John Cheever and a Christmas Tale for 2008

N. Mills: John Cheever’s Christmas Tale

IF THERE is a Christmas story that we can’t get enough of, it is Miracle on 34th Street. In the 1947 film and book, the Christmas spirit triumphs over commercialism and doubt. A Macy’s Santa Claus who thinks he is the one and only Santa Claus successfully fights the attempt to treat him as crazy and turns all those around him into better people.

But in today’s shaky economic climate, the Christmas tale that we ought to be paying attention to is John Cheever’s much neglected “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor.” At the center of Cheever’s 1949 story is the kind of warning that the Obama administration needs when it considers future bailouts.

Cheever’s story revolves around Charlie, an elevator operator at a fancy apartment building on New York’s Sutton Place, who feels sorry for himself because he has to work on Christmas day. When the tenants in his building greet him with Merry Christmas, Charlie replies by telling them, “It isn’t much of a holiday for me. Christmas is a sad season if you’re poor.” As the day wears on, Charlie, a bachelor, even invents a tragic family situation for himself, telling one tenant that he has four living children and two in the grave.

Charlie’s made-up tale touches the hearts of the tenants with whom he speaks, and they respond by showering him with gifts and food before his shift is over. He ends up with fourteen dinners, myriad presents, and toys for the children the tenants think he has. It is all enough to end Charlie’s gloom but not enough to make him wiser. The martinis, Manhattans, old-fashioneds, and eggnogs that Charlie consumes catch up with him. Drunk and out of control, he frightens the tenants by running the elevator up and down as if it were a ride in an amusement park. The day ends with Charlie being fired from his job.

Cheever is not being misanthropic in his Christmas tale. He never for a moment suggests that we should ignore the poor or treat Christmas like any other day. His subject is those who exaggerate their needs and then are hurt by their own greed, and his story ends with an unresolved question: How do we distinguish those who need our help from those who are good at playing on our sympathies?

It is a question for which the wealthy tenants who shower Charlie with last-minute presents don’t have an answer. But they can afford to remain in ignorance. Their misplaced charity does not hurt them. By contrast, when his administration takes office on January 20, Barack Obama will not have such leeway. If he decides to pour more money into banks “too big to fail,” he will have to make sure they use it for making loans rather than building up their reserves and buying other banks. If he decides to prop up the ailing Detroit auto industry, he will have to make sure that the companies he helps start producing energy-efficient cars that Americans can afford to buy.

Reading John Cheever’s Christmas story won’t help President Obama work out the details of any future agreements he makes with the banks and the auto industry. But what he can take away from “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor” is a sense of how badly our nation will be served by panicky giveaways. Cheever even had the perfect phrase for such behavior—“licentious benevolence.”

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. Photo: Rockefeller Center, 1981 (Rainer Halama / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons / GNU).