16/1/2007 - Personal documents - 'The Journals' by John Cheever
'When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. It is a headache, a slight case of indigestion, an infected finger; but you miss the 8:20 and arrive late at the meeting on credit extensions. The old friend that you meet for lunch suddenly exhausts your patience and in an effort to be pleasant you drink three cocktails, but by now the day has lost its form, its sense and meaning. To try and restore some purpose and beauty to it you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody's wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning that you were dead. But when you try to trace back the way you came into this abyss all you find is a grain of sand.'
In this (fifties) entry John Cheever describes in one paragraph the tone you can expect if you read one of his Collected Stories. More than qualifying a story like the above as 'depressing', it shows how much John Cheever was a truely 'emotional' writer in the non-sentimental sense of the word (I'd rather speak of a 'human' sense). Honest (Cheever only overcame his long battle with alcohol at a later stage in his life), straightforward and oh so beautiful. It made John Cheever into one of the best, most famous and most prolific short story writers of post-war America.
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