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On John Cheever

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On John Cheever BIOGRAPHY & FICTION 3 Aunt Muffin Competing visions ofJoim Cheever: priapic and puritan, heretical and orthodox, fanatical family man and chronicler ofcarnality ohn Cheever wrote m,my of his best T HOMAS MEANEY chool", a story about a reenage drop-out "childlike sense of wonder" was strongly on stories ill his underwear. In the lale who bristles at the thick genrlJity of lhe display. Cheever had not yet fruitfully nux-ed j 19 40~ in New York, he would leave hi Blake Bail ey school' s faculty. The only exceptioo b a in the irony that dominated his next phase. II Easl Side apartment dressed in a suit, hisLOry teacher dismissed for preaching the would take decades for his sentences to descend with the other men in the elevator. CHEEVER innocence of Sacco and Vanzeui. Bai ley acqutre their scorpion-like coil and sting strip dllwn to his pants in the basement. A Life suggests that Cheever knew lhis left-leaning Bailey IJi more of a chronicler titan a crilic. and writc in a storage rool11 until nOOn. 763pp_ Knopf. $35. element would appeal to the New Repllblic, and Cheever, along with his deflnitive life of 78 I 400 04394 I The routine became a legend - as Cheever whose a~ shlant editor. Malcolm Cowley, Rich::rrd Yates. makes Iilm the canon-keeper surely intended - but it obscures something John Cbe ever became Cheever'!> lifelong promoter and of the post-war American realists. The bio­ fundamentaJ about the man. Crit-ics have fellow fa ther-in-law. But Cowley was also graphy is best read as a compendilllll to lhe variously labelled Cheever "the C hekhov of COL L ECTED STORIES AND OT H ER imprel>5Cd by the carefuUy controlled chop of JOllmals, for which it serves as a reliable­ the <;ubu1"bs", 'lhe connoisseur of the RI TI NG the young author's prose: boast-detector. If Bailey devotes inordinate Edi ted by Blake Bailey mmute". '·the Ja.<;l Puritan": he is seen as 1 knew about the trees from the window attention to Cheever's sexual exploits. his 1,040pp.978 1 5985 3034 6 either the champion of post-war American fnunc ~. J knew the rain only from the sounds of subject demands it. The .follmals of John conform ity, or its greatest apos[ate, either a COMPLETE NOV E LS the roof. J was tired of seeing spring With walls Cheew!r, published po:-.thumously in 1982, minOT wriler who wrote made-for-order 'The Wapshot ChroniL:le", "The Wap~hnt Scandal". and awning to intercept the sweet £un and the may be the fuJlesl carnal portmit we have of a prose for the ivory slabs of the New Yorker, "Bullet Park'", "Falconer". "Oh What,l Paradise hard fruit. I wanted to go outdoors and ,ee the twentiel:b-cemury American male. Already at or a major one who anticipated postmodern­ ltSeem~" spri ng. ( wanted to feel and taste the air and be Thayer, Cheever (who got hh reading done Edited by Blake Bailey ist tactics by a generation. am(l ng the ~hadows . ThaI IS perhaps 11\ hy l Ien early) was mortified to find himself identify­ 960pp. 978 I 5985 30353 That Cheever is a writer who has been school. ing with Proust's Baron de Charlos. Bailey Library ofAmericII. :it'] 5 each. mL'iundeT'-[ood owes much to hi~ self-woven These are tbe lines of a precocioul/. if mildly goes further than Cheever's previous biogra­ web of tensions. Expelled from Thayer prelentiow,. Tomantic selli ng out for thi pber, Scott Oonald!>on, in believing I h~ firsl Academy at the age of fi ft een. he accepted an Academy in 1927 for ~m ok ing cigarettes. Ilr terrilory. Looking back at "Expe.lJed" many sexual experience to have been with his honorary degree from Harvard at slxty~six. fo r poor marks, or was even expeUed at all. year~ later, John Updike nominated Cheever brother,Fred. "I want my big brother to comt! J--Jjs first real job was editing a city guide for remain~ unclear. but Cheever exploited the lor the prodigy club of Rimbaul.l Cballerton back and be my love", Cheever wrote wist­ the New Deal, but he Inter shunned bis experience for "ExpeUed from Preparatury and ITenry Grcen. But while hi.~ !