Cheever: A Life

From the acclaimed author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates comes the unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912-1982), a man who spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. “I was born into no true class,” Cheever mused in his journal, “and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.” Written with unprecedented access to essential sources—including Cheevers massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published—Blake Baileys biography reveals the troubled but strangely lovable man behind the disguises, an artist who delighted in the everyday radiance of the world while yearning, above all, “to be illustrious.”

Cheevers was a soul in conflict: he was a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage while deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, family circle; a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen; a pioneer of suburban realist fiction who continually pushed the boundaries of realism; a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer; a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia in a revolving door of self-loathing and hedonism. We see a man who concealed his anxieties behind the mask of a genial Westchester squire—a paterfamilias in Brooks Brothers clothes whose world was peopled by legendary writers and beautiful women (Malcolm Cowley, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, Hope Lange, and John Updike, among them); whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek; a man whose demons and desperation were never quite vanquished by the joy he found in his work.

Blake Bailey has written a luminous biography, a revelation of a writer of timeless fiction and of the man behind the page.

"Rebellious Yankee son of a father who fell victim to the Depression and a doo-gooder-turned-businesswoman mother, father to three competitive children he rode mercilessly but adored, chronicler par excellence of the 1950s American suburban scene while deploring all forms of conformity: John Cheever (1912 — 1982) was a mass of contradictions. In this overlong but always entertaining biography, composed with a novelist's eye, Bailey, biographer of Richard Yates and editor of two volumes of Cheever's work for Library of America (also due in March), was given access to unpublished portions of Cheever's famous journals and to family members and friends. Bailey's book is fine in descriptions of Cheever's reactions to other writers, such as his adored Bellow and detested Salinger. Bailey is also sensitive in describing the prickly dynamic of Cheever's domestic life, lived through a haze of alcoholism and under the shadow of extramarital heterosexual and homosexual relationships. This 'Ovid in Ossining,' who published 121 stories in the New Yorker as well as several bestselling novels, has probably yet to find a definitive position in American letters among academicians. This thoroughly researched and heartfelt biography may help redress that situation. 24 pages of photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Two decades ago, reviewing Scott Donaldson's "John Cheever: A Biography" for The Washington Post, I commented favorably on the author's "careful and honorable job" but complained that, at 416 pages of text and apparatus, the book told us far more than we needed to know about Cheever's life. What, then, is to be said of Blake Bailey's "Cheever"? It weighs in at a stupefying 679 pages of text plus 89... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) pages of acknowledgments, notes and index, 770 pages in all, making for a vast inert pudding of a book that leaves the reader with a severe case of indigestion.

Who knows what Cheever would have thought of this? On the one hand, he was a vain man for whom even the most lavish praise was insufficient, so perhaps it would have pleased him that he rates so bloated a text. On the other hand, the best of his own writing was done in short stories, and the best of those are notable for their economy and precision. Surely he would be astonished to see himself inflated into yet another biographical Gargantua, not to mention in a book that feeds rapaciously on his most unattractive if not repellent aspects: his obsessive, divided sexuality, his spectacular alcoholism, his failures as husband and father.

Cheever was a wonderful writer — the Library of America has just given him his due with two volumes — but not, it seems, a very nice man. He was born in 1912 in the Boston suburb of Quincy to shabby genteel parents who left him with a sense of WASP entitlement. His mother ran a "cluttered gift shop" that seems to have interested her more than her two sons did. The household was, in Bailey's words, "crushingly miserable," from which John emerged pitiably vulnerable, deeply sentimental, wholly self-absorbed and astonishingly arrogant. He showed talent for writing at an early age and determined to make it his life's work, though only in his later years (he died in 1982) was he able to make more than a marginal living from it.

