Rereading John Cheever – The Atlantic

About 20 miles south of Boston, beneath an enormous maple close to a white clapboard church, John Cheever is buried subsequent to his mother and father and brother. He’s additionally buried beneath an accretion of fantasy and myth-busting. A restaurant on the sting of the cemetery, simply yards from the household plot, calls itself the Cheever Tavern. Promoting a “tasteful setting,” it invokes the nice author’s mid-Sixties public persona because the bard of suburbsville. The writer of a stunning circulation of New Yorker tales, he was hailed on the duvet of Time as “Ovid in Ossining” and introduced within the accompanying article as a monogamously married father of three residing in a grand home with the compulsory Labrador retrievers. “I had no concept that my father was something however the nation squire he pretended to be,” Susan Cheever writes in her new ebook, When All of the Males Wore Hats. He himself linked his greatest tales to “a long-lost world when town of New York was nonetheless full of a river mild,” as he wrote within the preface to The Tales of John Cheever (1978)—a time, he went on, “when virtually all people wore a hat.”Discover the October 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this subject and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreForget the hats. Fedoras and chook canine will not be the important thing to Cheever. However neither is the sordid flip aspect, the anti-myth that should intestine any misguided hankering after a mid-century golden age. In Dwelling Earlier than Darkish, a “biographical memoir” revealed in 1984, two years after her father’s dying, Susan Cheever outed him as doubly tortured: a closeted gay promiscuously untrue to his spouse with each women and men, and a self-destructive alcoholic who dried out after almost dying of drink and solely then accepted his homosexual id. She found his “sexual imposture” (his phrase) after he died, when she started writing about him. Her memoir was finally adopted by reams of corroborating proof, together with his personal writings, The Journals of John Cheever (1991), and Blake Bailey’s lengthy, wonderful, and desperately dismal Cheever: A Life (2009). That biography provided the ultimate indignity: the shocking information that, lower than 30 years after his dying, even his greatest books have been not promoting. In 2012—Cheever’s centennial—the novelist Allan Gurganus regretted that his buddy was “now unfairly referred to as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia.”For many who love the tales, the shrinking readership is what’s most regrettable. By turns lyrical and satirical, humorous and heartrending, they present us a paradise of kinds, a dream America—after which reveal horrible depths of discontent. His personal estimation of his fiction, as recorded within the Journals, is itself a hyper-condensed Cheever story: “flighty, eccentric, and generally bitter work, with its social disenchantments, somersaults, and sudden rains.”Learn: How John Cheever wrote inside turmoilHis most well-known story, “The Swimmer,” matches the invoice. Sitting by a buddy’s pool, one hand dabbling within the water, the opposite curled round a glass of gin, Neddy Merrill decides to swim the eight miles to his house, traversing the county pool by pool. “The day was lovely, and it appeared to him {that a} lengthy swim would possibly enlarge and have fun its magnificence.” However throughout this quixotic journey, the seasons change—there’s a sudden rain. Lovers develop hostile and outdated pals make cryptic, damning remarks about his “misfortunes.” He weakens, “stupefied with exhaustion,” and arrives at his home solely to seek out it locked, empty, deserted—no signal of his spouse and 4 daughters. The which means of this disturbing story is usually recommended when he’s not even midway house. “He couldn’t return,” Cheever writes. “He had coated a distance that made his return unimaginable.” Neddy’s life is a multitude; we don’t know precisely what occurred to him and his household, however the ethical is obvious: We can not recapture remembered bliss or get well bygone happiness.On the finish of his life, in a speech at Carnegie Corridor accepting the Nationwide Medal for Literature, Cheever insisted that “a web page of fine prose stays invincible.” His daughter makes use of that hopeful sentence as an epigraph in When All of the Males Wore Hats ; it’s a good abstract of her theme, as is one other epigraph, taken from the Journals : “Literature is the salvation of the damned.” Her first ebook about her father fused memoir and biography; this one fuses memoir and literary appreciation. She goals to assist us learn Cheever’s greatest tales, and if on this “sequel of kinds” she appears to be squeezing one final drop, she offers welcome context, clues to her father’s very explicit genius.As a author and a daughter of a author, she’s additionally exploring the wellsprings of creativity, which she does with openhearted magnificence. When younger Susie, already an avid reader, found that little women very very like her appeared in her father’s tales, she was indignant; he laughed at her considerations. “Fiction shouldn’t be crypto-autobiography,” he pronounced. And but Susan Cheever now additionally is aware of that “good writing doesn’t require pure intentions.” Within the Cheever family, the boundaries between artwork and life