If a tinge of melancholy haunts the cocktail hour, if a croquet mallet left derelict on the lawn evokes a broken merriment, if the bar car of a commuter train gives off a stale whiff of failed promise and bitter alimony, pause and pay homage to John Cheever. Light a bug candle on the patio in his honor. For Cheever—novelist, master of the short story, prolific diarist—is the patron saint of Eastern Seaboard pathos and redemption, the Edward Hopper of suburban ennui, preserving minor epiphanies in amber. Despite his patrician patina, Cheever was no saint in his personal life and not quite one of nature’s noblemen. The publication in 1991 of The Journals of John Cheever put a permanent wrinkle in that façade, publicizing Cheever’s previously cloaked bisexual appetites and polecat propensities, along with a lesser host of miseries, vanities, and maunderings that left an oily residue. A greater smirch on Cheever’s name recognition was inflicted a year later, on an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza (Jason Alexander) discovered that his prospective future father-in-law was a former lover of Cheever’s, hoarding a secret stash of letters from the dear man. Millions of viewers who may never have read a single story of Cheever’s now had his identity branded into their brains as a gay punch line.
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But if some of the mahogany richness has worn off of Cheever’s individual reputation following his death, in 1982, the influence of his imagination and sensibility has swum ever deeper into the cultural bloodstream, its unique formula of magical elixir and embalming fluid winding its way through everything from Ordinary People to The Ice Storm to American Beauty to Far from Heaven to Revolutionary Road to TV’s Mad Men. Nearly every stylized retro examination of the hidden tooth decay of the American Dream owes Cheever symbolic royalties (see also “Rethinking the American Dream,” by David Kamp). As this country edges into the prospect of losing so much of what it once had, a vast devaluing of everything it took for granted, the bittersweet pang of Cheever’s nostalgia and the bleak apprehension underlying idle chitchat have never been more apropos—perfect timing for the publication of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (Knopf), a biography of monumental heft and picky asides that certifies Cheever’s enduring relevance while smacking his wrist with a nun’s ruler. After one of Cheever’s typical lyrical effusions, his biographer chides, “Perhaps, but the fact remained that he was impotent, and often drunk before lunch.” Even when you’re dead, you can’t get away with anything.
My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory, and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place-name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun. —John Cheever, Esquire, July 1960.
In the halo’d circles where the craft of fiction is a devotional calling, Cheever is held up as an exemplar of a writer’s writer, tending to his tiny plot of fallen paradise. First published at the age of 18, with an account in The New Republic of being expelled from Thayer Academy (a private school), Cheever had the good fortune to land under the aegis of *The New Yorker’*s fiction editor William Maxwell, whose solicitude and self-effacement were the stuff of Vatican legend. In 1938, Cheever, who had published a few stories in the magazine under Katharine White’s editorial wand, was lateraled off to Maxwell. “Maxwell’s attentiveness was all the more flattering—and his editorial advice valuable—because he himself was already, at age thirty, the author of two well-regarded novels, Bright Center of Heaven and They Came Like Swallows,” Bailey writes. “For most of his career, though, his own reputation would be eclipsed by the greater fame of the writers he edited: Nabokov, Salinger, Welty, and (as Maxwell put it) ‘three wonderful writers all named John’—O’Hara, Updike, and Cheever.” Under Maxwell’s tutelage, Cheever produced a basket of golden eggs, stories that by the late 40s—“miraculous years for Cheever”—placed him near the top tier of the fiction writers at The New Yorker, an exclusive fraternity that included O’Hara, Nabokov, Salinger, and Irwin Shaw. But literary cachet didn’t stock the pantry or cover the dry cleaning, especially during dry spells. “In his journal Cheever wrote, ‘We are as poor as we ever have been. The rent is not paid, we have very little to eat.… We have many bills.’ Determined to write ‘a story a week,’ he was rejected four times in a row by The New Yorker, which meant he wouldn’t be receiving a yearly bonus either. Faced with dire poverty, and forced into writing ‘lifeless and detestable’ fiction, Cheever chided himself for entertaining an ‘unreasonable’ degree of petulance.”
A petulance inflamed into a rash of envy by the thumping success of his friend Irwin Shaw’s World War II epic, The Young Lions. It was like being slapped across the face with a fancy wallet listening to Shaw, who was raking in screenplay money on the side as the royalties rolled in, flaunting his jackpot status as postwar fiction’s newest golden boy. “For Cheever, it was exquisite agony to hear Shaw complain, blithely over lunch, about how much money he’d have to make this year in order to pay taxes on his earnings from last year.” This as Cheever prepared to attend *The New Yorker’*s 25th-anniversary gala in a secondhand tuxedo. Cheever would later feel overshadowed and outmaneuvered at The New Yorker by J. D. Salinger (which was like being upstaged by the Invisible Man), Donald Barthelme, and that ingenuous pup, John Updike.
