John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother” and the Eighth Deadly Sin

“…let us judge not, that we be not judged.” Lincoln quoting the bible in his Second Inaugural Address

Jul 29, 2023

As an eighth deadly sin, I nominate being judgmental in the sense of knee-jerk, excessive criticism, whether spoken or bottled inside. Often born of pride or envy, being judgmental leads to wrath, regret, and often the destruction of relationships. And it is a subtle corollary that causing others to be judgmental through your own careless and unnecessary actions is part of the industrial-judgmental complex. (1)

I’ve found that so much of my own corrosive anger comes from being judgmental, whether triggered by people close to me or by strangers. (More on my own judgmentalism later.)

There is, however, a get-out-of-sin card–––great literature that creates characters for you to be judgmental about without any damage to your immortal soul. In fact, most great literature demands that you be judgmental, at least on the first read. That’s true of the characters in John Cheever’s great short story “Goodbye, My Brother.” And while the reader is busy judging them, Cheever’s characters are engaged in their own terrible, destructive cycle of being thoughtlessly judgmental about one another.

Cheever gives us a WASP family, the Pommeroys, four adult siblings, three brothers married with children, a divorced sister, and an aged mother on an island off Massachusetts. It’s 1951, and they’re on summer vacation at the house their father built on a cliff overlooking the sea and the shore line (the “terminal moraine”). The father died long ago in a sailing accident. The sea and the beach, the fog and the heat, are characters in their own right as is the cliffside house built to look ancient at great cost when money was no object in the carefree ‘20s. (2)

Two of the brothers are the main characters. One brother, the never named narrator, is a weary, jack-of-all-trades boarding school teacher who desperately needs this two week vacation to be a balm to his other fifty weeks. “I only have two weeks in the year. Two weeks. I need to have a good time…,” he tells his younger brother Lawrence, the other main character.

Lawrence, a lawyer, is the youngest sibling, the outsider of the Pommeroys. He’s the family’s conscience as well as its scourge. His family addresses him not as Lawrence but as “Tifty,” a nickname derived from the sound his slippers made when he’d come down to breakfast as a young child. At other times, he’s called “Little Jesus” and “The Croaker.”

It’s the arrival of Tifty and his family that sets off a cycle of conflict and judgment. Tifty’s arrival at the house is dreaded by all, and they don’t hide their dread. There’s no effort to refrain from their old habit of jumping all over Tifty when he makes a negative comment, and he does make a few.

Tifty and his siblings share ownership of the house and its expenses, but Tifty stands alone in his dismal view of the house and its future and the futility of spending more money on repairs. (3)

“Facts are facts,” [Tifty] said, “and it’s a damned fool idea to build a house on a cliff on a sinking coastline.” And. "the house is probably in some danger now. If you had an unusually high sea, a hurricane sea, the wall would crumble and the house would go. We could all be drowned."

The narrator judges Tifty’s every comment severely, but for the most part he judges Tifty for what he imagines Tifty is thinking. For example, as he and Tifty are walking in silence on the beach, Cheever’s narrator is thinking the thoughts below in gorgeous, dark prose.

“[The] beach is a vast and preternaturally clean and simple landscape. It is like a piece of the moon. The surf had pounded the floor solid, so it was easy walking, and everything left on the sand had been twice changed by the waves. There was the spine of a shell, a broomstick, part of a bottle and part of a brick, both of them milled and broken until they were nearly unrecognizable, and I suppose [Tifty’s] sad frame of mind…went from one broken thing to another. The company of his pessimism began to infuriate me…”

The two brothers are hopelessly judgmental about one another. Tifty thinks his brother is a silly man devoted to frivolous things and delusions. Tifty fails to acknowledge his brother’s desperate need for these two weeks of optimism and frivolity––– a costume party at the club where the revelers jump in the ocean, and at the house each night constant drinking and bouts of playing backgammon for money. Tifty’s angry verdict: I should think you’d go crazy,” he said, “cooped up with one another, night after night.”

