MATSEC English Intermediate Level

The Teddy-bears’ Picnic

William Trevor
William Trevor’s “Teddy-bears’ Picnic” begins with an argument between a newlywed
couple, Edwin and Deborah Chalm. Edwin, a stockbroker, does not want to go to a
Teddy-bears’ Picnic, a get-together Deborah and her childhood friends attend every
few years at the home and gardens of an elderly couple, the Ainley-Foxletons. Due
to planning the Teddy-bears’ Picnic, Deborah forgets to cook Edwin dinner. Deborah
attempts to make dinner. They argue more. Edwin drinks excessively. Edwin apologizes
the next morning. They drive out from London to Deborah’s childhood neighborhood
on a Friday, spend Saturday with Deborah’s parents, and attend the picnic at the
Ainley-Foxletons’ on Sunday. At the picnic, after Deborah thanks Edwin for attending,
Edwin excuses himself from the garden picnic to go to the bathroom. He drinks
excessively in the house. He remembers a time from his youth when he made a
spectacle of himself at a party. He goes outside and pushes Mr. Ainley-Foxleton over
the edge of the lawn and the old man cracks his head on a sundial. Edwin returns to
the picnic. Mrs. Ainley-Foxleton discovers her husband’s body. Edwin leads the
picnickers over to the corpse, declares Mr. Ainley-Foxleton dead, and takes charge
of the proceedings.

“Teddy-bears’ Picnic” is about 9,000 words long and told through the close third
person, switching from the consciousness of Edwin to Deborah and then back to
Edwin again, with occasional rare moments of non-POV-dependent authorial
summary. There are five sections to the story, each divided into substantial chunks of
backfill and dialogue. Trevor’s “Picnic” features a protagonist who resists the action of
the antagonist. But here it is Edwin, the husband, who resists his wife Deborah’s desire
to go the Teddy-bears’ Picnic. The story’s first section, the longest, initiates this
confrontation; the second provides backfill on the couple’s relationship and a short
dialogue confrontation; the third, the shortest, escalates the conflict between the
couple (if in a somewhat indirect way); the fourth consists of an extended
memory/backfill from Edwin and the climatic action; the final scene provides
aftermath by detailing the consequences of the already settled desire-resistance
pattern.

Trevor registers Edward’s resistance to his wife’s desire to go to the Teddy-bear Picnic
in the story’s very first line: “I simply don’t believe it,” Edwin asks, “grown-up people?”
She tries to explain the Teddy-bears’ Picnic tradition, to continue to push her desire, in
a way that hints at the fundamental miscommunication between the two
personalities, which will surface again and again in the story. “Well,” she says, “grown-
up now, darling. We weren’t always grown up.” This disconnect between Edwin’s
understanding of maturity and his wife’s frames the desire-resistance pattern. Edwin’s
next response—“I’ll absolutely tell you this. I’m not attending this thing”—makes
obvious Edwin’s violent resistance to what Deborah sees as a perfectly harmless
desire.

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Through the course of the apartment scene—snippets of dialogue followed by a

paragraph or two of summary, both of the principles drinking more and more—the
desire-resistance pattern surfaces again and again. Deborah cannot understand why
her husband would refuse to have “a bit of fun” while Edwin cannot understand how
mature adults could “call sitting down with teddy-bears a bit of fun.” The idea of
maturity pops up again and again, expertly “loaded”—to reference another Douglas
Glover analytical term—through significant history, juxtaposition and word splintering,
but the reader does not lose sight of the plot due to the recursive dialogue exchanges,
all of which circle around whether or not they will go to the Teddy-bear’s Picnic. The
scene ends with a silent truce. We are told that the next morning Edwin apologized,
the implication being the first round of combat has gone to Deborah rather than
Edwin.

