* Throughout, journal and journals refer to the unedited mass of material as written by Cheever; The Journals to the published selection.
Chances are most readers will come to John Cheever’s Journals via his fiction. That is natural and proper. Whatever value his journals might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories. Depending on your point of view, that audience’s loyalty had already been tested or its curiosity whetted by his daughter Susan’s memoir, Home Before Dark, and the selection of letters edited by his son Ben. This “rapid posthumous invasion of [Cheever’s] privacy,” as John Updike deemed it, seemed modest and discreet in the face of the relentless, remorse-filled exposure of The Journals.* For more than forty years, it turned out, Cheever had subjected his liver-damaged soul to a daily regimen of self-excoriation.
All of this—memoir, letters, journals, and, to bring things right up to date, Blake Bailey’s massive biography—would normally be regarded as retrospective trellising around which the great works could be shown to have blossomed. A degree of shock, in such circumstances, is not unusual. In Cheever’s case, the gulf between the received image of the revered author and the revealed truth of “a writer who had just masturbated (he kept a record of that), doodling in the margins of his despair or boredom or occasional euphoria while waiting to hit the bottle” was, in some quarters, a cause for profound dismay.
But The Journals disturbs readers’ assumptions in another, more subversive and complex way. For Cheever was in that very weird minority of writers—Christopher Isherwood and the Goncourt brothers spring immediately to mind—whose private, unpublished writings contained much that was as good as, possibly even better than, the stuff that made their posthumous publication feasible. I would go further and suggest that this selection from his journals represents Cheever’s greatest achievement, his principal claim to literary survival.
Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Already, by 1959, he found his early stories “too breezy” and was soon trying to resign himself to being an “inconsequential writer.” Reading The Naked and the Dead made him despair of his own “confined talents.” He worshipped Bellow, admired and bitched about Updike, fretted that while Roth and others were “playing stink finger and grabarse I admire the beauty of the evening star.” Not surprisingly, these admissions of literary inadequacy were always tempered by a wounded defensiveness. Firmly rooted in “the genteel tradition,” his “old-fashioned fiction” about “the country-club set” served as a tacit rebuke to the unfettered excesses of “the California poets.”
Actually, some of the fiction—the 1962 story “A Vision of the World,” for example—is a lot stranger than one imagines it to be, or remembers it being. And while many stories are set in the suburbs, they often have the quality of “violet-flavored nightmare” that Cheever admired in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
Inevitably, The Journals reveals the germs of much that will eventually be transformed in the fiction. In 1972 we can observe the first faint, drunken glimpse of Falconer, so faint that when Cheever sobers up “it doesn’t seem to amount to much.” The reflection in “The Death of Justina” (1960) about how the soul might not leave the body but “lingers with it through every degrading stage of decomposition and neglect” is there, almost word for word, in a journal entry from the previous year. After you have read this passage in the starker context of The Journals—Cheever has run out of booze, is thinking of his dead mother while he is drying dishes—its force in the story is reduced by the knowledge that it has been craftily insinuated into the narrative. This happens time and again. Things we admire in the fiction—the eye for “traveling acres of sunlight,” the telling psychological detail, exuberant lyricism tinged with a residue of the last (or anticipation of the next) hangover—are spilled straight onto the pages of his journal.
The Journals also contains numerous hints of a kind of writer we do not expect Cheever to be. It’s not such a surprise to find that he can do proto-Carver—“On Sunday afternoon my only brother comes to call. He is told that if he drinks again he will die, and he is drunk”—but we don’t expect him, reflecting on Shea Stadium, in 1963, to anticipate the famous opening of DeLillo’s Underworld:
I think that the task of the American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. The umpires in clericals, sifting the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgments embodied in a migratory vastness.
Cheever is here describing a specifically American trajectory; fragments like the one about “law-abiding murderers” or the encounter with an old classmate and his wife are the kind of abbreviated fables Kafka might have written had he been born thirty years later, in Shady Hill or Bullet Park.
