Just about ten years ago John Aldridge wrote in Time to Murder and Create that Cheever was “one of the most grievously underdiscussed important writers we have at the present time.” He had been cursed with a “kind of good housekeeping seal of middlebrow literary approval”; he was said to be “a paid moralist of the button-down-collar Establishment.” Of course, as Aldridge added, “Cheever has … all along been unfortunate in the company his work has kept.” By that he meant The New Yorker, a Time magazine cover story, the National Book Award; Cheever was recognized as a writer of middlebrow-popular sensibilities. He spoke to, and continues to speak to, an audience that is indeed instructed by New Yorker fiction.

But Cheever has used the seeming conventions of New Yorker fiction to create a form of short fiction that transcends the conventions without quite violating them. His best stories move from a base in a mimetic presentation of surface reality—the scenery of apparently successful American middle class life—to fables of heroism. Superficially, his people seem like the gray flannel suited men of another decade; on the surface, they are “antiheroes,” stock figures in American popular writing of the recent past. In fact, they are desperate men driven to defending themselves from and against the culture. The stories chronicle a final statement against the decay of youth and the futility of action (“O Youth and Beauty!”), anxiety about failure that is close to the heart of American adult experience (“The Swimmer”), madness (“The Ocean”), the need to exercise some control over one's life (“The Music Teacher”), and the inevitable confrontation in the problem of commitment (“The Scarlet Moving Van”). The stories become fables about heroism—even if the central characters are not quite in themselves heroes: directly and obliquely, they must face action, responsibility, anxiety, and failure. Even in the most recent of his published stories, “The World of Apples”—and the battleground is there far removed from the fronts of suburban America, where an old and honored poet fights against a final sickness in his soul, where he finally asserts and triumphs with the forces of health and wholeness over sickness and filth—Cheever is giving us a man who is joined in deadly battle.

Like Randall Patrick McMurphy of Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Eliot Rosewater of Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Cheever's people are “mythic,” they are exaggerated, caricatures, characters who at first seem “real” and yet who move out of the conventions of middlebrow realistic fiction into another territory. That territory is one of the few ways of suggesting American experience at the present. It is one of Cheever's most telling achievements to have used the machinery of the conventional realistic story—for he is the teller of stories to the middle class—to imply and hint at a quality of experience that defies the limitations of his genre. The Cheever hero faces not the problem of the West, the frontier, the Indian, or the wilderness as it was stated and evoked in American writing of another time; the wilderness is now on the 5:42 for Bullet Park, the third martini, falling in love with the baby sitter, the swimming pools across Westchester County. Cheever's country is mostly dour and disappointing and yet this is not a fashionable restatement, restructuring of the landscape of the Wasteland, now the zombies at the cocktail party, the stupefying accumulation of wealth, the faceless commuters, their paper shuffling jobs, their lives denied nourishing tradition and religion. Against these apparent givens of the culture and of experience itself, aging, the loss of ideals and the impossibility of simplicity of emotion and action, his focal characters in his best short fiction persist in attempting some definition of self when confronted with adversity, inner and outer, that gives a measure to their lives.

“O Youth and Beauty!”—in some ways it is Cheever's “The Short Happy Life of Cash Bentley”—is a chapter in an American life. Bentley, he's forty, is fed up with the routine of his life: domestic fights, he and his wife make up, he feels cut off from life and the life of action, there are money worries at the edge of all he knows now and he finds satisfaction only in hurdling furniture at the country club or parties after he is so drunk that he feels free to express himself. A good part of this story is recognizable terrain; Cash Bentley looks like a version of that middle-aged American male who cannot quite give up his attachment to the robust, athletic life of his youth. Of course, he was a former track star. At the “tag end of nearly every long, Saturday night party,” Trace Bearden “would begin to chide” Bentley about his age and thinning hair until Bentley moved the furniture around the living room and once more ran the hurdle race. His wife Louise knows something of desperation, too: “housework, laundry, cooking and the demands of the children.” Her life is no more rich in meaning than is his. One night, racing around a room, he breaks his leg; as he recovers, he becomes aware of the smell of corruption around him, rank meat, rotting flowers, and he is nearly gagged by a spider web in the attic of his house. Discontent, he becomes rude and gloomy. Without the hurdles he is nothing. Then on a summer night, with the smells of life and a new season all around, with his perceptions of the young in one another's arms—“He has been a young man. He has been a hero. He has been adored and happy and full of animal spirits”—when he is fully recovered from the broken leg, he once more tries the hurdles and runs the race successfully. He is exhausted at the finish and his wife “knelt down beside him and took his head in her lap and stroked his thin hair.” The following night at home he sets up for the race again; it is a Sunday night—“Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday-night blues!” the narrator reminds us—and Bentley gives his wife a pistol to shoot off for the starting gun. But it is a real pistol, “she had never fired it before, and the directions he gave her were not much help.” She is confused about the safety on the weapon. “It's that little lever,” he tells her. “Press that little lever.” Then in his impatience he starts the race anyhow, goes over the sofa. “The pistol went off,” Cheever writes, “and Louise got him in midair. She shot him dead.”

