John Cheever at his home in Ossining, New York, 6th October 1979
Cheever: A Life By Blake Bailey (Picador, £25)
Literary history is dotted with writers who came to despise the works that made them famous. Arthur Conan Doyle churned out 56 short stories and four novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, yet considered his historical fiction to be his only “important” work. When William Golding reread his first novel, Lord of the Flies, two decades after it was published, he found it “boring and crude… O-level stuff.” The big creative problem of John Cheever’s life was that he was a first-rate short story writer who cared little for short stories; he wanted, rather, to be a great novelist. He laboured for more than two decades on what became The Wapshot Chronicle, supporting himself by writing stories for the New Yorker. The money he earned freed up time to work on the novel, but there was never quite enough money, or enough time, and Cheever became deeply resentful. As he wrote in his journal after failing yet again to finish it: “I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken.”
The Wapshot Chronicle was eventually published in 1957, when Cheever was in his mid-forties. He completed another three novels (and a novella) before his death in 1982. The books sold well and made him rich, allowing him to all but give up writing short stories (at least for the New Yorker, which he never forgave for delaying his ascent to Great Novelist status). Yet none were exactly critical triumphs and eventually even Cheever appeared to come round to the view that his real metier was the short story. “They [stories] seem in the end to be mostly what I’ve written,” he wrote to his longstanding New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, shortly before his death. Certainly now they are mostly what he is remembered for.
What makes Cheever’s stories so good? He was sometimes described as the “American Chekhov,” and his tales indeed have a Chekhovian plainness, a sense of having been scripted by life. He could conjure up rich, intricate worlds in a few pages—a family holidaying at their summer home (“Goodbye, My Brother”), a marriage in trouble (“The Season of Divorce”). While essentially realistic, his work often contains magical or surrealist touches. In “The Enormous Radio,” a couple buy a radio that starts broadcasting the conversations of neighbours; “The Country Husband” famously ends with the line: “it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” The result is that Cheever’s stories have a two-tone feel; they are at once life-like and mysterious, hum-drum and ineffable. In his hands, suburban America—that bastion of banality—became an enchanted place.
While Cheever’s stories are often miracles of clarity and compression, the same cannot be said about his life. The product of a well-heeled Boston family brought low by the depression, Cheever grew up with rigid ideas about manliness and social propriety. The life he constructed for himself was outwardly that of the stereotypical Wasp. After a spell in the army during the war (he didn’t see any action, and got out as soon as he could), he married above himself and settled in the affluent suburbs. His children were despatched to private schools and were encouraged (in plain defiance of their natures) to be grindingly conventional. Social life consisted of cocktail parties and afternoons at neighbours’ swimming pools. To the casual observer, Cheever may have seemed the perfect New England gentleman.
Yet it was all a bit of a sham, as he himself half-realised. His nature meant that he didn’t really fit in with the bankers and admen he associated with. Nor was he as ruggedly heterosexual as he pretended. Cheever’s denial of his homosexuality (or, at the very least, bisexuality) was the tragedy of his life. And he wasn’t its only victim. His wife and three children bore the brunt of his foul tempers, his incessant cruelty, his prodigious drunkenness. Drinking for Cheever was in one sense simply a social duty; it was what everyone did. But it was also a way of shielding himself from his errant sexuality; he anaesthetised his desires with drink. Over the years, his alcoholism corroded his creativity and in his early sixties it nearly killed him.
Then, rather miraculously, he attended an alcoholism treatment programme and never touched another drop. Not coincidentally, it was after this that he started to embrace his gay side. He became involved with a young writer, Max Zimmer, and at one point moved him into his house under the nose of his wife, Mary. The long afternoon walks they took together didn’t strike her as suspicious. She was more in denial about her husband’s sexuality than he was.
Weighing in at nearly 700 pages, Blake Bailey’s biography is in most respects a magnificent achievement. It takes us through Cheever’s life in formidable detail. We get the lowdown on his drinking, his vile treatment of his family, his obsession with his genitals (as revealed in his journal). There are lively accounts of his annual trips to Yaddo, the writer’s colony, and of his foreign jaunts (which became more regular as his fame, and alienation from Mary, increased). Yet it is also a rather wearing read. In a sense this isn’t Bailey’s fault; the book’s flaws are determined by its subject. Cheever, as was often noticed, was an extraordinarily lonely man who had lots of acquaintances but almost no close friends. Drunk most of the time, he lived in a state of emotional exile, and his life was arid as a result. It acquired more definition once he sobered up, and it is only when Bailey’s narrative gets to this point that it really comes alive.
Bailey accepts a fairly unimaginative psychological interpretation of Cheever’s unhappiness, which traces it to the depredations his family suffered during the depression. But this lets Cheever too easily off the hook, making him purely a victim of his misery rather than an active propagator of it. He could, after all, be strikingly self-aware—as if he knew exactly what he was up to. Berating himself in his journal for his cruel treatment of one of his sons, he wrote of pouring “onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt.” Cheever’s best fiction was often about cruelty, and there is a sense in which he wanted to know whereof he spoke. While it may be too much to say that he made himself—and those around him—miserable for the sake of his writing, it is certainly the case that his writing benefited from his misery. Bailey doesn’t seem quite prepared to acknowledge this. He sheds brilliant light on the failings of the man, but doesn’t connect them with the achievements of the artist.
