Misreading (and Misunderstanding) Cheever

The reviews of the first major biography of this country's greatest short story writer, Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey, have been a bit glum.

The late John Updike, who greatly admired his work, and knew Cheever about as well as Cheever would allow him to, called the book "a heavy, dispiriting read." The Christian Science Monitor calls Cheever's late novel Falconer "perhaps the greatest novel of the late 20th century," but nonetheless says the biography is "not an easy book to read." And in Harper's, a long essay by novelist Jonathan Dee concludes:

Dee argues pretty convincingly that we have misread Cheever's stories, seeing them as being about the suburbs (what Cheever called "Shady Hill") when really they're about his desperate desire to belong to the domestic world of "ordinariness," and his fear that he never would, because of the homosexual desires that shamed him. (Towards the end of his life he overcame this shame and self-loathing — and, perhaps not coincidentally, his alcoholism as well.)

But what the reviewers have unaccountably overlooked is Cheever's irresistible wit and joie de vivre — yes, he damn near drank himself to death, but he clearly had a wildly good time doing it.

It's a bit like saying, yes, this Oscar Wilde fellow can be amusing, but he did go to prison after all. For homosexuality, don't you know.

Who cares? Jesus, save us all.

Further, unlike countless other famous American writers who struggled with alcohol and depression, Cheever overcame both for once and for all, even in the face of terminal cancer.  

And, despite his almost frightening ability to hurt people with his eloquence, including his family, his three children clearly forgave him years and years ago. His wife certainly took her fair share of abuse, but stayed married to him for forty years, and obviously retained both her dignity and love for her husband. The children gave the biographer nothing but support and freedom. In their interviews with Bailey, they  admitted that their father could be hurtful, but also funny, self-deprecating, and sweet.   

If Cheever really was the "shit" everyone now seems to think he was, all that wouldn't be true.

Let me offer a few examples from the superb and hugely underrated biography by Blake Bailey:

As a teacher:

Cheever's students remember him as helpful, modest, and soft-spoken. Sometimes he'd give them assignments ("Write a description of Richard Nixon") but mostly he was content to read his own work and listen to theirs. "Most of the girls are so subtle you can't tell whether the characters are alive or dead and there is a good deal of loneliness and moonshine, etc.,") he wrote a friend, though in the classroom he kept his sarcasm in check. Which is not to say he wasn't critical when warranted. One woman liked to write erotica, and Cheever would listen to her stories with a polite poker-face — evidently finding them distasteful, but willing to be patient. He raised one mild objection, however, when she described a man abruptly withdrawing his penis and thus forgoing climax: "There is no recorded instance in history when a man was able to do this," he said. It was a fairly typical observation. Regardless of what they chose to write — and generally Cheever thought it a good idea for them to write what they knew — he insisted the characters behave in a plausible manner, and the reality of a story be made accessible to reads with vivid, specific detail…[even when a student insisted on magical realism] he simply insisted that, while revising, she "put in a few signposts" — that is, the kind of details that make up a believable world.

As a father, he could be sharp, but went to great lengths to redeem himself. His youngest son, for example, was not popular as a kid, and couldn't get along well with his intellectual mother, "whereas his father, if anything, was accessible to a fault: he sat through dreadful TV shows just show he could chat with the boy during commercial breaks; he even helped with homework. "He wanted passionately to be a good father," Frederico said.

As a bad boy, he is often hilarious. For some reason, he had a lifelong aversion to red neckties. One day in l968, when his drinking was most out of control. his wife brought home a fetching young student from her college.

Cheever dropped his trousers at a party and began chasing [the student]. The girl was a good sport about things, but [Cheever's son] Ben was appalled and tried to intercede. His father paused, pants around his ankles, and regarded his son with considerable asperity. "When did you start wearing a red necktie?" he demanded at last. Rather than remind Cheever of his own sartorial lapse, Ben found himself abashed: "Oh my God," he thought, "What am I doing wearing a red necktie?"

As a famous writer, he was aggressively modest. On the publication of his first novel:

When "The Wapshot Scandal" was completed my first instinct was to commit suicide. I thought I might cure my melancholy if I destroyed the novel and I said as much to my wife. She said that it was, after all, my novel and I could do as I pleased but how could she explain to the children what it was that I had been doing for the last four years. Thus my concern for appearances accounted for the publication of the novel.

As a reader of other writers, he kept his criticisms mostly to himself, and praised lavishly. When he read Philip Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, Cheever liked it so much he wrote the publisher:

This is not for publication because I don't believe in setting a good book afloat on a spate of quotations but I would like to thank you for the immense pleasure I took in the Roth stories. It was my wife who said that she is very grateful to Mr. Roth for having proved to her that somebody lives in Newark. 

As a story-teller, he is virtually without peer in American short story writing. As John Updike said:

From somewhere, perhaps a strain of seayarning in his Yankee blood, he had gotten the authentic archaic storytelling temper, and one could not be with John Cheever for more than five minutes without seeing stories take shape: past embarrassments worked up with wonderful rapidity into hilarious fables.

As a fiction writer, his art is precisely this ability to face the truth, and make it as surprising, as glorious, as funny, and as moving as the passage of life itself.

Cheever is our modern-day literary Rumplestilskin, taking the most ordinary and straw-like of American materials — affluence, boredom, gin, sorrow, and frustrated married people — and transforming these bits of hay into golden myths.

As a thinker, though he never graduated from high school, Cheever grasped a central issue for Americans that most environmentalists have yet to face: Our national denial of death.

Cheever said it best in his hilarious anti-commercial masterpiece The Death of Justina:

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

Given this focus, it's natural to ask — how did Cheever do with family and friends as a dying man? 

Quite well. Though some might object to the fact that his libido didn't flag with age and illness, and he had various disreputable assignations even while undergoing cancer treatments in the hospital, he also maintained his wit, his calm, and his poise, and endeared himself unto the last.

When informed one fall day that his cancer would kill him within six months, for example, he called his kids. His youngest son Frederico made plans to return home as soon as possible. "Some parents will do anything to get their kids to come home for Christmas," he quipped to his daughter Susan.

As a husband, he was difficult but ever hopeful. After one reconciliation (caused in part when Mary secretly took up with another man, and went on to let Cheever back into her bed), he wrote in his journal of his "blissful happiness":

I walked the dogs in a heavy rain. Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, strip off my clothes, dive into the pond, and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.

After his death, his wife was asked again and again about how she felt about his homosexuality: "It didn't make an awful lot of difference to me," she said. "…what's important is what he wrote, not what he did." For some reason — homophobia? — no one believes this, even though she is a well-regarded poet herself, and revered his work.

Towards the end Cheever was extremely generous to her, both monetarily and in print:

The word "dear" is what I use. "How dear you are." It is the sense of moving the best of oneself toward another person. I think this was done most happily within my marriage, although do remember being expelled to sofas in the living room…[still] I do recall the feeling of moving, rather like an avalanche, toward Mary.

[illustration from Harper's by Andrea Ventura]