THE COUNTRY HUSBAND
by John Cheever, 1958

While reminding us of John Cheever's fame as a New Yorker writer who chronicles suburban life, the title of Cheever's justly famous "The Country Husband" suggests as well the complexity of his work. A portrait of a middle-aged husband who embodies the values of twentieth-century suburbia, the story plays against William Wycherley's risqué comedy of manners The Country Wife (1675). Like Wycherley's Restoration play, it exposes the superficiality and emptiness of the very society that it celebrates. The allusion also emphasizes the current of sexual conflict that underlies human life. Wycherley's title is but the starting point for the dense allusive style of Cheever's story; it effectively highlights the comedic approach that is Cheever's forte.

"I'm in love, Dr. Herzog," Francis Weed confesses to a psychiatrist at a climactic moment of the story. The affliction, whatever one calls it, has made the middle-aged country husband behave absurdly and destructively. His awareness of his mortality (he had just escaped serious injury and death when his airplane was forced to make an emergency landing) may have been a factor in his pursuit of the attractive girl who sits with his children when illness has kept Mrs. Henlein, the usual sitter, away. Francis risks separation from his capable (if somewhat neurotic) wife, Julia, and the emotional security of his four children—two girls and two boys, the ideal combination for the ideal family. His futile pursuit of Anne Murchison also threatens Shady Hill, the paradise that Francis and his peers have endeavored to create.

Through the good work of Dr. Herzog, Francis regains his perspective. The comedy ends, as comedy should, with restoration and unity. The Weeds will not separate. Shady Hill (ambiguously named as it is) survives. Cheever's last look in the story is humorously, even mythically, focused on the community. As night falls in the story Cheever emphasizes the restlessness underneath the order of the suburban kingdom. Mrs. Masterson warns the wandering child Gertrude to return to her home. A nude Mr. Babcock chases his nude wife from their house to the hedge-screened terrace. Once again Mr. Nixon shouts his formulas at the squirrels in his bird-feeding station. Julia Weed tries to rescue the cat, "sunk in spiritual and physical discomfort" because it wears a doll's hat and a dress (Cheever's neuter pronoun tells us that the cat has endured more decisive violence); "'Here, pussy, pussy, pussy!' Julia calls. 'Here, pussy, here poor pussy!"' The dog, Jupiter, ever disruptive of the order of paradise, prances through the tomato vines, carrying "in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper." Understandably Cheever adored the final sentence of the story: "Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over mountains."

Comedies of manners never put much emphasis on plot, and audiences seldom remember those plots. They recall, usually, a situation and a few characters. A Cheever story is likely to be remembered in much the same way. Because events are numerous and varied and involve many characters, however, "The Country Husband" would not readily be translated to the stage. (It is the opposite of most of Hemingway's stories, in which characters are few and dialogue central.) It could effectively be translated to film, but such a translation would likely require feature-length treatment.

Although characters in comedies of manners usually exist to bandy witty dialogue, only a few scenes of Cheever's story rely on such dialogue. The first of these scenes is between Anne Murchison and Francis as he drives her home; she explains the reason for her tears—her alcoholic father. Cheever relies on dialogue to portray the dramatic change that has come upon Francis. The next morning, waiting for his commuter train, he insults grande dame Mrs. Wrightson. The evening of that day Clayton Thomas, a college student, comes to pay for theater tickets; he discusses his future with Julia and Francis, then voices condemnation about Shady Hill people. Francis is shocked when Clayton reports his plan to marry Anne Murchison. Clayton's visit produces the most extended dialogue of the story, provoking the crisis between the husband and wife.

For the most part the memorable lines of "The Country Husband" belong to the narrator. His elegance threads the story, uniting the many scenes. (Thread is one of the story's important metaphors.) His voice provides the allusive texture, creating the comic distance even as it insists on the ultimate seriousness of the issues. Finally the country of the husband is the country we all inhabit, precarious at best, fallen certainly, but always holding seeds for a more happy flowering.

Consider the opening sentences:

To begin at the beginning, the airplane from Minneapolis in which Francis Weed was traveling East ran into heavy weather. The sky had been a hazy blue, with the clouds below the plane lying so close together that nothing could be seen of the earth. Then mist began to form outside the windows, and they flew into a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires.

