SOURCE: "Drinking and Society in the Fiction of John Cheever," in Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 62-80.

[In the following essay Gilmore describes John Cheever's portrayal of alcoholism in his short fiction, both for comic effect and as a social critique of the upper-middle class.]

John Cheever may be the American writer who shows the most thorough and diversified familiarity with drinking in modern American society. At times the familiarity relaxes into comedy. As Cheever sketches the suburban milieu for his novel Bullet Park, he introduces the reader to the Wickwires, at first glance an unexceptionably attractive couple but for the arresting fact that "they were always falling downstairs, bumping into sharp-edged furniture and driving their cars into ditches." Their vulner-ability to accident is sufficiently explained by an intimate look at the detritus of their Monday mornings. Mr. Wickwire, badly hung over, utters a

cry of pain when he sees the empties on the shelf by the sink. They are ranged there like the gods in some pantheon of remorse. Their intent seems to be to force him to his knees and to wring from him some prayer. "Empties, oh empties, most merciful empties have mercy upon me for the sake of Jack Daniels and Seagram Distillers." Their immutable emptiness gives them a look that is cruel and censorious. Their labels—scotch, gin and bourbon—have the ferocity of Chinese demons, but he definitely has the feeling that if he tried to placate them with a genuflection they would be merciless. He drops them into a waste-basket, but this does not dispose of their force.

It is doubtful that a reader can be disturbed by the drinking problem of a man who is so wry and witty about his condition. It is even more doubtful that one would prefer the condition of a doctor, portrayed later in the same novel, who has recently joined Alcoholics Anonymous. In a trenchant parody, Cheever reveals what appears to be first-hand knowledge of two of the least attractive features of some AA parlance: its confessional banalities and the logorrhea of its evangelicalism. Not only the Wickwires' life but even a Rabelaisian abandon to drink would be more fun, at least if one may judge the latter spirit from a scene enacted in another novel by Moses Wapshot and Mrs. Wilston in a room at the Viaduct House, St. Botolphs's hotel. Both are far gone in drink. Moses, attempting to carry his rather too generously proportioned inamorata to bed, "weaved to the right, recouped his balance and weaved to the right again. Then he was going; he was going; he was gone. Thump. The whole Viaduct House reverberated to the crash and then there was an awful stillness. He lay athwart her, his cheek against the carpet. … She, still lying in a heap, was the first to speak. She spoke without anger or impatience. She smiled. 'Let's have another drink,' she said."

Although Cheever is capable of using alcohol for nothing more significant than comic shock, as when a character urinates into a sherry decanter and the rector arrives "and sipped piss," or for spinning a kind of grotesque tall tale, as when a woman turns to drunken promiscuity and then commits suicide because her appliances repeatedly break down and she has difficulty getting them repaired, he characteristically goes beyond these relatively easy achievements. Perhaps one reason for his parody of Alcoholics Anonymous in Bullet Park is his desire, conveyed in "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear," to avoid such clichés as "the alcoholic." The section of this story that deals with the stereotype is in fact an effective satire on it ("X" has a ridiculously exaggerated attack of the shakes, for example) and on its potential for sentimental exploitation. X, having been offered a fresh start in Cleveland, is returning home from a trip there. His family, meeting him at the station, is a model of propriety, support, and affection: "His pretty wife, his three children, and the two dogs have all come down to welcome Daddy." Daddy practically flows off the train. Cheever briskly aborts both the scene and the section at this point. It is perhaps not so much that Cheever objects to sentimentality (he himself is guilty of it on occasion—for instance, in the death of the boy in "An Educated American Woman") as that he objects to the simplicity that enables it. The drunk or alcoholic as such, stripped of every other trait, is neither interesting nor instructive in "the way we live."

When Cheever resorts to stereotyped drinkers, it is usually for some extremely short vignette or some transitory effect. The bibulous Irish maid Nora Quinn, in "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well," briefly parallels the action of the title by tumbling down a flight of stairs. But "The Sorrows of Gin," centering in part on another Irish servant, Rosemary, is complicated by irony and by shifting, largely unreliable perspectives on drinking. We see many of the events and persons through the eyes of a fourth-grade girl, Amy Lawton, who, after looking in on her parents' cocktail party near the beginning of the story, listens at length to their new cook, Rosemary. Unlike her fellow servant and sister, who was repeatedly dismissed from positions for drinking and who died in Bellevue Hospital, Rosemary implicitly eschews alcohol and professes to find her strength in the Bible. About the drinking of Amy's parents she is contradictory: after calling it "all sociable," she counsels Amy quite vehemently to empty her father's "gin bottle into the sink now and then—the filthy stuff!" One irony is that this seemingly respectable domestic, on her first day off, returns from New York totally intoxicated, her coat "spotted with mud and ripped in the back." When Mr. Lawton reprimands her for drinking in front of Amy, Rosemary cries, "I'm lonely.… I'm lonely, and I'm afraid, and it's all I've got." Evidently the Bible has deserted her. She is discharged at once, and as a result of this object lesson in the ravages of alcohol, Amy pours one of her father's gin bottles down the sink. This act leads the very next day to the discharge of a second newly hired cook, Amy's father angrily assuming that she has drunk the gin and meanwhile inveighing against various other servants who have consumed his liquor. Just as he reduces these people to stereotypes, so, in another irony, his daughter reduces him to the level of Rosemary and pours out still more of his gin. This loss produces a third perspective on the father's drinking, one that seems to bear some resemblance to Amy's and Rosemary's. Having discovered another empty bottle, Mr. Lawton accuses the babysitter, Mrs. Henlein, a member of the suburb's decayed gentility. Her reaction is not only to denounce him as drunk but also to telephone the police with the same disclosure, vociferously urging them to arrest him.

