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Reading John Cheever's books in quick succession, or reading The Collected Stories, we tend to forget that the creation of a body of fiction is a lifelong and a cumulative process. Faced with only the finished work, we might lose sight of the fact that the composition of these stories took place over many years, on a succession of rainy or sunny mornings and afternoons and under a variety of influences and conditions. However, for many writers, and surely Cheever is one of these, the blank page is not necessarily as blank as we might imagine because the writer does not forget what he learned while writing the last story when he sits down to write a new one. The accrual of tools and techniques in which the writer has gained confidence, and which he has learned to wield with growing authority, takes place, if the writer is any good and is dedicated to his craft, on a conscious level. Writing every day, he learns to avoid clumsy or boring constructions, learns that he cannot simply send his characters out on the road and expect something interesting to happen of its own accord, learns that he cannot introduce a two-page digression and expect the reader's willing indulgence. He is conscious of where he has succeeded and where he has failed in his previous stories or novels and will strive to build upon past successes and to put the failures behind him.

In the ten years separating The Enormous Radio and Other Stories from The Way Some People Live, Cheever appears to have learned a great deal. However, it is misleading to assume that the lesson took ten years to learn because in fact a mere three and a half years separates the publication in The New Yorker of the last of the stories from the first volume ("The Man Who was Very Homesick for New York" in November 1942) and the first of the stories from the second ("The Sutton Place Story" in June 1946). During this interval, Cheever transformed himself from a competent writer of occasionally memorable short fiction into a writer of the first order, a chronicler of his times, a writer who had stepped almost imperceptibly out of the ranks of those working in the shadow of famous mentors and innovative contemporaries, and into the more exalted company of those exerting the influence. The search for reasons why this "flowering forth" took place, and why it happened at precisely this time, may be a pointless expenditure of energy and a waste of paper, but it is worth noting, with James O'Hara in his important article on Cheever's "Breakthroughs" of 1947, that "The most logical explanation is that Cheever was both dissatisfied with the largely derivative work he had done so far, and confident enough (as a result of his performance as a soldier-writer) to experiment with his technique in more radical ways than he had previously attempted" (51). O'Hara concentrates on the elements of fantasy that began creeping into Cheever's work at this time, specifically in stories of high originality like "The Enormous Radio" and "Torch Song." But perhaps a more notable change in Cheever's fictional output of the late 1940s can be seen in the stylistic shift away from the clipped, tightly controlled prose of the early stories toward a more expansive, generous, garrulous narrative voice, one that often addresses the reader directly and in doing so exudes a degree of confidence and intimacy for which readers who had previously encountered Cheever only in The Way Some People Live would be entirely unprepared. The voice is very much that of a storyteller who understands and has great confidence in what he is doing. It is a voice that also exhibits a heightened awareness of the power of language to move and persuade.

Patrick Meanor sees Cheever's shift "from the straightforward naturalistic prose style of The Way Some People Live into the deeper, more reflective, and psychologically complex style of The Enormous Radio as a direct result of his meditative journal entries" (42). There may be some merit to this assertion, though it is difficult to quantify. If Cheever had developed a habit of exploring his own inner turmoil in lengthy journal entries, it is possible that the practice of inward exploration spilled over into his fiction, which then began to transform itself in order to accommodate the greater psychological fluctuations of his characters. More likely, it was a combination of factors that contributed to this transformation, a "chain of contingencies" as Cheever himself would have said. Living in a New York apartment with a wife and a young family, he began writing stories that incorporated these new circumstances, and he did so, probably as a result of a conscious decision, in a way that was uniquely his own.