The neurasthenic strain in modern European literature—a strain that reaches breaking point in Kafka’s Diaries—could be conveniently arranged under a quotation from Kierkegaard’s Journal entry of 1836: “I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me—but I went away—and the dash should be as long as the earth’s orbit --------------------------------------------------- and wanted to shoot myself.”
Cheever was all too familiar with the gin-sodden, mid-twentieth-century residue of this sentiment: “you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody’s wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning you were dead.” On the very first page of The Journals Cheever records a trip to church on the second Sunday of Lent. It is presented as part of the normal round of Westchester life, but the threat of damnation, the fear that he is a sinner standing “outside the realm of God’s mercy” is measureless. His milieu may seem circumscribed—martinis, swimming pools, lawns—but it has the infinite brevity of that Kierkegaardian dash. The comfortable specificity and familiarity of the setting—the way rows are routinely and silently choreographed around the morning’s toast and eggs—is part of a larger torment. Cheever’s flickering back and forth between a yearning for light and the lure (alcoholic, carnal) of darkness, his urge to destroy himself—more subtly, his sense that “the most wonderful thing about life is that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction”—is rendered on a scale that is at once “ingrown” and vast.
Any reader of The Journals will quickly notice that Cheever’s incessant inventories of light and landscape have their own peculiar resonance. Once it becomes evident that he is talking about “the moral quality of light” or “an emotional darkness,” then the adoring evocations “of light and water and trees,” of corner drugstores in summer twilight—all the signature elements of Cheever’s topography—begin to hum with a dangerous current. A “hint of aberrant carnality” is never far away. Entire landscapes, however idyllic seeming, become coded expressions of longings and dread: “The morning light is gold as money and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting, the light that cannot be defined.” As the years pass the message becomes steadily more explicit, unavoidable. On Easter Sunday 1968, sixteen years after that first church service, thoughts of “the empty tomb” and “life everlasting” are interrupted by intimations of obscenity: “All those cocks and balls drawn on toilet walls are not the product of perverse frustrations. Some of them are high-hearted signs of good cheer.”
Cheever, then, was wrong to talk about his talent being “confined,” but it is entirely appropriate that, like a tongue probing an aching tooth, this was a word to which he insistently returned. As he explained in 1976, Falconer did not come from his experience of prison but from the myriad different kinds of confinement he had experienced “as a man.” What he does not say—how could he?—is that the forms in which he gave dramatic expression to this sense could be enlarged manifestations of confinement. Richard Yates griped about the way that “John fucking Cheever” was always getting published in the New Yorker—an honor that was constantly denied Yates—but for Cheever, the shaping demands of the short story, his acquired habits of fictive resolution, all the aspects of hard-won craftsmanship that stood him in good stead at the New Yorker, worked against his being able to plumb the complex depths of his being. Only in the shapeless privacy of his journal could he do that. If he was “writing narrative prose,” Cheever believed that “every line cannot be a cry from the heart.” So he stopped crying. In the journals, meanwhile, he went the other way, wept “gin tears, whiskey tears, tears of plain salt” and stopped worrying about narrative. The irony is that while he was instinctively hostile to the splurging of Kerouac and “the California poets,” his own best writing would derive ultimately from a sustained forty-year word binge with no thought of form, or—at least not until very near the end—of publication. A further irony follows: that the consummate craftsman should end up being reliant on the posthumous intervention of an editor to turn this repetitive mass of bellyaching, “booze-fighting,” and self-lament into a book with immense narrative power. This power derives from three closely intertwined sources.
