I wasn’t sure whether to post Naomi Kanakia’s The New Yorker offered him a deal, because it’s very long and wouldn’t be of much interest to someone who didn’t care about John Cheever or the strange phenomenon known as the “New Yorker story,” but if you do care about those things it’s fascinating — she goes into the whole history of the magazine’s stories and why they work (and why they’ve always been criticized), and why the magazine’s demands determined Cheever’s career. And I have a deep respect and affection for people who do a deep dive into a corpus they’re interested in so they can report on the results with authority rather than making the usual facile assumptions and moving on: “All told, I’ve probably read five hundred New Yorker stories over the last three months.” (Compare my appreciation of Vera Dunham’s In Stalin’s Time, for which she “waded through mountains of elephant shit,” and see this 2010 post linking to Slawkenbergius’ “thoughtful take on John Cheever.”) She starts off:
Two months ago, I read a seven-hundred-page collection of short stories by John Cheever. But somehow that wasn’t enough. I went on to read seven-hundred-page retrospective collections from Mavis Gallant, Alice Adams, and John O’Hara. And I still wanted more!
Normally when I get halfway through a story collection I think, “Okay…I’m done now”, but with these authors, it wasn’t like that. I wanted more. Not more of these particular writers, but more work that was like their work in some weird, indefinable way. […]
Not only were these stories similar to each other, but they also seemed quite different from other literary stories. These stories were mostly marked by their extreme restraint. They didn’t just eschew plot, they also eschewed lyricism, symbolism, surrealism, or any other devices that would call attention to themselves. Their plotlessness made them seem highbrow, but their unadorned style made them highly accessible. And I wondered how The New Yorker could’ve arrived at this unique-seeming combination of elements.
And she proceeds to the history of how the early “casuals” became short stories, and how the tastes of the first editor, Harold Ross (who “was never totally sold on the idea of publishing stories”), determined the kind of story that would become the hallmark of the magazine. If any of this sounds intriguing, give it a try and you may find yourself reading the whole thing (and perhaps developing a new respect for Cheever, who for so long was a punching bag for critics of all descriptions and who was persistently underpaid by the magazine).
According to Thurber, Ross felt that the last sentence of any short story was best deleted, as it was always just the author showing off. Something like “Suddenly, Mr Smith felt tired.”
Something like “Suddenly, Mr Smith felt tired.”
Start with the first sentence of an Elmore Leonard novel, end with the above, and dispense with everything in between. The Anti-Ross.
Just last night I heard a thoughtful young woman claim that John O’Hara was underappreciated and underread these days compared to Cheever. Whose name may be a punchline but is also a synecdoche for a whole style/era so he does comparatively well (compared to O’Hara) on the any-publicity-is-good-publicity metric with younger potential readers.
Whose name may be a punchline
Oh, not any more — that’s one of the points of the piece, that the publication of his Collected Stories completely changed his image and made him, at long last, the respected author he’d always wanted to be.
what a fantastic essay!
one thing that struck me in the section on cheever’s late-life triumph – especially in its resonances with the sections on “diversity novels” and “the privileged formula” – was this sentence from david remnick:
“Read straight through, the earlier Cheever stories especially evoked an era as distant and as compelling to my generation as the loping steps of Joe DiMaggio or the tom-tom drums of Gene Krupa.”
it’s the late 1970s. the thing that ties dimaggio, krupa, and cheever together – and, as part of the Privileged Formula, cannot be named – is their whiteness. the baseball player and the jazz drummer were stars in a very specific period when their black peers were excluded from the high-prestige contexts where they played in their prime.* so too with cheever, a house writer during the thirty-year period when the New Yorker published no fiction by black writers.
remnick can’t, and kanakia doesn’t, say as much, but i think the rediscovery of cheever is very much a retrospective Great White Hope story. it happened at the moment when mid-century black writers were being returned to print from obscurity (e.g. zora neale hurston) and recognized as Major American Authors rather than second-class literati (e.g. james baldwin, langston hughes). for the New Yorker’s readership and its college-bound children, cheever was a perfect counterbalance – a suburban rocky marciano of literature.**
genre is a social practice, and “the New Yorker story” was/is very much defined by its racial and gendered borders – those aren’t kanakia’s subject here, but based on her mentions of how the genre’s gendering was framed in criticism, i’d be thrilled if she took that side of things up in the future.
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* and, i’d argue, owed some or much of their stardom to that exclusion. would joe have jolted so successfully in a league that allowed satchel paige and other Negro Leaguers to pitch against him (or hit on the other side of the inning)? i kinda doubt it – he’d’ve still been good, but the standards would’ve been meaningfully higher. krupa did play in integrated bands, but both as a sideman and as a bandleader, he had access to an array of professional opportunities that black drummers did not.
** i don’t know from boxing enough to say who raymond carver is in this metaphor. larry bird? kevin hale? pat metheny? gary burton?
Maybe, but I think Remnick’s analogy is badly flawed because Krupa doesn’t encapsulate an era the way DiMaggio did. A drummer? Come on. Also if Krupa equals DiMaggio then Rich is Ted Williams? And Blakey is Satchel Paige?
