Metamorphoses

by John Cheever

"Metamorphoses" by John Cheever is a collection of four interconnected sketches that explore themes of transformation, despair, and the complexities of human relationships.

Genres: Short Stories

34 pages, Unknown Binding

First published March 2, 1963

About the author

John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born.

His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both--light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.

Reviews

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Metamorphoses," a group of four sketches, all have some kind of transformation in the stories. The first three sketches are inspired by the myths of Actaeon, Orpheus, and the Nereids (Nerissa). The modern Actaeon is an investment banker with a hobby of breeding vicious hunting dogs. Orpheus is changed to a man with a gorgeous persuasive voice who sings in advertising products on TV. Cheever's Nerissa gets away from her superficial mother in a surprising way.

The fourth sketch is about a man whose perception of reality is altered when he tries to stop smoking--and he can't think of anything but tobacco.

It was an entertaining group of sketches, and it was fun to see how Cheever put a contemporary spin on the ancient myths.

"Metamorphoses" is story #48 in "The Stories of John Cheever."

[Kansas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Metamorfosis está formada por cuatro historias aparentemente independientes aunque puede que tengan en común el hecho de que sus personajes no sean lo que parecen, o la imagen que ellos quieren dar a la sociedad no tenga nada que ver con la realidad. En la primera historia, Larry Acton, no deja de sublevarse ante el hecho de que lo confundan con camarareros y repartidores frente a ascensoristas y también camareros. Hasta que llegado un punto, Larry se rebela:

" Soy banquero y voy a asistir a una reunión de directores donde se va a discutir la suscripción de una emisión de obligaciones por valor de cuarenta y cuatro millones de dólares. Tengo novecientos mil dólares. Soy propietario de una casa de veintidós habitaciones en Bullet Park, de una perrera particular y dos caballos de carreras, y tengo tres hijos en una universidad privada, un velero de siete metros y cinco coches".

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Generally a metamorphosis seems like it would be a happy or positive change but John Cheever's "Metamorphoses" changes that assumption. Four different characters whose action changes their lives completely.


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LARRY ACTAEON

"One of the partners was a woman. This was a widow named Mrs. Vuiton. Her husband had been a senior partner, and when he died she had asked to be taken into the firm. In her favor were her intelligence, her beauty, and the fact that, had she withdrawn her husband’s interest from the partnership, it would have been missed."

"Larry didn’t dislike her—he didn’t quite dare to—but that her good looks and her musical voice were more effective in banking than his own shrewd and boisterous manner made him at least uneasy. Moved by his enthusiasm, his boisterousness, he strode through Mr. Lothard’s outer office and impetuously opened the inner door. There was Mrs. Vuiton, wearing nothing but a string of beads. Mr. Lothard was at her side wearing a wristwatch. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry!” Larry said, and he closed the door and returned to his own desk. The image of Mrs. Vuiton seemed incised in his memory, burnt there. He had seen a thousand naked women, but he had never seen one so stunning. Her skin had a luminous and pearly whiteness that he could not forget.
He had beheld something that he should not have seen, and Mrs. Vuiton had glared at him with a look that was wicked and unholy. He could not shake or rationalize away the feeling that his blunder was disastrous; that he had in some way stumbled into a transgression that would demand compensation and revenge. Pure enthusiasm had moved him to open the door without knocking; pure enthusiasm, by his lights, was a blameless impulse. Why should he feel himself surrounded by trouble, misfortune, and disaster?"

"The man slid the door open onto a kind of infernal region, crowded with heaped ash cans, broken perambulators, and steampipes covered with ruptured asbestos sleeving. “Go through the door there and get the other elevator,” the man said. “But why do I have to take the back elevator?” Larry asked."

“It’s a rule,” the man said. “I don’t understand,” Larry said. “Listen,” the man said. “Don’t argue with me. Just take the back elevator. All you deliverymen always want to go in the front door like you owned the place. Well, this is one building where you can’t. The management says all deliveries at the back door, and the management is boss.” “I’m not a deliveryman,” Larry said. “I’m a guest.” “What’s the box?” “The box,” Larry said, “contains my evening clothes. Now take me up to the tenth floor where the Fullmers live.” “I’m sorry, mister, but you look like a deliveryman."

