A Few Words on Texture, with the help of John Cheever

I should like to offer some words on one of the most important elements in human made things in general and the arts in particular. Normally I would mention style or tone, but here I will speak of texture as a valid critical category.

When I speak of texture I in no way am speaking of objects which must have volume and mass, or even have a visual import or representation. I am talking about something different too from tone, a quality I consider the most crucial in any art (to say nothing of life). Texture possesses less specificity than tone. One way of understanding texture is to see it as a whole overarching set of assumptions in figural or representational form (say, that things should be hard and shiny, or light and airy, for example), whereas tone is more involved in particular emotional meaning. Texture deals with the most general of perspectives: how paragraphs are constructed in prose, mise en scene in film, quality of cloth in dress. This post will consist only of one quote from John Cheever. On posts to follow, I will use other examples from the different arts.

My example comes from the opening of John Cheever short story. I feel we can only fully appreciate this marvelous passage if we empty our mind of all the accumulative contextual stuff that we think we know about Cheever. I have to state it out in the open to clear the air. We should forget ideas about affluence, suburbia, alcoholism, the show Madmen, the sociology of the suburbs, his daughter Susan Cheever, what John Cheever's letters say, what Queer Theory has to say, his alleged bisexuality and the rest of it.

Now that I have gotten that out of the system we should proceed to the work. Not that those elements are unimportant. They might serve as a useful way for Cheever to get started, as initial generation of his electricity. But a passage like the following cannot be reduced to such discursive, conceptual notions. Moreover such concepts such as the ones in my list will prevent us from fully entering into Cheever's art, in essence feeling fully for his creations. Indeed its very existence is an explicit challenge to any attempt to contain it, so full it is of exuberance for the subject at hand.  What I am interested in Cheever is precisely what gets left out of my previous list. I have a feeling that what is left behind was what finally most interested John Cheever as well.

Reading the following passage makes one want to inquire about an entire mode of writing and its affective powers, its relationship to the reader. What does it mean that prose of this kind is no longer in great evidence? It surely cannot be that our times demand a different or more knowing kind of prose. I think the matter is quite the reverse: it is that we don't regard the texture of prose in the same way and we have given to prose a new set of work to do.  The times are what they are: the texture of art is a choice and it is only because we believe in notions like relevant and the appropriate - believe as the most fundamentalist believer does - that we see a reduction in a certain kind of prose. We brandish ourselves as worldly-wise and place older modes that appear to us as less informed into the category of  History: that which belongs to the past. We would do well to remember Faulkner however, who said that the past is never past.

Here then is the opening of John Cheever's "O YOUTH AND BEAUTY!"

"At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill, when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone home hours ago and the ten or twelve people remaining seemed powerless to bring the evening to an end although the gin and whiskey were running low, and here and there a woman who was sitting out her husband would have begun to drink milk; when everybody had lost track of time, and the baby-sitters who were waiting at home for these diehards would have long since stretched out on the sofa and fallen into a deep sleep, to dream about cooking-contest prizes, ocean voyages, and romance; when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves; when every proposal-togo to the Faquarsons' for breakfast, to go swimming, to go and wake up the Townsends, to go here and go there-died as soon as it was made, then Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair. The chiding was preliminary to moving the living-room furniture. Trace and Cash moved the tables and chairs, the sofas, and the fire screen, the woodbox and the footstool; and when they had  finished you wouldn't know the place. Then if the host had a revolver, he would be asked to produce it. Cash would take off his shoes and assume a standing crouch  behind a sofa. Trace would fire  the weapon out of an open window,and if you were new to the community and had not understood what the preparations were about, you would then realize that you were watching a hurdle race. Over the sofa went Cash, over the tables, over the fire screen and the woodbox. It was not exactly a race, since Cash ran it alone, but it was extraordinary to see this man of forty surmount so many obstacles so gracefully. There was not a piece of furniture in Shady Hill that Cash could not take in his stride. The race ended with cheers, and presently the party would break up."


