Word: delights
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...this transfigured world, there is delight as well as drama. On a quiet evening, "a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over mountains," a common citizen might see a door across the way fly open, "and out comes Mrs. Babcock without any clothes on, pursued by her naked husband. Over the terrace they go and in at the kitchen door, as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice...
...from the past, the ancient American moral severities and told a hundred parables to show that the emancipated middle class about which he now writes must pay homage to his tribal gods of purity and order. He has added (his ancestors might have thought it a subtraction) a lyrical delight in natural creation. The American wilderness is a sacred grove (not an inimical principle, as it was to Hemingway). Cheever's world is one of delight for those who obey the gods. He has rejected Puritanism and its "habits of guilt, self-denial, taciturnity and penitence" as a mere...
Father was indeed a formidable man, the redoubtable Dr. Milton C. Winternitz, dean of the Yale Medical School, spectacularly dynamic and articulate, and full of the authoritarian traditions of his profession. In short, a character to delight Cheever's heart. To Mary's faint astonishment, John immediately became a member of the family from which she herself had fled...