The stories in The Enormous Radio range far and wide, from suburbia to the city to a ski resort to a family's seaside retreat. In each of these settings Cheever operates much like a chemist in his laboratory, using characters as his compounds, which he mixes together in potentially explosive situations. If a single formula links these stories, it is that of the unwelcome revelation, a piece of knowledge forced upon a character that has the power to change or reshape his or her life. However, this generalization, like all generalizations, reduces something of immense complexity to the level of a cliché. Lynn Waldeland maintains, "In many of these stories the characters start from a sense of well-being only to have the order of their lives shattered by the sudden intervention of mysterious events over which they have no control" (John Cheever, 36). The problem with this assertion is that sometimes the events in question are far from mysterious and can be regarded as simple misfortune. In the end, we must admit that the forces driving Cheever's characters are many and various. However, one thing is certain: in his first book, the fictional world simply reflects the world he saw around him. In The Enormous Radio he begins to fashion a fictional world that uses the recognizable world outside his window as its point of departure. It is the alchemy of a personal creative vision - a vision that was to become more refined and more brazenly eccentric as the years went by - that Cheever is learning how to most appropriately invoke and deploy in his second collection.

The Enormous Radio and Other Stories includes some of Cheever's most famous and most frequently anthologized pieces, stories such as "Goodbye, My Brother," "Torch Song," and the title story. In critical discussion these tend to overshadow the other stories in the collection, specifically memorable and sophisticated character studies like "The Children," "The Season of Divorce," and "Clancy in the Tower of Babel." The overwhelming majority of these are stories rooted in the everyday world, a world in which changes in fortune, shifting perceptions, and the vagaries of human emotion determine the trajectory of the characters' lives. Fantasy as a plot device and means of revealing the moral laxness of his characters is manifestly evident in only "The Enormous Radio."

Cheever introduces his target couple, Jim and Irene Westcott, by emphasizing their statistical ordinariness, their position among the rank and file, mentioning along with their two children their entirely reasonable and utterly commonplace aspiration that they might someday "live in Westchester" (169). In this way he establishes the Westcotts as every-couple, stand-ins for all members of their class and generation. They appear untouched, unsullied by city life, and Cheever makes this point as well, describing Irene has having "a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written," and Jim as "earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve" (169). The only feature of their married life that distinguishes them from classmates, friends, and neighbors is their shared interest in serious music. This is where the trouble begins.

When their old radio gives up the ghost, Jim purchases a new one that is delivered to the apartment the next day. Immediately we encounter an ungainly piece of equipment that squats among the living-room furniture like an unwelcome guest. Its dials shimmer with a "malevolent green light," and as Irene tries to adjust the volume the music surges out of the box with all the belligerence of a physical assault. We are told, "The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy" (170). That evening, while waiting for Jim to return home, Irene sorts through the interference emanating from the machine and concludes that the radio is picking up electrically generated signals from surrounding apartments. Its "mistaken sensitivity to discord" wearies her and she switches it off.

It is after a repairman makes some adjustments that the Westcotts begin to realize that their new radio can be tuned to eavesdrop on conversations taking place in other apartments in their building. At first they think they're listening to a radio play, but then recognize the voices of people they know. The fear that they can be overheard as well is allayed when Jim shouts into the speaker and receives no response. Out of curiosity they settle in to listen, their interest in serious music momentarily forgotten, and remain riveted to the radio until midnight, when they switch it off and go to bed "weak with laughter" (174). Without knowing it they have made their pact with the devil.

Irene succumbs to the temptation the radio offers, the lure of a position of godlike authority, of knowing more about her neighbors than they could possibly know about her. The next morning after everyone has left she tunes in again and overhears a disturbing variety of human foibles being enacted all around her. The narrator tells us,

Irene's life was nearly as simple and sheltered as it appeared to be, and the forthright and sometimes brutal language that came from the loudspeaker that morning astonished and troubled her. She continued to listen until her maid came in. Then she turned off the radio quickly, since this insight, she realized, was a furtive one. (175)

The revelations offered by the radio color her perceptions of those around her in the crowded elevator. She regards people differently and looking at her friend across the lunch table, "wondered what her secrets were." She sits by the radio all that afternoon, and when Jim arrives home from work, he thinks she seems "sad and vague." That evening her rude behavior at a dinner party astonishes him. They walk home and after Jim has fallen asleep she returns to the living room and, like an addict giving in to her compulsion, once again switches on the radio.

