1964 John Cheever was born in New England, of ‘good stock’. His father was a shoe salesman, an early casualty of the Great Depression. Slump meant a rackety childhood. He grew up, around Boston, disliking his bossy mother and despising his drunken father.
As a boy he received a bad education at a good school – Thayer Academy. He was expelled in the twelfth grade on grounds (as he variously fictionalised it in later life) of either sexual delinquency, smoking, or poor classroom performance. He serenely turned his disgrace into a short story, and submitted it to Malcolm Cowley at the New Republic. Amazingly, the magazine published ‘Expelled’ in October 1930. He was in print, in a national magazine, at eighteen. What did it feel like? he was asked in later life. ‘Eighty-seven dollars’, he replied.
College was out of the question (he would, however, in later years claim to be a Harvard man). It was Cowley (also Scott Fitzgerald’s literary adviser) who instructed Cheever to cultivate the short story and the New Yorker as his principal outlet. Harold Ross’s magazine would be what Cheever called his ‘lifeboat’. A price was paid. Throughout life, there would be the recurrent criticism (to which the author, in his gloomier moments, subscribed) that beneath the smart gloss of his writing there was no more ‘substance’ than in a Charles Addams cartoon.
After a brief spell with the Federal Writers’ Project, whose proletarian zeal appalled him (too much ‘substance’ by far), Cheever married in 1941. Why? ‘Because I didn’t want to sleep alone any more’, he would blandly reply in later life. His bed-partner, Mary Winternitz, was of Yale patrician stock (with a dash of Jewish). A talented woman, she deserves commemoration as probably the most tolerant spouse in literary history.
Like other healthy males of his age, Cheever was drafted. He was judged not to be officer material and was transferred into the signal corps and a cushy home posting that allowed him time to write voluminously, drink copiously and dabble with his closet homosexuality. ‘If I followed my instincts’, he confided in his journal, ‘I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal’. He prudently suppressed his instincts.
His first collection was published in 1943, while he was still in khaki. After the war the Cheevers (now parents) joined the middle-class, white-flight migration to the suburbs of New York in the early 1950s. At Scarborough, (the ‘Shady Hill’ of his stories) Cheever would find his richest material. In 1961 the family moved to Ossining. His neighbours, who saw their images satirically rendered in his fiction, regarded him as their ‘skunk in the woodpile’. The world outside hailed him as ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs’. Cheever taught some creative writing classes at the nearby penitentiary, Sing Sing, the hardest of America’s ‘joints’. The rough homosexuality of the jail fascinated him.
‘I want a life of impossible simplicity’, Cheever wrote. Alcohol, uncertain sexuality, and infidelity did not simplify things. In 1975 he touched bottom and sobered up, with the help of AA. In recovery he at last allowed himself to become guiltlessly homosexual. He could never, however, quite eradicate the uneasiness that his writing was less important ‘than ironing shirts in a Chinese laundry’.
Money and awards showered on him in his later years. In March 1964 he even made the front page of Time magazine. It was in recovery, and at the top of the world, that he produced the novel Falconer – set not in the New York suburbs, but Sing Sing.
After his death, from kidney cancer, Cheever left his journal to be published. The last entry reads: ‘I have climbed from a bed on the second floor to reach this typewriter. This was an achievement.’ He was, his son Benjamin records, ‘a writer almost before he was a man’.