The New York Review of Ideas » Q&A | June 2009

A Deeply Weird Human Being

Talking John Cheever with Blake Bailey.

By Ian Crouch

It probably didn’t help that Cheever appeared on both the cover of Time and Newsweek.

He was writing very odd and subversive work but at the same time, again he was this charming Westchester squire who was appearing on the covers of these magazines—the ultimate sanction of the middlebrow establishment. Highbrows like Norman Mailer could not take Cheever seriously because of that. Mailer would, of course, later go on to appear on the cover of Time himself.

Cheever thought real writers wrote novels. But his greatest achievements came in the short story form. Has that limited his reputation?

Yeah, I think so. But I think there are various reasons that he’s fallen out of favor. And it is true that story writers are less esteemed. Writers of the first rank we associate with their best work. We think of Nabokov, we think of Lolita. When we think of Fitzgerald it’s Gatsby, when we think of Hemingway, we think of The Sun Also Rises. These are all novels. There is solidity, as Cheever himself pointed out; there is a solidity to the novel that is undeniable. It makes its claim to posterity. Whereas stories, well, they’re stories. But it is in many ways a far more challenging craft. And I think that Cheever’s greatest stories—and there are ten of them, I think, that deserve mention as the best stories of the post-war era. Those in themselves should stake Cheever’s claim to the canon. But he also wrote very interesting novels. My favorite novel, just in terms of sheer readability is The Wapshot Chronicle.

The parts of Cheever’s infamous journal that you include in the book seem mostly personal. Comparing it to say, Susan Sontag’s recently published journals, it seems less intellectually curious. What did Cheever use the journal for: to talk about his personal life, to experiment with his writing, to question the universe?

I would venture to suggest that Sontag’s high-mindedness is a lot more conventionally intellectual than Cheever’s, and also a lot more tedious. When Cheever first started the journal, especially the first big volume from late 1939 through the War, it was mostly a laboratory for his fiction. He’s trying out dialogue, trying out scenes and characters.

He didn’t write about his daily life?

Occasionally there was conventional diary entry, private ruminations or what happened that day. What it eventually became was a very volatile synthesis of both life and fiction. One thing I really liked about them, something that Chip McGrath said in the Times piece, is that in the journal Cheever begins to write on some personal matter and before your eyes, in mid-sentence, or mid-syllable, it is refined into something that he suddenly shows the spark of his fiction. He’s refining it for fictional use, and it’s changing before your eyes.

What’s an example of that?

When he finds that letter that his son Ben wrote him, calling him and Mary the most selfish creatures on earth—which, of course, they were—he begins to write this aggrieved response, and suddenly it becomes something for his novel Bullet Park. [Laughs]. And that happened all the time. It was never just one or the other. And neither was Cheever’s life. His life was art and everything was performance for him.

When did he write in his journals?

My impression is that Cheever ate breakfast, and he went to whatever room he happened to be writing in at that time, and the first thing he did was to get the juices going by writing in his journal. That got the pistons working, and then he turned to fiction.

Having read your Richard Yates book, and now Cheever, I was struck by the parallels between the two men. Cheever drinking himself to near death in Boston was so similar to Yates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. And the basic depression, self-abuse, and willful destruction. At some point did you realize your subjects shared so much in common?

What I’m really interested in is the disparity between appearance and inner reality. In Yates’s case, here you have this guy who had this humiliating, seedy childhood with his alcoholic, promiscuous sculptor mother. He aspired to distance himself from all that by cultivating this quasi-Ivy League persona—with his Brooks Brothers clothes and wonderful manners, and his courtliness. And indeed Yates, for his many vagaries, was essentially a very shy, tentative, decent, decent person. But, he had a lot of anger. He was mentally ill, he was colossally alcoholic. So you have this guy going around, being charming when he was sober—which became more and more rare—wearing these beautiful clothes, on the one hand, but you had this other person who had the foulest mouth imaginable, who lived in these incredibly squalid Dostoyevskyian apartments—with the cockroaches around his desk chair.

You mention the disparity in Yates’s life, what about in Cheever’s?

In Cheever’s case, you cannot simplify it as just being disparity of appearance and inner reality. Cheever’s personality was so oddly compartmentalized. He was like a Chinese box, a very intricate thing full of paradox. You have the aristocratic manner versus the essential raffishness of Cheever, wanting to hang out with convicts [when writing Falconer] and walking around naked all the time. You had the person who claimed to have a Yankee horror of publicity and notoriety, while on the other hand he deeply, deeply coveted it. You have a person who professed to disdain respectability, and yet it was his fondest desire to be accepted.

Another commonality between Yates and Cheever, and I notice this in both books, is your role as the champion of the lost, forgotten, or underrated writer. Is this a conscious project in your work?

When I proposed the Yates book, I was not in a position to propose a more famous figure. I had to go with someone rather obscure, because I myself was very obscure. Here was a guy who I knew deserved to have canonical importance and who was totally forgotten.

Everything was out of print at that point, right?

He was totally out of print. But everything fell into place, otherwise I would never have sold that book. Richard Ford wrote that introduction to the Vintage reissue of Revolutionary Road, and the collected stories came out. In the case of Cheever, yes, his reputation has fallen into terrible eclipse in recent years. But Cheever still has a certain cache and I knew that with the support of the family, and after the critical—though God knows not commercial—success of the Yates book that it would be a good thing in every way.

You portray Cheever’s relationship with New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell as complicated: part friendship and part rivalry.

Maxwell is a revered figure, and there’s a reason for that. He was a very gentle, kind, gracious, supportive person. But he was also deeply neurotic and tortured. And I think he felt somewhat betrayed by Cheever. And I think Cheever made him angry. He did a lot for Cheever. It was Maxwell who first said this guy is perfect for the magazine. He’s the guy who got him the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle. But there was a sinister side to William Maxwell. And if you fell out of his graces, he would find a way to exact his revenge. And he did.

Thanks for talking. Feeling any better about the Updike review?

Well, we have our pull quote: “A triumph of thorough research and unblinkered appraisal.” Then he goes on to say that it’s depressing and sort of relentlessly dark, and so on and so forth.

Well, at least you got the pull quote.

Yeah. I’m trying to focus on that. ♦