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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
On Sentimentality : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 And then the story's climax:
Invoking again those features of restraint and precision so essential to the success of this second explosive moment, notice that, while the act being described is highly dramatic, the teller's tone has not altered — and does not for a syllable through the entire story — from its introductory plainness. Even here, there's a casualness reverberating, as though he was saying he got down on his knees to plug in a light. Had the narrative volume somehow been raised and made artificially lush at this moment it would have resulted in two kinds of fatal harm. First, our attention would have turned from the action itself to the sound and stridency of the prose. Second, and connected to the first, the location of the feeling, the source of the sentiment, would have then resided not inside the character but outside, in the author imposing a heightened mood by turning up the dials. But as written, we sense, as we should, this final eruption to be a wholly organic one, coming to us from inside the character. Further evidence of Cheever's restraint and precision in this story: the husband/father's release of despair is inspired by the most homely of sights — his children's (who in their absence or his memory of them have not once been directly mentioned) smudged handprints, something which under other circumstances would have likely gone unnoticed or even caused the narrator's annoyance. Those damn kids, dirtying up the walls. What were they doing down there on the floor anyway? In the unfortunate imagination of a sentimental writer, the provocation might have been the set of crutches uncovered in the garage, left from the time one of the children broke his leg. He might have discovered and kissed a favorite doll, mutilated by love, spotted as he gets down on his knees to retrieve some change that's rolled under the couch. The doll, the puppy, the son's baseball glove — these sorts of tokens, saccharine and generic, are sure signs that sentimentality has entered the building. (As an aside, I can't help mentioning too the fact that, in kneeling down as he does, the narrator mimics the position he must have had in his mind as he fantasized touching the woman's ankle. I've no idea of course if this replication was intentional on Cheever's part, but there it is, brilliantly precise.) Finally, listen carefully to how Cheever writes this key line: I had to get down on my knees to kiss them. There's sheer artistry in the phrasing of that sentence. It emphasizes not that he kissed the handprints but by what physical means he reached them and in that emphasis there's the implication that the action itself was obvious and inevitable. It's saying, in effect, Of course I kissed my children's handprints. Nothing remarkable about that. You certainly would have too if you were feeling what I felt, and here's what I had to do to get to them. He's in such a state by now that he doesn't presume his action to be the least noteworthy, to be anything other than the common one. But we find it noteworthy indeed, and the well-earned heartbreak this instant produces has to do with our recognizing that he's traversed a landscape that began with his determination to present a facade of emotional imperturbability and has ended with his having so lost his grip that he's completely unaware of the impression he makes, of the degree to which he's revealed himself as he grovels in his need to kiss the dirt his children made. The story ends in two last quick paragraphs. Later that night the phone rings and, intuitively knowing it's his wife, he answers in a burst of urgent love that's been kept so arduously contained for so long — "'Oh, my darling! I'll drive all night I'll get there in the morning.'" |
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