POOR JOHN CHEEVER

“Cheever: A life” by Blake Bailey Poor John Cheever. When he died in 1982 his work--short stories, mostly--promised to stand the test of time. But he has largely been forgotten, except for the juicy secrets of his private life that have since come to light. "His calling was the short story", writes The Economist, a form that Cheever always knew had "the life expectancy of a mayfly".

But these dark, stylish snapshots of the suburban middle class are worth reading:

[T]hey were filled with longing and desire, a yearning for something just out of reach. He understood these characters. He pitied the bickering young couples and ageing alcoholics without sentimentalising them. He valued their grasps at youth, companionship and memory. Asked why he bothered to write at all if he thought everything was so terrible, he replied, “I write to make sense of my life.”

Just what he struggled to make sense of is chronicled definitively in Blake Bailey's “Cheever: A life”. This is not his first biography, but it is the only one worth reading. Bailey had unprecedented access to everything, including all 28 volumes of Cheever’s journals--a “monument of tragicomic solipsism”--full of wry quips, searing introspection and soggy narcissism (“I know that my need for love can be gross, self-centred, a sort of greed”). The result is a rich and often tender portrait of a rare and lonely man.

“In an upper-class gathering I suddenly think of myself as a pariah—a small and dirty fraud, a deserved outcast, a spiritual and sexual impostor, a loathsome thing,” Cheever once wrote. He never quite shook an image of himself as a pudgy and friendless boy whose parents never wanted him. More profoundly, he was tormented by his sexuality. “Here is some sort of conflict,” he wrote in 1963, “a man who has homosexual instincts and genuinely detests homosexuals.” Drinking was a salve of sorts, until he began drinking himself to death.

Narcissistic, self-absorbed and disarmingly charming, Cheever spent a lifetime crafting a haughty persona and fighting his baser instincts. In search of a socially acceptable “sanctuary for [his] cock”, he married Mary Winternitz and spent the rest of his life craving divorce. He never failed to let his children know they disappointed him. “I love you not for the person you are,” he told his son Ben, “but for your possibilities.”

His need for approval was insatiable, his insecurities boundless. He took countless lovers of both sexes and then bragged about them to his family. (Lauren Bacall was “madly in love with him”, he told his wife. In fact she was turned off by his “debutante accent”.) Psychiatrists never told him what he wanted to hear. His taste for men became overwhelming in old age.

But Bailey has written a story of redemption, more or less. Seven years before Cheever died, he was living alone, incapacitated with alcoholism. He nearly killed himself until his family shuffled him off to an alcoholism treatment centre. Afterwards, he wrote his most successful novel, “Falconer”, prompting his publisher to rush his short fiction back into print. “Here he’d been having a dreadful time,” observed Bernard Malamud. “And through the grace literature affords, he saved himself."

Late in life he explained that the short story is the literature of the nomad:

I like to think that the view of a suburban street that I imagine from my window would appeal to a wanderer or to someone familiar with loneliness. Here is a profoundly moving display of nostalgia, vision and love, none of it more than 30 years old, including most of the trees.

Though the trees are some decades older, lonesome wanderers may be profoundly moved by his imaginary visions once again.

~ EMILY BOBROW