The passage evokes Genesis as well as John's gospel. With the four elements clearly in evidence, the possibility for creation seems as great as the possibility for destruction. The name "weed" plays against the story of Eden, that earlier paradise. As he charts the domestic battle of the Weeds, Cheever frequently plays domestic strife against global strife, reminding readers often of the ongoing cosmic struggle between chaos and creation. Through a range of allusions (biblical, classical, contemporary) Cheever deftly balances the ordinary and the extraordinary in such a way that the extraordinary is always becoming ordinary, the ordinary extraordinary.

"The Country Husband" gives abundant evidence of Cheever's skill as a social realist. We usually hear it in the extended scenes of dialogue—especially in the scene depicting the visit of Clayton Thomas and the crisis it produces between Julia and Francis. The crisis is, in fact, the most mundane part of the story—precisely because Cheever renders it so mimetically with the narrator fairly effaced.

That domestic crisis comes fairly late in the story, however. If we compare it with Francis's homecoming after his near brush with the Angel of Death (to use the author's image from his opening paragraph), we find Cheever working in a very different mode. The narrator shuns the strictly mimetic; turning to present tense he utilizes an exaggerated comedic style to portray the nonwelcoming. The younger children are in tears in the midst of fierce combat, daughter Helen lies on her bed reading True Romance, and Julia attempts to keep peace and to get the family through the evening meal. The narrator uses some lines of direct discourse, but they are immersed in long paragraphs, working with effective indirect discourse that adds to the sense of speed and chaos. The scene ends with Julia in tears as she carries the youngest child upstairs to bed. Cheever concludes an episode that is representative as well as unique: "The other children drift away from the battlefield, and Francis goes into the back garden for a cigarette and some air." The narrator's metaphors, his blend of direct and indirect discourse, and his pace have made the common event seem a good deal more.

Even as it insists on the ordinariness of the Weeds, Cheever's story recounts numerous events that are out of the ordinary—the airplane crisis initiating them. Their clustering in a short time span adds to the sense of the extraordinary. The day after the near crash the Weeds have dinner at the Farquarsons. The maid who serves dinner, Francis recalls, is the French girl he had seen disgraced in her French town for having lived with a German soldier during the occupation. That same night Francis first meets Anne Murchison. The next morning as he waits for his train, he sees "an extraordinary thing": in one of the passing sleeping-car compartments he views a naked woman sitting and combing her golden hair—Venus incarnated. (That very night he steals a kiss from Anne.) In the context of this cluster his insulting of Mrs. Wrightson takes place, a signal of how far from the path of reason he has wandered. Chaos seems destined to triumph. The string of extraordinary events reaches a high moment when Francis makes his initial visit to Dr. Herzog, to be greeted by a policeman who orders him to freeze, then frisks him for weapons.

Thematically considered, the most instructive of these events is the least dramatic—Francis's memory of the French maid. In the face of Shady Hill's strenuous efforts to keep the ugliness of the world at bay, his vivid recollection of the scene in the French village asserts the importance of memory and history. Try as it might, Shady Hill cannot create a world in which the present and future inevitably dominate. (The narrator's cultural memory enhances the values implicit in Francis's particular memory; the allusions keep reminding readers of stories of love, war, disaster, and death.)

Memory, in fact, leads Francis to his resolution. Reflecting on the aborted plane crash, the Farquarsons' new maid, and Anne Murchison, he is reminded of the one time in his life that he had been lost in the north woods:

He had now the same bleak realization that no amount of cheerfulness or hopefulness or valor or perseverance could help him find, in the gathering dark, the path that he'd lost. The feeling of bleakness was intolerable, and he saw clearly that he had reached the point where he would have to make a choice.

As Francis confronts these personal memories, Cheever's readers confront Dante's famous image in the opening lines of The Divine Comedy: "Midway life's journey I was made aware/That I strayed into the dark forest,/And the right path appeared not anywhere." In a very different kind of comedy Cheever awakens cultural memories to bring his readers to contemplation of Dante's theological realities.

—Joseph M. Flora