“The Swimmer,” perhaps Cheever's best known story, starts within the conventions of the New Yorker tale. Again a Sunday, this time the afternoon “when everyone sits around saying: ‘I drank too much last night. … We all drank too much. … It must have been the wine.’” The reader seems to be assured that he knows this country well. It looks like what it's supposed to be: a slice of upper crust American affluence. The fiction, however, moves away from its conventions as Neddy Merrill, a slender man but by no means a young man—“he might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one”—decides to swim cross county, via his friends' pools, to his own house. And he names this string of swimming pools, “that quasisubterranean stream that curved across the county,” after his wife Lucinda. Neddy is by no means a “practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.” Neddy's swim, his odyssey through the mind of a particular kind of modern America, is alive with perils that suggest that his summer afternoon journey is more a species of nightmare than a presentation of daytime reality. Cheever has developed in “The Swimmer” a ghastly presentation of what it means to swim in American values of success, recognition, and status; for as Neddy plunges from pool to pool, encountering rebuff and indifference—and even more, the real suggestion of failure and disaster as the owner of one pool, Mrs. Holloran says to him, “We've been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy. … Why, we heard that you sold the house and that your poor children. …” her sentence trails off. But Neddy swims on, enduring even the regimented, chlorine-smelling, “All swimmers must wear their identification disks” indignities of a public pool, finding himself no longer welcome where he was once welcome, out of place where he once felt himself comfortable, only to arrive at his house that “was locked. … he shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it in with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.”

The house is empty and it makes little difference whether this story is an angle on madness or a paradigm of deep but rarely uttered American fears about the quality of our life. What is central to this story and a good many more in Cheever's work is that the hero must try to establish who he is in relation to an essentially meaningless—even absurd—world around him. He must try to act in some way, be it hurdling over living room furniture perhaps in pursuit of his lost youth or in swimming across the pools of Westchester County, so as to affirm his own being. Drinks, poolwise in Westchester, parties, the rhythms of commuters' lives—part of the ideal of the American good life—are the basis from which the Cheever hero must revolt. It matters not a bit that Cash Bentley or Neddy Merrill fail—fail? there were no goals to begin with—that they are shot or come home to find the house empty. But it matters a great deal that they are disgusted with the limitations of the environment. They find satisfaction not in victory or consolation in defeat but pleasure in action, in making themselves, in expressing a sense of rebellion against a life they can neither control nor understand. Read this way, the Cash Bentley of “O Youth and Beauty!” is not a pathetic middle-aged jock acting out once more the glories of his lost youth; he is a man trying to redefine himself against the contours of smug and shallow values, values that are mainly rotted with drink and acquisitiveness. So too is Neddy Merrill's cross county swim, be it actuality or dream, a gesture of heroic revolt. And if not heroic, something close to that; for Neddy on that swim does seem a fool or madman, no matter whether the swim is in the dark pools of his mind or in the sunlight of that Sunday. It is of the essence that they do, not that they win. To perform is to live, is to make a statement about the value of living over the descent into nothingness and even as that nothingness seems rich in good friends, good drink and good food, the pleasures of the family and the recognition of community. Perhaps what is so touching and even old fashioned about these heroes is their belief that there is finally a truth to experiences and that it can be realized in the form of action, no matter how futile or even symbolic.

