Novelists: Ovid in Ossining

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devoted to writing, but Cheever happily spends afternoons doing an exurban homeowner's chores and errands for his busy wife, who teaches English literature three days a week at nearby Briardiff College. Every Sunday he attends 8 a.m. Communion at All Saints Episcopal Church. He delights in dancing, enjoys his liquor with zest. His courtesy is immaculate, but in speech he is elliptical to the point of exasperation, with a tendency to finish only one in four of his sentences.

Moral Delight. Cheever is not a great expositor of character. Fiction as character study belongs to the Victorian novel, and this, he believes, is as obsolete as the world it moved in—the tight, homogeneous community, before mass communications smoothed out the world and blurred individuality. This tends to make his novels seem disjointed, but he defends it on the ground that disjunction is the nature of modern society.

Passions—abstracted from idiosyncrasy—and places are his concern. Thus the stage settings of his morality plays are important. In his stories, the places people live in are as eloquent of their lives as the words that issue out of their mouths.

Morality is his standard, but delight is his theme. And uniquely among latter-day writers, he argues that delight can come through morality, and perhaps only through it. No illicit pleasures commend themselves to Cheever. Says he, quoting Leander's last testament to his sons: "Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." Cheever does not interpret this as restrictive.

Technically, his attempt is to "determine whether you can describe the world in its own terms, by what people talk about or dream about."

Glad Tidings. "Writing," he says, "must extend itself into a whole new sense of factuality. When you find a woman, for instance, obsessed with her plaid-stamp book, I think you perhaps have something there that would be in the nature of an altogether new truth. It is quite possible that a woman who goes to sleep and dreams of getting a new plaid-stamp book is not quite as undignified as she appears to be. People actually sidestep the pain of death and despair by the thought of purchasing things. I am a traditionalist. I live in an old house, come from an old family, but the time for gravity or even making fun of people who go to bed and dream of having 17 plaid-stamp books full is over. One has to accept these people as adult and useful, and people have had worse dreams."

Ultimately, Cheever tries to "celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream." Says he: "One has an impulse to bring glad tidings to someone. My sense of literature is a sense of giving, not a diminishment. I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next, and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place."