470
PARTISAN REVIEW
an engineer whose marital squabbles and "lost ... sense of reality"
impel him to "decipher," for each significant moment in his life, " the
chain of contingencies that had detonated the scene," and thus to
express in miniature Cheever's own enterprise in the
Stories
at large.
So in a single strategy that combines his lyric gift for the particular
with his visionary inclination for what is abstract and paradigmatic,
Cheever focuses not on character as a thing in itself, but on what he
calls in "The Sorrows of Gin" "the literal symbols of Jife"-a familiar
object or a scene from the past-by which a particular character finds
his own relation to life concentrated in a particular image or situation.
"The Lowboy" is a prime example of how an object allows Cheever
both to evoke a world and take apart its mechanisms in a single stroke.
Like those haunting summer houses in the more familiar stories in the
volume, the old and once forgotten piece of family furniture that gives
"The Lowboy" its title raises powerful memories of childhood and
primitive rivalry in two brothers, memories deriving from a scene or
object like those of Proust's
madeleine
or like the symptoms of Freud's
hysterics. The
Stories
might even
be
arranged in terms of the "sym–
bols " or situations that locate and define the self from tale to tale-the
allure of Broadway for Evarts Malloy in "0 City of Broken Dreams";
the ancestral summer place in "Goodbye, My Brother" or "The
Summer Farmer"; the moving van that becomes an icon of humiliation
and flight in "The Scarlet Moving Van"; even a particular day in a
family's history like the one that gives "The Day the Pig Fell into the
Well" its title, and that allows a fractured and embittered collection of
relatives to reaffirm its stamina as a unit by recalling, from various
points of view, the circumstances that surrounded the decisive event.
If
there is melancholy and hesitatIon
In
Cheever's world, there is,
however, no anxiety in our recognizably modern or Jewish sense, no
struggle for self-mastery or coherence because life is already coherent as
it is. The inability of Cheever's characters to take action or even
to
feel
anxiety or rage about their circumstances is not, then, so much a moral
vision with problems as it is a vision beyond or apart from the moral as
we normally conceive it. For Cheever, culture precedes the individual
and subordinates him
to
it-makes him possible in the first place–
through the constitutive power of the "symbols" it supplies (thus
Victor and Theresa Mackenzie in "The Children," who wander from
situation to situation with no identities apart from those they can
assume by attaching themselves, for love and money alike,
to
a wealthy
family or an ailing estate). The Cheever of the
Stories
has a less
coherent nostalgia for the natural than the pastoral Cheever of the
