“Artemis, the Honest Well Digger” is the fourth story in a collection called The World of Apples (1973). Cheever’s Artemis Bucklin lives with his mother in “one of those conclaves of white houses that are distinguished by their displays of the American flag.” He works with an “old Smith & Mathewson chain-concussion rig that struck the planet sixty blows a minute.” He has an “inquisitive intelligence” and read some literature in college, but he’s really all about “Water, water,” which he liked to think “was at the root of civilizations”. Indeed, “he was a well driller and water was his profession, his passion as well as his livelihood.” It’s a Bucklin family trade, and his father had baptized him Artemis “thinking that it referred to artesian wells.” The accidental antique reference and the antiquity of the hero’s profession have a place among a few classical and Roman flourishes, though the American setting is to be drawn into relationship with the USSR, rather than any deep and European past.
To pursue the ancient theme, starting with that name, it should be noted that Artemis is late to its provenance; it’s not until he “was a grown man that he discovered he had been named for the chaste goddess of the hunt.” Is there any resemblance to that being? Artemis, a lover will note, has curly hair, and everyone but Cheever and reader calls him Art. His manner is “rustic and shy and something of an affectation”, “most rustic” when he says lines such as “Well, I’ll have to get back to work, ma’am.” That “affectation” is puzzling against the honesty promised in the title of the story. He’s practical and skilled, giving him a bias against the supernatural, which in this story is the “dowsers”, a resourceful few in the area who “made their living by divining the presence of subterranean water with forked fruit twigs.” But maybe he “distrusted” them out of envy. If they're really divining anything and not just grifting on dumb luck, they’re much closer to the source than he; “If magic bested knowledge, how simple everything would be: water, water.” Artemis’ ideal as made known in the first paragraph of the story is that same simplicity working toward tautology: “Man was largely water. Water was man. Water was love. Water was water.”
For Cheever’s literary purposes, though, water is not always water. A customer becomes a lover becomes a nuisance, and Artemis must fly away. The travel agent suggests Moscow, because Tokyo and Egypt are too far, and Europe too cold. Artemis goes to Moscow, where in the hotel “the hot-water spout made a Vesuvian racket and began to ejaculate rusty and scalding water.” This is to be related to his times with that lover back home, Mrs. Filler, when “the trajectory of his discharge was a little like the fireballs from a Roman candle and may explain our fascination with these pyrotechnics.” Where the name Artemis is an inadvertent antique touch, the “Roman” candle is some kind of counterfeit, a firework with no such ancient heritage. When Artemis goes off he makes no Vesuvian racket, rather, “at the most sublime moment, he usually shouted “Ouch, ouch, ouch.” Art is an American in the crucial moments. He finds another lover in Moscow, Natasha, and after his return to New York state his letter to her bears a “twenty-five cent stamp, a dismal grey engraving of Abraham Lincoln,” to answer her vexing Cyrillic address and “brilliantly colored” stamps.
There’s a lot of Italy, Rome most of all, throughout The World of Apples. Cheever had lived in Rome for a year in the late 50s. There are flights to Rome from Chicago, a hotel room in Taormina, and an artist living in Monte Carbone, a “loaf-shaped butte of sullen granite”. When Rome is mentioned in “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger”, it’s to show how bleak Moscow is by contrast:
There were some dead flowers on the bust of Chaliapin, but they seemed to be the only flowers in town. Part of the clash of a truly great city on an autumn night is the smell of roasting coffee and (in Rome) wine and new bread and men and women carrying flowers home to a lover, a spouse, or nobody in particular, nobody at all.
Does this reference to contemporary Rome brings any light to what Cheever is trying to do with his Roman candles, his Artemis? The ancient Latins may not have had coffee, but that might be the only anachronism dividing this Rome from that Rome. Cheever’s lament for and against the demeaned Moscow is as follows: “Oh, Moscow, Moscow, that most anonymous of all anonymous cities!” Yet his Rome in autumn is made vivid by nameless men and women, lovers and spouses, even nobodies. As compared to Rome, Moscow is surely lifeless, not especially anonymous. And like his Rome, all but one of Cheever’s ancient quirks are pretty anonymous: dowser, Vesuvian racket, Roman candle, and the exception of Artemis himself. Even in the exception the connection is vague, a malapropism rather than a series of associations that could color Artemis’ character; he is not really an ancient in a new world, or he really is just Art. In this story that ancient to new distance collapses, anyhow. People still need to dig wells, and the rain makes a “healing sound”. As it was in the beginning, “Men sought water as water sought its level.”