Book review: Cheever: A Life

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:44

Cheever: A Life By Blake Bailey Picador, 784pp, £25

FOLLOWING John Cheever's death from cancer in 1982, his reputation as a writer and human, despite his alcoholism – indeed abetted by his recovery from it – was at its zenith. But many more of Cheever's words were yet to be published. His letters appeared in 1988, and in 1990 and 1991 excerpts from his journals were serialised in the New Yorker – the magazine for which, after 1935, he had written 121 stories.

For a writer celebrated for his control of his characters' inner lives, for a husband and father notoriously prickly about his expression of the suburban proprieties – the crewneck Shetland sweater and khakis, the plummy accent, the adoring Labrador at his feet, the woodpile neatly stacked and grass hand-scythed – here was scandal in full spate, sludge flooding over his family and friends.

Even Susan Cheever – who in Home Before Dark (1984) had detailed her father's alcoholism, sexual ambivalence and emotional cruelty – could not have imagined the character Cheever had been at pains to record in his journals.

With self-flaying candour Cheever had recorded day after day, beginning in 1939, a sorry story of incest with his beloved brother, Fred; of pain and bitterness and contempt for his wife; and of relentless sexual predation. In his Journals Cheever slandered his friends, despised his mother and father, mocked his editors and despised himself, even as he managed, with heroic effort, to encourage the art he continued to fashion.

And here comes Blake Bailey's stunningly detailed biography, exploring step by stumbling step the crooked path that Cheever followed, disclosing the addicted urges and bawling self-pity to which he submitted himself and those within his household.

The Cheever family's roots in Massachussets were deep but hardly distinguished. By the time he was born in 1912, the "accursed" Cheever history was already one of financial ruin, fecklessness, alcoholism, solitude, madness and suicide. John's father, a travelling shoe salesman, liked to remind his sons to remember, "at all times, that I was a Cheevah". Literary grandiosity was a family indulgence: Cheevah's "despised" Uncle Hamlet was named in deference to Grandfather Aaron's well-thumbed set of Shakespeare, with, Cheever said: "Most of the speeches on human ingratitude ... underscored."

Cheever's grandfather died of "alcohol & opium" delirium tremens, alone in "squalid lodgings" in a Boston neighbourhood of "shabby immigrant" tenements.

Cheever's mother, to her younger son's extravagant shame, owned a gift shop in Boston. Everything about this enterprise – the doilies and potholders, China kittens and Toby jugs, his mother's tradeswomanly exchanges with her customers, the breadwinner's power she lorded over her unemployed husband – humiliated John Cheever. To him Bailey ascribes the conviction that his parents were "poor and outcast" not owing to their bad luck or indifference to material success, but "because they were, at bottom, strange and vulgar people". Cheever's mother drank herself to death, at the end of her life working her way through a case of Scotch, "having been warned that alcohol would kill her". (Among Bailey's virtues as a biographer is steady common sense: in his footnote he says that this Cheever-retailed family legend "smacks of mythology".)

It was in his late adolescence that Cheever's relationship – by his own account perverse – deepened with his elder brother, Fred. Two of Cheever's best works of fiction, the novel Falconer and the story, Goodbye, My Brother deal with extreme brotherly contests into violence and fratricide. If John's art managed to exploit Fred's confusions and contradictions, and to make of his own extra-brotherly attraction and repulsion a grand and acutely felt human mystery, the history of Frederick Cheever seems unremittingly sad. Soon after leaving Dartmouth, Fred travelled with his younger brother to Germany in 1931, where he became an enthusiast for National Socialism. Later he supported the fascists in Spain, believed black people to be "inferior because of malnutrition" and drank himself out of jobs and into poverty, relying on frequent handouts from John to keep himself and his oppressed family alive. John Cheever's powerful love for him remains an unaccountable but commonplace mystery of the twisty ways of the human heart.

Bailey seems to me as good an interpreter of Cheever's stories and novels as I have read. He is undaunted by the range of Cheever's prose, from the prison slang of Falconer to the high pulpit rhetoric of the writer's set pieces on light, sea, clouds, turning leaves, stars in their appropriate constellations. His own favourite story is The Swimmer, and Bailey's interweaving of Cheever's fiction with his experience – his mystical obsession with water, the changing seasons and the night sky – is a tour de force, a rare instance of fiction being deepened by its biographical circumstance.

But the business of this biography is to explore the varieties and costs of unreliability not only in the expression of art, but in the society of family and the prison of an obsessed self. This mission makes Bailey's biography of Cheever both arresting and disturbing, a disturbance of the peace, if you will.

Readers of literary biographies should long ago have disabused themselves of the illusion that writers learn or wish to learn from their works how to live their lives. But in Cheever the distress between "seemed" and "was" became so flagrant that Bailey has had to take extraordinary pains to account for it. It's a paradox of the best literary biography (and this book is even more eloquent and resourceful than Bailey's celebrated biography of Richard Yates) that it manages to unscramble the omelette. Provoked by Cheever's art – and why else trouble his rest? – it disassembles such a synthetic achievement as The Wapshot Chronicles and reveals that novel's constituent parts in the writer's personal history. Whether this process is wholesome or perverse is for others to judge, but it requires a bomb-disarmer's nerve and tact.

Bailey believes that Cheever, despite the opposing reflex of inbred reticence, intended his journals – booby-trapped as they were with explosively candid cries of despair, resentment and lust – to be read. But why? It may have been that those expressive magnifications of detail and hyper-focus, those blurrings, croppings and odd juxtapositions so justly admired in his fiction as a kind of magic realism, had their psychological analogue in the bent perceptions and attenuated judgment of an alcoholic.

Cheever, having started drinking as a youngster, finally stopped in 1975: on page 518. Watching the years unroll via page headings throughout Bailey's Cheever, I reached page 79 (1935), and realised with panic that I was to be pent up with a depressive drunk for 40 more years. Boo-hoo for me: think of Cheever's wife, sons and daughter. He bullied them all, with his younger son Federico receiving the least calumny but the most onerous caretaking responsibilities. The warfare between Cheever and his wife, Mary, was Homeric in its magnificent and unremitting cruelty. Susan 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.

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. If it is alarming to read Cheever bellyaching as late as 1973 about his unrequited lusts – "Why should people not respond to my caresses? I'll never know" – it is also amazing to realise that "his erotic drives withstood even the worst ravages of cancer and its treatment". These drives might more happily have been the comic excesses of Priapus, but even sex, like social class, tormented him. Just as he denigrated himself as "a pariah – a small and dirty fraud", a spy insinuated among his betters who had somehow or other "forgotten my mission", drifting to the gentry's tastes and values to live out his "disguises" – so he recognised himself as a man who acted unrelentingly on his homosexual instincts and "genuinely detests homosexuals" as "unserious, humourless and revolting". "I am the sort of iconoclast," he wrote, "who will ridicule the establishment endlessly and expect to be seated at the head of the table. They sometimes protest."

Because Bailey's Cheever is so wise and serious, so human an account, it may be churlish to wish that he had used rather less material to stand for the events and sensations of a life shaped by longevity and endless repetition. And I would not want to have missed any of Bailey's storytelling, his sound moral judgment or his critical sensibility.

His sketches of dozens of characters who were touched by Cheever are short stories in themselves, and he sometimes bores right to the centre of complex relationships, revealing their essence in a sentence, as when he explains Cheever's reluctance to teach while working on a novel, resenting "distractions of any kind, especially the muddling static of apprentice prose".

So let this book be, and thanks for it. And now maybe let Cheever's torments be, and let's all read his Complete Novels and Collected Stories and Other Writings instead.