Cheever: A Life By Blake Bailey (Picador, £25)
Literary history is dotted with writers who came to despise the works that made them famous. Arthur Conan Doyle churned out 56 short stories and four novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, yet considered his historical fiction to be his only “important” work. When William Golding reread his first novel, Lord of the Flies, two decades after it was published, he found it “boring and crude… O-level stuff.” The big creative problem of John Cheever’s life was that he was a first-rate short story writer who cared little for short stories; he wanted, rather, to be a great novelist. He laboured for more than two decades on what became The Wapshot Chronicle, supporting himself by writing stories for the New Yorker. The money he earned freed up time to work on the novel, but there was never quite enough money, or enough time, and Cheever became deeply resentful. As he wrote in his journal after failing yet again to finish it: “I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken.”
The Wapshot Chronicle was eventually published in 1957, when Cheever was in his mid-forties. He completed another three novels (and a novella) before his death in 1982. The books sold well and made him rich, allowing him to all but give up writing short stories (at least for the New Yorker, which he never forgave for delaying his ascent to Great Novelist status). Yet none were exactly critical triumphs and eventually even Cheever appeared to come round to the view that his real metier was the short story. “They [stories] seem in the end to be mostly what I’ve written,” he wrote to his longstanding New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, shortly before his death. Certainly now they are mostly what he is remembered for.
What makes Cheever’s stories so good? He was sometimes described as the “American Chekhov,” and his tales indeed have a Chekhovian plainness, a sense of having been scripted by life. He could conjure up rich, intricate worlds in a few pages—a family holidaying at their summer home (“Goodbye, My Brother”), a marriage in trouble (“The Season of Divorce”). While essentially realistic, his work often contains magical or surrealist touches. In “The Enormous Radio,” a couple buy a radio that starts broadcasting the conversations of neighbours; “The Country Husband” famously ends with the line: “it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” The result is that Cheever’s stories have a two-tone feel; they are at once life-like and mysterious, hum-drum and ineffable. In his hands, suburban America—that bastion of banality—became an enchanted place.
While Cheever’s stories are often miracles of clarity and compression, the same cannot be said about his life. The product of a well-heeled Boston family brought low by the depression, Cheever grew up with rigid ideas about manliness and social propriety. The life he constructed for himself was outwardly that of the stereotypical Wasp. After a spell in the army during the war (he didn’t see any action, and got out as soon as he could), he married above himself and settled in the affluent suburbs. His children were despatched to private schools and were encouraged (in plain defiance of their natures) to be grindingly conventional. Social life consisted of cocktail parties and afternoons at neighbours’ swimming pools. To the casual observer, Cheever may have seemed the perfect New England gentleman.
Yet it was all a bit of a sham, as he himself half-realised. His nature meant that he didn’t really fit in with the bankers and admen he associated with. Nor was he as ruggedly heterosexual as he pretended. Cheever’s denial of his homosexuality (or, at the very least, bisexuality) was the tragedy of his life. And he wasn’t its only victim. His wife and three children bore the brunt of his foul tempers, his incessant cruelty, his prodigious drunkenness. Drinking for Cheever was in one sense simply a social duty; it was what everyone did. But it was also a way of shielding himself from his errant sexuality; he anaesthetised his desires with drink. Over the years, his alcoholism corroded his creativity and in his early sixties it nearly killed him.
Then, rather miraculously, he attended an alcoholism treatment programme and never touched another drop. Not coincidentally, it was after this that he started to embrace his gay side. He became involved with a young writer, Max Zimmer, and at one point moved him into his house under the nose of his wife, Mary. The long afternoon walks they took together didn’t strike her as suspicious. She was more in denial about her husband’s sexuality than he was.
Weighing in at nearly 700 pages, Blake Bailey’s biography is in most respects a magnificent achievement. It takes us through Cheever’s life in formidable detail. We get the lowdown on his drinking, his vile treatment of his family, his obsession with his genitals (as revealed in his journal). There are lively accounts of his annual trips to Yaddo, the writer’s colony, and of his foreign jaunts (which became more regular as his fame, and alienation from Mary, increased). Yet it is also a rather wearing read. In a sense this isn’t Bailey’s fault; the book’s flaws are determined by its subject. Cheever, as was often noticed, was an extraordinarily lonely man who had lots of acquaintances but almost no close friends. Drunk most of the time, he lived in a state of emotional exile, and his life was arid as a result. It acquired more definition once he sobered up, and it is only when Bailey’s narrative gets to this point that it really comes alive.
Bailey accepts a fairly unimaginative psychological interpretation of Cheever’s unhappiness, which traces it to the depredations his family suffered during the depression. But this lets Cheever too easily off the hook, making him purely a victim of his misery rather than an active propagator of it. He could, after all, be strikingly self-aware—as if he knew exactly what he was up to. Berating himself in his journal for his cruel treatment of one of his sons, he wrote of pouring “onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt.” Cheever’s best fiction was often about cruelty, and there is a sense in which he wanted to know whereof he spoke. While it may be too much to say that he made himself—and those around him—miserable for the sake of his writing, it is certainly the case that his writing benefited from his misery. Bailey doesn’t seem quite prepared to acknowledge this. He sheds brilliant light on the failings of the man, but doesn’t connect them with the achievements of the artist.