Reading Bailey’s biography reconfirms an impression of Cheever that I’ve carried around in my locket for years—that the man had a lot of ham actor in him, which he served pretty thick. Like illustrious glazed hams of stage and screen such as John Barrymore, Charles Laughton, and Jack Nicholson, Cheever enlisted his audience as co-conspirators, calculating his effects down to the last Noël Coward drop of sherry. His role-playing began out of social necessity as he went through the motions of keeping up appearances, like a character in a minimalist cartoon strip or a Jacques Tati comedy. After Cheever, his wife, Mary, and their daughter, Susie (who would grow up to be an author in her own right), moved into an apartment on Sutton Place that they could barely afford, he took pains to pass himself off as a member in good standing of the corporate rat race. “Almost every morning for the next five years, he’d put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he’d doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch.” He might as well have been wearing prison stripes, so regimented was his routine, and Cheever wouldn’t discover his real, breathing persona until he dropped this cookie-cutter pose of uniformity and moved to the suburbs, where his inner Wasp could unbend and spruce up its affectations. His wardrobe selection was shabby chic before the phrase and style became voguish. His accent beautified into a veritable flute. “When appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, or putting an impudent barkeep in his place,” Bailey writes, “Cheever became almost a parody of the pompous toff (‘like Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island,’ the writer James Kaplan observed, ‘or Chatsworth Osborne in Dobie Gillis’), but at other times—relaxed, cracking jokes—he sounded not unlike a boy from the South Shore with an English mother.” Our literary life would be poorer without its theatrical touch-ups, and Cheever’s are no more to be begrudged and censured than the pile of buttermilk batter that James Dickey became or Isak Dinesen’s eye shadow. A little shamming doesn’t hurt as long as it doesn’t become the last line of brittle defense. But as Cheever grew older and his drinking spun into a kamikaze spiral, his mannerisms developed a desperate flutter and hollow ring, as if echoing from a cracked shell. He might fool his fans with fustian eloquence, but he couldn’t bluff the psychiatric staff of Manhattan’s Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center, where he was admitted in 1975 after a binge that left him “naked and incoherent.” They weren’t there to humor his lordship. Bailey writes:
Bullied at every turn for his “false light-heartedness” and “grandiosity,” Cheever retreated into a vast, fraudulent humility. “Oh, but ofcourseyou’re right,” he’d mutter (in so many words) when challenged. Nobody was fooled or amused. Carol Kitman, a staff psychologist, remarked that Cheever reminded her of Uriah Heep: “He is a classic denier who moves in and out of focus,” she wrote in her progress notes. “He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalized many rather imperious upper class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same time.”
It was in his erotic life that Cheever constructed his most ornate artifice, subject to erosion. Although he would stray from the marriage bed that he often found so cold and forbidding for sexual interludes with men, he prided himself on maintaining a masculine front with no minty accents. Swish he abhorred. “Although he loved men,” Susan Cheever writes in her biographical memoir of her father, Home Before Dark, “he feared and despised what he defined as the homosexual community; the limp-wristed, lisping men who are sometimes the self-appointed representatives of homosexual love in our culture. Men who run gift shops, sell antiques, strike bargains over porcelain tea sets.”
Fear of effeminacy and disdain for adorable bric-a-brac drove Cheever to police the premises like a butch watchdog in his role as patriarch, browbeating his poor son, Ben, over any fey infraction, according to Bailey. “You laugh like a woman!,” Cheever would snap at the boy when he giggled (interestingly, the Smithers staff were struck by Cheever’s own chronic tittering), and he accused his son of pampering himself like some starlet when he took bubble baths. Ben literally had to watch his every step. “[Ben] liked to dance in front of the bathroom mirror—pretending he was a gunslinger who could dance so well he could dodge bullets—until one day his father walked in: ‘That,’ said Ben, ‘was the end of my dancing in front of the mirror.’” And with it the promise of being a future Billy Elliot.
