Cheever the Transcendentalist

Despite my admiration for John Cheever and Henry David Thoreau, it never occurred to me that they had much in common. The suburban family man and master of the short story, with his alcoholism and his turbulent bisexual affairs, didn’t much resemble the ascetic New England seeker of the truth who never married and (as far as I can tell) had no sex life at all. Yet Charles McGrath’s long reconsideration of Cheever in the Sunday Times draws one parallel (and reminds me that Cheever and Thoreau both kept voluminous journals—and both loved to skate).

The journals sometimes record moments of almost ecstatic joy, often occasioned by physical activity or the natural world: a rain shower, an afternoon of skating or scything (he was inordinately proud of his scything), the glint of the afternoon sun. Cheever was at heart a Transcendentalist who saw in nature a kind of numinousness: “The sky is mixed, but there is some blue, and the motion of skating, and the lightness and coldness of the air involve quite clearly for me a beauty—a moral beauty. By this I mean that it corrects the measure and nature of my thinking. Space, perhaps, is what I mean, but there is the moral beauty of light, velocity and environment.”