The McMurtry post finally came out, so please check out
’s short vignette about Cadillac Jack.These 24 stories included the Updike classics “A&P” and “Pigeon Feathers”, the Cheever stories “Seaside House” and “The Brigadier General and the Golf Widow” and some O’Hara stories you’ve likely never heard of. I asked ChatGPT what other famous stories were published in The New Yorker that year, and it returned the following (none of which I’ve read):
“Hapworth 16, 1924” — J.D. Salinger
“The Vane Sisters” — Vladimir Nabokov
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” — James Baldwin
“The German Refugee” — Bernard Malamud
“Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern” — Richard Yates
“The Demonstrators” — Eudora Welty
“The Key” — Isaac Bashevis Singer
“A Place in the Country” — Shirley Hazzard
“The Darling Duckling at School” — Donald Barthelme
By the way, all this analysis would’ve been impossible without Joshua Loong’s spreadsheet of every story published in The New Yorker from its inception through 2019.
there's a terrific Seinfeld subplot where George's fiancé Susan Ross's father had a clandestine affair with Cheever...Larry David was ahead of the curve on this one
i have not read much Cheever, but you and Chabon's recent mentions of him have me convinced I'm missing out.
i read a short story by him recently and I see a lot of myself in it. and the middle class themes you've described are really my whole thing.
this will sound gauche but if you like Cheever, check out my stuff. it's clear to me i'm a sort of Millienial-ized Cheever without an editor.