We must immediately remark that there is, to some eyes, something of the pathetic in the spectacle of a middle aged "Cash Bentley" reliving his glory athletic days for the amusement of his fellow affluent suburbanites. All of which leads us into Cheever's genius which partakes of a certain Balzacian or Flaubertian naturalized view of a scene, a whole way of life. Note he says "nearly every long party", "the ten or twelve people always remaining". There is a detached, objective quality in this, not unlike what Jean Renoir will do in his ensemble set pieces in films like Rules Of The Game or The Golden Coach. There is the sense that everybody is doing these things specific to a whole way of life. He writes "the chiding was preliminary to moving the table." There are certain types: "the crapshooter, the pianist, the bellicose drunk." The cumulative result is a kind of texture of a certain lifestyle.

Where Cheever is unique, I think, in moments like this, is that the people he is depicting are his people, in his neighborhood. In this he is not only objective but subjective for he is one of them and he partially tries to bring the reader into this neighborhood. As such, it is implicit in the prose that there is something actually universal about his admittedly narrow social milieu.

And last, but not least, there is an elegiac quality. Cheever loves these characters with his whole heart and soul. There is a naive kind of compassion that I think is rather American and for which there is great misunderstanding and misreading by certain readers who wish for a harder, cynical social satire.  It is the latter approach - that of Madmen specifically - that is so favored these days. The chief reason Cheever rises above the merely critical and skeptical is that Cheever actually sees something of faith and admiration in Cash Bentley's dreams. (This respect for dreaming connects a lot of Cheever's figures and connects Cash Bentley deeply to the hero of The Swimmer, for example.) This notion of a dream realized in prosaic or earthly, sometimes banal guises, and this notion that the dream must be realized while wrestling with community is a notion that is important to American arts and letters: community is both a source of meaning and feeling as much as emptiness and alienation. (It is in Hawthorne, Pynchon, Toni Morrison, in lots of places). Cheever achieves all of this through his language: though he offers a list of various items, he nevertheless combines such list of details with a specific affect. Of course such a strategy on Cheever's part leaves him open to criticism for real skeptics: those that see in his "WASP" characters nothing but error and privilege. Yet I would argue that all the very best writers have a similar attitude towards their subjects, whatever nation or status they happen to inhabit.

The general loss of Cheever's belief in a kind of sustaining dream is one of the reasons why writing like this is so rare these days. Few of us "believe" anymore in the way that Cheever did. This is not because we can't, but rather that we have given up or have chosen not to.

Any recourse to the zeitgeist will not do to justify the absence of this social lyricism from todays "realists". Rich Moody opens his novel on suburbia, The Ice Storm, with a direct address to the reader: "I am going to dish you this comedy about a family I knew when I was growing up." Moody then proceeds to list all of these technological and cultural differences between the 1990s and the 1970s. ("No answering machines. No call waiting.") There is the same use of a panoramic list, but the effect is completely "wised-up". I liked The Ice Storm; yet we are in a world, stylistically rather removed from Cheever. Rick Moody is like a young anarchist or Marxist out to kill off his parents rather than attempt to inhabit or understand them. Instead his sympathies are with the children.

Always the point of view in  contemporary art and culture is that of the children. (This is also the case, as critic Daniel Mendelsohn pointed out in The New York Review of Books, with Madmen, where Mendelsohn argues that the point of view of the show is through the often absent children, even though the jaded adults are the ostensible main figures of the series That is, the show is unable to finally come to terms with the adult leads - Joan, Don, Pegg, Roger etc. - because it is imaginatively narrowed by being from only the point of view of today's assumptions, those that would have been very young children in 1962.)

Similarly, I believe Rick Moody's choices reflect not the needs of our moment but rather what we think to be the needs of our moment. He - and we - could have gone in different or other directions than what we consider the relevant ones.

We see here an example of how much texture can do to create meaning. Space permitting I could have a whole panoply of examples of varying and differing textures - all of which would give us equally varying and differing views of the world or philosophies of life.

