The New York Review of Ideas » Q&A | June 2009
A Deeply Weird Human Being
Talking John Cheever with Blake Bailey.
By Ian Crouch
Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, biography of mid-century American writer John Cheever, was published by Knopf in March. Bailey, who made his name with A Tragic Honesty (Picador, 2003), an exhaustive account of the life of Richard Yates, has had a busy few years. In 2005, his new home in New Orleans was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about for Slate. He credits a Guggenheim Fellowship for getting his family back on their feet and allowing him to get back to work. In addition to Cheever, Bailey edited two Library of America editions of Cheever’s fiction.
On the Monday morning we spoke, Bailey had just finished reading John Updike’s review of Cheever in The New Yorker, his last published review following his death in late January. “Updike shit on me this morning, from the grave no less,” Bailey moaned. “Talk about a dubious distinction.” He was still smarting when we talked.
I know you loved Richard Yates before writing A Tragic Honesty. Did a similar infatuation lead you to Cheever?
I finished the Richard Yates book in April 2002 and I was casting around for something to do next. And I certainly considered Cheever, who is one of my two or three favorite writers. But I wanted to be the first biographer of whatever subject I chose, which was kind of a fatuous, fixed idea of mine, but there it was. Janet Maslin reviewed my Yates book for the daily New York Times, and did so very glowingly. She pressed the book on Cheever’s son Ben, her husband, and he let it be known that he would very much welcome another biography of his father.
You say in the acknowledgments that the book was “technically an authorized biography.” What do you mean by that?
We had a written agreement that was drawn up by the Wylie Agency, which handles Cheever’s estate. It stated that the family could not cooperate with anyone else for ten years or whenever my book was finished, which ever came first. And they had to provide me with all materials they had: letters, manuscripts, photographs, etc. And they could not make any input of an interpretive nature. They could vet the manuscript for factual stuff—-that didn’t happen in 1962, it happened in 1961—that sort of thing.
I know Scott Donaldson ran into trouble with the family when he wrote John Cheever in 1988. Did you want to avoid his fate?
It was mostly my idea. It’s very bad judgment to proceed on any project, especially something as volatile as Cheever, if you’re going to have the rug pulled out from under you, as can happen.
What else concerned you while writing the book?
What particularly worried me was Max Zimmer [Cheever’s lover at the end of his life]. Max was traumatized by what happened between him and Cheever. He cooperated with the greatest reluctance. But once he did commit himself, he gave me all the material he had, some of it very compromising and embarrassing.
I was worried about him for a lot of reasons. One, because my heart went out to Max and I wanted to do him justice. It reflects very poorly on Cheever. And it’s not a good idea to demonize your subject. It alienates the reader, and it’s kind of a self-defeating exercise.
What choice do you have?
None, really. In biography writing, you cannot conceal anything. You have to put it all on the table. If you put it all there, the truth will come out in the wash. Again, I felt that Cheever was essentially pathetic, and ultimately sympathetic, despite the darkness of that episode.
Biography readers have come to expect a redemptive arc in a story. That doesn’t happen with your book.
It’s one of the things that pissed off Updike, I think. My whole approach was to invert the conventional redemptive fable legend, where Cheever was concerned, because I knew it wasn’t true. Yes, on the surface of things, he finally gets sober and he wins the Pulitzer and lives happily ever after. And he comes to terms with his sexual orientation and has this [laughs] redemptive relationship with this young man who loves him.
Sounds like redemption to me.
Sure, but it’s not true. Cheever was more tortured toward the end than at any point in his life. He did not really come to terms with his sexual nature, and therefore with his essential nature, until the very end, so there is that touch of redemption, but not in the conventional terms that had been hitherto accepted.
Why do you think Updike took offense at your portrait of Cheever?
Updike is pretty inscrutable, and I think he also took umbrage with the fact that I imply in the book that he’s inscrutable. And he’s being a little bit disingenuous when he says he was shocked by the darkness of Cheever’s journals. Why should he be so shocked? He saw Cheever in Boston drinking himself to death. He was greeted by Cheever naked and sodden drunk outside the symphony. What did he think was going on here? Then he saw in the letters how nasty Cheever could be on the subject of himself, John Updike, so what’s to be shocked by?