In the next scene, Trevor’s continues his deft POV switches, showing, somewhat
comically, how one side does not see this conflict as a big deal while the other views
sitting down with teddy-bears as an existential insult. Because Deborah finds “the
consideration of the past pleasanter than speculation about the future,” she spends
much of the scene providing relationship backfill and seeing “little significance” in
their quarrel over the picnic. Edwin, for his part, thinks about the future, his persistent
anger, and how he can give the marriage “a chance to settle into a shape that suited
it.” Yet only at the end of the scene, on the way to the weekend getaway—and in
yet another admirably concise dialogue exchange—does Trevor push the conflict to
the surface again. Deborah interrupts Edwin’s story about the stock exchange to tell
him the story of Jeremy’s “Poor Pooh,” her adult male friend’s teddy-bear. Edwin
“didn’t say anything.”

This silence constitutes the second movement in the conflict. Edwin’s passive
resistance, his stony agreement to attend yet not substantively interact with others at
the Picnic (a sort of adult pout really), colors both the second scene and the third. It
persists through his arrival at the elderly couple’s house and as they sit down for the
Teddy-bears’ Picnic. Edwin drinks heavily through this scene and privately rejoices that
he “smelt like a distillery” during his introduction to the elderly Mrs. Ainley-Foxleton. He
internally mocks the ridiculousness and ugliness of all of Deborah’s friends. He only
breaks this silence at the end of the third scene, when he tells Deborah, he has “to go
to the lav,” after Deborah whispers, “thank you.” (Interestingly Edwin makes no
comment about and does not seem to have an opinion of the elderly Ainley-Foxleton,
who will ultimately bear the brunt of Edwin’s rage.)

Edwin’s interpretation of his wife’s thank you is of course couched within his
understanding of the desire-resistance pattern, which is to say Deborah sees Edwin’s
attendance as a nice gesture, a moment of loving appreciation and give-and-take
between understanding spouses, while he takes her words for a sinister reminder of his
earlier humiliation. It also provides for the movement toward the third stage of the
desire-resistance plan and the story’s climax; Edwin has in a very literal sense left the
Teddy-bears’ picnic. It does not matter that he is just going to the bathroom and that
this would seem a perfectly natural thing to do; within the framework of the short story
this movement constitutes a definitive and provocative action, yet another resistance
on Edwin’s part, and the necessary plot step that brings about the third, climatic
confrontation.

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After an extended reverie on Edwin’s part, where he drinks the Ainsley-Foxton’s

whiskey and reflects on a time in his youth when boredom, anger, and a need to
come out on top pushed him to ruin a perfectly pleasant garden party—“within
minutes it had become his day”—Edwin goes out to the lawn and tells Mr. Ainsley-
Foxton that he sees fungus on the lawn below the rockery. He then murders Mr.
Ainsley-Foxton. Deborah is not present in this scene but Edwin’s action cannot be
interpreted as anything other than a violent resistance to her original desire. They are
still within the same “room”—the sentimental and, to quote Edwin, “gooey,” world of
the Ainsley-Foxton’s, Teddy-bears, and Deborah’s childhood (and, by implication,
perpetual childhood, the antithesis of Edwin’s stockbroker “manliness”). Whatever the
aftermath’s specifics, the consequences, the Teddy-bear Picnic will come to an end
and no one will ever again—at least within Deborah’s circle of friends—be attending
any Teddy-bears’ Picnics.

Trevor’s final section details the moments following the violent act of a protagonist,
moments where he waits for the consequences of his actions. Trevor becomes
hilariously mordant (and also philosophical) expertly juggling the juxtaposition of
nostalgia and fear, violence and maturity, and innocence and experience in Edwin’s
reflections on the blissfully unaware picnickers. And yet even though action does
occur—Edwin and everyone else hear Mrs. Ainley-Foxleton scream and Edwin takes
“charge of the proceedings,” becomes the grown-up in a world defined exclusively
by death—this Teddy-bear’s Picnic has already technically ended because Edwin has
already categorically and triumphantly resisted his wife’s desire.

