Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [393]
Susan engineered the journal sale in the late eighties, laying out her father's twenty-eight notebooks on a long table in her apartment and letting various editors spend an hour or two alone with them. The bidding was lively, until Gottlieb offered the rather staggering sum of $1.2 million to publish excerpts serially in The New Yorker (where he'd succeeded Shawn as editor) and finally in a book from Knopf. The critic Ted Solotaroff, for one, was astonished by such largesse; as an editor at Harper & Row, he and a colleague had also examined the notebooks and been distinctly unimpressed. As he later wrote, “The image of Cheever that settled in my mind was of a writer who had just masturbated (he kept a record of that), doodling in the margins of his despair or boredom or occasional euphoria while waiting to hit the bottle.” Solotaroff was therefore “very surprised and not a little crestfallen” to find himself fascinated by the excerpts (perhaps 5 percent of the total journal) that appeared in six installments in The New Yorker from August 1990 to August 1991. Gottlieb, too, was satisfied with his selection, though he'd found the work “very, very painful”: “The material is so dark, and the suffering [Cheever] underwent is so at odds with the polite gentlemanly exterior that I had been exposed to.” It was worth it, though, to read mail from so many “mesmerized” readers—mostly. As Gottlieb recalled, “There were also those who thought, ‘Why are you doing this stuff? I don't want to read one more word about this dopey alcoholic fag.’ “
Cheever often worried that, if he were perfectly candid in his work, he would thereby reveal “an almost unremittant depression and a frowsty concern with death,” though he liked to think that readers of his journal, at least, would approve of his brave determination to bare even the darkest parts of his soul (“What a good man he is!”). In that respect, he might have been disappointed by the actual response to The Journals of John Cheever, published as a book in October 1991. While the beauty of the prose was, as ever, given its due, reviewers tended to be less than admiring about any aspect of the author himself. “For all his vaunted honesty, Cheever had the drunk's habit of evading responsibility and not acknowledging the chaos and pain he caused,” Mary Gordon wrote in the Times Book Review; “a sad and depressing book,” said Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post, “the record of a man so enchained within the prison of self that he was never able to embrace others, even those he most loved.” As for Updike, he seemed almost chastened by this final knowledge of the man he used to consider “sprightly, debonair, gracious;” even though he'd once had to dress the drunken, naked Cheever for a night at Symphony Hall, and even though he'd read the man's beyond-the-grave abuse in the Letters, Updike was nonetheless shocked by the Journals. “Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder,” he wrote in The New Republic. “[Cheever's] confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the dark gulf between outward appearance and inward condition…”
So much for the celebrant of sunlight.
And yet. At least one protesting letter appeared in the Times Book Review—this from Thomas J. Sullivan, the Georgetown undergraduate whom Cheever had invited (with his friend George McLoone) to Cedar Lane, sight unseen, some twenty-five years before: “Cheever spent an hour answering our questions and sharing with us numerous anecdotes about his life,” Sullivan wrote. “He later took us to his neighbor's pool, where he demonstrated the Australian crawl stroke as he had envisioned it when he wrote the short story, ‘The Swimmer.’ The John Cheever I visited with was a witty, grinning, intellectually stimulating human being.”
A YEAR AFTER THE PUBLICATION of the Journals, an episode of Seinfeld titled “The Cheever Letters” was aired. The plot is a little hard to explain in so many