By the next day the sordid activities of her neighbors have driven her nearly to distraction. She is now in the uneasy position of knowing far too much of what is transpiring all around her and is appalled by the extent to which these apparently virtuous people mask their depravity and greed and licentiousness when they step out into the world. Jim finds her state of near hysteria affecting and agrees with her that they are indeed happy with their life together and nothing like the others, who are all "hypercritical or worried about money or dishonest" (179). He says he will get the radio fixed once and for all.

This he does, but the wounds that the radio has opened will not be healed quickly, and that evening over dinner Jim confesses that he does indeed worry about money and he attacks his wife for her extravagance. She in turn cautions him that their discussion will be overheard, and this sends him into a rage. He questions her sudden conversion into a "convent girl" and flings at her a series of accusations, enumerating instances of her own greed and dishonesty and wickedness, asking among other questions, "and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist?" In the end, "disgraced and sickened," Irene stands beside the radio hoping for friendly human contact, but its capacity for voyeurism has been successfully curtailed, and in a voice that is "suave and noncommittal" it simply reports the news and the weather.

"The Enormous Radio" follows a pattern that was to become familiar in Cheever's writing, that of the fall from a state of grace or innocence to a state of knowledge, which for the Westcotts is a state of "catastrophic self-knowledge" (Meanor, 53). Irene's distress, brought on by the discovery that her neighbors are not the virtuous householders she imagined them to be, is purely hypocritical, given Jim's denunciation of her behavior at the story's close. How can she suffer sincere anguish, how can she be surprised by what is taking place around her, when, having indulged in her share of morally questionable acts, she is no better than the rest of them? The answer is that all her life she has deluded herself, projecting a semblance of probity for others to see, and then compounding her offense by happily accepting this illusion as the truth. When the radio comes along and makes it possible for her to peer into the shallow hearts and dirty minds of her neighbors, she clutches fast to her arrogant conviction that she is doing so from a position of moral superiority. However, there is really nothing for her to hold on to, and when her husband reminds her of what she's done, out of greed and a malicious impulse, she helplessly watches herself, and Jim, who has condoned her conduct, slip into the moral abyss with the rest of humanity. The story, while in one sense a sophisticated critique of "a society in which technology and compartmentalized urban living are making human understanding and communication impossible" (Harmsel, 408), is also about the shattering of illusions. One presumes that the marriage of Jim and Irene Westcott will never be the same. However, Cheever is also getting at a deeper and much more disturbing truth. The Westcotts always knew of their past transgressions and chose to ignore them. But when the radio exposes them to truths previously hidden, to the true state of affairs, it is this "sickening" new awareness that they can no longer turn their backs on, the terrible things they know about themselves, that destroys their cozy vision of their life together. In the end the Westcotts are worse off than their neighbors, who will continue in their errant ways in a state of blind ignorance, believing themselves virtuous. The radio has made this impossible for the Westcotts.

The story represents as well one of Cheever's initial forays into the metaphor-rich, multi-layered fictional technique for which he was to become famous. On a superficial level, "The Enormous Radio" can be read as a relatively simple tale of one couple's moral downfall. However, if we regard the apartment building as the human psyche and the radio as an unexpected means of tapping the hidden depths of the unconscious mind, then the story takes on additional resonance. The radio is also very clearly a demonic presence in the "Eden" of the Westcott's home, one that precipitates their fall from innocence. And finally, as Henrietta Harmsel notes, a case can be made for interpreting the story as a criticism of the many ways in which technology invades and encroaches upon our lives, interfering with our attempts to communicate with one another and encouraging isolation by offering itself as a tempting surrogate for human contact.

