"The Sorrows of Gin" (The Stories of John Cheever)

John Cheever's The Shining

John Cheever struggled with alcoholism most of his life, yet no one glorifies his drinking. He wasn't a witty drunk like Truman Capote or an adventurous drunk like Hemingway or Kerouac. He didn't die young. He ultimately stopped drinking. Most importantly, he never romanticized addiction. His drunks don't run with the bulls or haunt jazz clubs. Alcoholism in Cheever stories is sloppy and sad.

“The Sorrows of Gin” is like What Maisie Knew and The Shining in its depiction of a child dealing with disaster parents. Amy Lawton is an 8 year old girl growing up in the 1950s suburbs, full of well-stocked liquor cabinets, live-in help and frequent parties. Everyone drinks. Her parents drink. Their friends drink. The cooks and the gardeners drink. Everyone is swimming in alcohol.

Besides the moments when she's asked to serve guests, her parents treat her like she's invisible. Her father is either working or complaining. Her mother tells her to get off the chair. Most of the time, her parents leave her with the help.

On one of those nights when they attend a party, they let the cook watch her. The cook, Rosemary tells her a sad story about her dead alcoholic sister. The moral is that Rosemary would be proud if Amy poured her father's gin down the sink. A week later, Rosemary goes to the city and comes back too drunk to stand. She's still drinking gin from a Coca-Cola bottle. Cheever has the confidence to maintain Amy's perspective. Amy knows the smell of gin, but Amy doesn't know why Rosemary contradicted her Bible thumping teetotaler sermon to get so stinking drunk that Amy's father fires her on the spot. So the reader never knows.

As far as Mr. Lawton is concerned, all the domestic workers are worthless drunks. At one point, he rants: “We paid that gardener three dollars an hour and all he did was sneak in here and drink up my Scotch. The sitter we had before we got Mrs. Henlein used to water my bourbon, and I don’t have to remind you about Rosemary. The cook before Rosemary not only drank everything in my liquor cabinet but she drank all the rum, kirsch, sherry, and wine that we had in the kitchen for cooking. Then, there’s that Polish woman we had last summer. Even that old laundress. And the painters. I think they must have put some kind of a mark on my door. I think the agency must have checked me off as an easy touch.” To make matters worse, Amy takes Rosemary's words to heart and begins pouring gin down the sink. So even the sober servants get blamed.

Enter Mrs.Henlein, the nosiest babysitter in fiction. A soon as the Lawtons are out the door, Mrs. Henlein is interrogating Amy. Mrs. Henlein is awful. At this point, Amy probably knows the consequences of pouring gin down the sink and does it anyhow. Only this time, Mrs. Henlein is an angry prude who reacts to the inevitable accusations with screams. She even calls the cops to report that...I don't actually know why she's calling the police. Is she going to demand that they arrest them for hurting her feelings? In John Cheever's world, even the sober characters act like angry drunks.

As Mrs. Henlein bullies the Lawtons, John Cheever gives the reader his best prose: "The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant."

So Amy decides to run away, stay with friends in New York City, hide in a museum, just get away from these awful people. She takes all the money she can find and walks to the train station. Her parents don't even know that she's gone until the ticket seller calls her parents.

The ending shifts the perspective to her father and his desperate inner life. As he's driving to the station,he shivers with longing for tavern songs, Venice churches and swans. For just a moment, he imagines a life less tedious. Then he snaps back to his willful blindness. The last sentences tells us that Amy's father is never going to understand her. “Oh, why should she want to run away? Travel—and who knew better than a man who spent three days of every fortnight on the road—was a world of overheated plane cabins and repetitious magazines, where even the coffee, even the champagne, tasted of plastics. How could he teach her that home sweet home was the best place of all?”

Again. Amy is eight years old. Why would she care about overheated plane cabins and coffee? She's a kid. She needs to be a kid. Her father cannot fathom what she's thinking so he just imposes his adult problems onto her. The Lawton home is not a happy home, but it's a wealthy home with plenty of servants. Mr. Lawton is too busy and sad to see how he's made his daughter's life a booze soaked nightmare.

At this point, we have to ask how much autobiography went into this story. According to Susan Cheever's book, her father was a depressive alcoholic. She loved him but she had to take care of him before she could take care of herself. Cheever wasn't the best father and his stories feel like confessions. Continually he writes about terrible parents who either lose their children (The Sutton Place Story), kill their children's pets (The Summer Farmer) or make their children miserable as they fail to rekindle their marriage (The Hartleys). Even in a time when husbands were expected to leave all the parenting to their wives, Cheever has a brutal take on his failings as a father.

Nexr week: Even more drinking (and murder!)

This one definitely calls for a link to Al-Anon

For more on John Cheever as a father, check out Home Before Dark by Susan Cheever