‘The Hartleys’ by John Cheever

The Hartleys by John Cheever, 1949

The magic trick:

Punishing his characters’ typically middle-class selfishness with an atypically extreme consequence

I must admit I did not see this story’s ending coming. There is something to be said for small stories about small feelings where the plot ruptures in only small ways. Certainly, that’s where I thought this story’s heart lay until that ending ruptured the plot in a very large way. But I anticipated incorrectly, and the story is all the stronger for Cheever’s surprising choice.

Mr. and Mrs. Hartley never are portrayed in a particularly good light. They clearly are sad and selfish as they pursue the happiness and freedom they enjoyed in the years before parenthood. It’s the kind of behavior, though, that is likely to prompt as much sympathy as criticism from the reader. This is the kind of behavior endemic to American middle-class culture.

But instead of just presenting the Hartley’s midlife crisis and leaving it sit for the reader to consider, Cheever takes the story to a totally different place in the end. Instead of letting the Hartleys linger on in quiet desperation he gives the couple exactly what they want: life without a daughter complicating things. In doing so, their attitudes toward parenting that might have previously been considered unfortunate but acceptable now take on a much darker tint. And because their feelings would have been so easily relatable to most middle-class readers of the time (and now), the reader feels the characters’ punishment as his or her own. I, for one, finished the story with more than a slight feeling of guilt. And that’s quite a trick on Cheever’s part.

The selection:

“Why do we have to come back?” Mrs. Hartley was crying. “Why do we have to come back? Why do we have to make these trips back to the places where we thought we were happy? What good is it going to do? What good has it ever done? We go through the telephone book looking for the names of people we knew ten years ago, and we ask them to dinner, and what good does it do? What good has it ever done? We go back to restaurants, the mountains, we go back to the houses, even the neighborhoods, we walk in the slums, thinking that this will make us happy, and it never does.

June 22, 2014August 15, 2025 by bcw56 Categories: Short Story Magic TricksTags: 1940s, American lit, American literature, analysis, criticism, fiction, John Cheever, short stories, The Hartleys 3 Comments

3 thoughts on “‘The Hartleys’ by John Cheever”

I especially like this sentence in the second to last paragraph of the story:

“People talk, of course, while they ski, while they wait for their turn to seize the rope, but they can hardly be heard. There is the exhaust of the tow motor and the creak of the iron wheel upon which the tow rope turns, but the skiers themselves seem stricken dumb, lost in the rhythm of riding and coasting.”

This sentence, to me, symbolizes the unstoppable, cruel wheel of time. Pulling and pulling, and eventually destroying youth, and therefore Anna.

bcw56 says:

Feb 05, 2017 at 7:20 pm

Thanks for highlighting that. It is a powerful image. That early Cheever is so 1940s/50s middle class white, but it never feels dated or constricted because of passages like this – ideas and images that transcend any boundaries. Fitzgerald is like that too, I think. You get a real feel for the time period but also ideas that are timeless. Thanks for drawing attention to this!

Reply

Indeed a powerful symbol — but, I’d say, it’s not just a symbol of the universal wheel of time, but also of the repetitiveness in the Hartleys’ lives and that of the others at the inn on the particular skiing vacation they are trying to convince themselves that they are enjoying. I’m sure you — tomzorz88 and bcw56 — would both have noticed the repetitions, such as:

a) Mr Hartley’s “eight years ago wonderful time” and Mrs Butterick’s “two rope brought by my son senior year in Harvard driving without licence plates” dialogues. They appear twice.

b) The child (Anne) going off to be by herself in the hut instead of joining the other children at skiing lessons. One would expect a child to do that perhaps once, and then start having fun with the other children the next day on…but no…that doesn’t happen here, not in Cheever’s story.

c) Note the sentence: “The Hartleys’ subsequent days were nearly all like the first.”

d) Like in the great Joyce story “The Dead,” there are quite a few images in this story of repetitious movements, hinting at the repetitiousness of middle-class life in general in those times.

Here’s one pair of sentences that does this, focusing on Mr Hartley and Anne: “The terminal posts of the tow looked like gibbets in the twilight, and Mr. Hartley and his daughter looked like figures of contrition and patience. Again and again they would circle the little rink, earnest and serious, as if he were explaining to her something more mysterious than a sport.”

e) Mrs Hartley finds a paperweight exactly like the one she’d had in childhood, and Mr Hartley finds a blackthorn exactly like one someone gifted his father!

There are surely more, but all put delicately so as not to be very obvious.

I love the way Cheever ends many of his stories bringing in some elements from nature. I think the sentences with which he ends The Hartleys are beautiful:

“When everything was ready, the stricken couple walked across the porch, looking around them at the bewildering beauty of the night, for it was very cold and clear and the constellations seemed brighter than the lights of the inn or the village. He helped his wife into the car, and after arranging a blanket over her legs, they started the long, long drive.”