Home Before Dark
Cheever, Susan
HOME BEFORE DARK Susan Cheever/Houghton Mifflin/$15.95 George Sim Johnston In the last decade many skeletons have been loosed from the literary closet and made to dance obscenely. Did the good...
...we seem to be getting the atmosphere of the man without excessive biographical luggage...
...Despite (or perhaps because of) the acting, the charm which infuses Cheever's work also managed to surface in his life...
...Home Before Dark may prove profitable, and may keep alive a career that was not exactly lighting up the literary firmament, but it is not exploitative...
...The best treatment of this ambivalent situation is Henry James's The Aspern Papers...
...Why else should Mailer write about himself in the third person...
...The book rings true...
...Great humorists (Swift, Twain, Waugh) are often melancholies...
...His daughter writes that "he taught us, perhaps without meaning to, that appearances are crucially important-not because one is judged by them so much, but because they represent some inner dignity, some statement about a way of meeting the world...
...After slapping Miss Cheever on the wrist for writing this book, I must say that she has produced a fine work...
...And in his daughter's defense it must be said that John Cheever never hesitated in his own work to make the family skeletons dance for the public.r the public...
...When he and his family lived in Manhattan, in an apartment a few feet from the Queensboro Bridge, he put on his orie good suit and grey felt hat every morning and rode the elevator to the lobby with the other men heading out to the office...
...Often when we meet a writer in the flesh, we are meeting the goose after enjoying the pate de foie gras...
...Contemporary writers are routinely pilloried the moment their posthumous selves appear in galley...
...His aristocratic New England background was partly sham...
...But while I may be intrigued by the material Miss Cheever is retailing, I do not think she should be admired for taking it public...
...The earliest piece in The Stories of John Cheever (1978) was published in 1947...
...I think this small book will prove superior to any official biography, which will undoubtedly be the size of a cigar humidor and tell us how often Cheever cut his toenails...
...A recent book about Hemingway demonstrated how "Papa's" public image was to a large degree one of his most carefully wrought fictions...
...There was ferocity beneath the patrician manners...
...He spent almost twenty years turning out slight apprentice fiction, and it was not until 1957 that he published his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, a wonderful book that has never been given its due...
...Was Henry James gay...
...Susan Cheever makes the interesting observation that her father's style was influenced by the cadences of Cramner's Book of Common Prayer...
...Instead, he put them in order, showed them arouod, and left them with no stipulations...
...He recorded much else, as well, in prose which is as good as any he wrote...
...At least two reviewers have called her "courageous...
...The most impressive thing about Cheever, which his daughter does not discuss, is his amazing career of self-improvement as a writer...
...a French poet once asked, our servants will do that for us...
...Did the good Doctor Johnson have himself chained and whipped by Mrs...
...In these volumes, he recorded much that is unseemly-his bouts with drugs, alcoholism, literary groupies, and, near the end, homosexuality...
...The extracts from his journals, moreover, have the same atmospherics as his stories...
...It is far better written and more adroitly conceived than her novels...
...Flaubert's family sat on his literary remains for years...
...One admires them for it, while one is also grateful that they eventually let go...
...The front was partly protective coloration and partly a matter of conviction...
...In a time when the styles of even the most accomplished novelists have an underlying journalistic slick, Cheever's later voice is like a benediction...
...Frost, Lowell, Berryman, and Kerouac are all doing time in the stocks for bad behavior...
...Admirers of Cheever's work may be permitted a double standard in approaching Susan Cheever's disclosures about her father...
...And the revelations about boozing and sleeping around which have received so much attention are actually a small part of the book...
...Who would want such courage in his family...
...But why all the fuss because John Cheever took advantage of groupies, made passes at young men in the woods, and hid his empties all over the house in Ossining...
...Years later, in his big white suburban house, his favorite place to hide his empties was behind the New York Edition of Henry James...
...And now, thanks to his daughter, they have been joined by the late John Cheever...
...His style improved imperceptibly from story to story until he had one of the finest voices in contemporary American letters...
...I'm trying to become subtle, melancholy, pallid, urbane and witty-all the things I'm famous for and that I, as you well know, have never been," he wrote to a friend...
...Many of the anecdotes in this biographical memoir are like drafts for a Cheever story...
...Live...
...Good writers put their best selves into their work, not their lives...
...The writing is expertfy pitched in the key of her father's middle period, and she follows the haphazard, anecdotal strategy of Andrew Field's superb Nabokov: A Life in Part with great success...
...Any writer, in fact, who comes on strong in public is probably faking it to a degree...
...James (who himself lit one of the great bonfires in literary history) comes out against the "publishing scoundrel" who, for the sake of posterity, tries to wrest a bushel of love letters from the aging mistress of a great poet...
...He did not light a literary bonfire when he knew he was dying...
...Gore Vidal (confusing platonic affection with practicing homosexuality) assures us that it was so...
...I would give my word processor to be able to read all twelve volumes...
...In the darkest depths of the library stacks academic drudges are putting together the evidence...
...John Cheever seems to have crafted a mask along the design of his fiction...
...Cheever was a professional writer of stories for seventeen years before that date...
...Nor did he secrete his intimate journals, from which most of his daughter's book derives, in an academic time capsule...
...Cheever, moreover, seems to have been an accessory to his own exposure...
...Thrale...
...The discrepancy is compounded when the writer has created an elaborate persona to accompany his work...
...Perhaps style is the man...
...Revelations about a writer one admires are fascinating...
...Her remark to the New York Times that "we could not suppress it, he was a public figure," is disingenuous...
...From the lobby he would walk down to the basement, to a windowless storage bin,-hang up his hat and suit, and sit down in his boxer shorts to his typewriter...
Vol. 18 • February 1985 • No. 2