Partly because of the unreliable perspectives, the realities of the Lawtons' drinking are not easy to determine. If the advice of Rosemary and the hysteria of Mrs. Henlein are obviously based on exaggeration, there appears to be an element of truth in their—and Amy's—view of the parents. But even Amy's view is not consistent: when not aroused by fears traceable to Rosemary, she seems able to achieve a degree of objectivity. Although Amy detects several changes that alcohol works in her father, most notably a happier mood, she firmly denies to herself any similarity between him and the drunks she has heard about, people who hang on lampposts or fall down. But then she recalls occasions when her father missed a doorway by a foot and once when a cocktail guest, Mrs. Farquarson, missed a chair she went to sit in. Amy concludes that the main difference between clownish drunks and her parents and their friends is that "they were never indecorous." When the other guests and Amy's parents pretend that Mrs. Farquarson did not miss her chair, they imply, for the reader if not for Amy, that such excess is not approved. As if to dispel any lingering possibility that Rosemary or Mrs. Henlein may be right about the Lawtons' drinking, Amy's father, in the final section of the story, awakes "cheered by the swelling light in the sky … refreshed by his sleep" and hoping to find some way to teach his daughter, who had tried to run away, "that home sweet home was the best place of all." On these notes, vaguely suggesting that the Lawtons have no serious drinking problem—but perhaps also hinting at paternal repentance and reform—the story closes.

As my concluding remarks on "The Sorrows of Gin" may indicate, Cheever's primary interest in drinking is societal: not so much in enlarging our understanding of alcoholism or in exploring its influence on individuals as in seeing its manifold effects, potential or actual, in marriages, families, or society. This focus is not surprising; it would be hard to think of a modern American writer more concerned with society and less concerned with the introspections of the romantic ego. In a number of Cheever's stories, drinking may be seen in one of three ways, though sometimes in a variety of combinations and permutations: (1) when practiced outside a recognized social form or to excess, drinking usually signals some kind of societal trouble; (2) drinking is occasionally used as a token or an affirmation of a social or familial bond; (3) occasionally, abstemiousness or abstinence is viewed just as dimly as excess, and for much the same reasons—its actual or potential harm either to the abstinent person or to his society. As illustrations of one or more of these approaches to drinking, three stories—"Reunion," "Goodbye, My Brother," and "The Swimmer"—seem the most remarkable for their intensity, their skill, or their complexity. Even more notable, perhaps, because of its transcendence of these approaches and their limitations, is "The Scarlet Moving Van." Finally, in three of Cheever's later stories we shall consider the evidence that Cheever becomes skeptical of society as a satisfactory norm by which to measure and criticize deviation. Instead, these stories suggest, it may be that society is deviant and that heavy drinking, drug abuse, or other forms of behavior traditionally reprehended as deviant are potentially redemptive.

Of the three views of drinking enumerated above, the first is the most common in Cheever's stories. Even extremely brief examples may be memorable and poignant. As the lonely narrator of "The Angel of the Bridge" gazes from his Los Angeles hotel window in the early morning hours, at the entrance of a restaurant across the street there emerges "a drunken woman in a sable cape being led out to a car. She twice nearly fell." Like the images of Blake's "London," this little scene seems only the visible tip of some larger derangement. For what other reason would a woman of means whose companion or husband shows her "solicitude" drink herself into this condition? No explicit answer is provided, but that her condition is either a symptom or a representative cause of social malaise is suggested by another brief scene immediately following, in which the occupants of two cars stopped for a traffic light get out, assault one another brutally, then drive off. Both scenes indicate, whether as cause or effect, a rupture or absence of the social bond. Though escorted, the woman is so isolated by her condition that seeing her can only deepen the narrator's sense of loneliness.

