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By Root 4149 0

words. George Costanza is meeting his girlfriend Susan's family for the first time. Susan's crotchety father, meanwhile, has sent George a box of Cuban cigars (“made special for Castro”), which George has dumped on his friend Kramer, who in turn has smoked them in a cabin belonging to Susan's father and burned the place down. When George breaks the news to the father, the man is devastated and takes to his bed. The next day, Jerry and George visit the apartment where Susan's family is gathered, and a doorman appears bearing a charred strongbox: “The only thing left from the remains of the fire,” he says. Susan opens the box in front of Jerry, George, and the family (but not her father, who remains in bed): “Letters … from John Cheever!” she brightly announces, then reads one aloud:

Dear Henry [Susan's father],

Last night with you was bliss. I fear my orgasm has left me a cripple. I don't know how I shall ever get back to work.

I love you madly,

John

Amid general consternation, Susan's father shambles in from the bedroom. “The box! My letters! Give me that! Who told you to open this?” The man's grown son, bewildered and almost tearful, exclaims “Dad! You and John Cheever—?“ “Yes!” the man says defiantly. “Yes! He was the most wonderful person I've ever known! And I loved him deeply”—he turns to his wife (a Waspy, sarcastic ice queen)—”in a way you could never understand!” Larry David, the show's writer and co-creator, explained that he'd used Cheever as the lover of Susan's father simply because “he was a well-known writer who was gay”*

One can only imagine how Cheever would have felt about being primarily known as a “writer who was gay,” but there it is. Because of this—to be exact, because he was a furtively bisexual writer who happened to marry and have children—a BBC documentary titled John Cheever and Family appeared in 1994, in which (as the London Times put it) “we are given a searing picture of the ripple effects of his life on the lives of his family.” Mary's performance is especially noteworthy. Pressed by the soft-voiced, remorseless off-camera interviewer to explain how she felt when she first suspected her husband “was not entirely heterosexual,” Mary evenly replied, “It didn't make an awful lot of difference to me.” Why not? Mary winced slightly, but smiled too, and chose her words with evident care: “By that time, our marriage was not a very full relationship …” The moment was characteristic. As Cheever's widow, Mary has answered many such questions, a bit grudgingly, and with a kind of bemused insinuation that there are better things to talk about. “What's important is what he wrote, not what he did,” she told the Boston Globe. “What was important in his life was to go on writing.” How important it was to her was resoundingly established in 1988, when she undertook what was described in the Washington Post as “the most expensive, protracted and vicious court battle to take place in recent years over a book.” The book was The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever, which had been proposed by a small publisher, Academy Chicago. For the token sum of fifteen hundred dollars, Mary had signed a contract for what she understood to be a selection of her husband's uncollected work, arranged in consultation with the family. This, however, was not what Academy Chicago (ultimately) had in mind; rather, they preferred a book that included everything omitted from The Stories of John Cheever: Hemingwayesque juvenilia (“Fall River,” “Late Gathering”), Depression-era potboilers (“His Young Wife,” “Saratoga”), topical fiction (“Frère Jacques,” “Behold a Cloud in the West”), army sketches scribbled at odd moments with a blunt pencil (“Sergeant Limeburner,” “The Invisible Ship”), and of course the entirety of The Way Some People Live, the very thought of which had never failed to make Cheever cringe in horror. After three years and almost a million dollars in legal fees, Mary “won” the case—that is, the contract was declared invalid—though Academy Chicago was still able to publish a collection of thirteen stories (including