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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
John Cheever's first novel may seem like a family saga set in a fishing village -- but it's really all about male hysteria and rage.
Jun 27, 2005 | I don't know how my airplane ticket ended up in the toilet, but that's where I found it, after a frantic 10-minute search of a ladies' room in Chicago's O'Hare airport. The fact that I was 90 percent confident I hadn't even been in the particular stall could only be interpreted as further evidence of how "The Wapshot Chronicle" was confusing and disorienting -- and also annoying -- me. I was drying my ticket underneath the automatic hand drier (the stares of the other bathroom visitors indicating they had never seen someone drying an airplane ticket before), as my name was repeatedly paged. I picked up my coffee cup and bags, and ran. At the gate, my sodden ticket created a great deal of confusion; a supervisor was called, and I was grilled: "And your ticket is wet because why?" I went with "sink" rather than "toilet," and was finally allowed to board. I stepped onto the plane right foot first -- an old superstitious habit. I'm only superstitious when I'm flying.
Perhaps there were more exciting and picturesque (and more sanitary) settings for my reading of, and stewing about, "The Wapshot Chronicle" -- including my apartment, and a wonderful French cafe on my street in the West Village (where I have a bit of a reputation as an almond croissant connoisseur), and a Midwestern college bar that I essentially didn't leave for two days (it had a dozen Belgian beers on tap -- and they kept carding me, so I loved them), and poolside at a Los Angeles hotel, where the guy in the chair next to me (who looked as if he'd spent decades of his life on that very lounge chair, and who reminded me of a ridiculous guy in college my friends and I nicknamed "Mr. Tan Man") literally snapped his fingers at the waiter and barked, "Come back here, baby. Baby ... baby! I'm not done with you yet."
But this particular Boeing 747 happened, unfortunately, to be where my thoughts about Cheever's often boring, often spectacular first novel started coming together, and apart. I suppose I hadn't read "The Wapshot Chronicle" for much the same reason I haven't read "Moby-Dick" -- it seemed too nautical. At the center of "Wapshot" were, I knew, a hoary old captain and a big boat of mythical stature. And would there be knots? Yes, there would also probably be knots, many different kinds. Add a few paragraphs about anchors and compasses, and I'll never need another Ambien hit ever again. Cheever was all about his short stories, which I'll admit I'd come to fairly late, just -- ahem -- within the last several years. I probably read "The Swimmer" and "The Enormous Radio" at some point in college, because everyone reads "The Swimmer" and "The Enormous Radio" in college, but, if I did, I didn't remember them (my guess is I was probably busy that day composing and passing bratty notes to friends in class, or maybe I had my headphones on, as happened occasionally).
In school, I had a lot of punky and very uninformed opinions about Cheever, starting with an immature bias against anything I, in my exotic, black-wearing ways, deemed preppy and of a canvas tote bag quaintness, and ending with another personal prejudice (and I'm still susceptible to this one) against any kind of quiet, commercially "fine" literature that receives the critical thumbs up. I was both wrong and right about "The Wapshot Chronicle" -- much of it, particularly the beginning, is dreadfully boring and, to me, being boring is the absolute worst sin. And while I did fall asleep by the pool in L.A. as I was trying to get through one of "Wapshot's" several trout-fishing sections (I woke up with a monster headache), it is also a structurally and stylistically risky book, often shockingly obscene, often funny, and often really, truly insanely angry. If Cheever's best short stories are masterworks of omission and indirection, "The Wapshot Chronicle," the uncharacteristic winner of a National Book Award for fiction (the committee in 1958 was actually giving him a belated award for his stories, right?), is a maximalist project, a mad, breathless, digression-filled spectacle. It's also a fascinating performance, because you get to see the master short story writer teaching himself how to write a novel. In bald summary, "The Wapshot Chronicle" is the family saga of several generations of Wapshots of the fishing village of St. Botolphs. But it's really about male hysteria and rage.
These were roughly my thoughts when I gingerly set my damp boarding pass, my paperback copy of "The Wapshot Chronicle," and my coffee, size venti, onto my aisle seat. I was stuffing my very heavy bags (I'm a legendary over-packer) into the overhead compartment, when I noted how precarious the situation on my seat appeared, and had a vague thought about how much it would suck if I somehow were to spill my coffee. Which, of course, I did, about 30 seconds later -- all over my pants, my then-trashed boarding pass, and my "Wapshot Chronicle." I'm always looking for symbols and signs before my plane takes off, and, so far, these two -- the ticket in the toilet and the spilled coffee -- didn't seem like two promising ones. Water and, by extension (so thought my superstitious brain), watery fiascoes seemed to be the theme of the day, both mine and the "Wapshot's."
The patriarch of the Wapshot clan is old Leander, the retired fishing captain. In the years since Leander's two sons, Moses and Coverly, left St. Botolphs, he has kept himself busy by composing his autobiography -- which is written in his journal in poetic, choppy maxims -- and by obsessively writing letters to his boys. A line from one of his late letters: "In locker room, asked self: Was pederast?" Leander, who has some of the heaviest lines and passages in the book, is a sexually troubled and emasculated figure -- his beloved boat, the S.S. Topaze, and the farm where he and his wife, Sarah, live, are both owned by his imperious Cousin Honora. A true sui-generis female character, Cousin Honora -- aka the Wonderful Honora, the Splendid Honora and the Grand Honora Wapshot -- is the controller of the Wapshot purse strings and is the novel's emotional heart. Volumes could be written about her. Her only romantic attachment was apparently decades ago, with a mystery man of European extraction, "whose titles and castles turned out to be air." She is imperious and haughty -- adjectives that can be applied to all the female characters in the novel, in fact -- and her sense of self is so strong that the refrain, "I am Honora Wapshot. I am Honora Wapshot," is all that's required to convince her that the nighttime spooks she so fears have been scared away. Honora finds a medical vocabulary indelicate and ungracious and therefore pronounces, for example, "testicles" "testimumblemumbles," and, in one of my favorite scenes, when she offers poor Leander a plate of ant-covered cookies and he points out the ants to her, she snaps (how marvelously indignant Honora is!), "That's ridiculous ... I know you have ants at the farm, but I have never had ants in this house," and eats a cookie, and several ants.
