Cheever: A Life

Warning: Direct and frequent association with John Cheever could be hazardous to your mental health. Over the years, I have read all of John Cheever's 121 short stories and five novels and re-read most of the stories. Until reading Blake Bailey's biography of him (1912 -1982), however, I knew almost nothing about his personal life but - based on what his work suggests - had incorrectly assumed that he was born into an "old money" family, was a graduate of a prestigious New England boarding school (perhaps Groton or one of the Phillips academies) and then an Ivy League college, and was loved and respected by those who knew him best. In fact, as Bailey learned, especially from Cheever himself after reading his personal journals (4,300 pages), he was a profoundly unhappy person throughout his life, consumed by self-loathing and alienated from his family members and associates until a year or so before he died. At one point, he left his wife and family and rented an apartment near Boston University where he was expected to teach. In fact, his only objective was to drink himself to death and he almost succeeded. After finally making my way through Bailey's 679-page biography and 42 pages of "Notes", I re-read several of Cheever's short stories with even greater admiration and understanding than I had before. I also sensed that so much more of the Cheever portrayed by Bailey is reflected in those stories than I had previously realized. For example, his preoccupation with maintaining appearances and his suppressed fear of proving unworthy of social status in combination with a profound sense of inadequacy, his obsession with water, his reluctance and/or inability to express affection for family members, his ambiguous sexuality, and in response to the course of his life and career, his suppressed rage and frustration, and from childhood until late in life, his dependence on alcohol. These help to explain the patterns of Cheever's life. As Deirdre Donahue suggests in her own review, "Perhaps that's the best aspect of [the book]. Bailey unravels an endless spool of bad behavior. And yet he and thus the reader remain sympathetic to Cheever, in part because of Cheever's own sense of self-loathing seemed to trump the justified fury he generated in family and friends. He struggled endlessly - against himself, his sexuality, his despair, and his addiction to alcohol. The battle with booze was one he eventually won." With regard to Cheever's marriage, as Geoffrey Wolff suggests in his review, "The warfare between Cheever and wife, Mary, was Homeric in its magnificent and unremitting cruelty. Susan [their daughter] has described the dinner table as a `shark tank,' her mother muttering to herself or keeping her lips resolutely zipped, her father mumbling incoherent imprecations." Obviously, the Cheevers' marital relationship reflected the nature and extent of his intoxication and consequent behavior. Wolff adds, "Even as Bailey can't help deploring the carnag

After reading Blake Bailey's wonderfully comprehensive biography of John Cheever, one still might ask, "who was Cheever?" It's a fair question and author Bailey does a terrific job trying to uncover the layers of this complicated writer, best known for "Falconer". As is suggested, John Cheever never let anyone in all the way and hence will remain as mysterious as he was gifted. Beset by inner demons....his nearly lifelong battle with alcoholism and his fear of being cast as a "gay author" (let alone known as a gay man)...Cheever, nonetheless, managed to keep up more than a whit of respect in his adopted home town of Ossining, New York. He drove his family to the brink as he drove himself there, too, and it is remarkable that the Cheever family held together at all. There is a curious "hearkening back to another time" quality about Bailey's book which might cause some comparison of a generation or two ago with today's society. First, his wife Mary stayed with him to the end, though their relationship had lost its commonality years before. Would she have stayed with him today? Second, was it simply Cheever's New England background and his being a product of his times that kept him in the closet? (whereas today he might have been that much more comfortable in the open) Mostly, it is Bailey's ability to look at John Cheever through a continuing prism of his subject's insecurities that makes this book shine. Cheever, the man, wrote fiction and lived fiction. "Cheever", the book, reflects this with an introspective and highly enjoyable narrative. I fully recommend it.

As biographies go, this is a page-turner. Even though one knows the broad outline of the story (downwardly mobile youth, short story writer for the New Yorker, alcoholic, bisexual, years as an out-of-print failure, eventual sobriety, author of late-in-life best seller, redemption shortly followed by death, and being outed in a daughter's memoir), the more detailed story is riveting in a painful, compelling way. It always hurts to see people you love miserable and self-destructive, but that is just the picture that Bailey gives us. With total access to all of Cheever's journals, published and unpublished, and with the cooperation of Cheever's wife and three grown children, he takes us farther than we sometimes would wish into the head of this tortured lion. But what makes this book a two-fer is the quality of the literary criticism. Even books you think you know well, like The Wapshot Chronicle, benefit from the analytical light that Bailey shines on them. Cheever was a genius, and he lived a tragic life that was both sad and monumental. He couldn't have asked for a better, more unflinching biographer than he now has.

Bailey writes a rich and full portrait of a man divided against himself. He combines sympathy for Cheever's inner torments with a clear-eyed depiction of his many failings. His critical examination of Cheever's work is insightful and refreshingly free of critical jargon--he made me go back and reread several stories with a new perspective. Although there is much sadness in Cheever's story--it's never easy to read about a talented person's self destruction, much less his ill treatment of his family--Bailey also celebrates Cheever's artistic triumphs, his biting wit, and his moments of joy.