In 1958 John Cheever, in his formidably detailed journal, turned his skeptical eyes to Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans:
My life is very different from what he describes. There is almost no point where our emotions and affairs correspond. I am most deeply and continuously involved in the love of my wife and children. It is my passion to present to my children the opportunity of life. That this love, this passion, has not reformed my nature is well known. But there is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living, and one is not exempted by being a poet.
That Cheever’s life was very different from Kerouac’s is well known. There are some similarities, worth noting for the light they shed on what makes Cheever singular. Both were born into drab if not entirely humble surroundings: Cheever in Quincy and Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts. Both showed early promise, were sexually conflicted (Cheever to a much greater degree), and came to see the bottle as muse and armor, anesthetic and slipknot. Both relied on autobiography, albeit in very different ways. Cheever climbed grudgingly onto the wagon and died surrounded by a family that, although it struggled with pain and resentment, could only be described as constant. Kerouac, a grown man living with his aged mother, succumbed to a blown-out liver.
Pondering the vastly different work they produced, one thinks of the titular character of Cheever’s 1960 story “Clementina,” who “wondered why the good God had opened up so many choices and made life so strange and diverse.” There is in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums a sneering appeal to
take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show.
This is Main Street in Cheever Country, but Cheever saw it as an object not of scorn or disappointment but of love and fascination, a place to be understood and protected.
Cheever’s terrain—Manhattan, Connecticut, Westchester, and New England—is frequently and rather tediously compared to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. (We could complicate things and include Italy in that list.) Cheever is called the “Chekhov of the suburbs,” as though the suburbs are so forgettable that we should be amazed they ever found their chronicler. People live in the suburbs, too, and wherever two or more are gathered under Cheever’s byline, one finds the whole panoply of human feelings and failures. The surprising thing is how nearly unique he was in giving this landscape the attention it deserves.
The 1950s and 1960s are clearly enjoying a resurgence in the popular imagination. Blake Bailey’s massive biography arrives in tandem with a two-volume edition of Cheever’s novels (five in all) and stories, edited by Bailey, from the Library of America. It is a time when America is still gripped by the popularity of television’s “Mad Men,” and Sam Mendes’s adaptation of Revolutionary Road. An Everyman’s Library omnibus of the works of Richard Yates, of whom Bailey has also written a biography, A Tragic Honesty (2003), has been published.
Why this sudden interest in a time that used to be a byword for convention and conformity? Is it, as Mark Greif wrote of “Mad Men” in the London Review of Books, the seductive appeal of “Now We Know Better”? “We watch,” Greif wrote, “and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking.” All these are found in Cheever’s work, but it belongs nevertheless to a different genre: We Will Never Know Better. The particulars and the geography are mostly incidental. What one carries away is Cheever’s penetrating appreciation of the individual’s fight against his own nature and desires—the lonely struggle, conducted in one’s head—that persists no matter how scenery and mores are altered.
Not that Cheever had much of a problem with the scenery or the mores. One of the most telling stories about him, recounted by Bailey, concerns his working habits in 1945, living with his wife, Mary Winternitz, in an apartment on East Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan:
Cheever even had an office of sorts. Almost every morning for the next five years, he’d put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he’d doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch.
Sometimes he “resented having to keep up with his dapper fellow tenants,” Bailey notes, “but they reminded him, too, that a writer was just as entitled to middle-class comforts as a lawyer or stockbroker.” Here is that “wonderful seriousness” of providing for a family that he mentioned in his journal years later. Being a writer was not, as it had been in his younger days, an excuse to live in squalor. (In 1934, Walker Evans photographed his Greenwich Village room—in Bailey’s words, “a quintessential Depression tableau.”) He had little time for the usual romantic or bohemian notions about his vocation.
What complicated this life for him was his insatiable and omnivorous sexual appetite. Cheever had homosexual encounters from childhood to very old age, and plenty of heterosexual dalliances; not even alcoholism or profound illness could dampen his ardor. There is no exaggerating the importance he placed on this condition, both in his life and in his art. The words “lewd” and “lewdness,” in reference to his erotic charge, appear with almost irritating frequency in his journals and writings. He seems to have regarded his desire as both a blessing and a curse, sacred and alarming—or revolting—in equal measure. But it is important to stress that he was not “faking” his marriage or family life. He was an abysmal husband and father, but he grasped the value of marriage and its responsibilities.