Farewell to the Suburbs, Hello to the City

“All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children, in fact, are barely presentable,” wrote Fran Leibowitz. I surely should apologize, dear reader, for having enough shallowness of spirit as to be unable to see adequately into the insides of others that I cannot but concur with Leibowitz’s sentiment. Alas our insides are very much invisible and silent. But our outsides are ever present and never stop talking.

Yet, to make matters worse, though we do have a bit of control over the presentation of ourselves, whether through cosmetics or dress, there are great limits that Nature has set before us. When it comes to our externally built environments, however, the ones we can never escape at least without a wrecking ball of sorts, we have something approaching total control. Though we have this control over our environments that we are denied over our own person, we have repeatedly committed acts of ugliness at best and outright sin at worst. The architects and designers of the 20th century have a great deal to explain, though they will surely resort to Theory as an alibi.

Second only to our original sin of slavery is the sin of deciding that every human being be entitled to car use and ownership alongside the massive development of what is called the suburbs to support such car centeredness, the spreading and sprawl of ourselves outside of our cities to accommodate these driving machines, the supreme sin being the planning and building of the Interstate Highway System. Every problem, from the inner workings of troubled families, the disease in any soul, to the decay of arts and culture more generally, can be traced to that fateful decision. Without the decision to suburbanize we would not be having much of a discussion about fossil fuels, and only a scientist would know how much less would be our effect upon the Ozone and so on.

We need a new way of regarding older words that is free from euphemistic cant. Instead of using the word entitlement to describe basic human needs like a living wage, or retirement funds, or medicine, or even the right to work, we ought to use the word entitlement - and in the most scolding sense - for the idea that sprung up in the forties and fifties that every human being deserves a house with a yard and even two children of their own, to say nothing of the dogs and cats. Think of how a wise extraterrestrial being would regard the spectacle of every human being moving around in these most ugly and cumbersome of machines to go from one place, many miles away, to another. Such a being would think us mad at best, evil at worst.

Recently I went back to Tampa, Florida for the funeral of my father. As my friend Greg drove me across miles of long stretches of cement, as we passed one chain restaurant after another - an Outback, an Applebees, The Cheesecake Factory, the only attractive diversion breaking up the soul killing monotony being what appeared to be an independently run strip club, or fringe Southern Baptist church - Greg sensed my great displeasure at what comprised the largest part of the humanly created American landscape. He said to me with great emphasis: “Mitch, these are your roots. This is where you come from.”

I have spent the remainder of my life trying to get away.

To be fair, I remember another part of my childhood far away from all of this and that was New York City - Manhattan. It is here where I must make some clarification for some of my peers in the ecology or environmental movements whom I take to be greatly insensitive to a great part of what makes us tick. For the problem is not, as these peers are wont to say, civilization, or modernity, or even industrialism. To regard civilization or, in particular, cities as the root of the problem is to commit what I call the error of Holism: to take life as forming a single system, such that, if there is anything wrong with the system you have to scrap that system and start over anew, even with revolution if need be.

Rather, the problem is a long series of little decisions that accumulate. Not the car itself, but the decision that everybody should have one is the real problem. The splitting of the atom did not compel us to make a weapon out of that act. That weapon was a choice we made. Whatever history is, it is not an inevitability. The Devil is in the details.

Curiously and perversely many of our ecologically minded peers have helped create our current crises in at least a couple of ways. The first is, by fetishizing nature and green spaces they only encourage sprawl and an anti-urban attitude, what one scholar, Carol Clover, termed urbanoia. Urbanioa might lead people to try and recreate the simulation of nature wherever they may roam. This is why in all of these cement strips that cover the United States you see these little plots of green, as if that is an aesthetic solution to anything.

