'Everybody knows how persuasive and treacherous fantasies can be'.

I wrote almost four months ago with my thoughts on reading the first 400 pages or so of John Cheever's Collected Stories. Well here's part two. You'll see from the picture on the left that my copy now has some lovely creases down the spine, there are plenty of pen marks and post-it's to mark those memorable passages and a sense of achievement on my part for having got through them all. I don't mean that in a bad way, far from it, but to have read almost 900 pages of short stories along with everything else this year I consider to be no mean feat. The man who deserves the real accolades is Cheever himself of course. I'll admit to not knowing much about him before reading these stories other than that he was a contemporary of William Maxwell and that he wrote The Swimmer. The tiny bits of biog I have picked up along the way (his alcoholism and struggles with his sexuality) have already shed a new light on many of his stories, but whilst reading them I was hoping to bring a fresh eye to 'the Chekhov of the suburbs'.

I noticed a return to some of the themes of his earlier stories initially. The malevolent power of a woman in The Music Teacher, whose eponymous villain is cast in a witch like role, exerting some kind of occult influence over the life of the narrator before meeting a violent end in the story's climax. There are several men in unhappy marriages; one beset by visions in The Chimera, as a means of finding solace from his abusive wife. Many of his stories are about change and The Seaside Houses shows brilliantly the influence of a building on its occupant as our narrator finds himself first fascinated by the traces left by the owners of a house he rents in the summer and slowly finds his character changing in line with what he has supposed about this other man.

Then there are the more experimental stories like Metamorphoses which is made up of four short tales of just that, beginning with Larry Actaeon who suffers a fate similar to his classical namesake and finishing with Mr Bradish who in his efforts to give up smoking finds himself suffering from hallucinations: the people he encounters taking on the form of various cigarettes, which is funny at first but will end with him being carted away by the police after attacking a small girl. Or A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear in which he lists those elements he wishes to eliminate from his fiction (many of which he returns to in later work): 'All scornful descriptions of American landscapes', 'All lushes' and rather hilariously 'All parts for Marlon Brando'.

He became famous as a chronicler of suburban life; the politics of society, the rounds of cocktail parties, the glances of men on station platforms. Showing, I think, the falsity of the set-up and indeed the limitations of living that life. That is why there also seem to be so many stories about change. In The Country Husband he does both at the same time. Francis Weed is brought face to face with his mortality when his plane is forced into an emergency landing. When this experience rouses no interest on his return home he finds himself contemplating that most un-suburban of things: risk-taking (but in the most suburban of ways: an encounter with the babysitter). But this is Shady Hill

'There was no turpitude, there had not been a divorce since he lived there; there had not eve been a breath of scandal. Things seemed arranged with more propriety even than in the Kingdom of Heaven'.

It is another character that articulates the limitation I mentioned earlier:

'I've thought about it a lot, and what seems to me really wrong with Shady Hill is that it doesn't have any future. So much energy is spent in perpetuating the place - in keeping out undesirables, and so forth - that the only idea of the future anyone has is just more and more commuting trains and more parties. I don't think that's healthy. I think people ought to be able to dream big dreams about the future. I think people ought to be able to dream great dreams.'

Now I grew up in the commuter belt around London and I'm still waiting to read a great short story set in Orpington!

And then we come to The Swimmer, a short story that spawned not only a feature film starring Burt Lancaster (which asked 'When you talk about the swimmer will you talk about yourself?') but a Levi's ad. All from a 10 page story. It's difficult to know what to say about such a well known story that hasn't already been said, so I'll be brief. For me the most striking thing is how the ambition of Neddy Merrill's idea of "swimming the county" comes up against the creeping reality of his situation. We are the one who becomes aware that all is not well in Neddy's life, we are the one who realises the significance of the changing weather, even the changing season, and we are the one who begins to dread that moment when he reaches home because we know what he doesn't; that it will be empty. Brilliant.

Reunion is a story which almost trumps it actually. Incredibly short, but one of those which seems perfect; no more or less than it should be, containing fantastic character and seeming to say so much. What it actually says is just enough to get your brain whirring in all sorts of directions. As a treat here's a link to a New Yorker podcast featuring Richard Ford not only discussing but also reading Cheever's story. As Ford says there; Cheever is a writer who 'somehow must be kept from slipping out our notice'.