The uncanny power of the radio to eavesdrop on conversations taking place in other parts of the building represents the story's fantastical element, and Cheever weaves it artfully into the narrative, never winking at his reader, never once holding out the possibility that it is a simple misunderstanding on the part of the Westcotts. The action appears to take place in a world that is recognizably our own, and yet when it becomes clear that the radio is in fact a conduit into other lives, that it violates peoples' privacy with terrifying ease, neither we nor the Westcotts question the technological gaffe that allows this to happen. At this point the narrative slips almost imperceptibly out of the known universe and into a realm in which the impossible is acceptable and commonplace. One may be left wondering how Jim Westcott explained the problem to the repairman, but Cheever's art never falters. The understated authority with which he relates these magical events quiets our doubts, making it a simple matter for him to transport us to a place where reality gives way to fancy and the literal gives way to the metaphorical.

Another story from this collection that is commonly cited as a venture into the supernatural is "Torch Song." This story is also set in the city, but it follows the lives of two characters very different from the Westcotts. Jack Lorey and Joan Harris have come to New York from the same Ohio town, and after a period of a few months in which they socialize almost exclusively with one another, their paths converge only occasionally over the next decade or so. A pattern of chance encounters is established when Jack, returning to the city one evening with his girlfriend, spots Joan in the train station diner in the company of a man who has "obviously passed out" (97). He observes her shaking the man's shoulder, watched by the restaurant staff who are waiting to clear the table, but, borne swiftly along by the crowd, Jack is unable to intercede on behalf of this "girl who reminded him of the trees and the lawns of his home town" (97). His next encounter with Joan takes place in a restaurant in the Village where the food is terrible. Jack is with a new girl and Joan is in the company of a man whom she introduces as a Swedish count. Later, Jack learns from a mutual friend that Joan's Swedish count was a fraud and a morphine addict whose habit was accompanied by a violent temperament. Joan became the junkie's supplier, prowling the seediest districts of town in search of a fix. The count left her, but Joan followed him, willingly placing herself in danger on his behalf and consorting with lowlife in order to feed his habit. Finally the count disappeared and Joan returned to her apartment. Troubled by this story, Jack arranges to meet Joan, but when he sits down with her over dinner he detects no change in her appearance or her disposition, which remains as sunny as ever. "Her voice was sweet, and reminded him of elms, or lawns, of those glass arrangements that used to be hung from porch ceilings to tinkle in the summer wind" (99).

This pattern of troubling encounters repeats itself as time passes and as Jack's life follows a standard course that includes marriage, divorce, and military service. Over the years he sees Joan in the company of a quarrelsome drunk, a boorish and violent German, a man who is twisting her arm in an unlighted corridor. Their next lengthy encounter comes after Jack's first divorce. Joan is moving out of her apartment, hounded by accusations from her neighbors that she is loose and immoral. She asks Jack to help her find a new place to live, and he does this. He next finds Joan in the company of Pete Bristol. The three of them spend the night on the town, celebrating "Russia's changed position in the war" (106). Later, Jack learns that Joan sold her jewelry and gave the money to Pete, who promptly left her for another woman. Jack is drafted. While in the army he marries and divorces again, and upon his discharge returns to New York intending to resume his former bachelor life. His feeling that everything is the same as it had been many years earlier is reinforced when he encounters Joan by chance and then attends a cocktail party at her apartment, where he meets her latest beau, Stephen, an Englishman who "kept coughing into a handkerchief" (110).

