John Cheever: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
John Cheever
Interviewer: What about the beginning of stories? Yours start off very quickly. It's striking.
John Cheever: Well, if you're trying as a storyteller to establish some rapport with your reader, you don't open by telling him that you have a headache and indigestion and that you picked up a gravelly rash at Jones Beach. One of the reasons is that advertising in magazines is much more common today than it was twenty to thirty years ago. In publishing in a magazine you are competing against girdle advertisements, travel advertisements, nakedness, cartoons, even poetry. The competition almost makes it hopeless. There's a stock beginning that I've always had in mind. Someone is coming back from a year in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship. His trunk is opened in customs, and instead of his clothing and souvenirs, they find the mutilated body of an Italian seaman, everything there but the head. Another opening sentence I often think of is, "The first day I robbed Tiffany's it was raining." Of course, you can open a short story that way, but that's not how one should function with fiction. One is tempted because there has been a genuine loss of serenity, not only in the reading public, but in all our lives. Patience, perhaps, or even the ability to concentrate. At one point when television first came in no one was publishing an article that couldn't be read during a commercial. But fiction is durable enough to survive all of this. I don't like the short story that starts out "I'm about to shoot myself" or "I'm about to shoot you." Or the Pirandello thing of "I'm going to shoot you or you are going to shoot me, or we are going to shoot someone, maybe each other." Or the erotic thing, either: "He started to undo his pants, but the zipper stuck . . . he got the can of three-in-one oil . . ." and on and on we go.
Interviewer: Certainly your stories have a fast pace, they move along.
Cheever: The first principle of aesthetics is either interest or suspense. You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.
The Paris Review interview with American novelist and short story writer John Cheever took place in 1976. He won both the 1979 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection The Stories of John Cheever. His numerous other works include: The Ways Some People Live (1943), Falconer (1977), and Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear In My Next Novel.
