#1,005: A Critical Insight from John Cheever

John Cheever: the "Chekhov of the Suburbs"

Vice President Kamala Harris and FPOTUS IT will be far away from the public eye for the next 36 hours. Instead, they will be spending their time huddled with their closest debate advisors, putting the final facts and strategic flourishes in place for Tuesday’s first - and perhaps only - nationally televised face-to-face rhetorical joust hosted by ABC News. The bell will ring at precisely 9:00 PM. EDT. After much behind closed doors sturm und drang, the debate rules will be the same as when IT and President Biden debated on CNN back on June 27: an empty hall, mics which are automatically muted at the end of each candidate’s allotted time; Democrat on audience right, Republican on audience left.

It is a fool’s errand to bet heavily on whether IT or Kamala Harris is going to win. From the point of emotion and innate political bias, I of course believe Harris has all the tools to force IT to look and sound less stable than an inmate of the Asylum of Charenton (think of the notorious provocateur the Marquis de Sade). In order for her to win, she must call out every one of ITs lies, be both brief and succinct on policy proposals, and leave him to do what he normally does best (which is, of course, worst) . . . rant, rave and call names.

The V.P. seems to have more room for growth than Trump. According to the New York Times’ Lisa Lerer: Twenty-eight percent of voters said they feel like they need to learn more about her, compared to 9 percent who say the same about Trump. It’s a reminder of how even though she is vice president, she remains less defined as a candidate. From a point of adding new voters, Harris is in much better shape than IT. He has long been stuck at a maximum of 47% of the electorate: in 2016 he received 46.1% of the vote (62,984,828) to Hillary Clinton’s 48.2% (65,853,514); in 2020, although receiving 74,223,975 votes, his share of the vote only rose to 46.8%, as compared to 51.3% (81,283,501) for Joseph Biden. In other words, as he enters Tuesday’s debate, IT needs to either impress new groups of voters to support him or give a reason for heretofore Democratic voters to switch their votes. The only place where Kamala Harris currently trails IT is in the number of people who have developed some knowledge about who she is and what she stands for. The first rule of presidential elections is to gain new voters; to open wide the tent flaps in order to admit a greater array of people. From what I’ve seen over the past several weeks, this is precisely what the Harris/Walz campaign has been doing . . . and tirelessly so. By comparison, the IT/Vontz/MAGA crowd doesn’t seem to want the support of anyone who hasn’t been a member of the cult all along . How much more counterintuitive can you get?

What viewers are most likely to see this Tuesday night are the vast differences between Harris and IT in presidential style, deportment, humanity and intelligence. We will see the difference between a genuine smile and a hurtful smirk. We will also likely be witness to two utterly different portraits or visions of America. In one, we will be presented as a land of endless possibilities that has managed to grow its economy, lessen unemployment, lower major crime, take a generous bite out of inflation, grow wages and once again improve its leadership role in the world of nations . . . a country doing its best to meet its challenges by calling on the best within all of us. In the other, we will be portrayed as a defeated nation caught in the throes of economic chaos; one being overrun by the dregs of humanity who steal into our shores in order to steal away our jobs, raise our crime rate and ultimately destroy the world we once knew.

This second approach is utter civic neurosis; making victims of the masses and insisting that our enemies are everywhere. It afflicts not only the politics that come from one side of the aisle; it has infiltrated and become endemic in a wide swath of society. IT and the MAGA maniacs are consistently “discovering” the “flaws,” “evil inconsistencies’ and “less-than-human weaknesses” of virtually everyone who is not loyal to their cause, who does not look like, act like or agree with the “true believers.” They simply refuse to see goodness in others . . .

Which brings us to the late writer John Cheever (1912-1982), often called the “Chekhov of the Suburbs. One of the best and most entertainingly literate of all 20th-century American novelists and short story writers, Cheever’s WASPY fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages, and based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born. And although his world and his characters are pretty much foreign to this Jewish Hollywood Brat, I have always found great universal wisdom and understanding in his entire oeuvre.

In one of Cheever’s best short stories, “The Worm in the Apple,” the narrator fixates on the seemingly perfect Crutchman family. The narrator suspects they must have flaws beneath their idyllic suburban existence, represented by the hidden ‘worm’ in the apple. The story satirizes the portrayal of perfection in American life, particularly in the 1950s, that golden period of American expansion and confidence.