Money problems catch up with Jack. He leaves his job for a higher paying one, which soon evaporates, leaving him unemployed. His fortunes do not improve and eventually he finds himself sick, running out of money, and living in a furnished room. Languishing in a fever, grateful that his friends don't know where he is, he hears Joan's voice in the corridor. She lets herself in and for the first time in their acquaintance he finds himself squeamish in her presence. "Her voice had once before reminded him of a gentle and despairing song, but now, perhaps because he was sick, her mildness, the mourning she wore, her stealthy grace, made him uneasy" (111-112). As their conversation progresses his misgivings intensify, and when she lights a cigarette and places it between his lips, "The intimacy of this gesture, which made it seem not only as if he were deathly ill but as if he were her lover, troubled him" (112). In a minute he has reached the conclusion that the Englishman, Stephen, has shared the fate of her other lovers and is dead, and he is yelling at Joan to leave, asking, "What kind of an obscenity are you that you can smell sickness and death the way you do?" Unruffled by his outburst, she promises to return in the evening. But Jack is hysterical with apprehension, and when she is gone he dresses and hurriedly packs his belongings, and "swept the floor with a shirt, so that there would be no trace of his life, of his body, when that lewd and searching shape of death came there to find him in the evening" (114).

Throughout the story we have been led to believe that Joan has been more than simply unfortunate in her choice of men. Her list of lovers either dead or missing in action is a lengthy one. However, suggestions of malevolent intent on her part are not so easy to find. At the outset we are told that Jack thought of her as "the Widow," because of her habit of wearing black and because "a curious disorder" in her apartment gave him the impression that "the undertakers had just left" (96). But other than these whimsical observations on Jack's part, Cheever gives us no reason to believe she is an agent of evil. Indeed, she seems more abused than abusive, more a victim than a perpetrator. Her men routinely betray her trust and treat her like a punching bag. The only unnatural aspect to her character is her ability to breeze through these relationships with her optimism and her cheery demeanor and her air of country wholesomeness intact. In the end, however, we are left wondering if she in fact contributes to her own misfortune, brings ill-luck upon herself, if her choice of needy and desperate and obnoxious men as companions is somehow indicative of how she feels about herself. In all the years of their acquaintance she has shown no interest in Jack as anything other than a supporting and trusted friend. Yet the minute he suffers a reversal of fortune and falls ill, she hunts him down and appears at his bedside and, by her manner, insinuates a degree of intimacy that leaves Jack sickened and horrified.

In "Torch Song" Cheever refuses to simplify his message or make Joan an obvious harbinger of misfortune or a dark presence that somehow feeds upon the afflictions of others. Evil does not walk and talk in this story. If we look closely we find that whenever we are tempted to regard Joan as evil, it is because we are allowing our perception of Joan to be colored by Jack's. It is Jack who refers to her as "the Widow." It is Jack who, reflecting upon Joan's history, perceives a pattern of weakness and instability among her male companions that, in his feverish confusion in the story's final scene, he interprets as a threat to his life. Joan has played no part in the muddle that Jack has made of his life, but when he hits rock bottom he apparently holds an attraction for her that he never had before. Perhaps she does thrive on illness and misfortune, but not in the manner Jack believes. The story is troubling because the ending is ambiguous, because it avoids making a conclusive statement about the moral choices that go a long way toward determining our destiny, and about the influence we wield over each other's lives, through what we choose either to contribute or to withhold. James O'Hara finds that "'Torch Song' disturbs precisely because it refuses to simplify the moral universe" (A Study of the Short Fiction, 25). The extent to which we regard Joan Harris as evil depends, in all probability, upon our prior reading and our personal experience, as well as how willing we might be to give credence to supernatural phenomena. However, these considerations aside, as a piece of fiction it remains singularly effective and creepy. As Lynn Waldeland concedes,

Joan's symbolic dressing in black, our gradual realization that all her men are dead, and her mysterious appearance in Jack's life at the moment when he is most vulnerable all give the story a sort of horror that makes it relatively easy to believe that we have read a story about an Angel of Death. (31)

Direct reference to the supernatural is rare in Cheever's work and the other stories in this volume are free of such incredible intrusions. However, the new voice with which he is experimenting is present in all of these stories to varying degrees, and in none is it more successfully wrought than in "Goodbye, My Brother."