have been blurry at greatest. “Our truths usually appeared as fiction; the fiction of my father’s heterosexual nature appeared as fact.”Maybe the eeriest instance, famous in Bailey’s biography however extra highly effective in Susan’s first-person account, is her interview along with her father when she was a 33-year-old working at Newsweek; the duvet story was a profile of him simply after he’d revealed Falconer (1977), which contains a love affair between the protagonist, incarcerated for fratricide, and a fellow inmate. The journalist daughter requested, “Did you ever fall in love with one other man?” The novelist father artfully replied that it may certainly occur, “however I’d assume twice about giving up the robustness and merriment I’ve recognized within the heterosexual world.” Robustness! Merriment! She then requested point-blank if he’d ever had a “gay expertise.” As an alternative of answering within the adverse as she anticipated, he mentioned, “I’ve had many, Susie, all tremendously gratifying.” A dreadful pause earlier than he continued, laughing, “and all between the ages of 9 and 11.”Learn: John Cheever’s brief tales revealed in The AtlanticShe took that as a no and soldiered on with the interview; the curious trade was printed within the journal. And she or he continued to think about her father as straight till she began studying his journals a few months after most cancers killed him, at age 70. She determined that she ought to be the one to disclose his sexuality, and resolved to seek out “a loving option to do it.” Tender, unhappy, and respectful, Dwelling Earlier than Darkish is a proud daughter’s elegy for an sad guardian.However there’s no loving option to current the torment he endures within the journals, whose posthumous publication he accredited. Gurganus referred to as the a number of million phrases—largely typed, stashed away in 29 loose-leaf notebooks—“a ten-thousand-page suicide notice.” Solely about one-Twentieth of it has been revealed, the winnowing expertly achieved by Robert Gottlieb, Cheever’s editor at Knopf, who described the work as essentially the most tough editorial mission he ever tried—as a result of “it was disturbing to be so immersed within the hell of Cheever’s inside life.” The landmark options of that hellscape are resentment of his spouse, a dropping battle with alcohol, and his “galling otherness.”Cheever desperately desires to honor the vows made to his spouse and kids, he writes, “however my itchy member is unconcerned with all of this, and I’m afraid that I’ll succumb to its itchiness.” Right here’s what occurs when he does (hardly for the primary time): “We sped into the closest bed room, unbuckled one another’s trousers, groped for our cocks in one another’s underwear, and drank one another’s spit.” His postcoital detachment is medical, cruel:I bear in mind the acute lack of curiosity with which I regarded his nakedness within the morning when he returned to mattress after having taken a piss. He was merely a person with a small cock, a pair of balls, and a small ass appropriate for cushioning a chair or a rest room seat and for nothing else.And but he believes he’s in love. “Lunching with pals who talked about their tedious careers in lechery, I assumed: I’m homosexual, I’m homosexual, I’m eventually freed from all this. This didn’t final for lengthy.”The author and critic Geoff Dyer believes that within the “shapeless privateness” of the revealed Journals, Cheever most totally plumbs “the advanced depths of his being.” Psychologically acute and stuffed with superb lyricism (“incessant inventories of sunshine and panorama”), they’re his best work, in accordance with Dyer, “his principal declare to literary survival.”Susan Cheever places her cash on the brief story as the shape by which her father’s imaginative and prescient discovered its most actual and astonishing expression; in an appendix she reprints six of them, all amongst these Gottlieb chosen for the large Tales of John Cheever, a runaway greatest vendor and the winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to a Nationwide E-book Critics Circle Award. She calls consideration to sexual ambivalence as a necessary artistic catalyst and theme (noting Gottlieb’s alertness to it), and certainly it’s laborious to argue towards the concept that Cheever’s sexual charade generated pressure in his life that helped produce some sensible fiction. However there have been different tensions squeezing him.In “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (it’s in her appendix and certainly the inspiration for the brand new tv sequence Your Pals & Neighbors), cash is the foundation of Johnny Hake’s troubles. A businessman with an archetypal suburban life-style, he loses his job and, to keep away from bouncing checks, begins sneaking into rich pals’ homes in the course of the night time to steal money. (It seems that an 11-year-old Susie, although she by no means stole a factor, additionally loved slipping into neighboring homes: She “appreciated watching wealthy folks sleep”—“an inherited style,” she writes, bending the legal guidelines of genetics to ascertain a hyperlink between her father’s fiction and a childhood eccentricity.)Johnny Hake steals as a result of monetary shame would undoubtedly finish his life in Shady Hill and exile him from his spouse and 4 youngsters. In a bravura sentence, Cheever provides us the measure of Johnny’s