THE METAMORPHOSES OF JOHN CHEEVER

For all the tweed, gin, and torn commuter tickets in the stuff of John Cheever's fiction, his stories carry the ancient authority of a faith that good and evil are not merely words, that grace rewards with joy on earth those who obey the gods, and that a Miltonic "chaos and old night" full of vengeful demons awaits the defiant and unruly. He has a long view in which:

> The magic of the imagination redeems life: "Art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency and we despise death, but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale's cage." > A drunken Episcopal priest who has forgotten his liturgy may utter a valid prayer: "Let us pray for all those killed or cruelly wounded on thruways, expressways, freeways, and turnpikes. Let us pray for all those burned to death in faulty plane landings, mid-air collisions and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all those wounded by rotary lawn mowers, chain saws, electric hedge clippers and other power tools. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the days that the Lord hath made in ounces, pints and fifths."

> Common life is a blessed thing: "I took the regular train home, looking out of the window at a peaceable landscape and a spring evening, and it seemed to me that fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sand-lot ballplayers and lovers unashamed of their sport and owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world that were made by men like me." > Moral deformity carries its own stigmata: "He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities."

> Many of the dead are still living: "Emile's mother was one of those widows who keep themselves in a continuous state of readiness for some call, some invitation, some meeting that will never take place because the lover is dead. You find them answering the telephone in the back-street cab stands of little towns, their hair freshly bleached, their nails painted, their high-arched shoes ready for dancing with someone who cannot come." > Pity is the cruel emotion: "If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists--all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone."

> Sociology is an enemy of the intelligence: "Among his friends and neighbors, there were brilliant and gifted people--he saw that--but many of them, also, were bores and fools, and he had made the mistake of listening to all of them with equal attention. He had confused a lack of discrimination with Christian love, and the confusion seemed general and destructive."

> The rootless can never be happy: "It was the kind of place where the houses stand cheek by jowl, all of them built twenty years ago, and parked beside each was a car that seemed more substantial than the house itself, as if this were a fragment of some nomadic culture. And it was a kind of spawning ground, a place for bearing and raising the young and for nothing else--for who would ever come back to Maple Dell?"

> Life itself survives its detractors: "I think of some plumber who, waked by the rain, will smile at a vision of the world in which all the drains are miraculously cleaned and free . . . I think that the rain will wake some old lady, who will wonder if she has left her copy of Dombey and Son in the garden. Her shawl? Did she cover the chairs? And I know that the sound of the rain will wake some lovers, and that its sound will seem to be a part of that force that has thrust them into one another's arms. Then I sit up in bed and exclaim aloud to myself, 'Valor! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!' The words seem to have the colors of the earth, and as I recite them I feel my hopefulness mount until I am contented and at peace with the night."

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