by Owen Lipstein July/August 2009
The Far Side of Paradise: Blake
John Cheever was regarded as one of the foremost American fiction writers—during his own lifetime, especially near the end, in the 1970s. Since then, academics have moved away from Cheever’s work—perhaps due in part to his slice-of-life style which doesn’t fit neatly into a particular classroom discussion—and the general reader has simply forgotten him.
Until now. The Cheever family gave biographer Blake Bailey unprecedented access to over 4 million words from Cheever’s unpublished journals, as well as his address books, photos and letters. In the copiously-researched, 784-page result, Cheever: A Life (Knopf, 2009), we are introduced to the man behind the artist: a man who struggled with family relationships, battled with homosexual urges, wrestled with alcoholism, and undulated between narcissism and self-doubt—and who somehow still managed to be a prolific genius.
When Bailey spoke with us, he helped not only to demystify the exceptionally tortured artist, but to make the case for his reinstatement in the American cannon.
Owen Lipstein: A tiny fraction of Cheever’s journal, replete with depression, alcoholism, adultery and bisexuality, was published posthumously as The Journals of John Cheever [(Knopf, 1991)]. Did he want that writing to get out?
Blake Bailey: Well, on that subject—as on every subject—Cheever was of about five or six different minds. In the early years, the 1950s, he said, “I find myself rereading my journal and thinking how wonderful it is, and how nice it would be to publish it or give it to a library—and I don’t want that at all. This is personal; this is an exercise in refreshing my memory [for the work].” But later on he rewrote a section of it and donated it to his manuscript collection at Brandeis, and toward the end of his life—or so his older son, Ben, claimed—Cheever had decided definitely in favor of posthumous publication. However, I think—and I’m not entirely sure about this—if he had his druthers he would have had it published after his widow Mary’s death.
OL: In your book, you describe an incident from the 60s where Cheever has just had an affair with a sailor named Calvin Kentfield, and he shows a scandalous part of his journal to the grand dame of the house he’s staying in—hoping for a reaction. That’s just one of these peculiar show/not-show tendencies he had, isn’t it?
BB: Absolutely. Again, when you read over the entire 4,300 plus page single-space-typed journal, you think to yourself, My God, this man had nobody to confide in. The implicit loneliness of the whole enterprise is absolutely overwhelming.
OL: It is overwhelming.
BB: He didn’t have anyone to talk to. He had a very contentious and erratic relationship with his family. He had no intimate friends. He saved everything of that nature for his work, and the laboratory for his work and for his emotional turmoil was his journal. So when he had something difficult that he simply couldn’t bear to hold inside—not only on that occasion, but on others, like later, when he was trying to confess his homosexuality to his son, Ben—he gave him his journal to read. That was sort of the way he went about it when he couldn’t formulate those sorts of things on a social basis.
OL: To read your biography is to witness the pain and suffering and the self-loathing he went through. Could you comment on him as both a pioneer—a person who wanted to be out but couldn’t quite be out—and a prisoner of his own battle with his sexual preference?
BB: I think an intriguing dimension of his particular struggle is that it’s sort of near the evolution of that issue in this country over the course of the 20th century, and Cheever was definitely quite conscious of that. Right before he had that relationship with Kentfield in Hollywood [he wrote] all of these remarks in his journal about having seen Gore Vidal on TV and how Vidal “doesn’t comport himself like a conventional fairy,” as Cheever would have put it—and that “people of the fold,” as Cheever would say, “are no longer being constrained into attitudes of rancor and bitterness, and that a better day is coming,” in short.
Then he went to [the] Iowa [Writers’ Workshop] in 1973 and met Allan Gurganus, who was really the first out gay man who was totally comfortable in his skin that Cheever had ever met; Cheever had known a lot of gay men at Yaddo, so this was eye-opening, especially since Cheever was attracted to him. It made his demonstrating that attraction much easier.
But I don’t think that Cheever ever got to the point where he could accept a person of his own generation being frankly gay. He was shocked and angered when one of his old [United States Army] Signal Corps friends told him that he had “had his cock sucked, too, on occasion—it’s not a big thing to worry about.” Cheever said, before he’d finished that sentence, “I decided to never see him again as a friend. And I never did.” And [when] John Ettlinger, his old dear, dear friend, confessed to Cheever a few years before his death that he had, too, led that sort of bifurcated life—that was profoundly shocking to Cheever.
OL: How he was he able to produce this amount of great creative work when he was drinking so much?
BB: Well, one of several of Cheever’s admirable qualities was an iron discipline. Part of that was instilled in him at childhood: he was a Quincy [Massachusetts] Cheever, and these were not frivolous people. These were people who were taught to be tough, and [while] Cheever was not particularly tough about certain aspects of his life, he was rigorously devoted to his work. Only toward the end of his alcoholism could alcohol really overwhelm that impulse. Quite apart from any conscious discipline, Cheever was the sort of genius to whom writing was such a pleasure and joy and bounteous overflowing, that alcohol, until the very end, couldn’t entirely interfere with it. And, Cheever kept himself sane with his art; again, he was a man without intimates and he had no one to confide in, so he had to work out all that pain on the page.