Infidelity, adultery, seduction, or promiscuity is often seen by Cheever as either abetted by or associated with drinking. In "The Five-Forty-Eight," Blake, a married man who is one of the most repugnant characters in Cheever's fiction, makes his move to seduce a newly hired secretary—an accomplishment that proves easy because he takes unconscionable advantage of her gratitude for his hiring her when other prospective employers, learning of her history of mental troubles, would not—by proposing a drink after they have both worked late one night. In "Brimmer," the title character, whose name of course denotes drinking, is portrayed as a master seducer, satyr-like even in appearance, whose natural ally is drink; he is sometimes glassy-eyed and "almost always had a glass in his hand." Although Brimmer arouses a little sympathy when he is later reported to be dying, for the most part the narrator regards his behavior with distaste as a potential source of "carnal anarchy," especially when Brimmer shows no hesitation about seducing a woman he knows to be married. Georgie, the mostly docile and inarticulate husband of "An Educated American Woman," is finally made so unhappy by an. increasing awareness of his empty marriage that his wife is awakened one night when he falls, noisily and drunkenly, in their bathroom. Shortly thereafter, more from loneliness than from sexual ardor, Georgie has an affair; as is usual with adultery in Cheever, it is facilitated by drinking. Mrs. Flannagan, the adulteress of "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow," enters an affair with Mr. Pastern for another reason; as he learns to his dismay, it is not love but a key to his bomb shelter that she is after. Again, drinking seems an essential component in initiating the adultery. In "Artemis, the Honest Well Digger," the title character, a canny rustic, discovers that the lust and drinking that excite him in the woman he loves, Maria Petroni, are united with flagrant promiscuity. When she declines his proposal of marriage and he asks whether she wants a younger man, she replies, "Yes, darling, but not one. I want seven, one right after the other.… I've done it. This was before I met you. I asked seven of the best-looking men around to come for dinner.… I cooked veal scaloppine. There was a lot to drink and then we all got undressed.… When they were finished, I didn't feel dirty or depraved or shameful. I didn't feel anything bad at all." Although Artemis continues to see Maria for a while longer, that account "was about it" for their relationship.

It is, however, "Reunion"—a story of only two and a half pages, the shortest of the sixty-one in Cheever's collected stories—that has the greatest power as a depiction of the devastating effect of excessive drinking on human relations. There are several reasons for this power. One, no doubt, lies precisely in the extreme brevity and concentration; these contrast with a tendency in quite a few of Cheever's stories toward diffuse and multiple effects, authorial or essayistic reflection. "Reunion" is perhaps the most fully dramatized of Cheever's stories. Except for the opening paragraph, which supplies information about the circumstances of the meeting of father and son, nearly everything is carried on by speech or action. Another source of its power may be that the situation it deals with—a boy's profound embarrassment by an inebriated father—draws on some indelibly mortifying experience of Cheever's own boyhood or youth. Judging from the surprising number of times that Cheever has incorporated versions of this experience in other works, though usually in just a few sentences or in short scenes, clearly he is fascinated with it almost to the point of obsession. If these other stories afford only peripheral treatments of this experience, "Reunion," by giving it exclusive attention, also maximizes its force.

A further aspect of the story's artistry is Cheever's tact, what he leaves unsaid. The son, who is also the narrator, at no point refers directly to his discomfort or embarrassment; although our only evidence is his growing insistence that he must leave his father to catch a train, the tacit quality of his feelings renders them all the more affecting. For the most part the narrator-son is only an unobtrusive recorder and the focus is on the behavior of the father. Here too Cheever chooses to underplay: though vivid and loud, the father is by no means grossly obvious about his intoxication; we know that he has been drinking (or that he is a habitual drinker) when he meets his son for lunch only by the observation that the father's smell "was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male." We know that he is drunk only from one ludicrous slip as he orders drinks ("two Bibson Geefeaters") and from his anger with a waiter for smiling. Probably the father's behavior is only a heightening or extension of his natural personality. For the son, however, this heightening is intolerable. Although he has been living with his divorced mother and has not seen his father for three years, he "was terribly happy to see him again" and to meet him for lunch in New York; he even wants a photograph to commemorate the occasion. But when, at the end of the story, he says that he never saw his father again after this meeting, it is also clear that he never made another attempt. In a mere hour and a half, then, a father's intoxicated behavior ends his relationship with an affectionate son.