Cheever thought highly enough of "Goodbye, My Brother" to give it the lead position in the Collected Stories of 1978, and it is certainly one of the first stories that comes to mind when we try to define what we mean by the term Cheeveresque. It is a first-person narrative, one of only three in The Enormous Radio, and the style in which the narrative is rendered can best be described as elegant, fluidly articulate, mellifluous, and evocative of a melancholy nostalgia for a past that the narrator certainly finds attractive, though not necessarily more attractive than the present.

The premise of the story it not complex, though in Cheever's telling it assumes the multi-faceted quality of a much longer work. The narrator is a man of middle age, a Pommeroy, brother of Chaddy, Diana, and Lawrence. Their father is dead, drowned many years earlier, and their mother has maintained the family's summer home at Laud's Head, "on the shore of one of the Massachusetts islands" (4). None of the family has seen Lawrence, who has been living in Cleveland, for four years, but he is moving with his family to Albany to take a new job with a law firm, and plans to spend ten days at Laud's Head on the way. The narrator prepares us for Lawrence's arrival, informing us that he has always been the odd one out among the Pommeroy children, the one "with whom the rest of us have the least in common" (4).

When he grew older, Diana sometimes used to call him Little Jesus, and Mother often called him The Croaker. We had disliked Lawrence, but we looked forward to his return with a mixture of apprehension and loyalty, and with some of the joy and delight of reclaiming a brother. (4)

The arrival of Lawrence and his wife Ruth and their two children in the midst of the vacationing Pommeroys immediately creates a vague but palpable tension. We soon learn that, to begin with, Lawrence is the only member of the family who has "never enjoyed drinking," and with infuriating indifference he asks for rum, knowing perhaps that there isn't any and that his mother would regard it as a poor choice, needlessly throwing her into a tizzy before settling on the initial offering of a martini. The dinner has been planned to please Lawrence: "It was not too rich, and there was nothing to make him worry about extravagance" (6). Yet in the hour following the meal he still seems displeased, and after a man arrives to take Diana out for the evening he asks rudely, "Is that the one she's sleeping with now?" The narrator gazes at his brother and sees in the stern set of his mouth the profile of a "Puritan cleric," and he recalls that the Pommeroy lineage includes a succession of ministers known for "the harshness of their thought" (7). Next, the discussion turns to planned improvements to the house, and Lawrence announces that such plans are pointless because within five years the house will fall into the sea. Lawrence's petulant comments on the foolishness of building a house on a "sinking coastline" finally defeat his mother's attempts to maintain her decorum, and she retreats to the pantry and comes back with a glass of gin, obviously intending to get very drunk. Later, after Chaddy has helped her up to bed, the rest of the family leave Lawrence to his censorious brooding and go "swimming in the dark" (10).

In the days that follow Lawrence leaps at each and every opportunity to exercise his stern and harshly judgmental assessment of his family and to deplore everything connected with them. The house, though built just over twenty years earlier, has been constructed - by using antique shingles and by treating new surfaces to make them look weathered - to appear much older, and for Lawrence this implies a frivolous temperament on the part of the builder (their father). The narrator traces Lawrence's attitude in this instance to his general scorn for people whose failure to cope with the present manifests itself in an untoward and overly romantic estimation of the past. Then the cook complains about Lawrence, and the narrator discovers that he has gone into the kitchen and informed the cook that she is suffering grievous abuse at the hands of this family that refuses to recognize her true worth and that makes her work too hard. Lawrence neither understands nor approves of gambling, and he observes his family playing backgammon with each other as if they were a group of hedonists engaged unashamedly in acts of lewdness. When the others attend a costume dance at the boat club, Lawrence refuses to enter into the spirit of the event. The theme of the dance is "come as you wish you were," and when the narrator and his wife attend dressed as a football player and a bride, they find that others have made the identical choice, that the dance floor is crowded with middle-aged football players and brides. This coincidence strikes everyone as highly amusing, all except Lawrence, who roams the perimeter of the assembly bristling with disapproval. After the narrator attempts to draw Lawrence into the fun and is rebuffed, he reflects,

