Odd Jobs (21 page)

T
HE SUDDEN DEATH
of Italo Calvino, scarcely into his sixties, deprives the world of one of its few master artists, a constantly inventive and experimental writer who nevertheless brought to his work a traditional elegance, polish, and completeness of design. Twenty years ago, he was little known in the United States; it was John Barth, himself an avant-garde writer with a strong admixture of aesthetic conservatism, who first mentioned him to me, as someone urged upon him by his own writing students. These students had met him, primarily, in the science fiction of
Cosmicomics
and
t zero
. I began to read Calvino, with admiration and delight, and had the pleasure of reviewing at length his beautiful
Invisible Cities
. What struck me, along with the rigor of the book’s intricate scheme and the inventiveness that filled out the scheme with a dazzling plenitude, was the tenderness of the civic concern that showed in his fantasy of many cities. The modern writer has often taken a mordant and hostile attitude toward human institutions; Calvino by contrast was a respectful sociologist, an amused and willing student of things as they are.

He was willing, in his basic reverence toward the human honeycomb, to submerge himself for years in his massive anthology,
Italian Folktales
, whose pattern of numerous interwoven tales influenced the form of
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
and, to a lesser extent, that of
If on a winter’s night a traveler
. Plurality became the method of his fiction, most recently reflected in the twenty-seven symmetrical facets of
Mr. Palomar
. His taste for complex patterns of little tales perhaps prevented his acceptance by that large public which likes the long and involving sweep of the novel, and which took Umberto Eco’s
Name of the Rose
to its bosom. But nevertheless, within the last twenty years, Calvino had become at
least in American academic circles the best-known living Italian writer, whose name, along with those of Nabokov and Borges and Günter Grass, figured in the inventories of any who tried to compile the “postmodernist” masters. Calvino was an artist in whom the intellectual and revolutionary passions of the modernists had been transmuted to a marvellously knowing if relatively detached meditation upon the oddities and bemusements of the postwar world. Born in Cuba of agronomist parents, Calvino grew up in San Remo and fought with the Italian partisans as a young man. His war stories, written in the late Forties and available in English in
Difficult Loves
, are like little else he wrote, in that the material outweighs, in interest, the form. His first novel,
The Path to the Spiders’ Nest
, deals, from a boy’s point of view, with the same material. Calvino began his literary career as a member of the Communist Party and of the neorealist movement, but by the Fifties had withdrawn from both and worked, as he would for the rest of his life, as an editor for the Turin publishing house of Einaudi. A state of philosophical suspension and political coexistence seems to be declared in his good-humored, exquisitely imagined fables. Speaking at Columbia University in New York a few years ago, he described the Italian writer’s need for elaborate schemata as a way of coping with the quicksand upon which he stands. Certainly no fiction writer of his time perpetrated designs more elaborate, more rigorous in their geometry.

With all due homage to the insights and harmonies of his later work, the trilogy of early fanciful novels with parallel titles remains in my mind as perhaps the liveliest and blithest items of his production. All three begin with premises that seem impossible: a knight who is nonexistent, an empty suit of armor; a viscount who is half a man, with one eye, arm, and leg; and a baron who decides to live among the trees, vowing never to set foot on the ground. Calvino’s inexhaustible fancy and his great literary tact breathe life into these grotesques, and use them not only to illustrate metaphysical and psychological ideas but to illumine various historical epochs. The learning behind his flights of fancy was always solid and extensive; his make-believe was spun from the real straw of scholarship. Of the three novels, the most extended and the most charming is
The Baron in the Trees
, which serves as a metaphor for the Enlightenment and for the life of the mind. Moving from limb to limb like a bird, concocting for himself many ingenious arboreal amenities, Cosimo avoids the earth even in death, when the dying old man sails skyward in
a balloon. Calvino, too, seemed to live well off the ground—though of course the trees he so agilely explored were rooted in reality. The son of scientists, he is never loose or vague in his inventions, even when they have the luxuriance of tropical plants. His creative impulse, if a single one can be discerned behind an oeuvre so variously antic, so tirelessly infused with intellectual play, was a curiosity concerning how men live with one another, in this crowded and paved-over world that they have made. His death removes from the global literary scene its most urbane star, its most civilized voice.

