John Cheever’s ‘The Fourth Alarm’: Summary and Analysis

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Fourth Alarm’ was published in 1970. This is significant given how much this John Cheever story reflects the sexual revolution of the 1960s (especially the last few years of that busy decade) and the changing attitudes to gender and sex that this brought. It features nudity, theatre, someone writing on a pair of naked buttocks, and a lack of regard for social mores. What’s not to love?

As if that wasn’t enough of an incentive to read it, it’s also blessed with that rare quality which often makes a short story even more appealing as a prospect: it’s one of Cheever’s shortest. It does everything it needs to in just six pages.

Summary

Narrated by a middle-aged husband and father in clipped, terse sentences, ‘The Fourth Alarm’ is about a man whose wife, Bertha, announces that she wants to give up her teaching job and audition for a role in a naked theatre production, Ozamanides II (perhaps recalling the naked revue O, Calcutta!, which was synonymous with the sexual revolution in the late 1960s).

The narrator is dead against the idea, and plans to divorce his wife. However, when he goes to see a divorce lawyer he discovers that he would require both parties to consent, since no adultery has taken place (only simulated sex acts, as part of the nude show). So he has to grin and bear it.

He puts off going to see the show for a month, using the excuse that tickets were expensive and hard to get as an excuse. When he does finally go to see Ozamanides II, he says he ‘can’t describe’ the performance, then proceeds to describe it. The wild performance makes him nostalgic for his own youthful, innocent experiences at the local cinema, and he recalls one film, The Fourth Alarm, which he saw at multiple screenings after school.

When he is jolted back to the present moment, it is just in time to see one of the male actors writing something obscene across Bertha’s bare buttocks. The man sitting next to him puts his hand on the narrator’s knee. At the end of the performance, the audience is invited to strip off their clothes and join the naked cast on stage. The narrator agrees to this, but cannot bear to put down his wallet, watch, and car keys, in case they’re lost or stolen. As he approaches the stage, a naked young man tells him to put down his ‘lendings’, and soon everyone else is joining in the chant.

Feeling out of place, he goes and retrieves his clothes, gets dressed, and leaves the theatre, feeling out of place but fairly good about himself, sensing that he’d connected with some ‘practical’ and obstinate part of himself.

Analysis

This story is about a couple who, upon reaching middle age and their two children no longer little, realise they have very different ambitions. The narrator is happy with the status quo, both domestically and societally, while Bertha, his wife, wants to embrace the more open, permissive culture the 1960s had ushered in. (Yes, there really were nude shows put on in the sixties: the musical Hair, which premiered in 1967, had a moment where the whole cast were naked on stage for thirty seconds, but they had to remain completely still in order to avoid falling foul of obscenity laws.)

Bertha herself is described as a strict mother when their two children, Peter and Louise, were younger, as if conforming to the social expectations of the time, whereby a housewife was expected to be a responsible wife and mother. When Bertha disciplined them, she would repeat the same threat to them over and over (with the wording changed slightly, but the structure the same).

This prefigures the ‘Put down your lendings’ chant which the narrator is confronted with by everyone in the theatre at the end of the story, inviting us to wonder whether she has simply swapped one set of social expectations for another (at the theatre, it is expected that everyone will get naked and dangle their bits about; the narrator is marked out as an outcast, like Mark Corrigan at Rainbow Rhythms, for not wanting to jettison his watch, keys, and wallet, that holy trinity of trinkets signalling that one is a member of civilisation).

As in any good story – and especially in a John Cheever story – every detail works towards the tale’s overall effect. Take those intertextual references to other ‘narratives’ which the narrator mentions in the course of the story. The most significant of these is the film which provides Cheever’s story with its title: The Fourth Alarm. This was, indeed, a silent film of this name released in 1926.

This film, as the narrator fondly recalls, is about the automobile replacing horse-drawn fire engines. However, the narrator’s memory of the film’s plot is rather rose-tinted, as one might expect with a memory of something that happened decades before (despite seeing the film multiple times during its run, this happened over forty years ago, if he saw the film when it was first released). He remembers the clapped-out old horse-drawn fire brigade saving the day and being hailed as heroes, but the film (a slapstick comedy, like many silent films) shows the intrepid heroes struggling to put out the fire, and encountering numerous challenges. In other words, the narrator’s memory of the film is a little selective.

But Cheever’s choice of this film as the narrator’s point of reference for childhood nostalgia is more layered than this. That film, The Fourth Alarm, was released just one year before The Jazz Singer in 1927. That Al Jonson film was the first full-length talking picture or ‘talkie’ which largely killed off the silent movie overnight. Just as the film is about one form of technology superseding an older and now outdated form, so the film itself is an example of the same phenomenon. Cinema would never be the same after The Jazz Singer.

As for the other intertextual references in Cheever’s story: as the narrator, humiliated by the crowd, is walking towards the exit in the theatre, he recalls making that journey after watching productions of King Lear and The Cherry Orchard: both plays about an old world coming to an end and making way for the younger generation.

There’s also the name of the fictional production in which Bertha stars: Ozamanides II resembles nothing so much as ‘Ozymandias’, Percy Shelley’s 1818 poem about a fallen civilisation. Since this production is essentially ‘Ozymandias II’, it’s almost as if Cheever is inviting us to view this naked romp as a distant sequel to Shelley’s poem about the decline of a whole empire. People like the narrator of ‘The Fourth Alarm’ viewed the new permissive society that the 1960s ushered in as a decline in moral standards, after all.

In fact, at a subtler level we might say that ‘The Fourth Alarm’ is even more intertextual than this. Take the name of the narrator’s wife: Bertha. Inevitably, that name calls up the most famous Bertha in nineteenth-century (perhaps all) fiction, Bertha Rochester (or Bertha Mason), the first wife of Mr Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rochester locks his estranged, ‘mad’ first wife in an upstairs room (not the attic, as is sometimes claimed) to get her out of the way, because he cannot legally divorce her.

The parallels with the narrator’s legal issue in ‘The Fourth Alarm’ are obvious enough.

Then there’s that falling snow as the narrator leaves the theatre, and the narrator’s reflection about how enjoyable it is to drive home in the snow after parties. It seems safe to assume this is a calculated nod to James Joyce’s best-known short story, ‘The Dead’ (1914), in which Gabriel Conroy looks out at the falling snow after he and his wife have been to a party, and he has learned about her first love, a young man who died while making his way to see her.

The theme of marital estrangement and the social gathering which brings things to a head suggest that ‘The Fourth Alarm’ might be viewed as Cheever’s response to Joyce’s story, on some level. As with ‘The Dead’, we’re left wondering what the fate of the married couple is going to be beyond the story.