John Cheever, Master of Traps

A quick Google search informs me that John Cheever’s most popular nickname, more popular than “The Cheevinator” or even “CheevDawg 3000,” is actually “The Chekhov of the Suburbs.” To anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading Cheever’s dazzling tales of affluent American despair, this nickname will make a great deal of sense. Cheever’s best stories, like Chekhov’s, are tight contraptions that somehow defy their own brevity, often fitting near-unconscionable heights and depths - entire human dramas in miniature - into a single paragraph. Cheever then gathers these paragraphs into mysterious entireties, stories that tend to indulge in our rawest emotions while remaining beguiling in their total effect. Without knowing too much about Cheever’s personal life (besides the most salient and notorious plot points), I picture him, through the prism of his work, as a marvelous gadabout, a man with an immense appetite for pleasure, not the least of which was the pleasure of spinning a good yarn. And spin he did.

Cheever by a train, presumably filled with drunk suburbanites

As I read my badly tattered copy of The Stories of John Cheever, I am most entertained by Cheever’s ability to conjure a complete character in mere sentences. Who else can draw a man so fully in so few lines? Take, for instance, this description of Herbert McGrath, a minor but oddly expansive character from “Just Tell Me Who It Was”:  

“Herbert McGrath was a banker, a wealthy, irritable man. At the bottom of his thinking there seemed to be an apprehension - a nightmare - that without the kind of order he represented, the world would fly apart. He despised men who raced to catch the morning train.”

Here we have a simple enough character, the kind of stuffy suburbanite we often encounter in Cheever’s stories. But Cheever doesn’t stop there. Instead, he recognizes his own archetype and introduces a new wrinkle, a droll little touch that places Mr. McGrath firmly within the race of men as we know them:

“Mixed with his insistence on propriety was a curious strain of superstition. When he walked along the station platform in the morning, he looked around him. If he saw a coin, he would shoulder past the other commuters and bend down to get it. ‘Good luck, you know,’ he would explain as he put the coin in his pocket. ‘It takes both luck and brains.’”

Here Cheever takes a man of power and apparent substance and renders him childish, a slogan-spewing gull to the silly everyday mysticism of coins and lucky numbers and broken mirrors. The effect of this detail is ambiguous: should the reader sympathize with McGrath (after all, who doesn’t have their pet superstitions)? Or does McGrath’s hustle to pick up a coin, the kind of hustle he apparently resents in other men, allow the reader to dismiss him that much more easily? These ambiguities are what makes Cheever’s characters so funny and vivid, but the best part of this brief portrait is that Herbert McGrath isn’t even an important character in the story. He’s just a guy that our hero, the hapless Will Pym, tries to avoid at a party. Needless to say, poor Will is unsuccessful, and the reader feels the exquisite agony of unavoidable cocktail party chit-chat. It’s all very funny and sad, and Cheever’s prose - as always - is arguably the apex of American English style. Score one for the CheevDawg.  

I told you it was tattered

But I didn’t come here to gush or, worse, over-explain. What I really came here to do, in my critical nanny-nanny-boo-boo sort of way, is point out a flaw. Because what’s more fun than an unnecessary autopsy of a dead genius’ work? (On second thought, don’t answer that).

This thing I’m calling a flaw (but which is really just a matter of taste) only comes up occasionally, only in Cheever’s weakest stories. But when it does rear its head, it can very nearly ruin its otherwise fine surroundings. In the rare instances when I’ve encountered it, I wish I had access to a magical, death-defying phone that would allow me to call Cheever and ask him, in his infinitely stylish wisdom, what the hell he was thinking.

I’m talking, of course, about Cheever’s occasional heavy-handedness, his High Modernist insistence on the literary epiphany. This is not a jab at the epiphany itself as a convention (where would we be without it?), but rather a jab at Cheever’s more ditty-ish mid-50s productions. Sometimes, at their very worst, Cheever’s story-ending epiphanies give me the impression that I’m not reading at all, but am in fact watching a strange, Brechtian play in which a cast member, dressed in rags and grinning lewdly, has produced and is now brandishing a sign that reads, “EPIPHANY HERE!”