June 1982

I
NTRODUCING
his collected stories, John Cheever wrote:

The gusto, the abrupt poetry, the clear consciousness of which room is the maid’s room are all Cheeveresque. From somewhere—perhaps a strain of sea-yarning in his Yankee blood—he had gotten the authentic archaic storytelling temper, and one could not be with John Cheever for more than five minutes without seeing stories take shape: past embarrassments worked up with wonderful rapidity into hilarious fables, present surroundings made to pulse with sympathetic magic as he glanced around him and drawled a few startlingly concentrated words in that mannerly, rapid voice of his. He thought fast, saw everything in bright, true colors, and was the arena of a constant tussle between the bubbling
joie de vivre
of the healthy sensitive man and the deep melancholy peculiar
to American Protestant males. He wrote, in
Bullet Park
, of a hero pursued by a
cafard
—“the blues” would be a translation—and he kept a little ahead of his own by means of beautiful sprints of art. His face always looked reddened and polished, as if by a brisk wind, though his hair was perfectly combed and his necktie tightly knotted. His characters cry out for the old-fashioned virtues—“Valor! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!”—while living lives exemplary in their modern muddle of emotional greed and misplaced aspiration. “Truly nostalgic for love and happiness” is how he described his generation. Though he was as alertly appreciative of contemporary details as any writer—his last novel breaks into a paean to supermarkets—he was born and bred on Boston’s South Shore, a pleasant, long-settled stretch that, like much of Massachusetts, has kept a visible residue of earlier centuries. From its steepled, shingled, sandy landscape Cheever distilled the lovely town of St. Botolphs in the two Wapshot novels, and it was there, in the First Parish Cemetery of Norwell, with its grassy hillocks and overarching trees, that he was laid to rest, alongside the traditional slate tombstones of his parents.

He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been. Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams; no one else satirized with such tenderness its manifold distinctions of class and style, or felt with such poignance the weary commuter’s nightly tumble back into the arms of his family. He made of the suburbs another episode in the continuing New World epic of Man’s encounter with Nature. Natural grandeur and human ignominy and dissatisfaction mingle in the haze from the cookout grill:

Thus spoke Johnny Hake, in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” before telling the reader how his quest for the good life led him to crime and
repentance. It took an effortlessly moral nature to imagine fall and redemption in that realm of soft lawns and comfortable homes; Cheever’s sense of the human adventure lay squarely in the oldest American vein. Like Hawthorne’s, his characters are moral embodiments, rimmed in a flickering firelight of fantasy. Like Whitman, he sang the common man, the citizen average in his sensuality, restlessness, lovingness, and desperation. A suburban man infatuated with his babysitter should make a sad and squalid story, but in “The Country Husband” the story ends with a glad shout of kings in golden mail riding their elephants over the mountains.

November 1982

H
E WAS
a courteous fidgety man with a rapid laugh that ended in a blend of hum, snort, and sigh, as jazz singers used to end a chorus with “Oh, yeass.” He was wonderfully quick—quick in apprehension, quick to find the words he wanted, quick to move on. The prose reflected the man, except that what in the man sometimes seemed impatience was in the prose all golden speed and directness. In his first short story, written when he was seventeen and published in
The New Republic
, he wrote: “In the spring I was glad to leave school. Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.” The mature Cheever is already here, in these definite declarative rhythms, the unexpected but
echt
adjectives, the love of the outdoors. He loved air and light and smells and weather and flesh; he had, like his character Moses Wapshot, “a taste for the grain and hair of life.” If his novels and even some of his longer short stories surprise us with the directions they take, and lose thereby something of momentum, blame his very acuity and ardor, which were excited by any scent and found the heart’s prey trembling in every patch of experience. He was of an ever-rarer breed, a celebrant.

