John Cheever (original) (raw)

American short story writer and novelist, called the "Chekhov of the suburbs". John Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision. Although he often used his family as material, his daughter Susan Cheever has reminded that "of course none of us expected accuracy from my father. He made his living by making up stories."

"He looked at us all bleakly. The wind and the sea had risen, and I thought that if he heard the waves, he must hear them only as a dark answer to all his dark questions; that he would think that the tide had expunged the embers of our picnic fires. The company of a lie is unbearable, and he seemed like the embodiment of a lie." (from 'Goodbye, My Brother,' in The Stories of John Cheever, Knopf, 1978)

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachussetts, the second son of Frederick Lincoln Cheever and the former Mary Devereaux Liley, an Englishwoman. One of Cheever's ancestors was Ezekiel Cheever (1615-1708), the author of Accidence: A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue. Cheever's father was a traveling salesman who sold shoes. He did relatively well until losing everything, including his self-esteem in the 1929 stock market crash. To save the family, Cheever's mother opened a gift shop, and later also another store, named the Little Shop Around the Corner. The young Cheever was deeply upset by the breakdown of his parents' relationship. His father, known as "poor Mr. Cheever" in the neighborhood, began to drink.

Cheever's formal education ended when he was seventeen. After leaving home, he studied at Thayer Academy in South Braintree, but was expelled for smoking. This experience was the nucleus of his first published story, 'Expelled from Prep School' (1930), which Malcolm Cowley bought for The New Republic. Cheever was only eighteen, a high school drop out. "I was some kid in those days," he once recalled, "hair down to my shoulders and I wore a big rig." ('Cheever, John,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 309)

For a time Cheever lived with his brother Fred in Boston. He wrote synopses for MGM and sold stories to various magazines. After a journey in Europe, Cheever returned to the US. He settled in New York, where he was acquainted with such writers as John Dos Passos, Edward Estlin Cummings, James Agee, and James Farrell. In 1933 he attended the Yaddo Writers' Colony in Saratoga Springs. On the suggestion of Malcolm Cowley, he submitted stories to The New Yorker. Cheever's lifelong assocation with the magazine started with 'Buffalo', which was published in the June 22, 1935 issue.

In 1941 Cheever Mary Winternitz, an instructor of literature; they had three children. The Way Some People Live(1943) was Cheever's first collection of stories, some of them dealt with Cheever's own experiences as a recruit. Originally the stories had appeared in magazines. During World War II Cheever served four years as an infantry gunner and member of the Signal Corps. He never rose above the rank of technical sergeant. Cheever scored too low on the Army General Classification Test ("108 or something") that would have qualified him for Officer Candidate School. (Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey, 2009, pp. 124-25) However, Cheever had a prodigious memory.

After the war Cheever worked as a teacher and wrote scripts for a TV series called Life with Father, based on the Clarence Day, Jr., memoir and the Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse Broadway production. The show ran for a couple of years. In 1951 Cheever received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. 'The Pot of Gold' won an O. Henry Award in 1951. When his first attempt for a novel – a hundred-page manuscript – was rejected by Random House, Cheever was deeply hurt and it took two years before he could return to the book.

Most of the stories in Cheever's second collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), were set in New York City. The much anthologied title piece bears some similarities with Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window(1954), in which the theme was voyeurism; in Cheever's story a woman eavesdrops on her neighbors' life through a magic radio ("The dials flooded with a malevolent green light"), which broadcasts their conversations. ("It's indecent," he said. "It's like looking into windows.") The collection was not a critical success, partly because the stories had appeared in The New Yorker, and many reviewers were prejudiced against writers associated with the magazine, considered elitist. Among them was Norman Mailer, who once revealed that he had not read Cheever's stories until after the author's death.

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) was strongly autobiographical, based on the relationship of his mother and father, the family's decline, and his own life. ""Advice to my sons," it read. "Never put whisky into hot water bottle crossing borders of dry states or countries. Rubber will spoil the taste. Never make love with pants on. Beer on whisky, very risky. Whisky on beer, never fear." (The Wapshot Chronicle, Random House, 2010, p. 306) Although the book sold better than expected and won the National Book Award in 1958, it "did not net enough cash to keep a family of five in shoe-leather and I'm damned if I know how I can finance another," as Cheever said in a letter. (The Letters of John Cheever, edited by Benjamin Cheever, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009, p. 214) The quirky and despotic Aunt Honora, the most memorable character of the book, has never paid her income taxes, which becomes an issue in The Wapshot Scandal (1964). The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Cheever the Howells Medal for the novel.

Cheever worked in the 1960s briefly as a Hollywood scripwriter on a film version of D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl from 1920. As a part of cultural exchange program, Cheever spent six weeks in the Soviet Union in 1964. John Updike, who shared with him the role of literary ambassador, enjoyed traveling with his older colleague, but Cheever had a quite different experience. "Updike and I spent most of our time back-biting one another," he recalled. "I find him very arrogant but my daughter tells me that I'm arrogant." (Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism by John Updike, 2012, p. 124) During the visit he drank the famous Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko under the table. ('John Cheever (1912-1982),' in Writing under the Influence: Alcohol and the Works of 13 American Authors by Aubrey Malone, 2018, p. 119)

From 1956 to 1957 Cheever taught writing at Barnard College – a work he never liked much. However, he was teacher at the University of Iowa, where he was drunk most of the time, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University (1974-75). He also taught creative writing to the inmates in Sing Sing prison, which was located close to his home.