By way of example, I will ruin a story for you (my apologies) by quoting from its final paragraph. The story in question is “The Wrysons,” which first appeared in the New Yorker in September of 1958. It is the height of the Cold War, and the Wrysons are a suburban couple very similar to Herbert McGrath in their paranoid bourgeois obsession with Order. But like most suburbanites, and most human beings, Mr. and Mrs. Wryson are odd in ways they feel compelled to hide from the world and from each other. Mrs. Wryson has recurring nightmares of suicide and nuclear holocaust, and Mr. Wryson, for his part, bakes clandestine cakes in the middle of the night as stress relief. When Mrs. Wryson awakes from a routine nightmare to the smell of smoke, she stumbles to the kitchen, where she discovers that her husband has fallen asleep in the middle of baking a cake. This comes as a shock:

“She turned off the oven, and opened the window to let out the smell of smoke and let in the smell of nicotiana and other night flowers. She may have hesitated for a moment, for what would the stranger at the gates - that intruder with his beard and book - have made of this couple, in their nightclothes, in the smoke-filled kitchen at half past four in the morning? Some comprehension - perhaps momentary - of the complexity of life must have come to them, but it was only momentary. There were no further explanations. He threw the cake, which was burned to a cinder, into the garbage, and they turned out the lights and climbed the stairs, more mystified by life than ever, and more interested than ever in a good appearance.”

Beautiful writing, right? Rhythmic and swift, parcelled out in those perfect Cheever rhythms. But what’s with that one sentence, the one that’s almost mockingly epiphanic: “Some comprehension - perhaps momentary - of the complexity of life must have come to them, but it was only momentary.” Surely this sentence wasn’t necessary? Surely Cheever didn’t need to construct a billboard for his own ending, an advertisement for the mysterious profundity he’s baked into his conclusion like sugar in a cake. If I had my way (yeaaaaah right), Cheever would have nixed this sentence in the drafting process, and I think the story would have benefited from its deletion, mostly because it expresses nothing about the characters other than the vague sense that they’re experiencing a Moment.

And thus arises the problem of Cheever’s short fiction: his stories live and die by their epiphanic endings, their success depending almost entirely on the eloquence and style of each epiphany’s expression. When reading Cheever, the question isn’t whether a textbook Modernist epiphany will occur; it becomes, instead, how well, how beautifully and surprisingly, Cheever will deliver the inevitable. In this sense, Cheever emerges as the most illustrative (and probably the most talented) of the writers Donald Barthelme identified, in 1964, as the purveyors of the Chekhovian mousetrap: “Fiction after Joyce seems to have devoted itself… to short stories constructed mousetrap-like to supply, at the finish, a tiny insight typically having to do with innocence violated, or to works written as vehicles to say no! in thunder.” When I first read “The Wrysons,” Barthelme’s words rang out in my head, and my own critical faculties kicked in, casting a dark cloud over this story I’d enjoyed so much up to that point.

Donald Barthelme, c. 1964 - interesting stance there, Don

At the same time, however, Cheever’s endings are almost always good, and more than occasionally great. “The Wrysons” and infrequent stories like it are rare exceptions, although I’m sure many readers would argue that “The Wrysons” is another good-to-great Cheever story, even with its gong-bashing ending. In fact, in my moneyballing estimation, Cheever batted about .900 over an amazingly prolific career, a career that spanned decades of impeccably-wrought stories and quietly boundary-pushing novels. There’s also his admirable career-long arc towards the surreal, an arc that begins in the mid-fifties, in creeping, panicky stories like “The Music Teacher,” and reaches its height in the 60s and 70s, with the now iconic “The Swimmer” and form-scrambling exercises like “A Miscellany of Characters that Will Not Appear.” And unlike the experimentalists whom Cheever seems (mostly) to have ignored, Cheever’s work proves consistently and convincingly emotional, with an unironic sense of moral truth.

All of which begs the question: so what if Cheever was a builder of mousetraps? If he was, then his mousetraps are worth falling into, if only for the delicious cheese.

Chasin' the Trey: Frustrations of a Fan

[Disclaimer: As a 23-year-old lover of Phish, my opinions could easily be dismissed as those of a “noob.” And while it's true that I've only seen Phish live a handful of times, I feel that I've earned these opinions after more than a decade of obsessive listening to the band’s recordings. And to those who assert that only “those who were there” can make accurate musical judgments, I counter that the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the recordings are the pudding.]

Trey Anastasio, the Young Lion

I’m a huge Phish fan (please, for the love of Jerry, don’t write “phan”), but it ain’t always easy. Apart from the incessant but ineffective jeers of my hipster friends, the greatest roadblock to my affections is the deterioration of frontman Trey Anastasio’s guitar skills. Once a psychedelic shredder nonpareil, Trey (like all Phish fans, I’m on a first-name basis with the guy) has somehow devolved into an avuncular noodler, a toothless caricature of his golden-age self.