>ignature fully in his fifties. After '·Expelled" was pub­ fOmJer colleagut!s amI tried to return his Iil'hed, he lived with Fred in BOMan, where he ocial security cheques. He was an all-star kept company with burle~qllc stars, mOOlhed alcoholk.. who ordered doubles "a~ if a single [f about Henry James in ~pcak-e<lsies, and would poison him". yet was back on th wa.., invariuhly described as "dapper". (In ('In~ wagon for lbl.! fmal lap of his life. He of the more bizarre subplot...:; in the biogntphy. despised homosexuals ("unserious. humoT­ 1 we watch as Fred Cheever gracelessly makc·­ It!ss. and revolting"), but pursue<.! men with the Lransition from an ardent Nazi sympa­ reckless abandon. First and foremost a thizer into the author of the unpublished work WASP - "remember that you are a Who Are tire Revolutionaries?: The Coming Cheel'ah", he told his chiltlren - he claimed Revolt Agai"sl the Middle Cluss. to feel like an immigrant in the COWl try his By lhe lime Cheever had graduated from family had Lived in for more than 400 years. Beacon Street bohemia lO Greenwich Vil lage Blake Bailey':.; new biography invites us to in the 1930s. he wa.<, avidly bi~exual. He read Cheever's life as a double act of rccov­ priued himself on a particularly ~ticky silu:t­ ry. With access to more than 4,000 pages of I tion with Walker Evans, who lOpped off unpubJ ished journals, he captures his subject's his Depression age collection American profound social anxieties largely in his own PlJotographl' with a shot ofCheever' s joyles words. Born in 1912 to a down-at-beel Boslon room on H u d ~o n Street. "When 1 was a family of dubious Puritan stock, Cheever both young man", Cheever wrote of lbe period: mocked his family '~ habit of revising its own I woke up one morning in the unclean bed­ past and used it to his advantage. "Don't ever sheets of squalid furnished rOom~. poor and we-ar an overcoat", Frederick Cheever. a shoe hungry and lonely, and thought that some salesman, cautioned bis son, "you might be mOrni ng I would wake in my own hou~e. taken for an Irishman." The remark, Cheever hQldi ng in my annR a fragrant bride an liked to point (J ul, was one only an Irishman hearing from the broad lawn beYl1nd my would make. But Cheever himself regaled window tbe voi tes of my beloved children. journalist'> wilh his famjly 's seafaring talc! And so 1 clid . and Revolutionary War herOics, compulsively 31.03.09 Paris The bride was Mary WinlernilZ, a Jewi~h girl claiming an ancestor at the Boston Tea Party. from ill] academic family. who both sealed and "J rearrange the details to make them more Before PrelJ;dent Sarkozy, there was magazine, and, after two years, into a complicated Cheever's respectability. A short inleresting anti significant", he con(jded in hi only one Petit Nicolas, the cartoon series of books. For his fiftieth birth· boul of faithfulness followed.. although .fo/lma/~. 10 The Waps/wt ChrOTl icle (1956 ), creation of Jean-Jacques Sempe and day, Nicolas has been honoured with Cheever often gives the impression of bein~ Ins first and most popular novel, he hoisted Rene Goscinny (who already bas an an exhibition at the Hotel de Ville in more in love with his marriage than hi the family lore up the ma~t and signalled him­ immortal to his Dam~ Astern the Paris, with 150 original artworks on Wife. "I Jove my wife s body and my child­ self Ihe o;pokesman for the Eust Coast \Jpper Gaul). Nicolas has been a naughty bow, together with a reconstruction of ren's mnocence", he Wnle5 flver and again U1 midUJe class of which he was never quire a schoolboy for the past fifty years, since Goscinny's office, and original manu­ the JOIII"I/ols like a fanatical family mun trymg member. his first appearance in Sud-Ouest scripts (Goscinny is responsible for the to keep the faith. But at Ole same time. "every BUI before lbe novels came tbe slorie..c:. on DinulIIcilc, a regionaJ newl.o-paper. words, Sempe the pictures). The exhibi­ comely man, every bank clerk and delivery which Cheever's reputation still rcl'\.s . before migrating into a children' tion is rree and runs until May 7. boy was aimed at my life like a luaded pist(lJ·~ . Whether he wa.'! t:xpelled from Thayer COTlfinued all page 4 TLS APRIL 3 2009 + 4 Cominued from page 3 BIOGRAPHY & FICTION 3 Thomas Meaney Blake BaiJey Cheever - A Life By his late lorties. all the guns were ftrin.g at John Cheever Collected SLOries and Other Writing. Complete NoveL~ once: Cheever resumed his homosexuality as if making up for lost time. Bailey describes POEMS 5 Benry Shukman Wind In Trees some sordid scenes f-rom later years; one 14 John Levett An Idle Bm;k moment, Mary is taunting Cheever about his 28 Raymond FTiei The Run chronic impotence; !be next. he is offering 1 34 John Mole SPalTOWS and Bamboo read a male sWdent'!; work in exchange for a helping hand with the "punctual accrual<; of LElTERS TO THE EOTTOR ------------------------.--------6 ---------------------­Jeremy Thacker: Longitude fake? Guemica.
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