Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [397]
Even his status as Ossining's “most prominent treasure” (a humble man who used to bring coffee to his barber!) seemed to wane after his death—indeed, Cheever lived just long enough to see the writing on the wall. “Superintendent Wishnie moved at a town meeting that a short street be named John Cheever Street,” he wrote the Dirkses in March 1982. “This was stopped by the baglady Jodine Wang. I want to name a street Jodine Wang Street.” Twenty-four years would pass before Cheever's name was finally bestowed on the main reading room at the Ossining Public Library, the only memorial in his adopted hometown. That, however, is one more memorial than he's gotten in Quincy or its environs. The house where Cheever was born, at 43 Elm Avenue, is now occupied by one Ronald Goba, who—despite being the retired director of English for Hingham public schools—knew nothing of Cheever's former occupancy until a few years ago, when a lone researcher appeared on his doorstep. “I'll tell you this,” said Goba. “There are no Cheever ghosts in here.” Nor at Thayer, where only a few of the faculty bother to recall (rather sourly) that Cheever was expelled for smoking and wrote a smart-alecky article about it for some magazine. And finally in Norwell—next to his father for all time (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on”)—Cheever's lichen-stained headstone sags a little into the earth. “He's kind of our lost child,” said Edward Fitzgerald of the Quincy Historical Society.
“I'm not inclined to think of myself as being remembered for anything,” Cheever said with characteristic (if calculated) modesty in 1979. “It seems to me that a writer is obviously mortal, and looking at the history of literature, a great deal that is splendid is splendid only for a very brief period of time.” For all the delight he took in his own fame, Cheever's shade just might be pleased with the less-than-general readership he's ended up with (for now): this includes other writers, certainly, as well as discerning people the world over. And no wonder. As Updike wrote in his New Yorker obituary, “He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been.”* Impervious to trends, Cheever remained true to a highly peculiar vision, and his archetypal world endures—waiting to be rediscovered by those who remember him, if at all, as a suburban writer or a New Yorker writer or, for that matter, “a writer who was gay.” In the meantime he will never lack champions among the initiated. In 2004 Jonathan Yardley called The Stories of John Cheever an “essential monument of American literature,” and Eggers went so far as to insist “that Cheever writes beautifully and with as much lust for words and life as anyone this country has yet produced”—this while imploring a new generation to delight in his novels as well: “They are so filled with love that it's hard to believe that a man wrote these sentences, and not some kind of freakish winged book-writing angel-beast.”
“Angel-beast” is a useful epithet for the man, whose older son can't help feeling annoyed by strangers who seem “closer to John Cheever than [he] ever did,” simply because they happened to read some books. Take the case of Patrick Coyne, a New York cabbie who used to give free rides to people who shared his love of Cheever; when this got back to Liz Smith, the columnist, she asked Coyne to supply her with a “short,