Benjamin H. Cheever
All fiction is memoir, right? Just as all memoir is fiction. Which is why my heart sank when I first read the opening sentences of ‘The Fourth Alarm.”
“I sit in the sun drinking gin,” my father wrote. “It is ten in the morning. Sunday.”
One of John Cheever’s most passionately asserted positions was that he was not a memoirist and that fiction was not crypto-autobiography.
I saw the story in 1970. I’d just seen Daddy. He had been sitting out in the morning sun with a glass of gin. Where was the art here?
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get another glass of gin,” he writes at the end of the third paragraph, and it was far too easy to picture him getting up from the typewriter and doing just that. This despite his frequent assertion that he never wrote drunk. And this despite his certain knowledge that if he kept on drinking he would die soon. Very soon.
Was he almost dead now? Had his talent predeceased him?
The story certainly had some of the elements of memoir. Like his protagonist, my father felt neglected by his wife. A local high school teacher was playing a part in a nude review in Manhattan. Across the river in Rockland County, Garnerville’s antiquated horse-drawn pumper was supposed to have helped put out a Harverstraw fire.
* * *
And now I think I can surprise you. I never pick up my father’s work without half hoping that I will see the trick, and conclude—as some critics and editors have—that the guy is not a serious writer, just a man with fast hands and a couple of pigeons concealed in the pockets of his Brooks Brothers suit.
A serious writer is a great craftsman, of course, but he’s more than that. A serious writer is a magician, but also a priest. Every son must at some point confront his father. If you’re up against a magician, all you need to do is spot his props. A magician distracts you from the obdurate and lasting truths. A serious writer reveals them.
* * *
It happens that the writer himself was uncertain about the quality of this particular story. His biographer, Blake Bailey, reports that Daddy had sensed that “he’d lost a degree of ‘keenness’ and that his work-in-progress, “The Fourth Alarm,” was little more than an ‘anecdote.’”
“Perhaps hoping for reassurance to the contrary,” Bailey continues, “he wrote Maxwell [Bill Maxwell, his editor at The New Yorker] that he was ‘doubtful’ about the story and didn’t want to publish it under his name. (‘I don’t want to return on these terms’); Maxwell took him at his word, and rejected it.”
Daddy’s self doubt was genuine, but his modesty was often false. He spun around and sold “The Fourth Alarm” to Esquire and used it to lead off his next collection.
He liked it. And so do I. There’s magic here. And more.