John Cheevers short story “The Country Husband”:
Write on ONE of the following passages from John Cheever’s short story “The Country Husband,” available in the Course Documents folder on Blackboard. The page numbers are given at the end of each passage. First try to put each description into context in terms of the plot. Then analyze it, discussing any difficult words or interesting, evocative images. Finally, explain the importance of the passage to the entire story, as you see it.
It was a pleasant garden, with walks and flower beds and places to sit. The sunset had nearly burned out, but there was still plenty of light. Put into a thoughtful mood by the crash and the battle, Francis listened to the evening sounds of Shady Hill. “Varmints! Rascals!” old Mr. Nixon shouted to the squirrels in his bird-feeding station. “Avaunt and quit my sight!” A door slammed. Someone was cutting grass. Then Donald Goslin, who lived at the corner, began to play the “Moonlight Sonata.” He did this nearly every night. He threw the tempo out the window and played it rubato [roughly] from beginning to end, like an outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity—of everything it was Beethoven’s greatness not to know.
The music rang up and down the street beneath the trees like an appeal for love, for tenderness, aimed at some lovely housemaid—some fresh-faced, homesick girl from Galway, looking at old snapshots in her third-floor room. (pp. 328-329)
The war seemed now so distant and that world where the cost of partisanship had been death or torture so long ago. Francis had lost track of the men who had been with him in Vesey [in France]. He could not tell anyone. And if he had told the story now, at the dinner table, it would have been a social as well as a human error. The people in the Farquarsons’ living room seemed united in their tacit claim that there had been no past, no war—that there was no danger or trouble in the world. In the recorded history of human arrangements, this extraordinary meeting [between Francis and the French maid] would have fallen into place, but the atmosphere of Shady Hill made the memory unseemly and impolite. The prisoner withdrew after passing the coffee, but the encounter left Francis feeling languid; it had opened his memory and his senses, and left him dilated. Julia went into the house. Francis stayed in the car to take the sitter home. (p. 331)