The father seems just as eager to demonstrate his love for his son as the son is to have it, but his expression of that love is abysmally misconceived. In slightly different circumstances, his rudeness to waiters in ordering drinks might display a refreshing audacity. The climax of the restaurant scene in the film Five Easy Pieces, in which Jack Nicholson sweeps everything off the table and then leaves, evokes gasps of admiration from the audience. Nicholson's rudeness, however, is retaliatory; the waitress fully deserves it. The father's insolence, in contrast, is unprovoked, and, where Nicholson acts deliberately, the father appears simply compulsive. In this characteristic also lies a basic difference between the father and Gee-Gee, the hard drinker of "The Scarlet Moving Van." Not only are his insults less trivial; for the most part Gee-Gee seems to know what he is doing and to be calculatedly indifferent to the consequences. The father is not indifferent to the impression he is making on his son. After they are turned away from four restaurants, either by direct invitation to leave or by refusal of service, the father says to the boy, "I'm sorry, sonny.… I'm terribly sorry," though whether he refers to his behavior or their failure to have lunch, or both, is impossible to know. Yet the father then proceeds to treat a news vendor with exactly the abusiveness that he has inflicted on a series of waiters: "Kind sir, will you be good enough to favor me with one of your God-damned, no-good, ten-cent after-noon papers?" The most striking irony of the story is that a man enslaved to drunken compulsiveness seeks to impress his son with his mastery over people. Perhaps not by chance, he resembles the drinker, in one of the most searching parables from the so-called Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, who plays at being a kind of cosmic stage manager, with other people merely so many pup-pets to be manipulated in order to display his power. We can respond with a sense of liberation to Gee-Gee's insults in part because his primary audience is one of adults and equals capable of shrugging him off like the waiters of "Reunion." But the primary if silent auditor of that story is the son; and if his father is as indifferent to the humanity of waiters as Gee-Gee is to that of his fellow suburbanites, we may surmise that, in driving his son away, the father has sentenced himself to a desolating and permanent loneliness.

"Reunion" focuses on the shock of embarrassment, only hinting at a pathos to follow. "The Seaside Houses," though more diffuse and less effective than "Reunion," develops its latent pathos. The narrator, knowing at first only the name, Greenwood, of the owners of a house he is renting for the summer, is saddened and disturbed by his discovery of several empty whiskey bottles around the house and grounds. Cheever, an alcoholic, must have been drawing from fears about his own drinking; his daughter has recorded that "long before I was even aware that he was alcoholic, there were bottles hidden all over the house, and even outside in the privet hedge and the garden shed." The narrator learns from a neighbor that, although the Greenwoods had built a curved staircase for their daughter's wedding, she "was married in the Municipal Building eight months pregnant by a garage mechanic." Then, going to New York on business, the narrator by chance sees Mr. Greenwood in a bar, recognizing him from his photograph: "you could see by the way his hands shook that [his] flush was alcoholic." Cheever captures pathos partly by emphasizing the isolation of such men—Greenwood is one of a "legion" of "prosperous and well-dressed hangers-on who, in spite of the atmosphere of a fraternity" in the bar, "would not think of speaking to one another"—and partly by not characterizing Greenwood extensively. But in his only words, Greenwood exhibits his close kinship to the father of "Reunion": "'Stupid,' he said to the bartender. 'Oh, stupid. Do you think you could find the time to sweeten my drink?'" And in the manner of his daughter's marriage and the words (probably hers) that the narrator has found scrawled on a baseboard of the rented house—"My father is a rat. I repeat. My father is a rat"—"The Seaside Houses" may be regarded as a companion to "Reunion," enlarging on the loneliness and pain stemming from filial affections destroyed by a father's drinking.

Excessive drinking, then, can lead to grievous ruptures of the bonds of domestic affection. But two of Cheever's stories indicate the desirability of moderate or social drinking, in particular as a ritual that affirms or strengthens domestic ties and affections. During summers in the Adirondacks over a period of many years, the Nudd family of "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well," whose primary means of maintaining closeness is its ritual retellings of the story of the unfortunate pig and other events of that day, gathers each evening for drinks. When Russell Young, a local boy once almost a part of the family, is reinstated in its good graces, he is included in this drinking. Joan, who at age forty is the Nudds' problem child, has a temper tantrum at one point but is calmed by a drink and a game of checkers with her father. So drinking has the effect of a ceremony by which the Nudds quietly reassure one another of their acceptance and affection.

Similarly, and even more prominently, the ritual of family drinking has beneficent significance in "Goodbye, My Brother." This is also one of a couple of Cheever stories in which the contrast or conflict between social drinking and apparent or actual abstemiousness is especially important.

Through images, allusive hints, and some well-chosen names, "Goodbye, My Brother" suggests that the tension within the Pommeroy family reflects a larger cultural struggle between freedom and Puritanism. As implied by the names of the narrator's sister and wife, Diana and Helen, most of the family has gained emancipation; and although he reverts to a moment of savagery in smiting his brother Lawrence (an act obviously meant to recall the story of Cain and Abel), the narrator binds Lawrence's wound. The spirit of beauty and liberation is triumphant as the story ends with Helen and Diana emerging naked from the sea after Lawrence has left the family's summer home in Massachusetts. Lawrence is associated with Puritan asceticism; he alone preserves the attitude of his ancestors that "all earthly beauty is lustful and corrupt."

