Cheever Is the Same Old Life Story

John Cheever's Fiction, and not His Life, Deserves Attention

Jun 9, 2009

Blake Bailey's new biography of the well-known difficult life of John Cheever doesn't do enough to illuminate Cheever's valuable place in American literature.

On March 14, 1977, every American novelist’s dream came true for John Cheever. That’s the date of an issue of Newsweek magazine with a big mug shot of Cheever and in big, bold letters the words: “Great American Novel.” The novel in question was Falconer, Cheever’s comeback after several years of decline in which he saw all of his short story collections and three previous novels fall out of print.

On the heels of Falconer came The Stories of John Cheever, which won the Pulitzer Prize and a host of other awards, and Cheever could rightly claim to be the most famous writer in America. With public fame came interest in the private man, and information began to pile up, with even Cheever’s daughter Susan, herself a fiction writer, getting in on the act with her memoir, Home Before Dark, published in 1984, two years after his death.

Cheever 's Talent Takes Second Place to Haunted Past

And what did all this information amount to? Notwithstanding Susan Cheever’s sympathetic portrait, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Cheever’s haunting childhood had seemingly relentless psychological effects. He spent most of his adult life propped up by his clinical thirst for alcohol. And he was a married man tormented by his own bisexuality, and, it appears, by sexual desire in general.

And so it’s hardly surprising that Blake Bailey’s rigorously detailed new biography of the man, simply called Cheever, is a heady read, as tough to get through as a bad day. In other words, it’s a good book about some not so good stuff. But those weary of the stereotype of the troubled writer who can’t cut it in the real world, and wondering where the pristine gifts of imagination and inspiration come from, will be disappointed.

What is needed is a biography that can give readers some insight into why, for instance, the first ten pages of Cheever’s “flawed” novel, Bullet Park, is still more intensely exciting to read than most or all the novels published today, or why his famous short story “The Swimmer” still leaps off the page, soaked in a sweet dew of wit, melancholy, and discerning irony, despite the fact that its “Cheever-esque” effects feel familiar and dated.

Baily's Fact-filled Biography of Cheever Not a Recommended Read

While it’s perhaps inevitable that no biography can capture any artist’s ineffable, almost magical achievements, it should be said that Bailey, who first garnered acclaim for his biography of the writer Richard Yates, does, on some level, give it a shot.

Readrs learn, for instance, that Cheever, who never went to college, read voraciously as a child and young adult, teaching himself great works of literature, rereading Madame Bovary again and again, and even, at age 14, reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in its entirety. Bailey also suggests that Cheever’s flavorful writing was, in part, a result of his trying to move away from the typical realist New Yorker story (still in evidence today), which he became adept at early on in order to make a living as a writer.

All this and more is illuminating stuff, but in the end, it’s not enough to overwhelm the feeling that all a biography of someone like Cheever can do is recount his failings as a human being. Though in some sense it feels like crossing a bridge without paying the toll, returning straight to Cheever’s work without reading Cheever is highly recommended.

The copyright of the article Cheever Is the Same Old Life Story in Artist Biographies is owned by Douglas Nordfors. Permission to republish Cheever Is the Same Old Life Story in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.