While in Boston, Cheever became depressed and his drinking problems continued. To regain control of his life, Cheever spent a month at the Smithers Rehabilitation Center in New York City. For a period he took tranquillizers, but they merely dulled his senses and drained him of his energy. These experiences found later place in the novel Falconer (1977), about a college professor, a heroin addict, rebuilding himself in a prison. Noteworthy, Cheever emphasized in an interview that Falconer was not Sing Sing. "I used the imaginary prison of Falconer principally as a metaphor for confinement." ('Talk With John Cheever' by John Hersey, The New York Times, March 6, 1977) The novel was dedicated to Cheever's son Federico.

""You are a professor and the education of the young – of all those who seek learning – is your vocation. We learn by experience, do we not, and as a professor, distinguished by the responsibilities of intellectual and moral leadership, you have chosen to commit the heinous crime of fratricide while under the influence of dangerous drugs. Aren't you ashamed?" "I want to be sure that I get my methadone," Farragut said." (Falconer, 1st Vintage International ed., 1991, pp. 8-9)

The protagonist Ezekiel Farragut is sentenced to Falconer Prison after killing his brother, Eben. Farragut's discovery of religion and his escape from the depth of despair can be interpreted as a kind of redemption. At the end an ordinary bus stop becomes Farragut's passport to new life. "Stepping from the bus onto street, he saw that he had lost his fear of falling and all other fears of that nature. He held his head high, his back straight, and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he thought, rejoice." (Falconer, 1st Vintage International ed., 1991, p. 211)

Despite his alcoholism, Cheever managed to be a devoted father and maintain a suburban life, play touch football on his lawn, to do gardening, relax with backgammon, and go on extensive walks. But he never joined a country club. "On Sunday mornings we would have Bloody Marys," recalled Cheever's daughter Susan. "In the summer we would stay cool with gins and tonics. In the winter we would drink Manhattans." (Note Found in a Bottleby Susan Cheever, 2015, p. 17) In 1971, Cheever was arrested for drunk driving. Moreover, his slow driving did not make him less guilty.

Due to heart problems in 1973 Cheever had himself admitted in the Intensive Care Unit of his local hospital. When he was put in a straitjacket he got out of it, like Houdini. Eventually drinking and homosexual tendencies ruined Cheever's marriage. He had an love affair with the actress Hope Lang, who was married to the director Alan J. Pakula at that time. Cheever referred to her as "the most beautiful woman in the world." All this did not prevent Mary from cooking for her husband. "This seems to me one of the great labors of history. She has often served me with bitterness; she had often refused to speak to me when she summoned me to the table; but night after night for a decade less than half a century she has brought food to the table." (The Journals by John Cheever, 2010, p. 356)

Cheever's other major works include the experimental Bullet Park (1969), an allegory of the struggle between good and evil, in which Eliot Nailles, a chemist, meets Paul Hammer, who is not the ordinary citizen he seems to be. ""We're the Hammers," the stranger said to the priest. Nailles did not think this funny, anticipating the fact that almost everyone else in the neighborhood would. How many hundreds or perhaps thousands cocktail parties would they have to live through, side by side: Hammer and Nailles." (Buller Park, Random House, 2010, p. 19) Hammer is the illegitimate son of a kleptomaniac. He has a manic plan to awaken the suburban world. Bullet Park was received with mediocre reviews, a shock for Cheever. Benjamin DeMott called the book "a grand gatherum of late 20th-century American weirdos". ('Cheever, John,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 311)

The Stories of John Cheever(1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for six months.

After spending some time in the Smithers Alcoholism Center on East 93rd Street in New York and entering there the AA program, Cheever was able to conquer his drinking problem. "I miss drinking. That's the simpliest way of putting it. When it grows dark I would like a drink," he wrote in his journal in 1980. (The Journals by John Cheever, 2010, p. 365)

John Cheever died of cancer in 1982, at the age of 70, in Ossinning, New York. His widow, Mary, signed in 1987 a contract with a small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle, and a book of 13 stories by the author, came out in 1994. Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, became novelists. Cheever's posthumously published letters and journals revealed his guilt-ridden bisexuality.

Cheever contrasted often the ordinary suburban milieu with the chaotic or hidden emotional states of his characters. Several stories, such as 'The Five-Fourty Eight' (1954), about the revenge of a humiliated woman, were set in the fictional suburban commuter town of Shady Hill, a fallen Paradise. Eventually Cheever's middle- or upper-middle-class characters come to face their own shortcomings. In three novels Cheever used two brothers to represent different values of modern life.

One of his most popular and most anthologized stories is 'The Swimmer' (1964), which portrays a middle-aged man, who refuses to acknowledge his failures. Originally the story was published in the New Yorker magazinein July, 1964. The protagonist, a middle-aged suburbanite Neddy Merrill, decides to swim his way home from his friend's house to his own, from one pool to another. At the beginning of his journey, Neddy seemingly has everything (except clothes), but gradually the midsummer Sunday turns into a cold and dark evening and autumn set in. Unable to turn back, Neddy is forced to face the inevitable truth. Cheever's story inspired the 1968 film by Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack, starring the athletic Burt Lancaster, who radiated both strength and vulnerability in his near-nakedness. The swimmer's stories about his success turn out to be a fantasy – his home is both locked and deserted. Before meeting the star of the film, Cheever drank a pint of whiskey to get his mind off his nervousness.

For further reading: 'John Cheever (1912-1982),' in Writing under the Influence: Alcohol and the Works of 13 American Authors by Aubrey Malone (2018); John Cheever, edited by Robert A. Morace (2013); C heever: A Life by Blake Bailey (2009); Treetops: A Family Memoir by Susan Cheever (1999); Uncollecting Cheever by Anita Miller (1998); John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction by J.E. O'Hara (1989); John Cheever: A Biography by Scott Donaldson (1988); _Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter by S. Cheever (1984); John Cheever by S. Coale (1977); 'Cheever, John,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975) - See also _The New Yorker_literary circle and John Updike

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