Lawrence's abstemiousness is a major sign of this spirit. He evidently has a long-standing hostility to drinking; he has avoided neighbors for this reason, and he once moved out on a college roommate with whom "he had been very good friends" because "the man drank too much." Reuniting with his family for the first time in four years, he accepts a proffered drink only with indifference and reluctance, thereby indicating his attitude toward the rest of his family, for whom predinner drinks on the evening of his arrival are a rite of inclusion. Ironically, although the family has drunk too much while waiting for Lawrence to appear, it is he who speaks with the effrontery of one with inhibitions lowered by alcohol. Inquiring about a man who comes for his divorced sister Diana after dinner, he asks, "Is that the one she's sleeping with now?" When his mother opens a favorite subject, improvements on their summer home, he asserts that "this house will be in the sea in five years." Though she has had too much to drink, she is at worst indulging in a harmless fantasy, whereas Lawrence is egregiously severe in speaking what he conceives to be the truth. The contrast is not in favor of sobriety.

The story is not simplistically black and white. We see enough of the mother to agree in part with Lawrence's judgment that she is rather frivolous and domineering; and when she becomes definitely drunk late in the evening of his arrival, she shows that she can be cruel as well. Her inebriation on this occasion, however, is a half-conscious contrivance to protect herself against Law-rence's harshness, as is her apparently intentional exclusion of him from an invitation the next day to "have Martinis on the beach." Because the narrator is careful to state that his mother "doesn't get drunk often," Law-rence's charge that she is alcoholic is palpably false. Normally, the family's drinking is moderate; like its shared swimming, tennis, picnics, and backgammon, it is both symbol of and aid to its loyalty and warmth. If Lawrence remains outside this circle, it is by his own choice.

The chief spiritual heir of a forebear "who was eulogized by Cotton Mather for his untiring abjuration of the Devil." Lawrence himself and his narrow abstemiousness are seen as devils that the family must abjure or exorcise in favor of light, beauty, and such innocent, alcohol-inspired fun as diving for balloons off the dock after the boat-club party. At one point the narrator notices that "the wild grapes that grow profusely all over the island made the land wind smell of wine." This touch, appropriate for a family that fosters its solidarity by drinking, is also a fitting portent of the scattering and banishment of puritanical sobriety to the hinterlands, to places such as Kansas, Cleveland, and Albany, where Lawrence has lived.

More complex and problematic than "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Swimmer" also employs a contrast between apparent abstemiousness and drinking. The meanings or values of the two sides of this contrast are in some ways difficult to ascertain, and a reader's responses may undergo major adjustments as the story progresses.

At first the protagonist, Ned or Neddy Merrill, seems largely admirable, like a Ulysses seeking to free himself from the impurities and beguilements of his Circean suburban environment. Its most marked impurity appears to be its dissoluteness. In the opening paragraph, the setting a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon, we hear a litany of complaints about having drunk too much the night before. So although the diminutive, "Neddy," raises some doubts about Merrill's maturity and therefore about his credibility as a hero in the customary sense, we probably approve of his decision to leave the poolside company in which he finds himself as the story opens—a company already drinking again—and to "swim" the eight miles to his home via a series of pools. He fancies that there may be an almost legendary quality about this adventure. If, like his name, this notion may make him seem slightly absurd, the aspiration and energy required for his undertaking at least appear preferable to the torpor and over-indulgence of his friends. He is, it seems, becoming a quasi-allegorical figure suddenly set apart from the rest of his society by a destiny or quest, even if this quest is puzzlingly unlike the quests of traditional heroes. Gradually, however, and finally in ways that drastically change these initial impressions of Merrill, we may reach three conclusions: that the difference between him and his society is not nearly as great as he may want to think; that his quest does not represent a clearly preferable alternative; and that the quest itself is seriously compromised by Merrill's confusion about or ignorance of its aims or purposes.

Water, the medium of Merrill's quest, has a number of established associations and symbolic meanings. In addition to its salubrious contrast with the alcohol being consumed by the others, Neddy's repeated immersions in the swimming pools may resemble baptisms; his apparent unconsciousness of any desire to wash away his sins does not necessarily make this meaning illegitimate. Another association, lying closer to Merrill's awareness, seems more plausible in the context of this story: that of water as a preserver or restorer of youth. Merrill is a little like a caricature of the faddish jogger who seems to hope that his exertions will endow him not only with eternal youth but also with a kind of corporeal immortality. A third association of water in the story is with the protection and comfort of the womb; swimming in his first pool of the afternoon, Neddy thinks that "to be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure … than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks." This association is an extension of the second one carried to its extreme; to avoid aging, Neddy would apparently go all the way back to a fetal state.