The problem for readers like me is that we tend to mistake these endings for the heart
of the story, which they are, in a sense. One leaves Trevor’s story impressed not by the
conflict between actors, but by the profound emotional effect and intellectual
questions the conflict allows. The effect is never simple; it inverts assumptions and
resists explication. In a sense that is the “conflict” of literature. Most readers desire
human experience be explicable within some heuristic; literature resists, heroically so.
These stories are remarkable artifacts of that resistance; and yet they are nothing at
all and mean nothing at all without their perfectly explicable internal desire-resistance
pattern. All talk of heart and soul and transcendence aside, these stories—to quote
Edwin—would be simply “gooey” without a plot to help substantiate them.

John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother” tells the story of Lawrence (Tifty) Pommeroy’s
visit to Laud’s Head, a summer place on the shore of one of the Massachusetts islands.
Lawrence’s family—including the middle brother and story narrator—awaits the
brother’s arrival with some trepidation, as Lawrence, the youngest brother, has not
visited the family in four years. Lawrence shows up with his wife and two boys, begins
complaining about the summer home’s proximity to the shoreline, and refuses to drink
with the family. His mother gets drunk. Lawrence goes to bed and the rest of the family
goes swimming. The next day Lawrence refuses to play tennis doubles with the
narrator and the family goes swimming to escape Lawrence. That night, Lawrence
disapprovingly watches the family play backgammon. Later in the week the narrator
and his wife help plan a costume “come as you wish you were” dance at the boat
club. The narrator tries to convince Lawrence to enjoy himself and attempts to
physically force him into the dance. Lawrence resists. Everyone at the party goes
swimming. The next day the narrator goes swimming and finds Lawrence on the

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beach. Lawrence agrees to walk to Tanner’s Point with the narrator along the beach.
The narrator confronts Lawrence about his bad attitude. When Lawrence insults the
narrator and walks away, the narrator hits him on the back of the head with a root.
The narrator goes swimming. A bloodied Lawrence returns to the summer home and
tells his family he is leaving. Lawrence leaves.

John Cheever

“Goodbye, My Brother” is about 8,000 words and is told in the first person, from
Lawrence’s brother point of view. Cheever breaks up the story into six sections using
line breaks. The major conflict—Lawrence (or Tifty) wants to show his disdain for his
family; his family resists—takes places in sections three, four, and five. These major
conflict sections take place chronologically, over the course of the two-week family
vacation. The first section provides backfill, summary of the family’s history. The final
section imagines and reflects on Lawrence’s leaving (aftermath rather than plot). It is
important to note that of three stories examined, Cheever’s possesses the most
complicated plot structure. Not only is the story told through a narrator who is
physically implicated in the desire-resistance pattern only in the story’s second half,
but the desirer—Tifty—also expresses his disdain for specific family rituals as well as
specific characters. This creates a more elegantly algebraic plot pattern, less A vs B in
three different rooms, than A vs X1, and then A vs X2, and then A vs X3. Further, each
of these X variables is subdivided into a somewhat consistent pattern of smaller plot
iterations—a1, b1, and b3.

The story’s conflict takes a definitive shape about a page into the story’s second
section. This scene is defined almost exclusively as a confrontation between Lawrence
and his mother, with the other family members watching on. Initially, there is “a faint
tension” in the room at Lawrence’s arrival, but Lawrence does not press his disdain on
the family and no one actively resists this disdain until Lawrence reappears from a visit
to the beach. Here, in a short dialogue exchange, Lawrence’s mother asks Lawrence
what he thought of the beach and if he wants a Martini: “’Isn’t the beach fabulous,
Tifty?…Isn’t it fabulous to be back? Will you have a Martini?’” She calls him Tifty—one
of two family nicknames for the youngest brother; the other is “Little Jesus”—and
essentially answers the question she asks for her son, rhetorically providing him an
“out,” what he needs to say to elide his four-year separation. Lawrence response—“I
don’t care…Whiskey, gin don’t care what I drink. Give me a little rum”—makes clear
that he will not fall back into the family banter and habits and has arrived not to rejoin
but has come to disapprove of the family. “We do not have any rum,” says the mother
with the “first note of asperity.” The narrator then goes on to provide more backfill, to
explain Lawrence’s original separation from the family after their father’s death, when
Lawrence originally disapproved, when he decided that his mother was “frivolous,
mischievous, destructive, and overly strong.”