One is the story of a marriage with its epic sulks, sexual lockouts (“Looking for a good-night kiss, I find the only exposed area to be an elbow”) and—though this is easily overlooked—interludes of long-shadowed harmony. The second is the author’s descent—already under way by the time The Journals begins—into (and eventual recovery from) alcoholism. Unless you are a recovering alcoholic—in which case you have had more than enough experience of this—it’s worth reading a couple of pages of The Journals when you get home at night, after you’ve got drunk at a dinner or in a pub. Let’s say it’s eleven at night. In an hour you’ll be asleep. But before you nod off, imagine what it must be like, being as drunk as this—no, a lot more drunk than this—not just every night but pretty much all day every day for decades. (A not untypical entry from 1968: “Dear Lord—who else?—keep me away from the bottles in the pantry. Guide me past the gin and the bourbon. Nine in the morning. I suppose I will succumb at ten; I hope to hold off until eleven.”) It must have been a form of insanity—albeit a madness Cheever shared with an extraordinary number of American writers. The unanswerable questions remain: even though drinking did him no good at all, even if by 1972 he seemed, in Bailey’s words, “permanently impaired by alcohol,” was it integral to what he ultimately achieved? Did he need its blurry delirium? Was it essential fuel for the journey?
The third strain is Cheever’s struggle to overcome, satisfy, and understand his sexual urges. He resolved, in 1959, not to become “the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semi-secret,” thereby announcing what, precisely, was in store. Effectively, Cheever’s slow discovery and eventual acceptance of his sexual identity conforms to the larger story of homosexuality in the twentieth century. In rough chronological order—and with many overlaps, contradictions, and relapses—we have: memories of adolescent horsing around with his friends (“cobbling,” as he terms it); sustained attempts to bury the allure by aping the censoriousness he fears would be visited on him if people only knew; periodic failures to resist the promptings of the body followed, predictably, by crippling remorse and renewed determination to suppress those urges (and corresponding increase in loathing for those who don’t even try); gradual acceptance (“I am queer, and happy to say so”), celebration, and realization that real harm was caused not by one’s sexual nature but by “the force that was brought to crush these instincts and that exacerbated them beyond their natural importance.”
Cheever’s eventual accommodation with his sexuality is not merely the story of personal rehabilitation; consciously or not, he is the beneficiary of a larger political struggle waged by and on behalf of men and women like him. In 1967 Cheever wonders if he will ever be “caught up helplessly in the storms of history and love.” The irony is that the journals of this self-absorbed, solipsistic, allegedly “friendless man” are freighted with history. And not only in the area of sexual orientation.
In 1962 there is a description of a scene in which, at the end of the day, people leave a beach: “It is always, for me, a moving sight, to see people pick up their sandwich baskets, their towels and folding furniture, and hurry back to the hotel, the cottage, the bar. Their haste, their intentness, is like the thoughtlessness of life itself…” Lovely, exact, poignant, it displays the observational grace and sweep typical of Cheever. But it is preceded by these two sentences: “I spend the day, as do many others, in watching Glenn orbit on TV, and I torment myself for not working. Once the man is in orbit, the crowds leave the beach.” So that timeless description of beach life and its aftermath was Cheever’s take on a specific and major historic event. Most entries lack that introductory, establishing context, but, thus alerted, we wonder how many more of these free-floating fragments are imbued with undated history. Combine that with the way in which the landscape and houses are an encoded—perhaps the better word is scrambled—inventory of psychosexual currents, and you have a sense of why so many entries in The Journals are possessed of “something much more mysterious than [the] bare facts” that occasioned them.
In seeking to define the narrative drive of any writer’s journals, there is a danger of marginalizing what is essential to their appeal, namely, the way that the incidental and irrelevant do not get pushed aside as must happen in the course of more streamlined narratives. So it should be added that, in the course of trips to Rome and Russia, Cheever reveals himself to be a brilliant if intermittent travel writer; that he was an insistent and penetrating reader of a wider variety of literature than we might have expected (“I read George Eliot and find myself to be so physical a person, so tactile, so crude, that when anything is touched—when Deronda at last puts his hand around an oar—I am thrilled”); that, finally, he succeeded according to his own stated terms:
To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about my sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depths of my discouragement—I seem to glimpse it in my dreams—my despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window; to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.
2009
* Throughout, journal and journals refer to the unedited mass of material as written by Cheever; The Journals to the published selection.