Either of the last two interpretations of water helps to make clear the aptness of the retribution that Neddy experiences for his unworthy, immature longings. In place of youth and its summery weather, in the course of a single afternoon he finds the season becoming autumnal and himself aging. To put the matter another way, Neddy is punished for making a travesty quest. By trying to move away from, rather than toward, the maturity and enlightenment that are the usual goals of a quest, he debases or trivializes it. Perhaps more accurately, Merrill does achieve a type of maturity—but it is a part of his punishment. Instead of culminating in enlightenment, its fruit is the incomprehensibility of Neddy's finding, at the end of his swim, that his house is abandoned and derelict, and evidently has been for some while. By an enormous acceleration, time has taken an apposite if harsh revenge on Neddy for hoping to exempt himself from its vicissitudes and in fact to reverse its flow.

A couple of scenes are especially helpful for seeing not only how Neddy's swim differs from a true quest but also how fundamentally similar he is to the rest of his society. Despite the growing chill of the afternoon, the gathering bleakness of autumn, and Neddy's progressive exhaustion and aging, his pilgrimage is altogether too easy. Unlike the genuine spiritual wayfarer, Neddy ventures into no unknown realms, seeks no real perils or tribulations. The hollowness of his journey is most sharply exposed in scenes reminiscent of but contrasting with the Vanity Fair episode of Pilgrim's Progress. Christian and Faithful courageously and unhesitantly reject the snares of Vanity Fair; for this reason and their ability to make converts, they are first smeared with dirt and displayed in a cage, then beaten and put in irons; Faithful is finally burned at the stake. By contrast, during his brief stops at parties of the Grahams and the Bunkers, Neddy is the epitome of temporizing politeness. Although he continues on his swim, he views the practices of these Vanity Fairs not with the aversion of Christian and Faithful but as "hospitable customs and traditions … to be handled with diplomacy." He feels "a passing affection … a tenderness" for the Bunkers' party, kisses several women, and shakes hands with an equal number of men. Compared to Faithful and Christian, Neddy is practically indistinguishable from the others at the two parties. Unlike Bunyan's figures, who firmly proclaim their destination to be "the Heavenly Jerusalem," Neddy just sneaks off from the gatherings—in part, no doubt, because he could not formulate his purposes even to himself.

The thoroughly compromised quality of his quest is also suggested by his drinking. At the outset of his sojourn, in his apparent concern with demonstrating or recapturing a youthful vigor or purity, Neddy seems to reject the dissipation of his drinking friends, but the story as a whole indicates that drinking is no less important to him than to the rest. Although he may only be holding a glass of gin beside the Westerhazys' pool as the story opens, and although he perhaps deliberately refrains from drinking at either the Grahams' or the Bunkers', by the time he reaches the Levys', at nearly the midpoint in his journey, he has had four or five drinks. Later in the afternoon his desire or need for a drink increases; he has one more before his swim is finished, and he tries to get at least three. A pedantically exact count is unnecessary for showing that Neddy's drinking is probably no more moderate than that of his society. There are even a couple of hints (though one is highly ambiguous) that his behavior has violated limits observed by this society. He has had not just a casual suburban flirtation but a mistress, at whose house he pauses in the course of his swim. At another house he overhears the hostess talking about a man who "showed up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five thousand dollars," though she may not be referring to Neddy.

Before the end of the story, Neddy himself seems to regret having left the company of his drinking friends. Whatever their excesses, this is his milieu. Vaguely seeking to transcend it, he has won for his efforts not only a reminder (possibly two) of his past turpitude but the most radical kind of displacement. Moreover, a second look at the opening paragraph may lead to a suspicion that Neddy's quest never had adequate warrant. Cheever's tone, the best indication of his attitude toward the excessive drinkers of suburban society, is one of at least half-amused tolerance, and the refrain of "I drank too much last night" conveys a sense of commonality or community that, though far from ideal, is better than the apparently irremediable dislocation of Merrill. As the story ends, he seems to be a kind of aged but infantile Adam, shivering, tearful, and mostly naked, expelled by his own folly from the only Eden he will ever know and with no other world before him.

Gee-Gee, the hard drinker of "The Scarlet Moving Van," achieves a transcendence of society that contrasts completely with Neddy's final misery. In this story, perhaps for the first time, Cheever questions whether society (or its smaller units, couples or the family) offers a valid norm by which to determine or implicitly censure deviations such as heavy drinking. But Gee-Gee's transcendence is difficult to characterize and is made more elusive by the fact that Gee-Gee's wife, his only friend, and Gee-Gee himself evaluate him in ways that are inadequate or unreliable.