The second way in which some ecologists contribute to the problem is by a dubious distinction between the natural which is considered virtuous and the unnatural which is considered unhealthy. Thus, Playboy magazines and Christian Louboutin shoes are considered most unnatural and therefore bad, while organic farms or tribal living are seen as more or less natural and thus, good. This is an arbitrary convention, reflecting the fashions and tastes of an epoch rather than eternal verities.

This distinction between the natural and unnatural contributes to a coarsening of our aesthetic sense. We criticize things that we deem unreal and praise things to the heavens that feel real, not knowing that everything we humans do is in a certain sense unreal all the way down. There is no object more unreal than the play Hamlet, for example. Yet there is no object that could have more to teach you about human life.

Humans do not merely dwell in one but at least in two dimensions. The dimension to which our ecologists rightly pay homage is that of utility and necessity: the world of farming, for example. Many today dream of going back to a purer world which by their definition always means something rural. They would point out that this is not mere utility but family and community and wholeness.

I would retort that family and community, in addition to Love, also always already possess conformity and narrow religiosity, to say nothing of homophobia, perhaps sexism and other evils. In a certain sense we do not choose our families so there is a very intimate connection between the nostalgic and traditionalist love for family and the concern with organic farming. Thus, perhaps there is a fear of choice involved among those who would restrict life to utility.

We do not live by need or necessity, including family, alone. There is a second dimension to human affairs and it is gratuitous. This is why humans need and create civilizations. It is why we need cities.

Marx, so long ago in the 19th century, spoke of the “idiocy of rural life”. Today so many of our idiots hail from rural areas, and the nature of such idiocy has seldom changed.

Without cities all of our arts and culture would surely be nonexistent. I do not deny the necessity to overhaul our way of life in some way. I only deny that in the future we not be reduced to utility alone. I only confirm that space be made for our gratuitous nature. For if history is any guide we humans are exceedingly gratuitous. And any vision of the future that does not incorporate that stubborn and often times sublime fact is a vision that surely could only have been been concocted by tech geeks, engineers and the like.

Indeed, a good part of our future should include a return to the city. By city I do not mean an “exurb.” I do not mean, say, Watertown. The use of terms like “Exurbs” or “edge cities” is a way of trying to give credence to the suburban way of life. Quite the contrary. I mean exactly something of the large cities of old. Maybe even, dare I say it, New York City. Of course nothing on that scale is safe or sustainable anymore. but the population density might be a necessity.

Instead of moving out, the time has come for us to move back into the city. We need to reclaim and reinvent the city. Of course this is assuming we have decided we still want a place for some kind of culture not reduced to utility. The city was a precondition for the creation of someone like a Shakespeare or a Bach - to be a little quaint and corny about it. The city was of course a precondition for American popular musical art, for the theater, and many other riches. Farming and hunting and gathering will not quite make it.

There was a brief moment, in the middle of the previous century, when great poetry came out of suburban experience. John Updike and John Cheever come to mind. That day is long past. The best works of art today that reinterpret representations of the small town are works of art that both foreground their artificiality or are descriptions of a purely contemporary sensibility, and are really more about the present than the past, as in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville or in Madmen. These works say more about our time than the past. They are stuck in the present, while pretending to be be an archeology or anthropology of the past.

I should note that there continues to be a romance of the car, exemplified in the car chase in cinema, the halfway decent art/exploitation film Drive being the most recent evidence that this romance shows no signs of abatement, whatever the fashion for the bicycle.

But perhaps as in Updike and Cheever for domestic life, this romance of highway life will grow rusty. Maybe it too will be ridden out.

Moreover there is economics to consider: people never tire of telling me that nobody lives in cities because they are too expensive. By and large I believe the causation to be reversed. Cities are so unaffordable because not enough people stay in them to keep them affordable: everybody desires to live further out, in the sticks if possible. They see in the city only a place to shop and consume and to escape their boredom.

In contrast to the trends of the past forty years, I hope the future belongs to the city. I will let others dream of the Anarcho-Syndicalist commune in the woods. Speaking for myself, I dream of a place for arts and what used to be known as culture in the city.