Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [0]
A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
EDITED BY BLAKE BAILEY
John Cheever: Complete Novels
John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings
For Mary, Marlies, and Amelia
I've never intended to be patronizing. As a child I was told to remember, at all times, that I was a CHEEVAH. I thought this bullshit had cured me.
—John Cheever to Frederick Exley
Fred, remember you are a Cheever.
—John Cheever's advice to his younger son
I am nothing and everything is a nothing and I want to play out the role to the end; and if I am less than nothing I am a wayward boy, angry at Mummy and Daddy and a little queer to boot; and how does this square with the image of a cheerful man of forty-five who has been given everything in the world he desires but a degree of unselfconsciousness.
—John Cheever, Journals
… it is too much to ask that people who spend very much time in a world of their own, as all writers do, should immediately and invariably grasp what is going on in this one.
—William Maxwell
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE {1637–1912}
CHAPTER TWO {1912–1926}
CHAPTER THREE {1926–1930}
CHAPTER FOUR {1930–1934}
CHAPTER FIVE {1934–1935}
CHAPTER SIX {1935–1938}
CHAPTER SEVEN {1938–1939}
CHAPTER EIGHT {1939–1941}
CHAPTER NINE {1941–1943}
CHAPTER TEN {1943–1945}
CHAPTER ELEVEN {1945–1946}
CHAPTER TWELVE {1946–1949}
CHAPTER THIRTEEN {1949–1951}
CHAPTER FOURTEEN {1951–1952}
CHAPTER FIFTEEN {1952–1954}
CHAPTER SIXTEEN {1954–1956}
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN {1956–1957}
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN {1957}
CHAPTER NINETEEN {1957–1959}
CHAPTER TWENTY {1959–1960}
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE {1960–1961}
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO {1961}
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE {1962–1963}
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR {1964}
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE {1964}
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX {1964–1965}
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN {1966}
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT {1966–1967}
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE {1967–1968}
CHAPTER THIRTY {1968–1969}
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE {1969–1970}
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO {1969–1970}
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE {1971–1972}
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR {1972–1973}
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE {1973}
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX {1974}
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN {1974}
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT {1975}
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE {1975}
CHAPTER FORTY {1975–1976}
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE {1976–1977}
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO {1977}
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE {1977}
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR {1977-1978}
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE {1978–1979}
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX {1979}
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN {1979–1980}
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT {1980–1981}
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE {1981–1982}
CHAPTER FIFTY {1982}
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Notes
PROLOGUE
ON APRIL 27, 1982, less than two months before his death from cancer, John Cheever appeared at Carnegie Hall to accept the National Medal for Literature. While his colleagues stood and cheered (“John had nothing but friends,” said Malcolm Cowley), Cheever hobbled across the stage with the help of his wife, Mary. Months of cancer treatment had left him bald and pitifully frail, shrunken, but his voice was firm as he spoke. In his journal he'd referred to this occasion as his “Exodus” and reminded himself that literature was “the salvation of the damned”—the lesson of his own life, surely, and the gist of what he said that day at Carnegie Hall. “A page of good prose,” he declared, “remains invincible.” As John Updike remembered, “All the literary acolytes assembled there fell quite silent, astonished by such faith.”
Seven years before—his marriage on the rocks, most of his books out of print—Cheever had tried drinking himself to death. He was teaching at Boston University, beset by ghosts from his awful childhood in nearby Quincy: “There were whole areas of the city I couldn't go into,” he said later. “I couldn't, for example, go to Symphony Hall because my mother was there.” Updike was living on the opposite end of Back Bay at the time, and when he'd visit the small furnished apartment Cheever had taken near the university (“no more lived-in than a bird perch”) he'd notice the first dusty page of Falconer stuck in the typewriter. One night he came to take Cheever