Cheever and Updike are often associated with each other. They had similar backgrounds, were both realist prose writers. Who do you prefer?
Updike doesn’t have that magic. Updike is an exquisite stylist—and Updike knew this too, as he said on the Dick Cavett show, Cheever does things very easily that I could not do with a great deal of effort. And that’s not false modesty; that is absolutely true.
Cheever’s fiction has a wide-eyed, boyish quality to it. And several people in your book mention that Cheever was a boy trapped and overwhelmed by a confusing adult world.
His most characteristic mode was bewilderment. Cheever had a very difficult relationship with the real world. He was a deeply alienated and unhappy person much of the time, and he escaped from that by living in his own world. The way he generally communicated, even with the people closest to him, was through a mandarin persona. But behind that was a person who just did not have a clue. And was deeply insecure and afraid of what was going on around him, especially anything having to do with money or practical affairs.
You say that “The Swimmer” is Cheever’s best story.
“The Swimmer” is especially interesting as a window on how Cheever proceeded as an artist. His personal material, in his best work, is always beautifully synthesized. He was very obsessed at the time with his brother Fred’s absolute and infuriating tendencies to delude himself into thinking that he wasn’t this colossal, destructive drunk who had ruined his own life and his family’s, and that everything was just wonderful. And he, in fact, was terrified that he would deceive himself into very bad alcoholism, which he of course did.
And Cheever liked to swim?
Yes! He loved to pool-jump [laughs]. He’d go from pool to pool to pool, he had all these friends with pools, he didn’t have a pool, and he loved to swim. Because of his peculiar bent of mind, magic happens, the transformative magic of Cheever’s imagination. So the seasons change. The result is “The Swimmer,” which is one of the great short stories of this or any other centuries.
Whenever anyone talks about Cheever, they link him to the suburbs. Chip McGrath’s recent Times Magazine Cheever retrospective is called “The First Suburbanite.” But Cheever never finished high school, lived through crippling poverty during the Depression, and appears from his journals to have hated most of the people in Westchester. How do you reconcile the myth and reality here?
People who are not deeply familiar with Cheever’s work will say Cheever had some kind of conventional sociological insight into the American suburbs. No. It was highly subjective and perhaps all the more piercing because of that. What intrigued Cheever about the suburbs was that decorum was everything, and to such an extent that the basic facts of life had to be denied. The fact that people had ravening sexual impulses, that people got sick and died. And all these things that made life interesting [laughs], that are the very essence of human existence are denied.
When critics dubbed him the “hero of the barbecue and Volkswagen set,” they were overlooking what his work actually contains.
Right. Well that’s mainly the fault of Cheever’s association with The New Yorker, and the fault of Cheever’s own ambivalence. On the one hand, he very much wanted the authority that came along with being a New Yorker writer. He also wanted the blessing of the establishment, be it the literary establishment or the social establishment. He deeply coveted that sort of acceptance.
Even with middle class, non-writer types. Like the story you tell of the young Cheever dressing in his only suit and riding down the elevator with his neighbors, only to go write in his underwear in his apartment building’s boiler room.
That’s very telling where Cheever’s concerned. On the one hand he very much wanted to blend in with the respectable lawyers and professional types that lived in that building, but then of course, he goes down to the basement and takes his clothes off. And Cheever liked to be naked. I hope that came across in the book.
But he never really did blend in. He spoke with that ridiculous aristocratic accent. He was a closeted bisexual and a dangerous alcoholic. Not exactly the all-American man that the critics saw.
Cheever was deeply, deeply weird as a human being and writer. But because of ineradicable association with The New Yorker, critics, especially snippy, pretentious critics like John Aldridge and Irving Howe tended to look down upon him, And that’s a shame, because they are doing it still, especially at universities and in the academy.