Cheever: A Life

Cheever once wrote, “I have no biography. I came from nowhere and I don’t know where I’m going.”

Where did he go? Well, just about everywhere an aspiring writer could imagine. Unlike the other sad, young literary men crowding Manhattan at the time, Cheever did not have a Harvard degree – he had no degree at all – and yet his fiction was so pressingly precocious, so fantastically knowing, that, within a few years of his arrival in New York, he found himself surrounded by high-powered editors and agents.

They pressed him to write, and he obliged: “The Way People Live,” an early collection, was followed in the ’50s by the “The Wapshot Chronicle” and, later, by the enigmatic “Bullet Park.”

By the time he published “Falconer,” in 1977, he was one of the pillars – John Updike was another – of the modern literary establishment. He appeared on the cover of Time in 1964, picked up the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, and the National Medal of Literature in 1982, just before his death. He wrote 121 stories for the New Yorker, each of them a small masterpiece of observational wit.

Like Richard Yates, author of “Revolutionary Road,” and the subject of another Bailey biography, John Cheever’s primary subject was the corruptive influence of the suburbs and the horridly normative patterns of city life. He believed in the possibility of redemption, but doubted that most men had the moral strength to make it that far.

Most of all, he doubted himself. He was buffeted by addiction and melancholy; from an early age, he felt more attraction to men than to women and he spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully wrestling with his sexual urges. Only after he was dead and gone did his children learn the truth. (His long-suffering wife, apparently, had a pretty good idea of Cheever’s predilections.)

Bailey’s biography, which relies heavily on Cheever’s personal journal and letters, is not an easy book to read.  Bailey spares us none of Cheever’s struggles.

In an essay published posthumously last week in the New Yorker, John Updike – an acquaintance of Cheever’s – regretted Bailey’s insistence on documenting his subject’s every transgression. It makes the biography, he lamented, “a heavy, dispiriting read, to the point that ... I wanted the narrative ... to hurry through the menacing miasma of a life, which for all the sparkling of its creative moments, brought so little happiness to its possessor and those around him.”

That seems to me an ungenerous assessment. It’s true that “Cheever: A Life” is a hard and bracing read, and that Bailey is indeed unstinting in his depictions of Cheever’s travails. And yet, all that darkness helps pull the genius – “the sparkling of the creative moments,” as Updike has it – into relief. To read Bailey on Cheever is to arrive at a much fuller appreciation of a deeply gifted chronicler of American life.

Matthew Shaer is a Monitor staff writer.

Previous

1 | 2