The themes of his fiction were, as he once wrote in his journal, "Valor, Love, Virtue, Compassion, Splendor, Kindness, Wisdom, Beauty, Vigor!" Bailey says, correctly, that "really it was the heart alone that interested Cheever." In the best of his short stories he explored these themes and subjects with sensitivity and understanding. He wrote about American middle- and upper-middle-class domestic life as tellingly as anyone ever has, and "The Stories of John Cheever" (1978), though it includes some weak work from his later years, is one of American literature's essential volumes. His great subject was the suburbs, where he found restlessness, uncertainty and discontent beneath the veneer of cocktails, country clubs and bright green lawns.

Bailey knows Cheever's fiction thoroughly and writes about it well, but readers are less likely to be drawn to this book for what it tells us about Cheever the writer than for its all-too-intimate disclosures about Cheever the man. Bailey's intention seems to be to show how art transcends and improves upon life, but the result is a biography that constantly teeters at the edge of sensation and voyeurism.

That the book received what appears to have been the enthusiastic cooperation of Cheever's family is inexplicable given its tone and disclosures. This leaves readers wondering whether the family actually wanted the faults of Cheever pere exposed to the full glare of daylight. There was plenty of that in Donaldson's biography, but in Bailey's it overwhelms everything else, the writing included. This is the chronicle of a man who was obsessed with sex and who drank "murderously," and it positively drips with detail about both.

On the first subject, it appears that although Cheever was aware of his bisexuality as a very young man, through most of his adult life he maintained a heterosexual front. As he grew older and as society's attitudes about sex began to relax, his homosexual side became more overt; the composer Ned Rorem, with whom he had occasional encounters, said that Cheever "was obsessed with homosexuality, as though hoarding lost time." Probably, the truth was that he was so needy, physically and emotionally, that he would settle for whatever warmth he could get.

He was a spectacularly heavy drinker. By the late 1940s, at least one acquaintance had him pegged as an alcoholic, by the 1960s he was frequently drunk most of the day. In the mid-1970s he finally got off the sauce; he "suddenly looked and felt twenty years younger." The damage had been done, however; he continued to write but with sorry results by comparison with his best work from the 1940s and 1950s.

No doubt it is important to an understanding of Cheever the man that he was sexually promiscuous and a fall-down drunk, and perhaps it tells us a bit about Cheever the writer as well, but it is one thing for the biographer to reach an understanding of these matters and quite another simply to record, over and over and over again, their quotidian details. Cheever interests us not because of who he was but because of what he wrote. Obviously, it is no coincidence that his writing declined as his drinking intensified, and thus the question of alcoholism must be dealt with. Since homosexuality figures in his novel "Falconer" (1977), a discussion of Cheever's own sexuality is also in order. But Bailey, having been granted full access to everything by Cheever's family and having interviewed zillions of people, cannot let go of his research and puts every detail, however trivial or squalid, into his narrative.

Readers who savor literary gossip may think that all this stuff makes "Cheever: A Life" a juicy romp, but caveat lector: It doesn't. It's as messy as the life it describes.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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From the acclaimed author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates comes the unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912–1982), a man who spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. “I was born into no true class,” Cheever mused in his journal, “and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.” Written with unprecedented access to essential sourcesincluding Cheevers massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been publishedBlake Baileys biography reveals the troubled but strangely lovable man behind the disguises, an artist who delighted in the everyday radiance of the world while yearning, above all, “to be illustrious.”

Cheevers was a soul in conflict: he was a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage while deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, family circle; a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen; a pioneer of suburban realist fiction who continually pushed the boundaries of realism; a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer; a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia in a revolving door of self-loathing and hedonism. We see a man who concealed his anxieties behind the mask of a genial Westchester squirea paterfamilias in Brooks Brothers clothes whose world was peopled by legendary writers and beautiful women (Malcolm Cowley, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, Hope Lange, and John Updike, among them); whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek; a man whose demons and desperation were never quite vanquished by the joy he found in his work.

Blake Bailey has written a luminous biography, a revelation of a writer of timeless fiction and of the man behind the page.

Blake Bailey is the editor of a two-volume edition of Cheever's work, forthcoming from the Library of America. His last book, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and his articles and reviews have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.