‘He was a wise man on the page and an idiot at the lunch table.’



Relax. This is a critical commentary, not an extension of the author’s earlier memoir of her father. Slices of biography are served but sparingly; and Susan Cheever WAS there when her father’s work was being cooked and prepared. Commendably, her aim is to inform and deepen, not scold and restrict.

That takes some nobility. That John Cheever was an alcoholic, snobbish, bad-tempered, walking disaster area has been well known since the publication of his journals and letters in the early 90s. It seems he over-achieved in sulking. During a stay in a drying-out facility - one of many - he would use his allotted calls to telephone his adult daughter at work (forty ‘blocks’ away) to loose torrents of molten self-pity. He wasn’t being treated like a feted writer but like a common soaker! Worse, they made fun of his…accent! (Imagine the voice of the dodgy mayor from The Simpsons and you’ve mostly got it.)

How such muddled human beings spin their lives into art is an enduring mystery, treated here with a careful balance of candour, respect, and with room for awe.

We learn the career-defining The Stories of John Cheever was really the swan-song of that career, largely intended as a cash-in following the unexpected success of Falconer. Grouping the stories together and publishing them was the brainchild of Cheever’s editor, not the author, who had an almost pathological fear of revisiting the past. The stories’ order was also the editor’s doing; they were not, in fact, presented chronologically, but frequently moved around in compositional time to better vary the artist’s programme.

Susan was something of an artist’s model for many of the children in Cheever’s stories. It seems the seedy underbelly of the Cheever family was displayed so frequently in the pages of The New Yorker that the latter seemed more like a literary version of National Geographic. This has its funny moments. One tea-spraying moment comes when ‘The Country Husband’ comes up for analysis:

‘The story seems freer and richer than the previous stories, and the dinner table argument—a classic-goes on for two pages in which Louisa and Henry go at it while Francis Weed does everything wrong. Weed then goes upstairs and finds his older daughter flopped down in bed reading a sleazy magazine, True Romance. I did read a lot of gossip magazines, but this happened to be some soft-core porn that I had sent away for from an ad.’

The story, for many Cheever’s greatest, was written to buy braces for his daughter, and with much complaint from the author about this fact. The result - a story that sweeps from death to life to wanting to shag the babysitter to visions of men in golden mail riding elephants - is masterful. Susan is not being facetious when she says she is proud to have had the crooked teeth that inspired the story - and few will disbelieve her. Good writing, after all, does not require pure intentions.

Susan is alert to aspects of Cheever’s work that others miss. When a Cheever story starts with contempt, she notes, it inevitably ends in fear, as in ‘The Angel of the Bridge.’ While the stories carefully paint the pastel watercolors of the suburbs, she argues, they frequently descend into horror, and the road there is lit by the energy of illicit sex and unwanted desires. The early masterpiece ‘The Enormous Radio’ introduces a surreal note, with its radio that magically picks up neighbours conversations and their deepest secrets. Susan also perceptively notes that what most people miss about ‘The Swimmer’, a surreal tale in which the seasons change in a single afternoon, is the story’s ending.

Usefully, the book reprints the stories under discussion at the back end - and all are well chosen. I am pleased to see ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ included here, not least because Julian Barnes’s recent selection unaccountably excluded it. In a just world, this clear-eyed labour of love will send readers back to the rest of John Cheever’s considerable body of work.