Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [1]
He came to himself in the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center on East Ninety-third Street in Manhattan, where for twenty-eight days he shared a bedroom and bath with four other men. He couldn't remember leaving Boston. As for Smithers, it was grim: he was told that a man had recently jumped out the window in the ward where he slept; he was taunted in group therapy for pulling a fancy accent. “Displaying much grandiosity and pride,” one of his counselors noted. “Denying and minimizing grossly.” The staff was particularly struck by Cheever's tendency to laugh at “inappropriate” moments: little giggles would erupt while he recalled, say, a time he'd hurt his family. On the telephone with his daughter, however, Cheever would become tearful and say he couldn't bear it another day. And yet he sensed that an early departure would amount to suicide—and he wanted to live, oddly enough; he wanted to finish Falconer. “Cheever's is the triumph of a man in his sixties,” Bernard Malamud said of his colleague's miraculous resurrection. “Here he'd been having a dreadful time … but he stayed with it. And through will and the grace literature affords, he saved himself.” After his wife drove him home from Smithers on May 7, 1975, Cheever never took another drink.
Less than two years later, he appeared on the cover of Newsweek over the caption “A Great American Novel: John Cheever's ‘Falconer.’” (He'd also been the subject of a 1964 Time cover story, “Ovid in Ossining.”) After reading Falconer, the article proclaimed, “one has the ecstatic confidence of finishing a masterpiece.” Large claims were made for Cheever's place in world literature: “Long before Donald Barthelme, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon began tinkering with narrative conventions, Cheever had unobtrusively disrupted the expected shapes of fiction. As was the case with Faulkner in France, Cheever has been unexpectedly recognized and honored in Russia for the corrosive criticism of American civilization his understated fiction implies.” The fact that all but one of Cheever's story collections were out of print was described as “a scandal of American publishing.”
This was remedied the following year, 1978, when The Stories of John Cheever became one of the most successful collections ever published by an American writer. The book remained on the New York Times best-seller list for six months and won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the American Book Award. Cheever (appalled) was introduced as “the Grand Old Man of American Letters” on a Boston talk show. The bookish middle class, it seemed, identified en masse with Cheever's vision of suburban alienation; his “corrosive criticism” of their culture was mitigated, perhaps, by what the author himself wryly called his “childlike sense of wonder.”
Cheever was determined to put his resurgent celebrity to its best use. As Cowley observed, “Yankees are distinguished, and tormented as well, by having scruples.” Cheever—a consummately scrupulous, tormented Yankee—paid off old debts to the people and institutions that had been kind to him in harder times. He served on the board at Yaddo and, as chairman of the