Unlike the other stories examined, Lawrence’s initial attack seems misdirected. He first
gets into a fight with the mother, then makes a snide comment about the sister’s
promiscuity, and finally ridicules the dead father’s “damn fool idea to build a house
on the edge of a cliff on a sinking coastline.” The scene concludes with the mother
getting “unfortunately” drunk and declaring that if there is an afterlife, she “will have

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a very different kind of family,” one with “fabulously rich, witty, and enchanting
children.”

Because Cheever’s story is narrated by a character who has no direct exchanges with
Lawrence in the first plot scene, the reader might conclude that this long first family
interaction with Lawrence is not plot. This reader would be wrong. Lawrence’s disdain
here addresses a particular family pastime—getting together to have drinks—and—
with this—the process of coming together, of reuniting after a long separation.
Lawrence’s challenges—which come in three neatly forceful dialogue exchanges
with the mother—represent an assault on the family’s “delight at claiming a brother,”
their efforts “to enjoy a peaceful time,” and, most importantly, their ritualistic drinking,
which refreshes “their responses to a familiar view.”

Douglas Glover, in an essay on Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung,” argues that Munro is

“almost always precise and transparent in terms of her desire-resistance patterns”
because “her story organization is heterodox.” In other words, the more complicated
the plot structure, the more important a precisely delineated desire-resistance
pattern. This holds true in the first scene of Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother.” Because
Lawrence is in conflict with an idea or family ritual rather than a specific person and
knowing that Lawrence will be conflict with another ritual in the following scene,
Cheever must guide the reader carefully through the scene, expertly modulating the
conflict’s pressure, insistently reminding the reader of what is in fact at stake. We have
seen in the other stories that a desire-resistance pattern tends to work best in three
iterations. Cheever knows this, so he gives the reader this three-pronged pattern within
the scene itself (think back to the “stepping out” observed in the O’Connor story).
Lawrence’s rejection of the family’s ritualistic drinking comes three times—remember
the three almost parallel dialogue exchanges?—that leads to the mother drinking too
much and insulting the family. The scene itself could be a story. It has its own desire-
resistance arc (a+b+c=A (Tifty) vs X1 (family drinking)), one that the consequent
scenes (where A will be in conflict with new rituals, new X variables) will reformulate
and expand upon.

In the third scene we finally have direct story interaction between the narrator and
Lawrence. The narrator asks Lawrence if he wants to play tennis. Lawrence, through
indirect dialogue, says “no thanks,” and the narrator excuses Lawrence’s decision
because “both he and Chaddy play better tennis than I,” but then, just a few lines
later, “Lawrence disappears” when family doubles are about to begin, which makes
the narrator “cross.” This frames the later direct confrontation with the narrator and
Lawrence—which will be the climax of the story—while carefully and consistently
perpetuating the desire-resistance pattern established in the previous scene. Here
Lawrence shows his disdain of family tennis doubles, then comments on the house’s
specious gentrification—“Imagine spending a thousand dollars to make a sound
house look like a wreck”—and finally the family’s eating habits. We have again the
three iterations, but this time of three separate family rituals; and yet—since we just
had this in the last scene and the key to quality plotting is reformulation, as Viktor
Shklovsky says in his Energy of Delusion, plotting requires “inversion and parody”—
these three expressions of disdain function as a prelude for the scene’s central
dissatisfaction, that is, Lawrence’s disdain for family backgammon (the X2 in the basic
plot pattern).