His life, which began in late May of 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts, followed a classic tripartite pattern: the provincial, sheltered home territory (Boston’s South Shore); the years of adult initiation in the big city
(New York, from the early 1930s to 1950, with time out for war); and eventual settlement in suburbia (Westchester County and, from 1956 on, Ossining, in an eighteenth-century Dutch farmhouse). The major decision of his young life would seem to have been leaving New England and the company of his brother, Frederick, who was almost seven years older; versions of the break figure in his early short story “The Brothers” (1935) and in that splendid monument to his youth
The Wapshot Chronicle
(1957). By quitting the sleepy tidal land where his ancestors presided, Cheever created for himself a changeless paradise, to whose skating pond and steepled village profile his imagination recurred in his last extended work, a valedictory novelette disjointed by the pain in which it was composed but overall as luminous and rapt as its title,
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
.

Inherited Yankee notions of virtue and rectitude gave edge and shadow to the Manhattan short stories of which “The Enormous Radio” is the best known. At the age of twenty-two Cheever had become a contributor to the also youthful
New Yorker
. For three decades his short stories stood out, in that crowded display case, in a heyday of the genre, as the most trenchant, being at the same time strikingly lyrical, frequently comic, and overtly tender. He was a fine observer and, better yet, a brave inventor. He became typecast as a laureate of the comfortable suburbs, but in truth Shady Hill and Bullet Park were as much states of a religious mind as paradisaical St. Botolphs, the site of the Wapshot tales. His suburbs were anything but comfortable: vastly uneasy, rather, and citadels of disappointment, vain longing, disguised poverty, class cruelty, graceless aging, and crimes ranging from adultery and theft to murder. He sniffed out corruption with the nose of a Cotton Mather or a Hawthorne. The Puritan admonition to look into the darkness of our hearts was not lost on him. Though a great evoker of lust, he does not show it as a simple force, or love as an unmixed blessing; Rosalie, the nymph who brings sex into St. Botolphs, grows “weary of trying to separate the power of loneliness from the power of love” and, looking at a lover, sees that “Lechery sat like worry on his thin face.” When Rosalie is spied naked, Moses Wapshot, the spier, feels “shamefaced, his dream of simple pleasure replaced by some sadness, some heaviness that seemed to make his mouth taste of blood and his teeth ache.” Alcohol, another two-edged pleasure, figures on the whole benignly in Cheever’s vision of mundane happiness; yet as he aged it was eroding his life. It testifies to his strength as an artist
and to the irrepressibility of his wits that as things fell apart he was able to make of his sliding sensations such poetic and universal stories as “The Ocean” and “The Swimmer”—this last a counterpart in nightmare to “The Enormous Radio” a generation earlier.

I had known John as a reader knows a writer for some fifteen years before we met, in 1964, in Russia. He and I were both guests of the state, and his lively fancy and brave ebullience lit up those potentially glum Soviet surroundings and made our days of touring catacombs and classrooms and speaking to wary clusters of writers and students as gay as an April in Paris. Ten years later, we lived for a time on opposite ends of Boston’s Back Bay. He had almost ceased to write. He taught and, living alone on Bay State Road as a Boston University faculty member, touched what looked like bottom. Being back in New England had activated dormant devils in him; the hellish atmosphere of
Falconer
contains those strange penitential months. He performed his duties in a daze and suffered cardiac seizures that might have proved fatal. His brother, who lived on Cape Cod, called his apartment every morning to see if he was still alive. Miraculously, he was. At last, in April, John returned to New York and signed himself into a hospital to be cured of alcoholism. He never took another drink, not even in the last days, seven years later, of terminal cancer. With sober dispatch he wrote his long-deferred prison novel,
Falconer
. With even greater success he collected his short stories, in a big shiny red book that appeared under everyone’s Christmas tree. Those old
New Yorker
stories had put on weight since their first printing: they had become the imperishable record of an American moment; the glowing windows of suburban houses would never again seem so beaconlike. If Cheever did not, like Hemingway, create a life-style, he did, like Faulkner, give a style of life its definitive fictional locale.