As for the narrator, he fails to make any allowance for the lifelong persecution his brother Tifty has suffered at the hands of the family. And even when Tifty is silent, every activity the narrator seeks to enjoy is partially self-ruined by what he imagines Tifty is thinking about it.

But we the readers get to judge these two men. I know this story is great, because my understanding of it has changed throughout the years with each new reading. The story is like the broken objects on the beach “twice changed by the waves.” The first time I read it, the beautiful expression of the narrator/Cheever’s thoughts placed me under his spell and thus I was completely swayed by his point of view. On the second and subsequent reads, I began to be able to separate the quality of the prose from my suspicion that the narrator was perhaps not being scrupulously faithful to the facts of the story. (4)

You may reach a different conclusion, and what could be better than using the text to debate the real “truth” of the story as it strikes each of us. My own brother and I have an ongoing debate about the story. (Of course I’m being analytical and he’s being judgmental, but what can you do with a brother like that!)

So, regarding my own tendency to be judgmental, “Goodbye, My Brother” gives me not only the joy of reading it, but some valuable self-advice.

For example, I subscribe to a wide range of substacks covering different views, and I’ll inevitably encounter comments from strangers that anger me. Usually comments that are either indisputably wrong on the facts or plainly bigoted. The other night, I was angered by a comment using the phrase “legacy Americans,” code words for white supremacy. I was so angry, it interfered with my sleep. If, however, I return to the story and think about the narrator and the way he allows Tifty to run amok in his mind, “rent-free,” it helps me recognize the wastefulness of my anger at a stranger.

Closer to home, a common example is when someone doesn’t respond to my emails. I can feel very much slighted. Why can’t I assume that the email slipped by them unnoticed, or that they intended to respond but became busy and forgot, or have a response in “drafts” and then left it there, or had something much more pressing going on in their lives. I’ve been guilty of all that to others. (5)

Following is an example of an unnecessary action I took that I should have predicted would cause someone I love to be needlessly judgmental. Not unlike the biblical proscription against putting a stumbling block in front of a blind man.

In the spring of 2015, when I still identified as a Republican on many issues, I gave an early and generous donation to Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, thinking he was the best of that 2016 cycle bunch. My wife and I met privately with Rubio and talked mostly about his position on gay rights, a key personal interest for us as our son is gay and had come out a few years prior at the age of 18, on the night before he left for college. (His announcement was greeted by love and complete acceptance from his family, without exception.)

We asked Rubio whether he could see himself moving politically closer toward full equality for the LGBT community. He gave a politician’s answer about having gone to his beloved, gay uncle’s wedding and saying he had no interest in overturning what was likely to be the Supreme Court ruling (“Obergefell”) later that year in favor of gay marriage.

When we told our son about our Rubio contribution and our Rubio meeting, he was furious at us. Rubio’s public positions on LGBT issues had been (and still are) consistently “anti.” Our son scoffed at our efforts to influence Rubio. He felt that we had betrayed him by supporting a politician hostile to his identity. At the time I judged my son’s feeling of betrayal as being an overreaction and I told him so. That made him even angrier.

In hindsight, I had failed to think about it from my son’s point of view, a failure very common to a cycle of judgmentalism. It would have been easy, and so much better, to have asked my son how he would feel, before we made the contribution. And maybe I didn’t ask because I knew what my son’s answer would be, and I wanted to be a big shot getting ”alone” time for my wife and me with Rubio.

It took me too long, about a year, to admit to my son what a bone-headed mistake I’d made. I had acted like either or both of the brothers in the Cheever story, failing to communicate earnestly and failing to consider the other’s point of view.

I hope I’ve encouraged you to read (or read again) “Goodbye, My Brother,” PDF attached below. Its greatness rests on its fluent, lyrical prose, its biblically reminiscent tale of two brothers who fight savagely because they don’t connect with one another, and its protean, changing nature as you re-read it. And like all great stories, there are lessons to be gleaned. Finally, and perhaps most impressive of all, given that Cheever creates an entire world with memorable characters, the story is remarkably short.

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.vmi.edu/dist/f/1818/files/2015/10/Goodbye-My-Brother-1trovbu.pdf

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Sparks from Culture by David Roberts

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