Peaches's view of her drunken husband is the most obviously simplistic and unrealistic; she just wants him to return to being the All-American football player, "fine and strong and generous," that he was in college. Fortunately, he is a good deal more interesting than this. But Gee-Gee, too, lacks proper appreciation of his present self. When he manifests any self-awareness, he seems to believe that his role is something like the one Robert C. Elliott has ascribed to the archetypal satirist: that of telling his society such dangerous or mortifying truths that he is often turned into a scapegoat and banished. Although Gee-Gee is driven to move frequently because of his affronts to society and the resulting ostracism (the title of the story may also suggest a branding or stigmatizing like Hawthorne's scarlet letter), Gee-Gee's criticisms of society are extremely rudimentary even for an archetypal satirist. They consist mainly of his repeated declaration "I have to teach them," together with accusations of stuffiness and such outrageous actions as stripping to his undershorts at parties and setting fires in a hostess's wastebaskets. These words and deeds scarcely justify any attention to Gee-Gee as a satirist or critic of society.

Charlie Folkestone, the friend and neighbor at whose house Gee-Gee becomes uproariously drunk on his first night in town, is equally unsuccessful at making a satisfactory appraisal of him. Evidently believing in Gee-Gee's self-professed role of teacher, Charlie at one point attempts to define it: "Gee-Gee was an advocate for the lame, the diseased, the poor, for those who through no fault of their own live out their lives in misery and pain. To the happy and the wellborn and the rich he had this to say—that for all their affection, their comforts, and their privileges, they would not be spared the pangs of anger and lust and the agonies of death." In a way somewhat similar to Gee-Gee's own error of self-judgment, these reflections give him a didactic weight and a moral authority for which there is not nearly enough supporting evidence. How Gee-Gee could be thought to offer any lessons to the wealthy is a mystery that Charlie fails to clarify, and, as a representative of the poor or wretched, Gee-Gee is certainly an odd choice. Though without a visible source of income, he is scarcely one of the poor: his frequent moves must cost a good deal of money and seem always to be from one upper-middle-class suburb to another, and one Christmas he is able to send his wife and children to the Bahamas. If Charlie's reference is not to material want but to loneliness or isolation, a poverty of soul or spirit, Gee-Gee appears to be in circumstances that make this poverty inevitable when Charlie goes to see him one Christmas in another suburb. Gee-Gee is alone; having broken his hip, which is in a huge cast, he can move about only with the aid of a crutch and a child's wagon. His home is in a new subdivision, with most of the surrounding houses still unoccupied and looking, to Charlie, raw and ugly. Oppressed by a sense of dreariness and desolation, Charlie tries to convince himself that these must be Gee-Gee's feelings. In fact, however, Gee-Gee insists that he does not mind being alone, and his heartiness confirms his assertion. To be sure, after returning home Charlie receives a telephone call from a frightened Gee-Gee, who has fallen out of his wagon and beseeches his friend to return. Although Charlie fails to go, we learn at the end of the story that Gee-Gee next called the fire department, one member of which drank "a quart of bourbon every day" with Gee-Gee until Peaches and the children came back from Nassau.

Gee-Gee, then, simply refuses to be victimized by the conventional horrors or disasters of the alcoholic. If he suffers some misfortunes, he recovers with amazing speed and resilience. Nowhere is Charlie quite so wrong as when he associates Gee-Gee with death or dying. He is correct, however, in attributing to Gee-Gee "some tremendous validity" even if he never comes close to defining it. One clue may lie in Gee-Gee's name, which, as his wife explains, is a contraction of "Greek God," a designation given him by admirers in college. Later in the story, when Charlie visits him, he notices Gee-Gee fumbling with some matches and observes to himself that "he might easily burn to death"; a moment later he thinks that "there might be some drunken cunning in his clumsiness, his playing with fire." If the last phrase sounds a little like a reference to Prometheus, Gee-Gee's liver is being consumed neither by vultures nor by liquor. But we are probably not supposed to identify him with a specific god; it is more illuminating simply to see him as an un-differentiated life force or spirit, presided over, as he says, by a guardian angel that Cheever characterizes as "boozy" and "disheveled." We may be further enlightened by remembering that an old name for alcohol is "spirits." Because of his indomitability, his sheer power of survival, Captain Grimes of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, who is also something of a drinker, seems remarkably similar to Gee-Gee even though more fully developed as a novelistic character. If Gee-Gee has a function as social critic, it is conveyed by his spirit rather than by his trivial words or actions. Perhaps Cheever and Waugh suggest that in the almost preternatural vitality of Gee-Gee and Grimes—or in the creative imagination needed to invent them—lies the best hope of surmounting the deadness of society. But the fate of Charlie, who by the end of the story has apparently begun to experience all the alcoholic suffering and degradation that Gee-Gee avoids, may represent Cheever's warning that Gee-Gee's transcendence of society will not always succeed.