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'when almost everybody wore a hat'

Collected Stories
by John Cheever

It's difficult to find the time to read when you have a baby so, for once, I opted for short stories as the perfect accompaniment to a bus journey into town and to give my addled brain a rest. Those lovely chaps at Crockatt and Powell (recently voted No.1 in the best book shops in The Independent) had a copy of Cheever's collected stories when I popped in a while back and I've been slowly working my way through them. At almost 900 pages with over 60 stories I thought I'd post my thoughts gradually so here's part one.

In his preface Cheever notes the embarrassment of having his immaturity documented in some of these stories. For us reading them now they're more like documents from a lost world, not so much innocent but certainly a New York from a different time entirely, with social structures and hierarchies as clearly delineated as the grid work of streets that mark it up. The photo on the cover shows a lift attendant and in a few of the early stories he uses the attendant or building superintendent as a perfect tool to show us this structure. It isn't just the difference between the attendant and those that live at the top of the building he shows but with the traffic in between floors we see the movement of those rising in the world, those holding on by their fingertips and those making the slow and shameful journey to the ground floor and out of the door onto the street. One notices the hole in the ladies gloves or the repaired rip in a dress which shows those struggling to stay up a class, living beyond their means and courting catastrophe because it is the only means of survival.

The Enormous Radio (the title story of his second collection) is a striking modern parable which is extraordinarily prescient in our age of reality TV. A man buys an expensive radio for his wife's enjoyment but she finds that as she tunes through the stations she can overhear conversations from other apartments in their block. After her initial shock she is captivated by her aural voyeurism and when her husband falls asleep that night she goes back to the living room and turns on the radio. She is comforted that her own life isn't as unhappy as the lives she tunes into but the next day it isn't conversation she hears but arguments and violence and she pleads with her husband to call a man to fix it. 'Our lives aren't sordid, are they, darling...we are happy, aren't we?', she asks and her husband reassures her. The expensive radio repair causes him to argue with her the next day and in this short outburst he vents every secret of their life together making them just another shocking instalment in the drama of real life.

Cheever creates unease very well. In The Cure, where a man attempts to 'cure' himself of his failing marriage, he is haunted by a presence outside his house which causes him to lose sleep. He doesn't know who it is or what they hope to see but when a friend says that she can see a rope around his neck he realises that this presence is waiting to watch him hang himself. It is the impetus he needs to make things right with his wife. In Torch Song Cheever creates the ultimate femme fatale in Joan Harris, known as the Widow ('she always wore black, and he was always given the feeling, by a curious disorder in her apartment, that the undertakers had just left'), who passes in and out of the life of our narrator Jack. It is only years later when he is very ill himself and she comes to see him, to care for him, that he sees that she is almost death's attendant; the men in her life have all passed away and now she has come for him. He sends her away 'There are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful years ahead of me, and when they're over, when it's time, then I'll call you...and give you whatever dirty pleasure you take in watching the dying, but until then, you and your ugly misshapen forms will leave me alone.'

The Pig That Fell Into The Well is a story about a story. It entices you in with one of those perfect Chekhovian lines:

'In the summer, when the Nudd family gathered at Whitebeach Camp, in the Adirondacks, there was always a night when one of them would ask, 'Remember the day when the pig fell into the well?'

This is the story that keeps the Nudd family together. In the same way that they convene each year in the same place, they need a touchstone to remind them who they are. What Cheever shows so brilliantly is the elasticity of the story. It can, and indeed must, be told differently each time, just small changes but necessary to even out the imbalances in the family. Somebodies role may become larger one year or their virtues exaggerated because they need encouragement. And what the story really helps to preserve of course is the Nudd's picture of themselves, the myth of their perfect summers. And whilst they laugh away at themselves they can ignore their failures and lack of achievement.

Those are a few of the stories that have stood out in the first 400 pages but they are remarkably consistent in their strength. He may well have been embarrassed about his early work when looking back, as we all are, but that says more in favour of what he went on to achieve rather than any deficiencies in his first forays in storytelling. Bring on the next 500 pages.

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