Foolish or mad as Cash and Neddy might be, their situations are in differing ways resolved, in death or in the nothingness of the empty and abandoned house. Their absurd quests are simple contrasted with the moral ambiguities of Charlie Folkestone in “The Scarlet Moving Van.” For Charlie there is a call to action, literally a phone call, a call for help, to which he does not respond and in that failure he loses his life as certainly as Cash shot dead in midair. Charlie and Martha Folkestone—they live in a pleasant town beyond the city, where “in nearly every house there were love, graciousness, and high hopes”; and “the schools were excellent, the roads were smooth, the drains and other services were ideal”—welcome their new next-door neighbors whose goods arrive in a scarlet moving van one spring at dusk. They invite the new neighbors, Peaches and Gee-Gee, over for a drink. Peaches is “blond and warm” and Gee-Gee (“They called him the Greek God at college. That's why he's called Gee-Gee”) “had been a handsome man, and perhaps still was, although his yellow curls were thin.” But Gee-Gee drinks too much, calls the Folkestones stuffy, insults them further, and takes off his clothes. His wife begs him to stop, “Not on our first night.” In eight years Peaches and Gee-Gee had lived in eight different houses; invariably Gee-Gee insults people, smashes furniture, and crockery, insisting always “I've got to teach them,” until life becomes so uncomfortable that they must move away. And he repeats the pattern in the Folkestones' town. Charlie tries to help, go on the wagon he urges Gee-Gee, but without results. Peaches and Gee-Gee move away to another town, but Charlie later learns that Gee-Gee had broken his hip and one Sunday afternoon in winter—Sunday is the day of horror in Cheever's world—he gets his number from Information and drives over for a drink. Gee-Gee is alone, his wife and children are off to Nassau, he is in a cast and gets around the house in a child's wagon. He lights cigarettes and fumbles with the matches and Charlie wonders that he might burn himself to death. Outside it's snowing heavily and Charlie has a difficult two hour drive home; he wonders about having abandoned “a friend—a neighbor at least—to the peril of death.” Safely at home and enjoying the comforts of family life on a snowy night, Charlie receives a phone call from Gee-Gee asking for help, get over here he cries, it took two hours to crawl to the phone. But Charlie will not respond; the roads must be impassable, he thinks; and his children “looked at him calmly, as if they were expecting him to make a decision that had nothing to do with the continuing of a pleasant evening in a snowbound house—but a decision that would have profound effect on their knowledge of him and on their final happiness.” But Charlie will not go and it is unimportant that the reader is told that Gee-Gee got help from the fire department in “eight minutes flat.” Charlie becomes a drunk, loses his job, becomes abusive of friends and neighbors, and in the end they, too, have their goods carted off in a scarlet moving van; the Folkestones are gone.

Drinks, friends, the suburban town, comfort, and even culture—Charlie and the older children are playing a “Vivaldi sonata” when Gee-Gee calls—this is the scenery of New Yorker fiction comforting the reader in his sense that he knows this country well. Yes, of course, the scenery; but the story according to the conventions of realistic fiction is patently absurd, even as it describes an absurd hero. Why does Charlie call in the first place? Why does he not try to drive back to Gee-Gee, for the desperate cry for help is more important than a difficult drive over snowy roads? And certainly no man turns into a drunk and loses his job because he failed to help “a friend,” anyhow an ex-neighbor and an obnoxious person? There is a madness to this suburban world of Cheever's, this demand for action, blind, foolish, senseless, even puerile, as it confronts the equally disastrous threats of paralysis that suggests the terrors of Beckett's The Unnamable: “I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me. … when I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” The condition of Charlie Folkestone is literally unnamed and unnamable and it is the condition of many of Cheever's heroes.

The man who does not respond to the call is in the world of Cheever's absurd and yet moral fictions the man who has collapsed into the ultimate terror: paralysis. Many of his people experience that. And yet for the aged poet of “The World of Apples” and for Cash Bentley and Neddy Merrill there is still the lovely, legendary, and briefly heroic moments of hurdling living room furniture or swimming cross county, even when the race ends in death or the swim concludes with the man confronting his abandoned home. It is one version of the hero creating his own legend, even if that legend seems pointless, futile, finally absurd. And that may be the last resort of heroism.