Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [388]
* With Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
* Previous recipients included Nabokov, Auden, Welty, Edmund Wilson, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Lowell.
EPILOGUE
CHEEVER DIED almost at the pinnacle of his fame, and would have been delighted by all the posthumous applause. “Front page, Edgar!” he used to badger his barking dog, when the subject of his own obituary came up. “Front page!” The front page is what he got, almost everywhere that mattered. “JOHN CHEEVER IS DEAD AT 70,” proclaimed Michiko Kakutani's generous Times obituary; “NOVELIST WON PULITZER PRIZE.“ Cheever's reputation as “a kind of American Chekhov” was duly noted, the big themes of his work were all explored at gratifying length, and a few favorite pensées of the author (qua public figure) were quoted in full: “It seems to me that man's inclination toward light, toward brightness, is very near botanical. … It seems to me to be that one's total experience is the drive toward light—spiritual light. …”
Indeed, it was this Cheever—”A Celebrant of Sunlight,” as Time hailed him—who received by far the most attention, and never mind that the man and his work were often quite gloomy. The Boston Globe mourned Cheever with not only a front-page obituary, but also a fine homage on the editorial page that was intended to fix his fame for all time as both a marvelous writer and a “good and generous man”: “Greater authors there are than Cheever, but painfully few of whose work it can be so emphatically said: It delighted us. … In a world of Calibans, John Cheever was pure Prospero: He, too, bestowed magic.” Even the reclusive William Shawn (whom Cheever always suspected of having it in for him) came forth to praise Cheever as “one of the country's great literary figures of the last fifty years … humane, warmhearted, and brilliant.” Perhaps most poignant was a tribute in the Quincy Patriot Ledger, which delicately alluded to the author's wayward past: “John Cheever's death Friday at 70 leaves a gap that it would take a very special person to fill—a youngster with a love of writing and the courage to pursue it until maturity brings a mastery of prose and, finally, of personal failings.” On the South Shore, at least, neither his courage nor his personal failings were forgotten.*
And to the South Shore he returned at last, for lack of any desirable alternative. Cheever himself used to tell his family to bury him in the backyard, but they couldn't bring themselves to consider the matter until the very end, by which time Cheever was in no condition to say whether that was still his wish. Fortunately, his niece Jane had an appealing solution. Long ago the family had bought a plot in the Nor-well Center cemetery, about fifteen miles from where Cheever was born, and a space remained available beside his parents—an eternal proximity that might have given him pause, though it seemed preferable to some obscure spot in Queens. Federico, who'd never set foot on the South Shore until his father's funeral, said, “It was the last place in the world he would have wanted to be buried.” And yet it's just possible that Cheever might have decided, after all, that death was precisely the right time to go home again. “Nothing seems as genuine and vital to me as the life of the family I have left,” he'd reflected back in 1940. “Living in New York I've seen people grow old and buildings torn down, I've seen women cry and funeral processions but when I try to recall the way people live and die I think of my mother and my father and the people who live on our street.”
June 22 was a lovely day in Norwell—a “very clear, vertical, Cheever day,” as Gurganus put it. The North River sparkled through the trees,