Remembering Quincy’s John Cheever on 100th anniversary

Ronald Goba enjoys telling people that he lives in the house where Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever was born, on Elm Avenue in Quincy’s Wollaston neighborhood.

The retired English lit teacher used Cheever’s short stories in his own classes at Hingham High. But he didn’t know Cheever grew up in the house until a visiting scholar told him, years after he and his wife moved there in the early 1990s.

Goba’s discovery pretty much sums up Cheever’s place in his hometown, in the 100th anniversary year of his birth.

A celebrated chronicler of post-World War II suburbia, he was posthumously inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame in June. Biographer Blake Bailey says contemporary fiction writers revere him.

Here, you have to search. Quincy’s Thomas Crane Public Library featured Cheever’s books for the anniversary. Quincy named a park ampitheater for the late actress Ruth Gordon, but there’s nothing for Cheever, not even a marker.

“He’s our lost child,” Quincy Historical Society director Ed Fitzgerald said.

Not that he would have much cared. When he left Quincy in the 1930s, first for a Saratoga, N.Y. writers colony and then New York City, Fitzgerald said “he never looked back.” He occasionally visited his parents, but never set foot in Quincy again after his mother died in 1956.

Bailey says Cheever had ambivalent feelings about Quincy – he liked the small-town ambience, but came to see the city as very provincial. None of his later stories were set on the South Shore.

Born May 27, 1912, Cheever was the younger son of a former shoe factory executive and a matronly British native. When his father lost his money – first to bad investments, then in the 1929 stock market crash – his mother opened a Quincy Center gift shop to pay the bills. Bailey said the teenage Cheever “felt stigmatized by his family’s disgrace.”

Cheever attended Thayer Academy and then Quincy High. He was an indifferent student at both schools, and may have been expelled from Thayer for poor grades. (That episode inspired one of his first published pieces, a New Republic magazine essay.)

He struggled for literary success through the 1930s and ‘40s, with short stories in The New Yorker and other magazines. In 1957 the success of his award-winning first novel, “The Wapshot Chronicle,” made him a rising star on the American literary scene.

In the 1960s his unsettling, myth-flavored short story “The Swimmer” was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster. Time magazine put him on the cover. President Lyndon Johnson invited him to the White House.

Fame and fortune didn’t save him from heavy drinking, depression, conflicts with his wife Mary, or struggles with womanizing and homosexual affairs. He battled emotional and financial upheavals to the last years of his life.

His family contended with all of that as adults. Daughter and author Susan Cheever wrote about it. Son Benjamin Cheever edited his personal journals for publication. In a 2000 Patriot Ledger interview, Cheever’s niece Jane Cheever Carr of Hingham said she and others were well aware of his drinking problem.

Carr eventually learned of what she called “the sordid parts of his life.” But she said that didn’t keep her from loving a personable uncle who had a buoyant laugh, who gave her an expensive, pink Brooks Brothers blouse for Christmas one year.

Carr and her husband had dinner with Cheever the day his 1979 Pulitzer was announced. She said he was thrilled. He was diagnosed with cancer two years later and died in June 1982, three months after his last novel was published.

Thirty years later, Norwell resident Gerry Preble is among the few local devotees who’ve marked Cheever’s centenary. The president of the Beal & Thomas civil engineering firm is re-reading his favorite stories – “The Swimmer” among them – and giving reading lists to anyone who asks him about Cheever.

The AMC series “Mad Men” has prompted some comparisons, since the series is set in the 1960s and New York, like most of Cheever’s stories. Preble doesn’t see much of an echo in “Mad Men,” but he does think Cheever’s often dark and often allegorical style would appeal to a lot of 21st-century readers.

“There aren’t many writers who write like him these days,” Preble said.

Lane Lambert may be reached at llambert@ledger.com.

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The John Cheever Bookshelf

Novels

• On What A Paradise it Seems (1982)
• Falconer (1977)
• Bullet Park (1969)
• The Wapshot Scandal (1964)
• The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

Stories

• The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
• The Swimmer (1964)
• The Five Forty-Eight (1954)
• Goodbye My Brother (1951)
• The Enormous Radio (1947)

Nonfiction

• The Journals of John Cheever- Edited by Benjamin Cheever (1991)

Biography

• Cheever: A Life- Blake Bailey (2009)