Cheever, A Life
Blake Baily
Knopf
ISBN-13: 978-1400043941
Hardcover, 784 pages
$35.00
Review by William Burleson
Was John Cheever the internalized homophobia
poster child?
After 679 pages of every excruciating detail of this man’s life it would be hard
to conclude otherwise. He tortured himself for his attraction to men from an
early age to, really, his grave. While he did eventually find some modicum of
peace late in life, it was more of a ceasefire rather than a true embrace of his
bisexual self.
Few people’s lives and troubles have been as publicly aired as John Cheever’s.
Since his death in 1982 at age 70, examinations include the book
Home Before Dark by his daughter
Susan, the publication of his personal journals in 1991, a 1988 biography and
even a posthumous cameo appearance on Seinfeld in 1992 in the form of love
letters to Susan’s (George’s fiancé) father.
What more could there be to tell about this man? Apparently a lot. Author Blake
Bailey’s smartly-written, extensive work
Cheever, a Life may be the definitive volume about the great author
having enjoyed both the perspective of time not granted to the earlier works and
extensive access to Cheever’s family and personal records. The result is a
nuanced narrative of a complex character.
John Cheever was in many ways was a sad paradox. He was by nature a shy man, yet
lived a life in the public eye. He presented himself with aristocratic airs yet,
rather than dining on the upper-east side, Cheever spent most of his life flat
broke. Those self-important airs, incidentally, would show up—consciously or
unconsciously—as needed: in the book one man remembers how the more nervous
Cheever became, the “more hauteur he affected and the more gargly and Katherine
Hepburn-y he became.” He was once compared in his affect (and, one can guess,
his looks) to Thurston Howell III.
Cheever was born and raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, and after a promising
start found himself part of a deeply dysfunctional family with a drunken, failed
shoe salesman of a father and a struggling gift store owning mother. He married
Mary Winternitz March 22, 1941, to whom, beyond all reason, he remained married
until his death. His many affairs with women (which he would often brag about to
Mary) and his affairs with men (which mostly came later) were well known. Mary
Cheever said in 1969 that “He may be unfaithful, he may be drunk, but he always
came home for dinner.”
And drunk he often was. In fact, having come from home with an alcoholic father,
Cheever managed to replace his dysfunctional family of origin with an even more
dysfunctional one of his own. Eventually Cheever’s drinking would nearly kill
him before his brother Fred dragged him to a treatment center in1975, after
which he would never drink again. It’s actually quite amazing: at one point
hospitalized and nearly dead, he would sober up and two years later publish
Falconer.
However, when it came to creating a rocky home life, much more than his
philandering and perhaps even more than his drinking (if that is possible) was
the reality that he simply was not a very nice man. He was often insulting,
belittling, and humiliating to Mary and their daughter Susan and sons Benjamin
and Federico, and he would use his rapier whit to eviscerate them and anyone he
chose as he saw fit. The last years of his life, he and Mary lived together like
strangers.
That all said, this book is not a daytime soap or a TMZ report. The beauty of
this book is Bailey’s discussion of Cheever’s life’s work. Bailey deftly gives
us an understanding of the writing: the roots and impact of the stories and
Cheever’s writing process. Bailey clearly loves Cheever’s work, but is also not
afraid to lay it out there. For example, “…finally he managed to write his first
story in four years, “The Night Mummy Got the Wrong Mink Coat,” quite possibly
the worst thing he ever published.”
Bailey suggests Cheever was arguably the finest practitioner of the genre of
short story of his time. He was something of a wunderkind, at age 18 first
appearing in the New Republic with “Expelled from Prep School.” “It’s an
astonishing debut at age eighteen,” Bailey reports. “Cheever has evolved a voice
that alternated seamlessly between droll, oddly precise details…and flights of
somber realism.” Cheever would go on to write hundreds of short stories, perhaps
most famously chronicling the nascent suburban experience in
The New Yorker. In 1964 Joan
Didion observed in National Review
that “I can think of no other writer today who tells us so much about the way we
live now.”
In 1979 The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize.
Cheever struggled to complete his first novel, finally finishing
The Wapshot Chronicle
in 1957 followed by
The Wapshot
Scandal in 1964, both based heavily on his family of origin.
Bullet Park came out in 1969,
and in 1977 Falconer debuted
to widespread praise.
Oh, What a Paradise it Seems, his last novel,
was published shortly before his death.
Cheever may have been a lot of things, not the least was the internalized
homophobia poster child, but he was also a complex man and a great writer. It is
rewarding to read this smartly written book and really see not only his dark
side but also his drive and his sacrifice. It’s in the writing—both Bailey’s and
Cheever’s—where Cheever, a Life
really succeeds.
William Burleson is the author of Bi America, Myths, Truths, and Struggles of an Invisible Community from Routledge Press. www.williamburleson.org
William Burleson is the author of Bi America, Myths, Truths, and Struggles of an Invisible Community from Haworth Press. www.bi101.org