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Unsurprisingly, given Cheever’s previous patterning, the backgammon scene-let can

be further subdivided into three iterations also (a+b+c) that blooms from the climax of
the original three iterations (tennis, house, food):[1] Lawrence watches on with disdain
as the narrator plays his other brother’s wife (a), the narrator plays his other brother
(b), and finally the other brother plays their mother (c). As the games proceed, the
narrator is sure that Lawrence “finds an inner logic” to this innocent family ritual, and
“it will be sordid.” He will, according to the narrator, see each loss and victory as
evidence of “human rapaciousness,” that they battle not for money, for fun, but for
“one another’s souls.” It’s also important to note here that all of this is filtered through
the narrator brother, who, importantly, not only internalizes his brother’s criticisms but
also interprets and voices them. While one might think that this distancing might
mitigate the intensity of the desire-resistance pattern (why not just have Lawrence
verbalize these accusations?), the fact that this interior monologue of disdain comes
from the narrator’s imagination of Lawrence actually increases the conflict’s intensity.
The disdain Lawrence feels for the family is bottled up by the narrator and fermented,
and the narrator “resists” Lawrence’s disdain by trying to articulate it, trying to frame
it, which again foreshadows his eventual failure.

Lawrence wins this scene’s desire-resistance pattern. He effectively expresses his

disdain for this family ritual through silence (which the narrator verbalizes) and then, in
the final paragraph, actively states, “I should think you’d go crazy” and “I’m going to
bed.” Here, about halfway through the story, we have a seeming break from the
desire resistance pattern, as the narrator makes a point to avoid Lawrence over the
next few days, to enjoy his vacation and plan for the “Come as You Wish You Were”
dance. But this is not an actual break in the plot. Like Mrs. May’s decision to go look
for the Greenleaf boys and Edward’s pouting, this is an attempt to resolve the conflict
by a new form of resistance (escape). It is another plot step, but one accomplished
in the form of a delay (remember Shklovsky on digression and delay). Lawrence might
not be physically present or even mentioned through the majority of the scene, but
the reader waits for his return, which roars back at the end of this fourth scene with
the same puritanical disapproval, this time of the dance party ritual (A vs X3). The
narrator resists by pushing Lawrence into the party—the first physical resistance of the
story—and Lawrence fights back limply, asking, “Why should I? Why should I?” The
narrator returns to the party without Lawrence and they all dance and drink and
“chase balloons”—another attempt to escape the conflict, and also the satisfying
and logical climax to that scene’s desire-resistance pattern.

The fifth and climatic scene follows the pattern established in the previous scenes, but
Cheever adjusts the movement, reformulates it in a way that speaks to the increasing
pressure of Lawrence’s disdain on the narrator specifically. It might be useful to think
of this in cinematic terms. The first part of the story has a distant shot of the desire-
resistance pattern and Cheever moves in closer and closer until the conflict becomes
a physical one (a close-up) between Lawrence’s disdain for the family and the
narrator’s resistance. This is not to say Lawrence in this final section does not despise a
family ritual too. He very much does—he despises the very idea of a beach vacation.
After Lawrence’s wife’s vacation laundering affronts the narrator—her “penitential
fervor,” iteration “a”—he goes to swim and finds Lawrence at the beach (iteration
“b”). He swims with Lawrence watching. Upon exiting, the narrator imagines

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Lawrence’s criticisms—this again comes in a neat three-iteration cycle; remember

that Cheever constantly has the third iteration give birth to a subset of three iterations,
like algae blooms of conflict—and the narrator confronts the way Lawrence “kept his
head down” as they walk along the beach (iteration “c”). Lawrence responds with
the first explicit expression of disdain: “I don’t like it here.”

Following this blunt description of the desire-resistance pattern, the narrator resists
verbally by repeating, “come out of it, Tifty.” Lawrence then insults the narrator
physical appearance. The narrator strikes Lawrence from behind with a “sea-water
heavy” root. This violence comes fast and is surprising, yet at the same time it is
expected; through the successful cycles of desire-conflict exchanges, how Cheever
reformulates each in their movement toward this particular confrontation, and the
fact that the narrator has been verbalizing Lawrence’s disdain for the family through
the entire story, it only make sense that the narrator would end up committing
violence on a family member and, by extension, on the family.

