As many of the most staid-seeming of
[Johnson] was a traveler, familiar with the miseries of loneliness, with the violence of its sexuality, with its half-conscious imagery of highways and thruways like the projections of a bewildered spirit; with that forlorn and venereal limbo that must have flowed over the world before the invention of Venus, unknown to good and evil, ruled by pain.
So we know that Cheever writes beautifully and with as much lust for words and life as anyone this country has yet produced (I said it, you didn’t). But he’s also funny. I’ll leave you with one of the funniest lines written in our language, and it’s all the funnier for when it was written, in the darkest shadow of possible atomic Armageddon. It occurs in a passage about Coverly’s boss, Dr. Cameron, a nuclear scientist and the director of a massive government research center, who stands in as a sort of passive, crazed God-among-us. He is at once brilliant, broken, and powerful enough to destroy the world many times over. (This book is very much a Cold War book – confused and terrified by atomic energy, by knowing so little about it, its makers, its wielders.) Cameron is a widower and has a mistress he visits in Rome; he flies there as often as he can. He must see her in Rome because to do so in the United States would be scandalous, but – and soon we’ll get to the line in question, couched between em dashes: ‘There was a legitimate side to these trips — the Vatican wanted a missile — and a side more clandestine than his erotic sport.’
Anyway. I thought it was funny. Please read this book.
The snow began to fall into St. Botolphs at four-fifteen on Christmas Eve. Old Mr. Jowett, the stationmaster, carried his lantern out onto the platform and held it up into the air. The snowflakes shone like iron filings in the beam of his light, although there was really nothing there to touch. The fall of snow exhilarated and refreshed him and drew him—full-souled, it seemed—out of his carapace of worry and indigestion. The afternoon train was already an hour late, and the snow (whose whiteness seems to be a part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere) came down with such open-handed velocity, such swiftness, that it looked as if the village had severed itself from its context on the planet and were pressing its roofs and steeples up into the air. The remains of a box kite hung from the telephone wires overhead—a reminder of the year’s versatility. “Oh, who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?” Mr. Jowett sang loudly, although he knew that it was all wrong for the season, the day and dignity of a station agent, the steward of the town’s true and ancient boundary, its Gate of Hercules.