In most rock bands, this might not be such a big deal. But Phish is not like most rock bands. Their sound is predicated almost entirely on face-melting guitar solos, the kind of six-string heroics that inspire rapture and, under the best circumstances, allow the listener to forget the dubious songcraft that allowed for the solo in the first place. In the absence of such heroics, what remains is Phish’s inimitable and unprecedented stage show, a live event that is both parts rock concert and experimental theater performance. It’s an endearing and often enthralling mixture - and it’s undoubtedly the beating heart of the band’s appeal - but it also becomes a bunch of bullshit if Trey can’t play his instrument convincingly.

For one thing, the songs aren’t great in any conventional sense. The early and ambitious stuff - Trey’s magna opera - actually are great, but their mix of Zappa-esque virtuosity, psychedelic hijinks, and prodigious compositional length might as well be the definition of “acquired taste.” On the other hand, Phish’s simpler rock tunes are often fun, but rarely deep. At their worst, Phish’s straightforward rockers and ballads dwell in a cheesy purgatory of on-the-nose wordplay and not-quite-there conceits. For all you Phish fans nauseated by my heresy, try to sway a non-fan by playing “Waste” or “Farmhouse” for them. Chances are they’ll drown in the cheez. And when that same non-fan asks graciously for a second sampling, try to get him or her to sit through an entire “Reba” or “Divided Sky” without looking at their watch. Not everyone has the patience for all that bagging and tagging and selling to the butcher in the store-o.

But let’s get back to Trey and his guitar. At the height of his powers in the early- to mid-nineties, Trey consistently tapped into a musical force that few musicians ever even conceive of. In fact, in some live recordings from 1994 and ‘95, Trey actually reminds me of John Coltrane. This might seem like hyperbole, probably because Phish doesn’t play “jazz” and Trey never approaches Coltrane’s linear or harmonic sophistication, but there’s an energy in Trey’s playing that is undeniably similar. Add to this feverish, demoniac energy an inspired performance by the rest of Phish, and you get a young band that almost sounds more like Coltrane’s classic quartet than the Grateful Dead. ‘Trane lovers with far heavier credentials than mine will scoff at this notion, but I couldn’t care less. I’ve heard it, and it’s the truth.

So what happened to this energy, this near-spiritual force that transcended its goofball surroundings and blew minds from coast to coast, continent to continent? There are several theories of varying validity. The first is aesthetic.

On Halloween night, 1996, Phish performed the Talking Heads’ seminal album Remain in Light as part of their annual “musical costume” Halloween gag. For those not familiar with this record, it’s a spare, funky, and haunting set of songs that mixes David Byrne’s pop sensibilities with an all-out embrace of the arty and weird (it is, after all, a Talking Heads album). Adrian Belew’s guitar solos on this record are few and far between, but they hit with maximum impact, in economical shards of post-punk noise that suggest mechanical malfunction just as much as human dexterity. In performing the album live, Trey played these solos note for note, or at least as closely as he could. At the same time, drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon copped Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s grooves to a tee, adopting a tight, funky style that would prove influential to Phish’s own evolving sound.

The Remain in Light performance remains (ha) a watershed moment in Phish history. Gone were the days of unrelenting, balls-to-the-wall shredding, replaced instead by a slinkier, more groove-observant band with a different lead guitarist, a dude who began to express himself more through chunky chords and wonky effects pedals than through heroic, thousand-note solos (there are countless exceptions to this rule, including much of the cocaine-fueled summer tour of 1998, but what is a rule without its exceptions?). As a listener, I actually love the ensuing “funk’n’space” years, which lasted roughly from 1997 to 2000, when the band decided to go on an indefinite hiatus. In the countless live recordings from this era, Trey sounds both inventive and strong, and he solos with his customary jaw-dropping force when called upon. But there can be no doubt: his playing overall has become more placid; he is no longer the late-period Coltrane of the jam world.

Phish's IT Festival, Summer of 2003; Few bands inspire devotion - or ticket sales - like Phish

Yet while the aesthetic theory might explain part of Trey’s musical transformation, it doesn’t tell the whole story. To get that, we’ll have to dig the Second Theory of Deterioration, which is very straightforward and unsurprising and has everything to do with drugs.  

I don’t want to oversimplify the drug use of a man I’ve never met, but the fact is that Trey Anastasio’s struggle with the hard stuff has played a huge part in his musical hero’s journey. This struggle (which involved untold amounts of cocaine, opiates, and, worst of all, heroin) started in the late nineties, took him on an awful ride that lasted nearly a decade, and ended with an embarrassing but life-saving arrest and rehabilitation in late 2006. When one considers this struggle on a human level, guitar playing and entertainment become pretty irrelevant.