"It was only a little less than a mile to his house, and he really didn’t mind the walk. He strode briskly along the empty streets and unfastened the gates to his driveway. He was fastening them when he heard the noise of running and panting and saw that the dogs were out. The noise woke his wife, who, thinking that he had already come home, called to him for help. “Larry! Larry, the dogs are out! The dogs are out! Larry, please come quickly, the dogs are out and I think they’re after someone!” He heard her calling him as he fell, and saw the yellow lights go on in the windows, but that was the last he saw.”

After seeing a female worker naked with the boss, he feels disaster ahead and when things happen to him it seems like he is self fulfilling this in some way. It seems that he has gotten injured but unsure to what extent.


ORVILLE BETMAN

"He first saw his wife on a Fifth Avenue bus on a rainy night. She was then a young and slender woman with yellow hair, and the instant he saw her he felt a singular attraction or passion that he had never felt before and would never, as it happened, feel again."

"His voice touched her as it seemed to have touched the rest of the world, but it touched her glancingly. “I don’t look at television,” she said. “What is it you want?” “I want to marry you,” he said sincerely. She laughed and went on into the lobby and the elevator. The doorman, for five dollars, gave him her name and circumstances. She was Victoria Heatherstone and lived with her invalid father in 14-B."

"His instinct when he first glimpsed her on the bus had been unerring. She was the woman life meant him to have; she was his destiny. She resisted his claims on her for a week or two, and then she succumbed. But there was a problem. Her old father—a Trollope scholar—was indeed an invalid, and she felt that if she left him he would die."

"Betman wanted to marry; wanted to have the union blessed, celebrated, and announced. He was not content to have Victoria come to his apartment two or three times a week as she did. Then the old man had a stroke and was urged by his doctor to leave New York. He moved to a house he owned in Albany, and this then left Victoria free—or free at least for nine months of the year. She married Betman, and they were vastly happy together, although they had no children."

"However, on the first of June she left for an island in Lake St. Francis, where the dying old man summered, and she did not return to her husband until September. The old man still thought his daughter unmarried, and Betman was forbidden to visit her. He wrote her three times a week to a post-office box, and she replied much less frequently, since, as she explained, there was nothing to report but her father’s blood pressure, temperature, digestion, and night sweats. He always appeared to be dying. Since he had never seen either the island or the old man, the place naturally took on for Betman legendary proportions, and his three months alone each year was agony."

“I can’t, darling, my darling. He’s dying.” “How many times have you thought this before?” “Oh, I know, but now he is dying.” “Come with me.” “I can’t. He’s dying.” “Come.” He took her hand and led her out the door, down over the treacherous, pungent carpet of pine needles, to the landing. They crossed the lake without speaking but in such a somberness of feeling that the air, the hour, and the light seemed solid. He paid for the boat, opened the car door for her, and they started south. He did not look at her until they were on the main highway, and then he turned to bask in her freshness, her radiance. It was because he loved her too well that her white arms, the color of her hair, her smile distracted him. He veered from one lane into another and the car was crushed by a truck. She died, of course. He was in the hospital eight months, but when he was able to walk again he found that the persuasiveness of his voice had not been injured."

After being separated from his wife for 9 months who is taking care of her dying father and wanting her so badly, an accident occurs.

MRS. PERANGER

"A white-haired woman, beautifully dressed, she wielded the power of rudeness so adroitly that she was never caught in an exposed position, and when people asked one another how she got away with it they only increased her advantage."

"Mr. Peranger and her only son, Patrick, were dead. Of her only daughter, the nymphlike Nerissa, she would say, “Nerissa is giving me a few days of her time. I don’t feel that I can ask her for more. She is so sought after that I sometimes think she has never married because she has never found the time. She showed her dogs last week in San Francisco, and hopes to take them to Rome for the dog show there. Everyone loves Nerissa. Everyone adores her. She is too attractive for words.” Enter Nerissa then, into her mother’s drawing room. She is a thin and wasted spinster of thirty. Her hair is gray. Her slip shows. Her shoes are caked with mud. She is plainly one of those children who, without bitterness or rancor, seem burdened with the graceless facts of life. It is their destiny to point out that the elegance and chic of the world their mothers have mastered is not, as it might appear to be, the end of bewilderment and pain. They are a truly pure and innocent breed, and it would never cross their minds or their hearts to upset or contravene the plans, the dreams, the worldly triumphs that their elders hold out for them."