Why? Because this is the exact pattern established in the first confrontation with the
mother and the drinking— her afterlife with “fabulously rich, witty, and enchanting
children”—where Lawrence’s disdain for the family produces a disdain for the family
from the family itself. This action is a plot twist and yet is also firmly within the established
pattern. So too the narrator’s actions after the violence—his binding of the wound, his
silence about the action, and his decision to go swimming yet again, to throw himself
into that baptismal font, that “illusion of purification,” the one place in the family’s
world that Lawrence “neglected to name,” and thus the one place resistant to
Lawrence’s powers of “diminution” (one gets the sense that the narrator cannot
name it either, and that is what keeps it redemptive and viable even after the events
of the story; it is also, of course, where their father drowned—ironic conflict means
syntactic excitement!).

In the next scene, the narrator imagines his brother leaving and reflects on the
morning’s intensity and wonders whether anything can be done with “a man like
that.” He then looks out his window to see the women of the family emerging naked
from the water. In terms of story, the sublime imagery and wordplay are ancillary
(though no less important). The plot has already ended. The conflict itself came to a
conclusion on the beach. Likewise, the narrator’s philosophical ruminations, all the
varied reasons he gives for Lawrence’s disposition and disdain, are tempting to
privilege (as they come at the end), but this misses the fact that the actual story, the
plot, would not work at all if not for Cheever’s determination to follow the original
conflict—that of Lawrence’s puritanical disdain for the family—through the course of
the story and to let them play out in three similar yet distinct scenes. This nuts and bolts
craft substantiates the lyrical prose and philosophical digressions to follow. Missing this
craft does not mean we miss the point of the story; it simply means we will likely have
a good amount of trouble writing one.

In his Theory of Prose, Shklovsky argues that “art is not a march set to music, but rather
a walking dance to be experienced, or, more accurately, a movement of the body,
whose very essence it is to be experienced through the senses.” Each of these three
stories has a pronounced musicality to them, and it certainly feels at times that the
reader is carried along through the background music alone (whether that comes in

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the form of syntax or theme or psychology). But this is not what makes a story. As E.M
Forster declared in his Aspects of the Novel, a story quastory has but one single merit:
that it “makes the audience want to know what happens next.” This merit exists only
in an author’s capacity to create a “walking dance to be experienced,” a
determination to follow with “the body,” an investment with “the senses.”

We have seen this play out in the three stories analyzed. Each takes a specific
character’s desire and invents a situation where another character or group of
characters resists this desire. It then takes this conflict and reproduces it at least three
times in at least three distinct scenes, and each iteration is reformulated to provide a
sense of syntactic excitement, irony and elaboration without ever abandoning the
original desire-resistance pattern. This steadfast commitment to the original conflict
creates the aesthetic space for the “movement of the body” because this plotting is,
ultimately, a commitment to the senses on the part of the author and the reader, to
exploring—to quote O’Connor again—“the definite to its extremity.”

Culturally Americans tend to treat literature as an unknown quality, unique with

respect to other art forms and disciplines, both urgent and enduring precisely
because it cannot be planned, described, and compartmentalized. But this isn’t quite
true. The urgent and enduring qualities of literature extend directly from the fact that
literature is, as Douglas Glover says, “a process of thinking with its own peculiar form.”
Contrary to popular belief—a romanticized and lazy understanding of what art
accomplishes and is—this peculiar and specific form provides literature its unknown
quality. Writers create interest through, as Glover argues, “variation of form, surprising
turns or denials of expectation, dramatic action and emotional resonance”; writers
move readers through a walking dance, never for a sentence forgetting that there
would be no dance without conflicting bodies and no interesting bodies without this
formulaic dance.

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