But while we’re on the subject, I’ll try to lay out my “Trey and drugs” opinion as succinctly as possible: it must be damn difficult to play guitar in front of thousands of people when you’re strung out on dope. It also must be damn difficult to play guitar in front of thousands of people when you’re no longer strung out on dope. With all that in mind, it’s kind of a miracle Trey gets back up onstage at all. It’s also no wonder his playing has changed.

The Lion ages, conquers his demons, wears a spiffy suit to court

But what else leads to change, to entropy and ultimate dissolution? The answer, of course, is Time. And so we arrive at the Third Theory, which states that Trey is old(er), and that old men do not play like young men. This one is simple and requires, I think, no further explanation.

So, you may be asking yourself, why is this guy writing all this mess if he thinks Trey sucks now? The first part of my complicated answer is that I absolutely do not think that Trey sucks. He’s still a powerful string-bending force, the glistening centerpiece in his band’s wholly original sound, a sound he built from scratch over thirty years of playing crazy, rule-breaking music with his three closest friends. You can count rock bands with that kind of longevity on both hands (at the very most, you might have to employ a toe or two). But unlike the other bands in this hallowed echelon, Phish can boast a track record of frequent and relatively radical change. This is a band that never stays in the same place for long, and Trey’s changing (what I’d call diminishing) guitar chops are a part of that process, for better or for worse.

Another reason I’m still wrapped up in this band after over a decade of intensive, near-Pharisaic listening is my hopeful insistence that each tour might be different in the right way (or at least “right” as I selfishly designate it). With each leg of each summer tour, each New Year’s run, each one-off stint in Mexico, I tell myself that maybe Trey has been practicing, maybe, just maybe he’ll be back to his Coltrane-level prime.

But what I hear instead is something akin to Miles Davis’ deterioration as a trumpeter. Miles was never a blistering bopper a la Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown (despite his years with Bird and his lifelong adoration of Diz), but he was still a truly great trumpeter, a consummate stylist whose burnished tone is one of the most recognizably personal sounds in all of American music. That changed as Miles aged, and sometime in the early 70s, around the release of the masterful aesthetic statement On the Corner (1972), his playing turned plangent and squawky, a reflection less of his artistic vision than, I would argue, the weakening of his embouchure and a burgeoning addiction to cocaine. The similarities to Trey’s musical trajectory are difficult to dismiss, although I’d say our hero is in pretty good company alongside the Prince of Darkness. Let's call him the Prince of Ginger.

Miles Davis, around the time his sound turned squawky

To make a very long story short, I guess what I’m ranting about is that, despite recent claims of a Phish Renaissance beginning in the summer of 2015, I find Trey’s latter-day playing only fitfully inspired. And, as I outlined earlier, as goes Trey, so goes Phish: the jams are completely dependent on his front-and-center guitar playing, whether he decides go with “sheets of sound” or with chunky, effects-laden minimalism. Either way, what I hear in Trey’s playing, as a lifelong listener and a not-untalented musician in my own right, is not only the weakening of the man’s once-godlike fingers, but also a narrowed guitar vocabulary - a series of permutations of maybe ten to fifteen minor pentatonic and mixolydian licks that Trey shuffles like a swindling mountebank, hoping desperately you won’t catch him in the act.

On the other hand, it might just be that I’m growing up and growing out of the musical obsession that ruled my teen years with a tie-dyed and ganja-stinking fist. Many fans I’ve encountered on Phantasy Tour (a.k.a. "PT," the Phish-focused and one-of-a-kind “drug band message board” I’ve frequented since 2006) express the exact same frustrations on a regular basis. The thing is, we’ve heard what this guitar player and this band are capable of, and we’re just a little put out by what they're doing now. Maybe we’re “jaded,” but I have a hard time believing I could be jaded about anything at my age. Maybe we’re just honest.

Or maybe I should heed the words of the man himself, who asks Wilson, the cruel dictator of the mythological Gamehendge, an important question in the eponymous anthem: “Ooohh, Wilson, can you still have any fun???”

Postscript:

The preceding rant might not sound like the words of a "true" Phish fan. But I really do love this band, and it’s a crime I’ve barely even mentioned its three other members, whom I love just as much as I revere (and sometimes revile) their fearless leader. There’s Mike Gordon, the weirdo bassist I learned so much from as a young wannabe jammer; Page McConnell, the pianist/keyboardist and designated secret weapon whose touch ranges from silky to strident, depending on the tune; and, last but not least, drummer Jon Fishman, the resident clown in an already beautifully clownish band.