Cheever: A Life [Paperback]

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 - incorrectly had 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's 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 suppressed fear of proving unworthy of social status in combination with a profound sense of inadequacy, his obsession with water, his 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 carnage Cheever left in his wake - more than a couple of wrecked lives of those he exploited - he manages to stand, at essential moments, in wonder."

After reading Cheever's journals, John Updike observed, "Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder." Years later, in his review of this book, Updike described it as "a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal" but acknowledged that "all this biographer's zeal makes a heavy, dispiriting read, to the point that even I, a reader often enraptured by Cheever's prose and an acquaintance who generally enjoyed his lively company, wanted the narrative...to hurry through the menacing miasma of a life which, for all the sparkle of its creative moments, brought so little happiness to its possessor and to those around him." That is precisely how I felt on numerous occasions while reading the book but to be fair, Bailey felt obliged to take full advantage of the resources available to him and he probably produced what will remain for quite some time, the definitive biography of John Cheever. I also wish to commend him on his sensitive and perceptive analysis of Cheever's works, especially the short stories. (I do not share others' high regard for the literary value of the novels, including Falconer.) In one of the short stories I recently re-read, I came upon this passage, one that provides an appropriate conclusion to this review:

"He looked at us all bleakly. The wind and the sea had risen, and I thought that if he heard the waves, he must hear them only as a dark answer to all his dark questions; that he would think that the tide had expunged the embers of our picnic fires. The company of a lie is unbearable, and he seemed like the embodiment of a lie." (from "Goodbye, My Brother" in The Stories of John Cheever, 1978)

John Cheever, according to one of his lovers, was "...a basically decent person, with something in him that kept him from being completely decent." In other words, a complicated character and surely not an easy person to capture in a biography. But Blake Bailey has achieved something wonderful here: a sensitive and balanced portrayal of an enormously complex man, that is always completely readable. This book doesn't shy away from the less pleasant aspects of Cheever's personality, nor the less successful parts of his writing. It's a really great book and I recommend it.