Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [392]
The Letters of John Cheever appeared four years after Home Before Dark, and gave new life to the notion that Cheever's children were bent on defaming his once-beloved memory. “My usual feeling about mail is that it should be received, answered and destroyed on the same day” Cheever had written Litvinov. “I do save yours although I am afraid that, when we are both dust, some damned fool will publish them.” Cheever's fears were realized to a degree he could scarcely have anticipated, for his son saw fit to publish even his most graphic letters to lovers of both sexes—since, after all, these reflected an essential part of the man, and besides the cat was out of the bag. “Plus,” said Ben, “I thought with some bitterness that if I had had to acknowledge this truth, then others, a lot farther from ground zero, could jolly well come aboard.” Among Ben's defenders was William Maxwell, who invoked Voltaire (“we owe nothing to the dead but the truth”) in his remarks to the BBC: “Would we like or prefer to know less about Flaubert (who was quite as shocking in his diaries, if not more, than Cheever) in order to find him less upsetting? It is too silly.” And really Cheever could hardly have found a more gracious apologist than Ben, who insisted on his father's essential goodness—”his joy and the talent he had for passing that joy on to the people around him”—which was evident, said Ben, even in his cruelty or hypocrisy. Though he could accuse Updike, say, of “exhibitionism” and a “stony heart,” his lavish praise on other (more public) occasions was, at bottom, “an attempt to be better than he was.” Finally, if Cheever's spirit hadn't been so painfully divided, he might well have pursued an easier occupation than writing novels—Bullet Park, for instance: “Nailles is too good to be anyone you ever met, and Hammer is too bad,” Ben wrote. “By and large his letters convey the sociable lovable side of John Cheever, but the careful reader will see another figure lurking in the background, the vain, ungenerous, ruthless and self-indulgent Paul Hammer. It's like the wolf seen at the edge of an Alpine forest a moment before nightfall. Without that wolf there would have been no sleeping children, no thatched cottage, no village at all.”
The question of whether to publish the journal remained, and in this case it was hard to say what Cheever had wanted. “I seem unable to read this journal for what it is,” he'd written in 1956; “a means of refreshing my memory. I seem to look delightedly at myself in a glass. I think of it as something to be published and studied in libraries and this is not what I want at all.” As the years passed, though, and the pages mounted—more than four thousand in all, eventually—Cheever became increasingly convinced that the journal was not only a crucial part of his own oeuvre, but an essential contribution to the genre. At the very least he thought it belonged in a library somewhere. In the sixties he sent an excerpt to his manuscript collection at Brandeis,* and when he received his honorary degree at Harvard, he told Professor Daniel Aaron, in a burst of exuberance, that he wanted to “give [his] papers to Harvard.” In a cooler moment, Cheever clarified: by “papers” he meant specifically the journals, and by “give” he meant sell; Rodney Dennis, the curator of manuscripts at Houghton Library, offered five thousand dollars on the spot. “You're not serious,” said Cheever, and there the matter rested. After all, it wasn't merely an important literary document that Cheever proposed to part with, but a breathtakingly personal one. “I read last year's journal with the idea of giving it to a library,” he noted around this time. “I am shocked at the frequency with which I refer to my member.” Also, he couldn't fail to notice that he was awfully hard on his family—incessantly so in Mary's case (“she comes out very poorly and I am quite blameless which cannot be the truth”). † But toward the end, in any event,