[In the following essay, originally published in the New Republic in 1982, Wain applauds Cheever's The World of Apples for being witty and intelligent while depicting characters that behave decently as people “generally do in real life.”]

I don't know what goes on in the minds of very young people, but to most of us grown-ups there comes a sense, very often, of having started our lives amid the outlines of a civilization and having watched them melt away, leaving a featureless desert; quite a suitable environment for prayer and meditation, and also for nameless crimes, but very unfavorable for the practice of ordinary virtues such as tolerance or unselfishness. Goodness knows, the crumbling away of values has been going on for 200 years, but anyone born, as I was, in the 1920s did at least grow up with the feeling that, though metaphysical guidelines had vanished, social ones remained; even though we didn't “believe in God,” we accepted a system of values derived from Christianity and our emotions attached to these, so that we recognized love, courage, self-sacrifice, generosity, as virtues and cruelty and meanness as vices. This gave a meaningful basis for action; World War II, for instance, was fought not just from nationalistic competitiveness but from a desire to rid the world of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the swastika and the goose-step; from the point of view of the new morality, the worship of “alienation” as a principle and the fierce-eyed preaching of meaninglessness and negativism, it is impossible to see how these things could be judged adversely, let alone resisted at the cost of one's life. Can we, in fact, go on inhabiting the planet unless we have something to believe in? As the English critic A. E. Dyson has remarked, “The notes of despair, negation, absurdity, suffering now echo through our literature; and it is probable that when loyalties to everything outside the self have been successfully banished, loyalty to the self will finally fail.” In which case, good-bye Charlie.

Mr. Cheever tackles this problem very directly; most directly of all in his title story, “The World of Apples.” This tells how an old and famous poet, loaded with honors and near the end of his life, was overwhelmed by an obsession with sexual and defecatory dirt and finally managed to shake it off. The story is told simply and unpretentiously, with nothing much in the way of invention and without the little fanciful melismata that so often enliven the other stories in the book. The old poet has always associated himself with sanity and strength. Of the five other poets of his generation with whom he has customarily been grouped, four committed suicide and the fifth died of drink. He himself has avoided making this kind of mess, not out of adherence to any positive system of belief such as a religion, but just from a personal conviction that it won't do.

Poetry was a lasting glory and he was determined that the final act of a poet's life should not—as had been the case with Z—be played out in a dirty room with twenty-three empty gin bottles. Since he could not deny the connection between brilliance and tragedy he seemed determined to bludgeon it.

The story is an account of how the poet almost lost that balance and ultimately recovered it. One day a visitor takes him for a trip into the forest. He steps aside from the path to relieve himself and stumbles on a couple making love. The sudden sight puts in motion a train of thoughts and images which he cannot stop. It is not just that he broods on copulation: it is that his broodings are uniformly obscene—what we would call, if the word still had any meaning in the world rigged up for us by the Andy Warhols and the Ken Tynans, “dirty-minded.” It is a real crisis; it calls into question the whole of his life's achievement, which at his age he cannot possibly go back over and rework. He has written a famous volume of poems, The World of Apples (the Frostian association is obviously quite intentional, even insistent) in which the qualities celebrated are those of sun and air and freshness and soil and patient ripening; the old poet is shown as living in a country villa in Italy, and indeed his imaginative world seems to be that of Virgil in the Georgics. His poems celebrate “the welcoming universe, the rain wind that sounded through the world of apples.” Now suddenly these things seem unreal. Has he been a dupe, his life wasted on things which appeared interesting only because of the angle at which they were posed?

What was it that he had lost? It seemed then to be a sense of pride, an aureole of lightness and valor, a kind of crown. He seemed to hold the crown up to scrutiny and what did he find? Was it merely some ancient fear of Daddy's razor strap and Mummy's scowl, some childish subservience to the bullying world? He well knew his instincts to be rowdy, abundant, and indiscreet and had he allowed the world and all its tongues to impose upon him some structure of transparent values for the convenience of a conservative economy, an established church, and a bellicose army and navy?

At this point, presumably, the most characteristic denizens of the world of today would answer with an emphatic Yes. As they would see it, the old man has at last seen the light of revelation and unchained his Id, liberating it from the domination of Ego and the even more villainous Super-Ego, who between them are responsible for this tribe of monsters—the economy, the church and the armed forces. It may be a little late in the day, but not fatally so, since he is not impotent (the story specifically says that, to try to restore his mental balance, he has intercourse with his housekeeper, who “was always happy to accommodate him”). Presumably there is more rejoicing in the priapic heaven over one sinner who repents than over half-a-dozen saints; this must be one of the sources of the crusading zeal behind contemporary porno-eroticism, where it is not simply concerned with making money.