I feel like I’ve read a lot of writing about jazz by a lot of people of different generational cohorts but can’t recall coming across someone of Remnick’s age (born 1958) using Krupa as a synecdoche that way. Krupa pairs well with DiMaggio in that they were both already famous before Pearl Harbor, which gives a certain sense of distance and temporal remove, but that doesn’t match Cheever, who was the same age but was still largely unknown in ’41 and is a “suburban Fifties and pre-Beatles Sixties” guy in terms of his time-period resonance. Indeed, by the time Cheever was peaking as a mass-market celebrity the New Yorker was already publishing James Baldwin … If you wanted a white jazzman parallel to Cheever in that chronology-of-mainstream-fame way I would have thought Dave Brubeck would be the obvious choice.
But the reason you would use Krupa rather than even e.g. Charlie Parker is because the up-to-1941 swing/big-band thing is a very different cultural/historical thing to evoke than the post-war bebop thing (despite being out of sync with Cheever chronologically), but, you know, Basie would have paired perfectly well with DiMaggio for evoking that former thing. Indeed, the Gong Show’s use of “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” (originally a hit for Basie in ’38) reintroduced him to Remnick’s generation when they were in their late teens.
Although Krupa is interesting because the very specific flashy/showmanlike style of drumming he pioneered (like Rich and Bellson) didn’t really have too many equally high-profile black practitioners – e.g. Sonny Greer and Papa Jo Jones were more stay-in-the-background guys in that era, although I guess Chick Webb was maybe a bit ahead of Krupa in a quite similar style before his death at a quite young age. But then the post-war bebop high-profile black drummers (perhaps Blakey but certainly Kenny Clarke and Max Roach) were working in a different style not just musically but in terms of their show-biz presentation.
A good non-fiction NYer story today, or at least I think so, having also roomed student years in Waltham and Somerville Mass., “The Chapman House,” by Jill Lapore,
which I mention even though the caption contest editors passed on “tray chic.”
For a moment there I thought I might be being unfair to Remnick because his quote was specifically about the “earlier” Cheever stories, but digging into it a little more he doesn’t really mean the early ones, i.e. those published before WW2 that Cheever himself came to regard as embarrassing juvenilia but which maybe for that reason are more relevant datapoints for the evolution of the “New Yorker story” as a genre. Because Remnick is talking about the 1978 anthology from which Cheever deliberately excluded all of that supposed juvenilia. The earliest thing in that collection might be from 1947 so the big bands are in decline and we’re already contemporaneous with Bird and Diz, Daddy-O.
BTW, for someone of Remnick’s generation who is probably not actually Remnick himself, Krupa might have been (if you knew more history than most) of quite considerable significance, but as a prophet of the future not as a relic of a bygone past. If you were 15 years old in ’73 (as Remnick was) and thought that the high point of 20th-century musical experience was seeing Deep Purple rocking an ice hockey rink full of stoned suburban kids and actually enjoyed the ten-minute-plus drum solo by Ian Paice, the fons et origo of that “now let’s have an extended drum solo” part of the evening really does go back fairly specifically to Krupa’s time as a featured player in Benny Goodman’s band.
what a fantastic essay!
Yay, somebody actually read it! I have not wasted my time on earth. And of course I agree with the way you place it in cultural/racial context.
Krupa doesn’t encapsulate an era the way DiMaggio did. A drummer? Come on.
You wouldn’t feel that way if you’d known my Uncle Gene, who fought at Iwo Jima and for whom Krupa was absolutely a central cultural figure like DiMaggio, as he was for so many white Greatest Generation guys. The question of why Baby Remnick thought of citing him as such is a different one, for which JWB’s answer is as good as any I can come up with.
I mean, you could talk up Krupa’s own positive contributions to the integration of jazz, as rozele alluded to, but to give the man his due he also had the Coolness Factor of being one of the very first white showbiz personalities to get in trouble with the law for cannabis-related reasons – busted in early 1943, five and a half years before Robert Mitchum. Which has a linguistic angle, because Time magazine then published that year, with Krupa’s prison sentence as the news peg, a helpful “explainer” for its readers giving a range of allegedly then-current marijuana-related slang. (I was interested to see that they’d already moved beyond the older “marihuana” spelling.)
https://time.com/archive/6774291/music-the-weed/
Etymological caveat: the Time story claims “The word marijuana is of Mexican origin and means ‘the weed that intoxicates.’ ” Mexican origin yes, but no modern etymological source accepts “the weed that intoxicates” or any other interpretation — it remains a mystery. Merriam-Webster has one of its long and detailed online etymology notes, tracing the earliest attestations of mariguana/marihuana in mid-19th-century Mexican sources, one of whom already remarked that the word was a puzzle: “Marihuana…Planta … cuyo nombre acaso está formado de la voz Mari significando Maria i la palabra Huana significando Rosa, ignoro á que idioma pertenece: será planta que como otras muchas pasó á Mejico del Asia antes de la conquista, como parece demostrarlo en cierto modo su nombre americanizado?”
I don’t know whether the Time writer drew on the then-available scholarly literature, such as https://www.jstor.org/stable/486994
The most interesting Mexican etymology in this semantic field might that of the now-archaic greefo (or greapha, greefa, grefa, griefo, griefs, grifa, griffa, griffo, grifo …), from which probably cometh AmEng “reefer” and which is etymologized by Green’s as “[Mex. Sp. sl. grifo, under the influence of marijuana; the original use of grifo is tangled or frizzy hair; thus the image of mental fuzziness/frizziness].”
For its time, that is a very surprisingly positive coverage of marijuana.