Cheever was born in 1912 to a family that was both average and, as filtered through his heightened sensitivities, deeply strange, even embarrassing. His father, Frederick, was a traveling shoe salesman. His mother, Mary, occupied herself with social-service work; Cheever would satirize her charitable impulses in stories like “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” (1949). His brother, Frederick, Jr., had been born in 1905, and by the time John arrived, the parents’ marriage was failing. Resentments rooted in his earliest years haunted Cheever’s writing forever. His most disturbing memories were of being told that he’d been conceived by accident and that his parents had dined with his prospective abortionist. (These were not so disturbing that he showed any reluctance to use them.)
His father nearly went broke in 1927 and his mother opened a gift shop to support the family, including her increasingly alcoholic husband. This humiliated John, who made it a centerpiece of his novel The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), in which it is relocated to an unseaworthy boat, the Topaze: “New England’s Only Floating Gift Shoppe.” Even armed with Bailey’s exhaustive biography, it is difficult to understand what so rankled Cheever about this minor indignity. Aesthetic horror? His father’s wounded pride? It is in any case a potent early example of the trouble Cheever would have squaring his reality with the way he wished to be seen.
Cheever was an unsuccessful student but a brilliant boy, who read everything and published his first story, “Expelled,” in The New Republic, at age eighteen. Comprising impressions of his time at Thayer Academy, the story reveals a precocity rarely encountered today. In a portrait of one of his teachers, he wrote:
When she asked me for tea I sat in a walnut armchair with grapes carved on the head and traced and retraced the arms on the tea caddy. One time I read her one of my plays. She thought it was wonderful. She thought it was wonderful because she did not understand it and because it took two hours to read.
The story prickles with restrained frustration. It’s Holden Caulfield, were he capable of maturing into a forgiving and broad-minded adult.
That teacher, we must remind ourselves, was a real person, one who had done quite a bit to mentor young John, and there was vocal outrage at her fictional mistreatment (“She was slightly bald and pulled her pressed hair down across her forehead . . .”). But learning that his gift could be an instrument of torture, so to speak, did nothing to deter him in the future—thank God. He found his fictional wealth all about him, and he used people, places, and incidents indiscriminately, as though they would be lost to history if not preserved in the amber (or, in fairness to the times, aspic) of his stories. His parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, lovers, and wife—no one was safe. His beloved brother Frederick only escaped by being too far gone in alcoholism to recognize himself.
One may well ask: What writer doesn’t beg, borrow, and steal from life? For Cheever it was a compulsion or ritual. His journals are so thorough that one wonders where he found the time to do the things described therein; in published form they cover 1952 to 1982 and represent only a fraction of his Pepysian labors, which are estimated at around four million words. Reading them and Bailey’s biography side-by-side with his work invites a disorienting déjà vu: Haven’t I already read about that hit-and-run accident in Italy? Where have I seen that phrase “patent-leather hair”? When Neddy Merrill in “The Swimmer” (1964) slides down the banister and gives “the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack”—isn’t that Cheever himself whooping it up at Yaddo? In how many different stories or novels now has Cheever revisited the—let’s be honest, not exactly unique or earth-shattering—facts of his tipsy conception at a sales banquet?
Bailey has done an outstanding job of chronicling Cheever’s life—both in his prose and in his almost maniacal attention to detail. (“X-rays revealed that the cancer had now metastasized to his left ilium and femur, right ninth rib, and bladder.”) But it must be said that the work is best enjoyed, at least the first time around, without the seeming skeleton key Bailey has provided. One could come away from this biography feeling tempted or obligated to treat Cheever’s oeuvre as a sort of vast, therapeutic or demon-exorcising roman à clef. To give Bailey his due, his book is a serious piece of research, reconstruction, and criticism, and a (grim) pleasure to read. But it is best left to scholars and other obsessive devotees. It gets in the way of the words.
Among the few complaints one might level against Cheever’s work, the most serious is that, though quite a lot of it stands the test of time, it doesn’t stand being read all at once. “A page of good prose remains invincible,” Cheever famously said, and though his finest stories, taken separately, do remain invincible, reading them in this comprehensive edition can be deadening. Alcoholism, adultery, poverty, boredom, alienation, anomie, humiliation, and failure are all there, in copious amounts. Cheever is capable of great humor, but it is very rarely cheerful. In “O City of Broken Dreams” (1948), a first-time playwright and his wife, Alice, leave the Midwest to make it in New York. At a party full of movie stars, Alice is facetiously asked to sing with the piano player. Alas, “Alice’s mother had taught her to sing whenever her host asked, and Alice had never violated any of her mother’s teachings”:
Years ago, when Mrs. Bachman had taught Alice the song, she had taught her to close it with a piece of business that brought her success as a child, as a girl, as a high school senior, but that, even in the stuffy living room in Wentworth, with its inexorable smells of poverty and cooking, had begun to tire and worry her family. She had been taught on the closing line, “Lay me doun and dee,” to fall in a heap on the floor. She fell less precipitously now that she had got older, but she still fell, and Evarts could see that night, by her serene face, that a fall was in her plans.
