Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726

Pif Magazine
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Seattle, WA 98122-3813

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On Sentimentality : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

We immediately hear in the narrator's account a tone of extraordinary, even eerie dispassion that's at odds with the circumstances he's describing. He presumes his marriage is ending, that his children will be taken from him, that he'll be forced to leave the comfort and history of his house, and yet he offers all this to us in a voice of resoundingly practical detachment. I particularly admire Cheever's use of the pallid and almost offhand seeming "glad," with which the narrator twice characterizes his feelings about his wife's choice of summer as the season for her departure. Glad? we think. He may as well be confirming a Sunday morning tee time. Oh, good. I'm glad it's — ten. That'll leave me time to clean out the garage.

This very mismatch of events and the abandoned husband's apparent attitude toward them conveys not the absence, but the nearly palpable denial of emotion. In other words, feeling, sentiment, is very much present from the outset, but thoroughly tamped down, creating a mood of disquieting emotional unreliability. We feel sentiment in these sentences not because it's displayed, but because it's under such repressive pressure we can sense the struggle required to keep it from escaping. Were the narrator to launch his story with a wail, some high keening of distress, the tone might at first sound more recognizable and seem more understandable to us, but would quickly lose its strength and interest simply because it was so much the sound we assumed we'd hear. I don't believe it would produce the same energetic sentiment, the tension and curiosity, as does Cheever's narrative restraint, which he accomplishes by giving the husband a voice of discordant calm.

This voice, perfectly pitched, continues as the narrator explains his rational plan for passing the summer nights alone.

The first months will be like a cure, I thought, and I scheduled my time with this in mind. I took the eight-ten train into town in the morning and returned on the six-thirty. I knew enough to avoid the empty house in summer dusk, and I drove directly from the station parking lot to a good restaurant called Orpheo's. Afterward I'd drive over to the Stonybrook Drive-In Theatre and sit through a double feature.

Logical as his decisions may be, affectless as is the tone in which they're explained, we recognize in the motives behind them the emotional turmoil he's so determined to keep dormant. Furthermore, we begin to learn that he recognizes it, too: "I knew enough to avoid the empty house in summer dusk." In other words, the texture of sentiment in the story is, with masterful subtlety, becoming gradually its surface as well as its substratum.

At this point, the story takes a turn as the gathering strength of his loneliness and sorrow competes with his refusal to look directly at it. Waking in the night and unable to return to sleep, he goes downstairs to read.

Our living room is comfortable. The book seemed interesting. [The fiercely uninvested adjectives, the reportorial flatness, continue.] Then I heard, very close to me, a footstep and a cough.

I felt my flesh get hard — you know the feeling — but I didn't look up from my book, although I felt that I was being watched. . . Then a fear, much worse than the fear of the fool outside the window, distracted me. I was afraid that the cough and the step and the feeling I was being watched had come from my imagination. I looked up.

I saw him, all right, and I think he meant me to; he was grinning.

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