Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [395]
And what of the children? Most children are ambivalent about their fathers; Cheever's are more so, as anyone who reads Susan's various memoirs will gather. “[M]y father loved his children,” she wrote in the first and most affectionate one. “The three of us were, as he said, ‘the roof and settle’ of his existence. As individuals we often displeased him, but as a unit we were cherished and indispensable.” This is certainly true, though Susan is also eloquent about the damage done by self-absorbed alcoholic parents and John Cheever in particular, writing of her own inherited struggle with alcohol in Note Found in a Bottle* Her mother, however, categorically denies that Susan was ever a real alcoholic, regarding such a preposterous (to her) idea as simply “part of [Susan's] identification with her father.” And Ben would agree, at least, that his father has cast a long and complicated shadow over Susan's life: “I always feel like she's marrying Daddy,” he remarked in John Cheever and Family. “First she married the son of the man who published his first story. Then she married a man who was like Daddy appeared to be—went to Princeton, had some money, wrote full-time for The New Yorker. Then she married an alcoholic writer at the top of his powers, which is Warren Hinckle.” The irony is that Cheever himself would hardly have wanted—very often did not want—such an odd, talented, challenging daughter, which of course Susan knows better than anyone. As she observed, more or less cheerfully, “In many ways I was a tremendous disappointment to them”—Mary included—”I'm proud to say, and hope I've continued to be, since what they wanted me to be is pretty empty.”
As for Ben, writing about his father in the Letters might have been the “beginning of identity,” but it was hardly the end of it. His first two novels, The Plagiarist and The Partisan, were both about domineering literary father figures, and both reflect something of what it's like to feel as if one were “a minor character in someone else's book,” and never mind the more fraught sexual issues. That said, Ben has since written a number of books that have little to do with father figures one way or the other.
Federico, for his part, feels somewhat fortunate in comparison: “I think my experience as a child was quite different from Ben and Susan's, which explains partially our very different trajectories in life. To some degree, when you're the child of a relatively famous person you have the choice of going into the family business or not. I decided not to. But I think he was judgmental with them in a way he wasn't with me, and as a result they spent a lot of their lives chasing his approval through proxies, while I haven't.” And yet Federico's childhood was far from ideal, given his frequent isolation with a ruinously alcoholic father; one can't help wondering whether the memories make him angry or sad sometimes. “I was cast in the role of a helpmate, and wasn't really entitled to have anger,” he explained.
Sometimes it pisses me off massively … but what do you do with that? There's no help for that. You do what you do.
I don't know what it would be like to come from a normal family. I have not a clue. It's interesting because I'm bringing up my own children and they have, like most children, space to indulge themselves—to be angry without reason, run around and do stupid things, to test their parents’ love. This was not something I ever had.
And what, finally, of Max? A few days after Cheever died, he found himself alone in his little apartment. There were no more errands to run, no funerals to attend; his therapist had advised him to stop writing for a while; he couldn't go back to Utah, what with one thing and another, and for the moment he was unemployed. Cheever was gone,