What besmittened Cheever to his young protégé Max Zimmer, an aspiring writer whom he had met while visiting the University of Utah, was that he wore cowboy boots and “had none of the attributes of a sexual irregular,” such as rampant antiquing on weekends. Using his clout as literary wizard, Cheever championed Zimmer’s work and got him a spot at the artists’ colony Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, and he expected something nice in return. “I knew before I left for Saratoga,” the Mormon-raised Max realized with a heavy heart, “that I’d have to give him another hand-job.” Although Cheever insisted he had no intention of feeding upon Max’s cowpoke innocence like a praying mantis, he was a wily cuss when it came to getting his way. Whenever Zimmer brought a manuscript to the master for appraisal and advice, Cheever, who believed that sexual arousal sharpened his eyesight and concentration, would ask that Max assist in unblurring his vision. Sigh; it was time to give the old handle another crank. I am irresistibly reminded of the comedian Louis C.K.’s requiem for a halfhearted wank: “That hand job was probably the saddest thing that ever happened in America. There should be a monument to that hand job, with a reflecting pool, where you just sit and think, ‘God that was fucking sad.’” It was more than sad for Zimmer. It had an air of gentle coercion. As a cautionary lesson, Cheever would invoke the example of an earlier protégé, Allan Gurganus, who would earn best-selling success with Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. “Gurganus … was often invoked for Max’s benefit, both as the embodiment of true homosexuality (‘he suffers acutely from the loss of gravity that seems to follow having a cock up your ass or down your throat once too often’) and as living proof that it was unwise to spurn Cheever’s advances. As he told Max more than once, he’d helped get ‘Minor Heroism’ published in The New Yorker; but now that he’d withdrawn his patronage, Gurganus would never appear in the magazine again.” And Gurganus didn’t appear in The New Yorker again while Cheever was still alive.
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It can’t be said that Cheever played coy in his maneuvers with the opposite sex. He carried on an intermittent flurry of an affair with the actress Hope Lange (the star of The Best of Everything and TV’s The Ghost & Mrs. Muir) about which he crowed far and wide, countenancing her advancing years with a courtly twirl, confiding to his journal: “That her voice may be shrill, that her looks may be passing, that there is very little correspondence in our tastes are things I know and don’t care about at all.” There is so much one is willing to overlook when one is diddling a celebrity. But it wasn’t reciprocal, this forbearance, as ice formed on Hope Lange’s higher slopes. “The decisive episode had occurred after a recent lunch when, returning to her apartment, Cheever had dropped his pants and waited. ‘I can’t help you,’ she said, and made a phone call.” Leaving him dangling. Even coarser than Cheever’s crude shortcuts through the art of seduction (enter room, drop drawers) was the smarmy way he extolled womanly charms to his fellow cavaliers. To Frederick Exley, the author of A Fan’s Notes, with whom he went rollicking at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cheever wrote, “We seem to have something basically in common, something more lambent, I hope, than hootch and cunt.” And to Max Zimmer he exulted in the afterglow of a gala dinner celebrating the publication of The Stories of John Cheever that was held in his honor at Lutèce, where he was seated between the actresses Lauren Bacall and Maria Tucci (the wife of the collection’s editor), “bask[ing] in that fragrance of beaver we both so enjoy.” I’m sure the evening was a treat for them too.
Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday night blues! Those departing weekend guests, those stale cocktails, those half-dead flowers, those trips to Harmon to catch the Century, those postmortems and pickup suppers! —John Cheever, “O Youth and Beauty!”
Now we come to the inevitable station stop in the piece where we say, But enough about the Life, with all its gauche lapses and unkempt complications—what about the Work? The Work holds. The Work withstands. As Bailey observes, Cheever—whose 1977 novel, Falconer, scored him the cover of Newsweek (due in large part to daughter Susan’s editorial role at the magazine) and whose collected Stories lionized his place in letters (“not merely the publishing event of the ‘season’ but a grand occasion in English literature,” marveled John Leonard)—“died almost at the pinnacle of his fame.” And despite the biographical and autobiographical disclosures since, Cheever retains a pinnacle aura. His worth as author has not suffered the steep drop-off of his fellow John, O’Hara. It isn’t simply that Cheever wrote more handsomely than O’Hara, but that his best stories have an emotional reach and regretful ache that the more stonyhearted O’Hara was incapable of, so intent was he on laying out the real inside dirt on his country-club louses. Whatever inside dirt Cheever extracted on the secret vices of suburbanites was gold-flaked with a tender idolizing of the clouds, wind, sun, rain, swimming pools, tennis courts, and elegant greenery that composed their miniature kingdoms. In the best Cheever stories (his novels I find too hodgepodgy), there’s always something wild ready to break loose once the leash of propriety snaps, which often takes only a few drinks and a bared bra strap. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cheever was a besotted romantic who might slop around in person but who kept a taut rein on his lyrical gifts, striving for an exalted precision of perception that would infuse his descriptive passages with enough rapture to keep the demons temporarily at bay. Despite the epic boozing (“You drink like Siberian worker!” he was once hurrahed) and other dissipations, Cheever had a tremendous stamina that saw him through to the triumphant finish. A stamina and missionary zeal worthy of the protagonist in his classic story “The Swimmer,” who swam from pool to pool in a quixotic quest to reach home: “He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.” Not a bad epitaph for Cheever himself, whose vague modesty was all part of the act.
James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