I knew that Lawrence was looking bleakly at the party as he had looked at the weather-beaten shingles on our house, as if he saw here an abuse and a distortion of time; as if in wanting to be brides and football players we exposed the fact that, the lights of youth having been put out in us, we had been unable to find other lights to go by and, destitute of faith and principle, had become foolish and sad. And that he was thinking this about so many kind and happy and generous people made me angry, made me feel for him such an unnatural abhorrence that I was ashamed, for he is my brother and a Pommeroy. (20-21)

The narrator has observed that Lawrence's children are "frightened and skinny," and at the sight of Lawrence's wife Ruth in the laundry room performing her labors with "a penitential fervor" he speculates that she may be "at the mercy of an expiatory passion." To cleanse his mind of the dour influence of his brother and his brother's wife, he heads out to the ocean, to the beach, but Lawrence is there. And as the two walk together he finds that even the simple act of walking on sand in the company of his gloomy brother alters his perception of a landscape he has cherished all his life. Lawrence informs him that he plans to sell his interest in the house to Chaddy and never return, that he has only come back on this occasion to say goodbye. And when the narrator pleads with Lawrence to snap out of it, to drop the miserable façade, Lawrence delivers a scathing assessment of his family. Driven to fury, the narrator picks up a heavy root and gives Lawrence a blow to the head that sends him to his knees. The sight of blood makes him momentarily repentant and he binds the wound with his shirt, but then he leaves his brother to find his own way back to the house. Lawrence and his family leave Laud's Head early the next morning.

The symbolic and thematic richness of the language and imagery of "Goodbye, My Brother" have given rise to a great deal of critical dialogue and a variety of interpretations. Patrick Meanor has formulated an ingenious and exhaustive discussion of the mythic patterns and historical allusions that occur in the story. For Meanor it is a story of opposites and conflicting attitudes, of Calvinist gloom versus sensual vivacity, of light versus dark, of the cleansing power of nature versus the doom-saying prophet's forecast of destruction. For Meanor, "Goodbye, My Brother" is a declaration on Cheever's part that he has forged an artistic alliance with Hawthorne, with whom he shares a deep abhorrence of the Puritan ethic, favoring instead a romantic vision that embraces all the unruly and messy passions of life (Meanor, 44-46). For James O'Hara, the story is an open declaration of the beauty and "essential goodness" of life and the natural world, and he sees the narrator's attempt to kill his brother as an effort to purge the world of the story of influences that would deny this (A Study of the Short Fiction, 33). Lynn Waldeland finds that the mythic allusions and linguistic echoes of the King James Bible reinforce "the story's point that traditions needn't be constricting but can be life-enhancing" (John Cheever, 29).

"Goodbye, My Brother" does appear to be telling us that one's outlook on life and love can exert a momentous influence on what we make of the world and who we grow up to become. The paradox that the story presents to us is that two characters sharing the same ancestry and upbringing can formulate diametrically opposing attitudes toward precisely the same world, attitudes that differ so profoundly that in the end one must drive the other out. Lawrence represents a negative influence so devastating, so toxic in its effects that the narrator cannot simply ignore him. The malaise he inspires, the atmosphere of self-denying admonition that surrounds Lawrence is so strong, that when faced with Lawrence's undisguised contempt, the narrator believes he has no choice but to resort to violence in order to reclaim the enjoyment he would otherwise derive from the sea, the sand, the salt air, the brightness of the day, the fecundity of life, were Lawrence not around to deny him these pleasures. Their ultimate clash comes as they argue over the "realities" that each, in the opinion of the other, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge, realities that in fact co-exist in opposition to one another. When he lifts the root, the narrator's intention is murderous and he wishes his brother dead, dead because he regards Lawrence as a murderer, a killer of other's pleasures and passions, a denier of life, a purveyor of darkness. By the time they reach this point in the story, we realize that there is no simple argument that can possibly reconcile them. The rift dividing the sets of values that each embodies is as wide as the gap between life and death, between joy and sorrow.