Mr. Cheever's answer, on the contrary (and I think we are here definitely required to contravene D. H. Lawrence's maxim and identify the “artist” with the “tale”) is an equally emphatic No. To him, the poet's collapse into dirty-mindedness is that and nothing more. It is something to be climbed out of, like a depressive illness. The exact steps by which he climbs out of it are, in my opinion, less memorable than the fact that he is determined to climb out, and his inventor, the author, is determined that he shall. If I were in a niggling frame of mind I could even find fault with the way the story is resolved. The old poet hears from his housekeeper about a sacred statue in “the old church of Monte Giordano,” the statue of an angel which has the power to purify men's thoughts. He undertakes a pilgrimage to the statue, carrying with him the customary gift; the load begins to lift, and on the way home he comes across a cold, deep hillside stream and suddenly remembers how he saw his father, a Vermont farmer, bathing in such a stream as an old man like himself. He does the same, “bellowing like his father,” and seems “at last to be himself.” Liberated, he spends the remaining months of his life writing “a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air.” And the story unequivocally represents this as a happy ending.

I find this story extremely interesting. Not that it is, as an example of literary art, as good as some of the other stories in the volume. But the fact that Mr. Cheever has chosen the title of this story for the masthead of the whole book, and has placed it last in the volume (traditionally a point of emphasis), combined as it is with the air of conviction, of getting down to bedrock, which pervades it, brings the tale firmly into the foreground. Mr. Cheever is saying something, and he is evidently not afraid of being laughed at by people who accept the notions currently “in.” If you showed this story to the kind of person who keeps the box office happy at the Theater of Total Copulation and Public Masturbation, he or she would have a great deal of superior fun at the expense of such worn-out steps to regeneration as the shrine in a church and the immersion in cold water. Weren't “cold baths,” he or she would recall, one of the two bastions against self-abuse in the English public school, the other being “long walks”? And where did it all lead except to frustration, leading in turn to the economy, the church, the army and the navy? We are here in the presence of a genuine difference of opinion, a real fork in the road at which the individual has to declare a choice. Personally I am happy to cast my vote with Mr. Cheever's. His protagonist is not a prude or, in the limiting sense, a self-denier; the episode with the housekeeper is presumably brought in to establish this, and in case it is still in doubt Mr. Cheever has him turn over the pages of Petronius and Juvenal and approve of their “candid and innocent accounts of sexual merriment.” What he doesn't do is reach down his well-thumbed copy of the Marquis de Sade's Les 120 Journées de Sodom and read the hallowed pages once more, exclaiming reverently over the Divine Marquis' fearless devotion to truth and the scandal of his martyrdom at the hands of a hypocritical society. He doesn't, in other words, equate “sexual merriment” with the infliction of pain, the reduction of other human beings to objects which must be systematically maltreated and destroyed in the search for self-fulfillment. He tries to reconcile the sexual instinct with “the rainy wind that sounds though the world of apples” rather than with “alienation.” And in this he surely shows a tenacious hold on human wisdom.

My excuse for devoting so much space to this one story in Mr. Cheever's collection is that it sets the keynote. There is another story just as bedrock and affirmative—and, purely as a story, better written and more convincing—called “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger,” which is nothing more nor less than a study in innocence, an attempt to hold our attention with the portrayal of a man with no harm in him. It succeeds brilliantly, in part because of the deftness with which the hero is shown against the backdrop of just about every kind of evil the modern world abounds in—situation follows situation in a rapid and economical series, so skillfully projected that, though Mr. Cheever of course contrived them, they don't seem what one calls “contrived.”

Now, because Mr. Cheever has written a volume of stories which tend to show people as being motivated by old-style feelings like love and loyalty and kindness and consideration for others and protectiveness toward the weak (e.g., children), one doesn't want to represent him as preaching. It is merely that every work of art, like every creation of any kind, comes out of a system of values and preferences, and this is a book by a gifted and established writer which doesn't, for once, seem to come out of negativism, alienation, despair of the human condition and frantic self-gratification in whatever horrifying ways suggest themselves. One meets people in everyday life who have these old-fashioned values, and perhaps the shortest way to convey the rare quality of Mr. Cheever's book is to say that here, for a wonder, we have a modern work of literature in which people behave as decently as they generally do in real life, rather than behaving like sick fiends.