The (not so) Secret Diary of John Cheever, aged like a fine wine - when he wasn't drinking it of course...

John Cheever was not just a prolific writer of short stories. From about the late thirties Cheever kept a journal, as his biographer, Blake Bailey, explains:

'At such times his main companion was his journal, where he stored the sights and sounds and smells which might prove useful as story fodder, as well as the private sorrows which he was all but incapable of sharing with the world, at least in raw form. ...the journal was primarily conceived as an exercise in professionalism; no longer a gadabout youth living off the charity of Yaddo, he couldn't afford to let saleable impressions go to waste. As Susan Cheever explained, 'He never said to himself, 'This is good material.' He didn't think that way. What you see in his journals is what he had to do instead, which is to write down everything that happened and see what rang and what didn't ring.'

What do we make of this description of a good idea, or potential story 'kernel', as something that 'rings'? How do you recognise the 'ring' in your own ideas? And what of writing down everything in a journal, in the level of detail that Cheever was in the habit of doing? Is this something that you do, or think could be useful? Or, does the idea of documenting your every waking hour on earth ring nothing but the tedium alarm for you?

John Cheever and the New Yorker

We have already talked about John Cheever's longstanding, professional relationship with the New Yorker magazine. They published over a hundred of his stories during his lifetime. Well, that special relationship continues... Anne Enright (author of The Gathering and regular fiction contributor to the New Yorker) has chosen 'The Swimmer' as a New Yorker story from the archives to read and discuss.

Follow the link below to hear Ms Enright in conversation with the New Yorker's fiction editor before and after a recitation of one of Cheever's best known short stories....

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/02/fiction-podcast-the-swimmer-1.html

Note the emphasis on the American short story of the sixties as an alternative source of sex education!

Childhood memories

I asked you to think about your earliest memory this week. Mine involves sitting, with my older brother, on a large green sofa in a big green room listening to 'Hit me with your rhythm stick' by Ian Dury and the Blockheads on the radio. 


My entire life is punctuated with musical memories as there was always music of some description on in the house and, this being the seventies (the days before 'organised activities'. The best you could hope for was the odd morning making chocolate cornflake cakes with acne ridden YTS workers at the local Playscheme during the summer holidays) any time not spent down the 'rec' was spent at home or in the garden with the radio constantly on in the background. 

One such summer I found an album called The Point by Nilsson in my parents record collection. It came with comic book style sleeve notes. I loved the story, the characters and the songs. I returned to it as an adult and remember thinking, 'Ooh, this is actually quite profound.' You see, everything in the land of Point has a point. And if you don't have a point you are banished to the Pointless Forest where Oblio (who does not have a point) is sent only to discover that everything in the pointless forest DOES actually have a point. Deep eh? 

Anyway, this particular song helps to put all manner of things in perspective. As it says, 'Now, think about your troubles.' 

Truth, existence and other states best contemplated over a glass of something clear, crisp and cold...

I posed a question... Is there a contrast between the truth of our lives and the story we tell of our existence? It strikes me now that this is a question that requires a spot of individual contextualising. For the sake of this post, the context is this: as writers, each story we tell begins, at some level, with us. It is born of us. It is indelibly linked to our experience and our concept of who we are. We are going to accept, for now, that a writer is a born storyteller, embued from first thought with the instinct to take reality and shape, contort, twist and disseminate it until it lies in broken, but more fascinating, fragments at our feet. Benevolently then, as nurturing onlookers attempt to understand what we are doing, we sidestep all confusion, carefully scoop the wreckage up and mould the pieces back together to present it as our 'story'. 

As a whole, the story is unrecognisable as its former self. It is more 'significant' than the truth, as John Cheever notes when assessing the effect of the 'rearranging (of) facts' that was an inherent part of his storytelling self. This allows us to look friends and family square in the eye and say, 'Of course it wasn't based upon you'. Take an individual piece of that same story, however, and subject it to scrutiny and the more insignificant, but truthful seed of our original existence reveals itself: still living, still able to bear more fruitful labours under the misaprehension of fiction. Perhaps, franchise fans, for that all important sequel...

Why does a writer write?

As someone who is interested in the writers that exist behind the writing and the relevance, or not, of biography and context to our understanding and appreciation of their output, 'Why does a writer write?' is an important question to ask. It is a question that, as writers, it is also interesting to ask ourselves. I would encourage you to think about this. Why do you write? What does it feel like to write?

One of the reasons that I write is to make connections between experiences and visual images in an effort to preserve the 'moment'. The following image comes from an exhibition I saw at the Museum of the City of New York. It is one of many images taken from recent trips to New York that I am using to write a collection of poems based upon my experiences of this amazing city.

The exhibition told the story of the tenure of John V. Lindsay as Mayor of New York between 1966 and 1973. It was a time of upheaval and great change in New York and Lindsay, as a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and opposer of Vietnam, played a central role in the turmoil of the times. This powerful image tells much of the story of the city during that period. Of course, as a writer inspired by the image, the challenge is to use it to tell (possibly) the same story in a different way. More on that at a later date...