(BTW: Por those who do not wish to read the entire story [approximately 750 words] I have recorded a version which you may listen to below)

The story’s opening paragraph sets the stage:

The Crutchmans were so very, very happy and so temperate in all their habits and so pleased with everything that came their way that one was bound to suspect a worm in their rosy apple and that the extraordinary rosiness of the fruit was only meant to conceal the gravity and the depth of the infection. Their house, for instance, on Hill Street with all those big glass windows. Who but someone suffering from a guilt complex would want so much light to pour into their rooms? And all the wall-to-wall carpeting as if an inch of bare floor (there was none) would touch on some deep memory of unrequition and loneliness. And there was a certain necrophilic ardor to their gardening. Why be so intense about digging holes and planting seeds and watching them come up? Why this morbid concern with the earth? She was a pretty woman with that striking pallor you so often find in maniacs. Larry was a big man who used to garden without a shirt, which may have shown a tendency to infantile exhibitionism.

The setting, as often in a John Cheever story, is well-heeled American suburbia: the neighborhood is called, suggestively, Shady Hill. The narrator discusses the Crutchmans, a ‘very, very happy’ American family comprised of husband and wife Larry and Helen and their two children, Rachel and Tom. Through the course of the short narrative, the narrator dissects the Crutchmans’ meticulously decorated home, their expensive car, and their seemingly harmonious family life. Each detail is scrutinised carefully in the hope of finding ‘the worm in the apple’: the one corrupt flaw in the family’s otherwise happy life.

For example, the narrator wonders if the fact that Helen, the wife, is far richer than her husband is a cause of resentment for Larry, who could easily lose his sense of purpose when he is not the breadwinner of the family. But the narrator admits that no proof of such resentment can be found. The narrator also combs over other details of the family’s life: does the husband have a drink problem, or are there issues with their children? But every line of enquiry yields a dead end.

As the narrative progresses, the narrator’s attempts to uncover this ‘worm in the apple’, this hidden darkness in the Crutchman family, becomes increasingly desperate. In the end, the narrative voice shifts from the present tense to the future imperfect: he imagines whole futures for the two children, which contain unsavory or unhappy elements.

The story ends with the narrator confessing that the Crutchman family continues to live happily, with no indication of any worm in the apple of in their lives or their relationships. Despite the narrator’s intense scrutiny, the Crutchmans remain an enigma, leaving the reader to ponder the nature of appearances, hidden truths, and the human desire to find flaws in others.

Without question, Cheever provides a critical insight - both for his own time (the story was first published in 1958) - and, perhaps, even more so for ours. For today today, there is so much societal insecurity and civic neurosis that many people are intent upon finding flaws (both potentially fatal and decidedly human) in neighbors, leaders and just plain folks. While this intention doesn’t provide a whit of cure for whatever it is that ails us, it does seem to lower the social, academic or political playing field by enveloping us in the knowledge that nobody’s perfect . . . something we should have known all along. If you want to view human imperfection, look into your own mirror.

What Cheever chose to get across through both irony and satire is a kernel of knowledge that can be of great use in our present time of collective ennui: that most people are shaped as much by their achievements and good intentions as they are by their frailties and failures.

I fully expect IT to be overwhelmingly guided during tomorrow night’s debate by the latter: turning the Vice President’s every human flaw, inconsistency or misstep into the embodiment of evil . . . all the while putting on display for the ten thousandth time the fact that he is a thoroughly damaged, deraigned soul who should be kept as far away from the seat of power as a rabid dog from a playground filled with children.

Like Cheever’s narrator who is initially fixated on finding the worm in the apple of the Crutchman family, far too many are entranced by “discovering” the worst in those who seek to lead, uplift or inspire. Let IT go on and on about the sins, flaws and failings of all those who dare to disagree with him; those who refuse to see in him either the messiah or the ultimate victim. It goes without saying that he is neither; to be either one or the other or both, he would have to be delusional.

As we watch tomorrow night’s debate, let’s keep our feet up, cuppa tea at the ready and John Cheever’s narrator in our frontal lobes. . . .our emotional and behavioral control center.