But there is also an implication afoot within the text that the narrator is intent on purging from his own psyche the troubling, gloomy aspect of his character that he can no longer abide and that threatens to overwhelm his love of life, a Puritanical aversion for beauty and disdain of pleasure that he has inherited from his harshly pious and judgmental forebears. In this reading, Lawrence, as much a member of the family as the others, represents the melancholic side of the dualistic Pommeroy nature and his presence exposes these attitudes to the light of day. It is interesting to note that it is the narrator who repeatedly describes for us Lawrence's morose manner of thinking, giving us his dismal take on things. He is obviously capable of a deeply empathetic appreciation of his brother's predilection for melancholy and pessimism when he ventures inside his head and ruminates again and again on how the sea would appear, or the wind would sound, or how the family's backgammon tournament would look, from Lawrence's jaundiced perspective. But he also hates what he sees of his brother in himself. The act of violence that dispatches Lawrence on his way is the narrator's attempt to annihilate all traces of this dark side. Lawrence will leave Laud's Head never to return and he will take his clouds of despondency with him. The justly praised and oft-quoted final passage of the story stands as a summing up of opposing perspectives for which there is no common ground, no possibility of reconciliation.

There is the suggestion as well that with the departure of Lawrence, Cheever is casting aside the Puritanical inflexibility of his own ancestors. The story does appear to dramatize a clash of values that one can imagine occurring as New England's Puritan legacy collided with a more easygoing and permissive modern world.

"Goodbye, My Brother" is densely packed with rhetorical flourishes and passages of surpassing lyrical beauty and for many readers it is Cheever's signature piece. The language is as richly and melodiously seductive as anything Cheever wrote. Particularly noteworthy are passages in which he describes the natural beauty of the land and sea that surround Laud's Head, and in which he evokes the mythical significance of his characters' actions. One senses that the elevated rhetoric is deliberate and that it is meant to suggest that the Pommeroys of Laud's Head do not reside in a single place and time, but in all places and all times. The conflict that divides the narrator and his brother resounds with echoes of Cain and Abel. But Cheever appreciated that in order to do justice to a Biblical theme he had to find a style of composition that could accommodate the burden of meaning and profundity he wished his story to carry.

The language throughout The Enormous Radio and Other Stories is more richly textured and more evocative, the characters more sharply drawn, their situations and moral dilemmas more artfully presented, than in the previous collection. The theme of characters faced with a sudden reversal or alteration in their circumstances, or with an inexplicable and disruptive influence, or a feeling of being alone in a strange and unsympathetic community - a community they do not understand and that doesn't understand them - pervades the collection.

The Enormous Radio and Other Stories is most frequently noted for the vast step forward it represents over Cheever's previous collection. In it, he experiments with a variety of storytelling techniques and a more fully developed and lyrical prose style, and in the process creates some of his most compelling and memorable fictions. The stories are longer, more intricately plotted. The sense one draws from the first volume - that there are pitfalls and hidden dangers everywhere, that the seemingly solid world we inhabit could crumble at any moment, that at some rudimentary psychological level, we are all capable of cruelty and violence - is here given greater urgency and potency. In this book he has begun to stake out untrammeled territory and describe the unique fictional landscape that his characters would inhabit for the next thirty years.

Works Cited

• Cheever, John. The Enormous Radio and Other Stories. New York: Funk & Wagnell, 1953.
  

• Harmsel, Henrietta T. "'Young Goodman Brown' and 'The Enormous Radio'."
  Studies in Short Fiction 9 (1972): 407-408.
  

• Meanor, Patrick. John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1995.
  

• O'Hara, James. John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
  

• "John Cheever's Flowering Forth: The Breakthroughs of 1947."
  Modern Language Studies 17, 4 (1987): 50-59.
  

• Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.