Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [402]
Notes
For a man who hated to dwell on the past, Cheever left an almost appallingly vast paper trail, and I'm afraid these notes reflect that. His letters are scattered among various libraries and individual recipients all over the world; archives of particular interest are at the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary. The largest manuscript archives are at Harvard's Houghton Library and Brandeis, where most of Cheever's New Yorker stories are preserved. For a detailed list of items in each of the major archives, I recommend a series of articles by Francis Bosha (two are cited below), which have appeared intermittently in Resources for American Literary Study.
I will venture to guess that I am one of perhaps ten people—others include Cheever's children and his editor at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb—who have read all forty-three hundred or so pages (mostly typed, single-spaced) of Cheever's journal. Since 2000, this remarkable document and its attendant detritus (newspaper clippings, train tickets, business cards) have been available to the public at Houghton Library, whose excellent staff have done their best to make sense of it all. And yet it remains somewhat in disarray. A few volumes are haphazardly paginated, others are not, and anyway the pages are badly jumbled. A twenty-three-page segment of handwritten notes from Cheever's 1976 trip to Romania is included with Journal Four, which otherwise is concerned with the years 1955-56; the 242 pages of Journal Two have been shuffled like a deck of cards, skipping around willy-nilly between the years 1947 and 1953. And so on. During my research I compiled the most detailed chronology of Cheever's life that I could manage, and thus was able to restore the page order of the journal with a fair degree of accuracy. Then, once I'd transcribed what I needed, my family was displaced by Hurricane Katrina—whereupon my Xeroxed copy of the journal (or rather Ben Cheever's, alas), which had occupied four linear feet on the bottom shelf of my research cabinet, was drowned in the flood. I repeat that, fortunately, all the necessary parts were already on my computer, but the stately, organized document itself is lost to posterity. In any event, there would be no point in citing the unpublished journal: given the condition of the original, there is no way to cite accurately, and besides these notes are already intolerably swollen. The reader may assume that uncited Cheever quotations are from the unpublished journal at Houghton, or else from a curious memoir fragment that Cheever wrote in two-or three-page increments (double-spaced, perhaps fifty pages in all), sometimes titled “Bloody Papers.” This is available at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the better to distinguish it from the Houghton journal, I cite it throughout my first two chapters, where its use is most prevalent.
I did try to avoid repetition in these notes, with indifferent results. Interview subjects are cited initially, and thereafter only when needed for the sake of clarity. I took care to date my interviews—for whatever reason—though I rarely cite separate interviews with a previously cited subject (I conducted some twenty interviews with Mary Cheever alone). The reader may assume that uncited quotations are from personal interviews, and in general, when a source (of any kind) is explicitly given in the text, or glaringly obvious, I omit further citation below. Uncollected stories, when quoted, are cited (once) according to their original magazine publication or their appearance in Cheever's disavowed first collection, The Way Some People Live* The canonical Stories of John Cheever is only cited when its contents are quoted for their biographical (as opposed to critical) interest, and the same applies to the novels. In dating letters, Cheever tended to give the month and day (sometimes only the latter: “Wednesday” or “The Twelfth