The Sunday Times
November 15, 2009
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
American author John Cheever

The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon

In 1979, three years before his death, a survey found that John Cheever ranked third (behind Saul Bellow and John Updike) among living American writers whose work was expected to “endure and be read by future generations”. This fame was not to last, however. As Blake Bailey points out in his compelling biography of the great short-story writer, “if Cheever were eligible for such a survey today…it’s unlikely he would appear anywhere in the top 20”.

Given this diminished reputation, it is now hard to believe that Cheever’s face once graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, and he was even featured in a Rolex advert. During his prime in the 1950s, he was the Chekhov of the American suburb, an eminently civilised voice whose tales of philandering commuters and lonely housewives (a staggering 121 of which were published in The New Yorker) defined Mad Men territory. In The Five-Forty-Eight, for instance, a businessman on an evening commuter train is confronted by his gun-toting jilted mistress. In The Swimmer, a disillusioned suburbanite decides to swim home from a cocktail party through his neighbours’ pools. In Cheever’s own words, his stories depict “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat”.

Cheever certainly fitted the bill as the bard of the upper middle class. Born in 1912 into an ‘‘old’’ Boston family, the sort with ancestors named Ezekiel, he had a headmaster’s face and a crisp waspish voice. Married with three children, he lived in a leafy New York suburb, where he served as a volunteer fireman. He wore smoking jackets and had a fling with the wholesome blonde actress Hope Lange. His stories had the authority of inside jobs, written by a man who understood what it was like to worry about how his lawn looked.

Soon after Cheever’s death, however, this image crumbled with the publication of his letters and journals. The author, it turned out, was a serious drunk who would bolt gin before lunchtime. At the age of 50, he suffered a bout of delirium tremens so severe that he thought a copy of The New York Times containing a rave review of his work was, in fact, a confession the KGB was making him sign.

Even more shocking were revelations of his secret taste for homosexual sex, including rough trade with men picked up in train ­stations. This tension between image and reality only increased his need to drink, and to write. “In an upper-class gathering I suddenly think of myself as a pariah,” he confessed in his journals, “a small and dirty fraud, a deserved outcast, a spiritual and sexual impostor, a loathsome thing.”

Bailey’s frank depiction of this hidden life raises the question of how central these revelations were to Cheever’s eventual loss of status. Did the country-club types who formed his ideal readership drop him once they discovered he was prowling the men’s room at Grand Central Station? Or was his decline more a question of changing literary fashions, as postmodernism and dirty realism gained sway?

Bailey’s biography makes it clear that while both of these featured in Cheever’s declining reputation, the central reason for his fall from grace is that he abandoned the short story to seek legitimacy as a novelist, even though he was never at his best with the longer form. One of his editors wondered “how Cheever could compress the material for four or five novels into 20-odd pages” while leaving his novels feeling relatively threadbare.

This misguided quest was fuelled in part by financial insecurity, and by the need to keep up with his great rivals, Updike and JD Salinger. According to Bailey, by 1971, “never again would [Cheever] complete another ambitious, first-rate short story”. Even though his novels were critically acclaimed and, in the case of Falconer, bestsellers, they failed to enter the canon in the same way as Rabbit, Run or The Catcher in the Rye.

One closes Bailey’s monumental study hoping that Cheever’s stories will gain their proper place in that canon. The Stories of John Cheever, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1978, remains the greatest single collection of short fiction by an American. As Bailey points out, Cheever’s work encompasses the entire range of the short story, deploying not just stark suburban realism but also magic, whimsy and humour to expose the soul of the American middle class. They should be read by anyone interested in the genre.

It took a Hollywood film, last year’s Revolutionary Road, to resuscitate the reputation of another great chronicler of the American suburbs, Richard Yates (the subject of Bailey’s previous biography). One can only hope that some A-list producer is currently making his way through Cheever’s stories with a similar resurrection in mind.

Cheever by Blake Bailey
Picador £25 pp770