enchantment:We now have a pleasant home with a backyard and a spot outdoors for cooking meat, and on summer time nights, sitting there with the children and looking out into the entrance of Christina’s gown as she bends over to salt the steaks, or simply gazing on the lights in heaven, I’m as thrilled as I’m thrilled by extra hardy and harmful pursuits, and I assume that is what is supposed by the ache and sweetness of life.After his fall, dismayed by his thievery, he exclaims: “Oh, I by no means knew {that a} man might be so depressing and that the thoughts may open up so many chambers and fill them with self-reproach!”In 1956, Cheever bought the film rights to “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” for $25,000—a uncommon windfall. Nonetheless, he was chronically stricken by monetary anxiousness, partially as a result of The New Yorker constantly underpaid him. He may plausibly exclaim, Johnny Hake, c’est moi! However his daughter is inclined to see the story as springing from a distinct type of anxiousness. She quotes Blake Bailey: “Beneath all of it, in fact, was an escalating terror of homosexuality, and residing among the many dauntingly regular residents of Scarborough didn’t assist.” On this studying, Cheever’s “galling otherness” is extra worrisome than cash troubles, although the son of a touring shoe salesman who misplaced his job within the Nineteen Twenties and his investments within the Crash will all the time be delicate to monetary stress. It was an important ingredient in his cocktail of anguish and inspiration.From the August 1968 subject: Alfred Kazin on middle-class storytellers“The Nation Husband” is a coruscating story about love and dying, or, anyway, about infatuation with the babysitter and a near-fatal airplane crash. It options an indelible description of “public chastisement” for sexual misconduct. The protagonist, Francis Weed, sees a waitress passing drinks at a Shady Hill occasion and realizes that he acknowledges her from the battle. He’d seen her as soon as earlier than, at a crossroads in a village in Normandy. She’d been condemned for sleeping with a German officer, and he’d watched with the group as her head was shaved. Then she was pressured to strip bare. “One lady spat on her, however some inviolable grandeur in her nakedness lasted by means of the ordeal.” Her sexual crimes, and the grim punishment, resonate powerfully, although Francis acknowledges that “the environment of Shady Hill made the reminiscence unseemly and rude.”Can Cheever’s concern of being outed, of public chastisement for his “sexual imposture,” have been the only real impetus for this story, which Vladimir Nabokov singled out for reward as “a miniature novel superbly traced”? I’d argue that financial anxiousness was at work right here too—and Susan Cheever provides proof to again me up. “The Nation Husband,” she tells us, was written to pay for her orthodontics. “I’m proud,” she writes, “to have had the crooked tooth that impressed it.” Her “costly overbite” gave us a narrative by which a pilot sings, “I’ve acquired sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence. I’ve acquired sixpence to final me all my life” because the airplane he’s flying drops out of the sky and the panicked passengers see “the spreading wings of the Angel of Dying.”Angst is angst, regardless of the trigger. Circumstance could constrain, ambivalence paralyze, however nice artists—miraculously, mysteriously—remodel ambient stress into beautiful cultural artifacts. In her two books about her father, Susan weighs each ounce of the burden of stress he carried; she takes notice of his literary alchemy and in addition of the emotional bruises inflicted on his spouse and kids.“The lens by means of which he noticed the skin world for the needs of his work was as sharp as the sunshine on a chilly winter day,” she writes; “the lens by means of which he noticed his household was sizzling, blurry, and generally self-serving.” She herself is each clear-eyed and compassionate. She provides an astute studying of a narrative she loves, “Reunion,” a couple of divorced father who meets an estranged teenage son for lunch and will get drunker and drunker and by no means orders meals. She acknowledges her father’s voice: He’s the dreadful drunken boor. “I’m outraged at this portrait of him, till I bear in mind he wrote it.”“My deepest feeling about Cheever,” the critic Alfred Kazin wrote, “is that his marvelous brightness is an effort to cheer himself up.” Which will sound dismissive—Susan Cheever finds it “imply”—however I believe it factors to the key engine of his greatest work (sure, it’s the tales; his daughter is correct). His anguish and his piercing pleasure are inseparable. Once we strip away all of the extratextual padding, the parable and the countermyth, we uncover, studying slowly and lovingly, a author whose large expertise for emotional oscillation allowed him to traverse, in a sentence and even in a clause, the gamut of human hope and despair—as in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” which ends, “and off I went, whistling merrily at midnight.”This text seems within the October 2025 print version with the headline “John Cheever’s Secrets and techniques.”When All of the Males Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Tales of John CheeverBy Susan Cheever​While you purchase a ebook utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.