Cheever was both a pioneer and a master of this kind of cringe-making, tragicomic scenario. Though his authorial gaze means to be benevolent, sympathetic, and even mournful, it sometimes surrenders to a darker impulse to say: “I’ve suffered enough in my own life. Your turn.” Often the humor and pathos rely on the fact that what is amusing or distressing to the reader—say, an aging former track star’s habit of hurdling furniture while drunk (“O Youth and Beauty!” [1953])—is perfectly ordinary to the characters. This is an invitation not to be smug but to wonder how one’s own habits of behavior and mind would look to a detached observer. We don’t need to find the seedy underbelly. Despite our most valiant efforts, our most cherished self-delusions, we are the seedy underbelly.
“The Enormous Radio” (1947) captures this fact most vividly—not coincidentally, it is one of Cheever’s most famous stories. It was first published, like so much of his work, in The New Yorker, but it couldn’t be more different from what readers and critics, some of them derisively, called a New Yorker story. Despite being set in a Manhattan apartment building, it was a serious departure for Cheever. It has often been called Kafkaesque, but its conceit is more reminiscent of The Outer Limits, right down to the mysterious radio’s first appearance:
The dials flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance only for an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy.
The “violent forces” in the radio turn out to be the sounds of the neighbors, their fights and secret shames; the protagonist, Irene Westcott, becomes addicted to this infernal “music.” At last her husband intervenes angrily—in a scene that reveals many of the couple’s own problems—and we are left with Irene’s plaintive cry, again mixing black humor with real pathos: “Please. They’ll hear us.” It couldn’t have ended any other way, and yet it retains the full force of surprise. The gimmickry of the concept is nowhere to be found in the execution.
“The Enormous Radio,” though perfect in its own way, does not match the emotional potency of Cheever’s best stories. “Goodbye, My Brother” (1951) is, among the stories, his greatest achievement, and Lawrence, the black sheep and black cloud of the Pommeroy family, is Cheever’s most palpable and compelling character. He seems to be Cheever, the miserable fatalist shrinking from the light that Cheever sought, with varying success, all his life:
The sea, at our other side, was the open sea. We always tell guests that there, to the east, lies the coast of Portugal, and for Lawrence it would be an easy step from the coast of Portugal to the tyranny in Spain. The waves broke with a noise like a “hurrah, hurrah, hurrah,” but to Lawrence they would say “Vale, vale.” I suppose it would have occurred to his baleful and incisive mind that the coast was terminal moraine, the edge of the prehistoric world, and it must have occurred to him that we walked along the edge of the known world in spirit as much as in fact.
This passage alone is a feast. There is the grim humor, the organic and beautiful echo of Catullus’s fraternal farewell (“ave atque vale”), the commingling of rhetorical grandiosity and cold, hard, geologic fact. There is, needless to say, the prose. But above all, there is the slyness of putting the whole of Lawrence’s pessimism in the mind of his brother, the narrator, reminding us that he is just as capable as Lawrence of this bleak outlook. This is worth every mediocre story Cheever ever wrote to turn a buck.
There are far too many excellent stories to give each the attention it deserves. “The Swimmer” is well-known, from a 1968 movie starring Burt Lancaster. A handful of others must be mentioned for the unusual effects they achieve. “The Five Forty-Eight” (1954), in which a man is tailed by his deranged former secretary, with whom he had a one-night stand, has the pacing and suspense of hard-boiled crime fiction, but is a deeply discomfiting piece of psychological portraiture. “Torch Song” (1947) and “The Music Teacher” (1959) are two of the most sophisticated horror stories ever written. And the surreal comedy of “The Death of Justina” (1960), published in Esquire, out-Barthelmes the writer who came to replace Cheever, stylistically, as the darling of The New Yorker.