In three later works, including the novel Falconer, Cheever further utilizes characters whose excesses or aberrations are better than a society that either fails to function as a positive standard or is corrupt. As "The Fourth Alarm" begins, the anonymous narrator sits alone drinking gin at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning. Although he is not yet intoxicated, his isolation seems ripe for excess, and the unnaturalness of the hour and the day for drinking (why is he not in church, or at least innocently playing golf?) may seem to promise the portrait of a man justly expelled from society. But perhaps the chief surprise, in a story of surprises that Cheever handles with unusual adroitness, is that his drinking, even if it should become excessive, seems entirely justifiable as a defense against pain. His wife has virtually abandoned him and their children in order to play a leading part in a nude Broadway show that features simulated copulation and audience participation. The success of the show suggests its eager approval by the rest of the narrator's society. He attends and undresses, as bidden, in an attempt to understand his wife; but when his bourgeois instincts prompt him to carry his valuables on stage, the entire cast jeers him. Although a solitary drinker, the narrator is the only embodiment in the story of the old social decencies and proprieties. His abstemious wife, who now and then will drink a polite glass of Dubonnet, represents the madness of sexual freedom, far more corrupting to society than any conceivable alcoholic excess.

One of the several unconnected stories in Cheever's "The Leaves, the Lion-Fish and the Bear" focuses on a one-night homosexual relationship, with excessive drinking a facilitating agent. Though the story is unconvincing as a look at homosexuality or its causes, the moral implication perhaps fares better. In a society of solitary travel and strange motels (two components in the setting) a homo-sexual encounter may be a defensible protection and warmth against otherwise overpowering loneliness. The two men, Stark and Estabrook, are conventional enough that they must get drunk before the encounter in order to lower their inhibitions; but their experience has redeeming social value, for when Estabrook returns home, he is said to find his wife lovelier than ever.

Cheever seems to show some nervousness or uncertainty in his handling of the subject matter of this story. He is a little too insistent on the innocence of Stark and Estabrook. Because Cheever remained uneasy and circumspect about his own homosexuality, which he allowed himself to face and act on only late in his life, he must have had grave misgivings about treating the subject at all in his fiction. Falconer, however, is more assured; it is also Cheever's most extended representation of the positive value of alcohol, drugs, and other excesses. Farragut, characterized by his wife as suffering from "clinical alcoholism," is also and more prominently a drug addict; he is in prison for having murdered his brother "while under the influence of dangerous drugs." But in Farragut's several mental returns to the slaying, a reader finds mitigating, perhaps wholly extenuating circumstances, including the brother's odiousness. In this he resembles Lawrence of "Goodbye, My Brother," but, unlike the narrator-brother of that story, who after striking Lawrence a potentially lethal blow saves him from the ocean's undertow and binds his head, Farragut manifests not the slightest compunction about his deed. The novel presents no reasons to condemn his attitude; on the contrary, though Farragut sometimes seems ambitious of little more than shock (as when, in a flashback to his professorial days, he recalls how he and his department head "would shoot up before the big lecture," or when he imagines a priest placing an amphetamine on a communicant's tongue and saying "Take this in memory of me and be grateful"), there is little material in the book to dispute Farragut's claim that "drugs belonged to all exalted experience." Instead, just as in the South Pacific battles of World War II in which Farragut served, so now in the usually less violent but more corrosive conflicts between prisoners and guards, drugs or alcohol seem almost sane, civilizing forces. The alternatives are the sadism of some of the guards or the futile rioting of some prisoners, behavior that simply imitates the barbarity or senselessness of most of the world outside the prison walls, as illustrated by Farragut's wife and brother.

Apart from Farragut, the only heroes of Falconer are Jody (his homosexual lover, whose escape foreshadows the ingenuity of Farragut's own) and the first person Farragut meets after escaping. This unnamed stranger, impoverished (though he denies it), crude of speech, physically unattractive, and smelling of whiskey, has just been evicted from his lodging, probably for drunkenness, and is on his way to stay temporarily with a sister whom he hates. Nevertheless, this misfit is Cheever's version of the good Samaritan, paying Farragut's bus fare, inviting him to share his new quarters, even giving Farragut a coat (one of four, he says—but perhaps, like most modern Samaritans, he is embarrassed about his own goodness and therefore minimizes it). When Farragut leaves the bus before he does, the stranger extends his blessing: "Well, that's all right." It is no wonder that at this point, as the novel ends, the thought running through Farragut's mind is "Rejoice … rejoice." By the time he wrote Falconer, Cheever was a recovering alcoholic and a successful member of AA; so Farragut's benediction at the end of the novel is most of all Cheever's self-forgiveness. But these two characters—the drunken outcast from society and Farragut, murderer, fugitive from justice, and drug and alcohol addict—seem strange occasions for rejoicing when one remembers Cheever's earlier fiction. Although, as Glen M. Johnson points out, Farragut breaks his drug addiction while in prison, he is the hero of Falconer even while still an addict. This fact sets him sharply apart from the prosperous New Yorkers or suburbanites for whom heavy drinking was a regrettable departure from desirable social norms in much of Cheever's earlier work.