The Angel of the Bridge

Consider John Cheever's opening paragraphs from short stories he wrote in the early 1960s.

 

Mr. Pastern was far from dead

"Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement. She usually wore weeds, and a stranger watching her board a train might have guessed that Mr. Pastern was dead, but Mr. Pastern was far from dead. He was marching up and down the locker room of the Grassy Brae Golf Club shouting, 'Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let's throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who's boss.' He was brigadier of the club's locker-room light infantry, and at one time or another declared war on Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and China."

~~ from "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" in The Stories of John Cheever

chronicled in scuffed baseboards

"All my dealings are with [rental] agents, and I have never known the people from whom we have rented, but their ability to leave behind them a sense of physical and emotional presences is amazing. Our affairs are certainly not written in air and water, but they do seem to be chronicled in scuffed baseboards, odors, and tastes in furniture and paintings, and the climates we step into in these rented places are as marked as changes of weather on the beach. Sometimes there is a long hallway of benignness, a purity and clearness of feeling to which we all respond. Someone was enormously happy here, and we rent their happiness as we rent their beach and catboat."

~~ from "The Seaside Houses" in The Stories of John Cheever

the Lermontov medal

"It was an old, small, poor country church. The angel was in a chapel on the left, which the priest lighted. The image, buried in jewelry, stood in an iron cage with a padlocked door. The priest opened this and Bascomb placed his Lermontov medal at the angel's feet. Then he got to his knees and said loudly: 'God bless Walt Whitman. God bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.' The priest locked up the sacred relic and they left the church together."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

The World of Apples

"Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and one had died of delirium tremens. Bascomb had known them all, loved most of them, and had nursed two of them when they were ill, but the broad implication that he had, by choosing to write poetry, chosen to destroy himself was something he rebelled against vigorously."

~~ from "The World of Apples" in The Stories of John Cheever

Bellow's Cheever

"Will I read your book? Will I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet? I am longing to read the galleys. Since I have to go to New York this weekend, and also to Princeton to see my son Adam playing Antonio, the heavy in The Tempest, I shall get Harriet Wasserman of Russell and Volkening to obtain a set of galleys for me from Knopf. I would like to see you too, but I don't know when I will be free from this mixture of glory and horror. But I will write to you pronto about the book, which I am sure to read with the greatest pleasure."

~~ from Saul Bellow to John Cheever, November 10, 1976

Iowa Writers' Workshop

"How Iowa Flattened Literature" has been around the interwebs recently, about the CIA and the workshop, and in fine blogging fashion, I've only skimmed parts of it so far. Nevertheless here are more than ten things, mainly books and writers, I think of when free-associating about the Iowa Writers' Workshop:

1) The Stone Reader a documentary about a forgotten Iowa writer that the director determines to find

2) The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt

3) After the Workshop by John McNally

4) Fred Exley at Iowa in Pages from a Cold Island

5) drinking stories about Raymond Carver and John Cheever at Iowa

6) stories I've assigned by Bharati Mukherjee, Nam Le, and Sana Krasikov

7) John Gardner and T.C. Boyle, wildly successful, prolific novelists with PhDs from Iowa (if I'm not mistaken, Gardner was one of America's first PhDs in creative writing although this is perplexing as I've always been under the impression Iowa does not offer such a degree)

8) John Irving, one of my father's favorites

9) Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Richard Yates and other literary greats who passed through Iowa

10) my rejection in '93 or '94; in retrospect, I'm sure it was a weak application (no publications, undergrad workshops, or thorough references, and a hurried seven semesters of college; my creative writing sample was likely somewhat experimental and weird)

11) need to get to work but plan to add hyperlinks and Jesus' Son, Joy Williams, and others

12) shouldn't forget Alexander Chee

13) Henry Israeli, Philly poet and publisher of Saturnalia Press

14) Jayne Anne Phillips, kind enough to answer my questions about her "Home"

15) for posterity's sake, of course, it's worth noting that none of the writers listed above are at my level, so to speak, and particularly not in the categories of sloth, fatigue, generalized failure, and penchant for procrastination (and for all their sakes, I hope they are also weaker than me in neuroses, doubt, angst, and occasional chest pain). ps--and it goes without writing, until I do, that I'm also better at my patented process for blog of editing, publishing, and then editing again. and again. . .

*#12 once included Steve Almond, but in a local library on 6/26/14, while reading from one of his nonfiction titles, I chanced upon his insistence that he attended the MFA at UNC-Greensboro. . . no doubt, another reason Almond has felt awkward and out of place with all the other nuts.