Cheever began his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, in 1940, calling it The Holly Tree, and took nearly two decades to finish it. It depicted a seaside New England hamlet, partly as he remembered such places and partly as he wished them to be. “The impulse to construct such a village as St. Botolphs,” he once confessed, “occurred to me late one night in a third-string hotel on the Hollywood Strip where the world from my window seemed so dangerously barbarous and nomadic that the attractions of a provincial and a traditional way of life were irresistible.”
It was not only the world but the past that Cheever hoped to reorder in this work. The chaos and disappointment of his youth become, in the Chronicle, quaint eccentricity and cheerful Bildungsroman adventure. The Wapshot (that’s “warpshart”) family consists of the slightly cracked seaman patriarch Leander; his wife, Sarah; a bizarre and imperious elderly cousin, Honora; an older son, Moses; and Coverly, who is Cheever himself. We see much of St. Botolphs, then follow the two young men as they make their ways in the great Northeastern cities. Interspersed in the narrative are the journal entries of Leander, a man summed up nicely enough by Bailey as “a larger-than-life character given to shouting ‘Tie me to the mast, Perimedes!’ whenever he hears the merry-go-round at Nangasakit.” The book ends with Leander’s drowning, and the page of deathless advice he leaves to his sons:
Never put whisky into hot water bottle crossing borders of dry states or countries. Rubber will spoil taste. Never make love with pants on . . . . Never sleep in moonlight. Known by scientists to induce madness. Should bed stand beside window on clear night draw shades before retiring . . . . Eat fresh fish for breakfast once a week. Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely gray hair. Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord.
Some critics thought the book disjointed and plotless, and indeed the form it takes was—is—unusual. But others saw no cause for complaint. The Washington Post called it “exuberantly, cantankerously, absurdly, audaciously alive,” and between hardcover and one paperback edition, it sold nearly 200,000 copies. His idealized family, luminous and fascinating, gave Cheever the pleasure of escape. As Bailey writes:
Abandoning naturalism—in this case a literal and all-too-painful evocation of the past—was akin to walking out the “door” that had stood open for Cheever all those years he spent trying to dig his way out of jail “with a teaspoon,” as he’d once put it.
Cheever returned to his imaginary family in a sequel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964), which pits the small-town warmth and love of the Wapshots against the corrupting and terrorizing forces of the larger world. Coverly is now a computer programmer at a missile installation; Moses’s wife, Melissa, is brutally cuckolding him with a grocery delivery boy. The humor and humanity remain, but the mood is apocalyptic, and loneliness and fear permeate the lives of the characters. It is a painful book, but not nearly as painful as the two that were to follow. (Cheever’s final novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, was published in 1982, the year of his death. It is a slight, forgettable work, included only for the sake of completeness.)
It might suffice to say of books as strange as Bullet Park (1969) and Falconer (1977) that they should be read and taught. Apart from being dark and violent, and tremendous pleasures to read, they reveal the two hemispheres of Cheever’s imagination. Bullet Park takes us to the suburbs, but they are suburbs that represent comfort, purity, and familial love, and must be fought for against malevolent encroachments. That the novel ends as preposterously as any action movie is, like The Wapshot Chronicle’s “disjointedness,” a problem the reader may not even notice. Cheever considered Bullet Park a simple tale of a father’s love for his son. It is much more: a brick-and-mortar manifestation of the world Cheever valued and the intensity of his faith in it.
Falconer describes a very different brick-and-mortar world: a penitentiary, modeled on Sing Sing, where Cheever taught creative writing classes for a time. This is an apology—in the mea culpa and the doctrinal sense—for the sordid or “lewd” side of Cheever’s nature, ever threatening to undo him. The protagonist, Ezekial Farragut, is a heroin addict and fratricide who finds his only spiritual escape in a homosexual romance. He emerges from a crucible of addiction, brutality, and humiliation a truly saved man. Despite Cheever’s familiarity with Sing Sing, Falconer is undeniably the work of an imagination firing on all cylinders. There is, it seems, no better metaphor for Cheever’s battles than a prison, and Falconer is a harrowing and triumphant escape.
Cheever’s novels, like his journals, belong to his lewdness and his pain, and it is easy to see why they have never been as popular as his stories. They are blunter instruments than the polished scalpels of his short fiction; they can be sloppy, challenging, even inscrutable, but they hit the reader with great force. In his stories, Cheever tried to make sense of the world and of other people; in his novels, he mostly tried to make sense of himself. Naturally, the world was more interested in reading about itself, but it would do well to revisit John Cheever’s patient, determined attempt to understand and make peace with John Cheever.