John Cheever at his home in Ossining, New York, 6th October 1979
Cheever: A Life
By Blake Bailey (Picador, £25)
Literary history is dotted with writers who came to despise the works that made them famous. Arthur Conan Doyle churned out 56 short stories and four novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, yet considered his historical fiction to be his only “important” work. When William Golding reread his first novel, Lord of the Flies, two decades after it was published, he found it “boring and crude… O-level stuff.” The big creative problem of John Cheever’s life was that he was a first-rate short story writer who cared little for short stories; he wanted, rather, to be a great novelist. He laboured for more than two decades on what became The Wapshot Chronicle, supporting himself by writing stories for the New Yorker. The money he earned freed up time to work on the novel, but there was never quite enough money, or enough time, and Cheever became deeply resentful. As he wrote in his journal after failing yet again to finish it: “I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken.”
The Wapshot Chronicle was eventually published in 1957, when Cheever was in his mid-forties. He completed another three novels (and a novella) before his death in 1982. The books sold well and made him rich, allowing him to all but give up writing short stories (at least for the New Yorker, which he never forgave for delaying his ascent to Great Novelist status). Yet none were exactly critical triumphs and eventually even Cheever appeared to come round to the view that his real metier was the short story. “They [stories] seem in the end to be mostly what I’ve written,” he wrote to his longstanding New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, shortly before his death. Certainly now they are mostly what he is remembered for.
What makes Cheever’s stories so good? He was sometimes described as the “American Chekhov,” and his tales indeed have a Chekhovian plainness, a sense of having been scripted by life. He could conjure up rich, intricate worlds in a few pages—a family holidaying at their summer home (“Goodbye, My Brother”), a marriage in trouble (“The Season of Divorce”). While essentially realistic, his work often contains magical or surrealist touches. In “The Enormous Radio,” a couple buy a radio that starts broadcasting the conversations of neighbours; “The Country Husband” famously ends with the line: “it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” The result is that Cheever’s stories have a two-tone feel; they are at once life-like and mysterious, hum-drum and ineffable. In his hands, suburban America—that bastion of banality—became an enchanted place.
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