Basically Decent
A big biography of John Cheever.
by John Updike March 9, 2009

On the one hand, Blake Bailey’s biography “Cheever: A Life” (Knopf; $35) is a triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal—a seven-hundred-and-seventy-page labor of, if not love, faithful adherence.

John Cheever, the author of five novels and of many—a hundred and twenty-one—of the most brilliant and memorable short stories this magazine has ever printed, died in 1982, at the age of seventy, and in the years since an unusually full and frank wealth of biographical material has accumulated: a memoiristic biography, “Home Before Dark” (1984), by his daughter, Susan; a collection of letters, edited and annotated by his son Benjamin (1988); a four-hundred-page biography by Scott Donaldson (1988); and, an embarrassment of riches and a richesse of embarrassment, the forty-three hundred pages, mostly typed single-space, of Cheever’s private journals, stored at Harvard’s Houghton Library and mined, by Robert Gottlieb, for six excerpts published in The New Yorker between August of 1990 and August of 1991.

Bailey estimates himself to be one of possibly ten persons to have read through the journals, which he calls “a monument of tragicomic solipsism.” His investigations have been tireless: from the murky details of Cheever’s indubitably Yankee ancestry and his career at Thayer Academy right through to the confidential lab reports on his terminal cancer, Bailey distills facts from the impressionistic version of reality that Cheever spun around himself.

Of a certain Dr. Schulman, whose divulgences to his patient may have been less than candid, Bailey informs us in a footnote, “I’d very much like to hear Schulman’s side of the story, but he died several years ago in a head-on collision,” and of an aspiring writer assured by Cheever that he should submit his novel to a New York publisher “and they’ll publish it right away,” we learn in parenthesis “ ‘I never got it published,’ the author reported thirty years later.”

On the other hand, all this biographer’s zeal makes a heavy, dispiriting read, to the point that even I, a reader often enraptured by Cheever’s prose and an acquaintance who generally enjoyed his lively company, wanted the narrative, pursued in methodical chapters that tick past year after year, to hurry through the menacing miasma of a life which, for all the sparkle of its creative moments, brought so little happiness to its possessor and to those around him.

The biography’s valedictory pages are rather stunningly anticlimactic. Though “The Wapshot Chronicle” and “Falconer” appear on best-novels-of-the-century lists, “neither novel (nor any of Cheever’s others) is read much anymore.” “Academics tend to throw up their hands: Cheever is hardly taught at all in the classroom, where reputations are perpetuated.”

In Ossining, New York, where he lived for decades as the town’s most prominent citizen, a move to name a short street after him was turned down at a town meeting, and only the main reading room of the public library honors his memory.

The joy of the physical world, so often extolled in his fiction, and the triumph of his rise from an impoverished young immigrant to New York City to star literary status afforded him, it seems, far from enough comfort. Max Zimmer, the chief of the male acolytes and servitors brought into Cheever’s life by his belated homosexual acknowledgment and by his gradually increasing debility, said at the time, “If there’s someone who never loved himself, it was John.” Twenty-five years later, Max, married and with a family, and having turned his literary ambitions into a livelihood as a technical writer, summed up his former mentor:
He was extraordinarily blessed by anyone’s standards . . . but he liked to say that all he had in life was an old dog. There was his despair. And then there was his inability to comprehend the despair and self-negation he inflicted on others.

Read Updike's full piece at The New Yorker online.

Footnote:

John Updike died in January this year.