"His touch with animals, Nerissa thought, was quick and natural, and, standing above him as he knelt at the whelping box, Nerissa felt a strong compulsion to touch his dark hair. She asked if he was married, and when he said that he was not she let herself luxuriate in the fact that she was in love again. Now, Nerissa never anticipated her mother’s censure."

“You know, you’re awfully nice,” he said. “Did anyone ever tell you that?” Then he kissed her lightly and tenderly and drove away. Nerissa didn’t see her mother until four the next afternoon, when she went down to tea wearing two left shoes, one brown and one black. “Oh, Mother, Mother,” she said, “I’ve found the man I want to marry.” “Really,” said Mrs. Peranger. “Who is this paragon?” “His name is Dr. Johnson,” said Nerissa. “He runs the new dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14.”

"There is a dog-and-cat hospital on Route 14 that I would like to have shut down. I’m sure your husband can discover that some sort of zoning violation is involved. It must be some sort of nuisance. If you will speak to your husband about the dog-and-cat hospital, I will get the membership list to you so that you can decide on your other sponsors. I will arrange a luncheon party for the middle of September. Goodbye.” Nerissa pined away, died, and was buried in the little Episcopal church whose windows had been given in memory of her grandfather. Mrs. Peranger looked imperious and patrician in her mourning, and as she left the church she was heard to sob loudly, “She was so attractive—she was so frightfully attractive.”

A society women will go to extremes to prevent her daughter from marrying, and losing her daughter.

MR. BRADISH

"He did not mean at all by this that he wanted to change himself—only his scenery, his pace, and his environment, and that for only a space of eighteen or twenty days. He could leave his office for that long. Bradish was a heavy smoker, and the Surgeon General’s report had made him self-conscious about his addiction. It seemed to him that strangers on the street regarded the cigarette in his fingers with disapproval and sometimes with commiseration. This was manifestly absurd, and he needed to get away. He would take a trip. He was divorced at the time, and would go alone."

"Glancing above the clerk’s head to a map of the world, he saw it all as a chain of tobacco stores. There was no escape. “I think I won’t go anywhere,” he said. The clerk flashed her smile, bit it off like a thread, and watched him go out the door."

"He felt himself to be gaining some understanding of the poetry of the force of change in life, felt himself involved in one of those intimate, grueling, and unseen contests that make up the story of a man’s soul. If he stopped smoking, he might stop drinking. He might even curtail his erotic tastes. Immoderation had been the cause of his divorce. Immoderation had alienated his beloved children. If they could only see him now, see the clean ashtrays in his room, mightn’t they invite him to come home? He could charter a schooner and sail up the coast of Maine with them."

"Walking to work the next morning, he found himself jockeyed rudely onto the side of the angels; found himself perforce an advocate of abstemiousness, and discovered that some part of this condition was an involuntary urge to judge the conduct of others—a sensation so strange to him, so newly found, so unlike his customary point of view that
he thought it exciting. He watched with emphatic disapproval a stranger light a cigarette on a street corner. The stranger plainly had no will power. He was injuring his health, trimming his life span, and betraying his dependents, who might suffer hunger and cold as a result of this self-indulgence. What’s more, the man’s clothing was shabby, his shoes were unshined, and if he could not afford to dress himself decently he could surely not afford the vice of tobacco. Should Bradish take the cigarette out of his hand? Lecture him? Awaken him? It seemed a little early in the game, but the impulse was there and he had never experienced it before."

"It was a young woman—really a child—whom he mistook for a Lucky Strike that was his undoing. She screamed when he attacked her, and two strangers knocked him down, striking and kicking him with just moral indignation. A crowd gathered. There was pandemonium, and presently the sirens of the police car that took him away."

A man gives up his vice and things are worse for him.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is actually a collection of four sketches dealing with transformation. All explore complex relationships, unreasonable expectations, self-destructive behavior, and/or obsessions. While, in my mind, I associate a metamorphosis with something growing, not just changing; Cheever's sketches involve change without growth.

(#48 - Stories of John Cheever)

[mark propp · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't know that these thematically related stories were helped all that much by bundling them together like this. i'd have preferred 4 shorts rather than one rather long one.

but it's some dark stuff. among the darkest of this collection for sure.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

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