Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [344]
The parturition of a writer, I think, unlike that of a painter, does not display any interesting alliances to his masters. In the growth of a writer one finds nothing like the early Jackson Pollock copies of the Sistine Chapel paintings with their interesting cross-references to Thomas Hart Benton. A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork.
Nicely said, but of course the book opens with “Goodbye, My Brother”—one of Cheever's two or three greatest stories, written some twenty years after his first published effort and almost five years after the oldest piece in the collection (“The Sutton Place Story”); such “early” stories do not remotely entail the literary equivalent of learning to eat one's peas off a fork. Suffice to say, however, that if Cheever had seen fit to include work prior to 1946 (as opposed to destroying the evidence whenever possible), the reader might well have noted some “interesting alliances” to Hemingway, Chekhov, O'Hara, and Fitzgerald, to name a few. And though the mature Cheever had mostly assimilated his influences, there's a lingering trace of Fitzgerald, perhaps, in the most exquisite line of his preface: “These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” In his little essay for Atlantic Brief Lives, Cheever had argued that Fitzgerald—far from being a dated relic of the twenties—was a “peerless historian” whose period details evoke the “excitement of being alive;” similarly, Cheever's reminder of a city bathed in “river light” conveys an entire epoch in a sort of magical amber.
The reception of The Stories of John Cheever was tantamount to a coronation, as reviewers seemed bent on topping each other's ecstatic, all but unstinting praise. Paul Gray of Time wrote that the book “chart[ed] one of the most important bodies of work in contemporary letters;” William McPherson opened his front-page review in the Washington Post Book World by declaring that “John Cheever's stories are, simply, the best.” Such compliments seemed almost trifling, though, next to John Leonard's definitive proclamation in the daily Times: “It would be meaningless and impudent to commend one or another story in a volume that is not merely the publishing event of the ‘season’ but a grand occasion in English literature. For whatever the opinion is worth, John Cheever is my favorite writer.” A number of Cheever's fellow fiction writers were likewise eager to give the master his due: “John Cheever is a magnificent storyteller,” Anne Tyler wrote in The New Republic, “and this is a dazzling and powerful book;” “John Cheever is the best storyteller living,” said John Irving in Saturday Review; and once again John Gardner (who'd extolled the merits of Bullet Park and Falconer as if to champion a great cause) chimed in, calling Cheever “the dean of the contemporary American short story.”
Amid all the superlatives, Cheever proved elusive to reviewers trying to define his place “in the stream” (as he would say). Gardner, a brilliant analyst of literary craft, remarked on Cheever's “postmodernist experiments”—authorial intrusion, self-parody, etc.—by way of concluding that the “stories are realistic in the best sense of the word, anchoring the dream in the concrete example, nailing the reader to the page with ruthless attention to detail character by character, scene by scene.” (One thinks of Cheever's advice to his Barnard student Judith Sherwin, the young woman who wanted to write magical realism: “put in a few signposts.”) Cheever's virtuosity is such that one forgets how subtly the sense of a dream persists in his otherwise “realistic” fiction,