Traveling Music
John Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal
by Ed Minus
Though unlikely to be dubbed “experimental,” John Cheever’s novel The Wapshot Scandal is not altogether traditional either. “Free-wheeling” is the word that comes to mind. For in the course of its two-hundred page year, six of the seven main characters are pretty constantly on the move: the scene shifts several dozen times, and no more than three chapters in succession (scarcely more than ten pages at a stretch) have the same setting. Within the first five chapters we are introduced to the three main (fictional) settings; St. Botolphs, a village not far from Boston; Talifer, a Mid-Western site for Missile Research & Development; and Proxmire Manor, a Westchester-like suburb (and, on the wrong side of the tracks from Proxmire Manor: Parthenia). As the story picks up steam, we not only bounce back and forth among those three places but also find ourselves in (among other locations) New York, Nantucket, Rome, a Colorado ski resort, Atlantic City, the Vatican, Washington, Boston, Toledo, Naples, and Ladros And, inevitably, we are often in transit: waiting at train stations, dockside in New York harbor, stranded at various international terminals.
The novel does not, I think, feel as frenetic as these lists may suggest – and to Cheever’s credit it never takes on the tone of a travelogue. It is, however, undeniably restive. Not even Besey Wapshot, the one major character who stays put for most of the book, is happy where she is. Honora Wapshot is happy in the village she has lived in for seven decades, but she is forced to flee not only St. Botolphs but, indeed, her native land. We assume that her cousins Moses and Coverly first left St. Botolphs when they went away to school, after which their careers deposited them in places somewhat similar to each other but distressingly different from their New England hometown. Moses’ wife, Melissa, is probably a native Northeasterner; but Coverly’s wife, Betsey, came from “the Georgia badlands.” Dr. Cameron, director of the missile site where Coverly works, is driven hither and yon by a consuming lust for power, flesh, and forgetfulness. Nineteen-year-old Emile, who has seldom been beyond the confines of Parthenia at the beginning of the novel, ends up traveling halfway around the world and living (in sin) in Rome with Melissa. And at the very end of the book the narrator himself, presumably another native of St. Boltophs, tells us that he will never come back.
What then are we to make of all this? All this motion. All this harried globe-trotting. What Cheever makes of it, I would contend, is an extraordinarily entertaining, multi-faceted story, whose highly episodic structure intensifies its central themes. Structurally speaking, the novel is fragmented – just like the Wapshot family, just like the lives of most of the main characters. (A relevant irony is that many of the minor characters whose lives may seem to be more of a piece are crude and shallow.) “Most of us,” the narrator reminds us midway through the book, “travel to improve on the knowledge we have of ourselves.” Undeniably, there is an element of quest about some of the journeys in The Wapshot Scandal; but there is just as often an element of flight. (There is the recurrent suggestion throughout the novel that what most of us are fleeing from all too heedlessly is the past.) And so it’s hard to feel, on balance, that more has been gained than lost by Cheever’s wanderers. Indeed, a sense of loss pervades the novel. But so does an unmistakable hopefulness. And if the novel’s structure contributes, with considerable effect, to our impression of confused and shattered lives, it is Cheever’s sensibility, manifested in his style, which serves as a constant reminder that the world is still worth savoring and celebrating.
Cheever’s distinctive voice is more easily admired than analyzed, but there are recognizable patterns in the style, just as there are in other aspects of the book. Though his point of view may seem to be handled somewhat casually, that casualness is almost certainly calculated. Most of the novel is told by an invisible and omniscient narrator; but at the beginning and the end an old schoolmate of Coverly and Moses speaks to us in first person; and there are a couple of wonderful passages where it would seem to be the author himself who addresses us directly, imperatively, and engagingly:
“Spread them out on some ungiven summer evening on the lawn between their house and the banks of the West River in the fine hour before dinner.
“…regard this lovely woman then, getting off the train in Proxmire Manor. See what she does. See what happens to her.”
As those sentences suggest, Cheever’s attention to the ordinary is remarkably careful. By the same token, even as the ordinary is valued, the banal is exposed and dismissed: underpants printed with poker hands and dice, machines for vending sacred medals, Cimarron: Rose of the South West. And it happens on occasion that even the most inconsequential items take on unexpected power and significance: the burnt match in Norman Johnson’s greasy soup, the crimson feathers on the arrow that almost kills Coverly, the scar in the hair on Emile’s belly, Honora’s curling iron. Nor is it, with Cheever, simply a matter of an eye for the telling details; it is a question of intelligence, of insight and understanding:
“…the extraordinary density of a family gathered at a kitchen table on a dark winter morning.”
“…here was a lonely man, familiar with blisters and indigestion, whose humble motives in inventing a detonative force that could despoil the world were the same as the child actress, the eccentric inventor, the small-town politician.”
Just a the novel’s shifting structure allows for various contrasts, Cheever’s most typical stylistic design juxtaposes disparate elements: the abstract and the concrete, the cosmic and the domestic, the scientific and the secular, spirit and flesh:
“There was a deep octave of thunder, magnificent and homely, as if someone in heaven had moved a chest of drawers. Then there was some lightning, distant and discolored, and a moment later a shower of rain dressed the earth.”
It would be possible, of course, to keep strolling through this antic novel, pointing out its pleasures, for quite some time – but those pleasures are much more splendid in vivo. As in the best of Cheever’s short stories (and there are many), the characters here are fully alive – and more complex than they may seem at first. The situations range from the tranquil to the farcical, from the erotic to the repellent. There are frequent, surprising, breathtakingly skillful modulations of tone. The style is lucid, passionate, eloquent, full-bodied. And in this novel – more impressively than in any of the stories of other novels – structure and style combine to give us a vivid sense of the texture of lived experience. A sense unmatched by the work of most of Cheever’s contemporaries.
Void Magazine 