The Journals of John Cheever
Edited by Robert Gottlieb
Knopf, 399 pages, $25
In his introduction, John Cheever`s son Ben poses a question that troubled many a reader of these journals as they appeared in New Yorker installments during the past year. ”Why,” he asks, ”would anyone want this material published?”
Ben Cheever advances two reasons, neither of them related to what was reportedly a seven-figure advance. First, his father wanted the journals published, though he didn`t quite say so. Second, they tell the story of his life, and represent a form of communication with those readers-Cheever once imagined them as living in the woods around his house in Westchester County, N.Y.-to whom his fiction has made a difference.
The trouble is that the story these exquisitely written journals tell is almost unrelievedly one of woe.
Covering 35 years, from the late 1940s to Cheever`s death from cancer in 1982, only rarely do the entries express the kind of joy articulated in many of his stories and novels. For the most part, they are dominated by the cafard, or personal cockroach, who pursued Cheever wherever he went. Early on, he conceives of himself as ”a naked prisoner in an unlocked cell, and to tell the truth I don`t know how he will escape.” Thirty years later, he lies naked on an examining table. ”What seems to be bothering you?” the doctor asks.
”I feel terribly sad,” he answers.
Occasionally his spirits are rallied by the wonders of nature, by swimming or skating or skiing, or by Bach or Verdi, but the cafard invariably returns. His depression reaches what may be its deepest stage in 1962:
”The span between living and dying is brief and anguished, and the soul of man is reflected not in snug farmhouses and great monuments but in fourth- string hotel rooms, malodorous and obscure. That is all there is. There is nothing. Tired but sleepless, lewd but alone, hopeless, drunk, sitting at the window on the airshaft in some other country: this is the image of man. . . . All the rest of it-the cheering lights of morning, sweet music, the towers and the sailboats-are fantastic inventions, evasions, lies,
vulgarities, and politenesses poorly invented to conceal the truth.”
Nasty, brutish, and short, all right.
Robert Gottlieb, who edited Cheever`s last five books at Knopf and is now editor of the New Yorker, made the selections from the journals, and a highly selective process it was, for he included only about one-twentieth of the three to four million words Cheever wrote down in 29 separate looseleaf notebooks. Fractional though the result may be, Gottlieb feels sure that any extensive selection from the journals would reveal ”the same life and the same talent; in fact, the same man.”
Certain themes, for example, recur so often as to demand attention. Scanning some of his earlier journals in 1968, Cheever was struck by their concentration on ”two astonishing contests, one with alcohol and one with my wife.”
At first, Cheever`s drinking problems were not much more acute than those of the characters in his story ”The Swimmer” who sit around a pool on Sunday lamenting that they ”drank too much” the night before. The secret drinking apparently did not start until the mid-1950s. By 1958, though, he speaks of himself as ”a solitary drunkard.” The next year, he observes that he ”could very easily destroy” himself with liquor.
Thereafter, Cheever repeatedly comments on the daily ”booze fight,” the struggle to hold off taking his first slug until noon, or 11, or 10. Eventually, he needs a drink as soon as he wakes. Having very nearly drunk himself to death, in 1975 Cheever went through the 28-day rehabilitation that saved his life. Among modern American writers, his addiction was not at all unusual. Yet he was one of very few, he reflects-John O`Hara was another-who
”kick(ed)” it and continued to work.
One reason I was allowed to see only a few of Cheever`s journals in preparation for writing ”John Cheever: A Biography” was that they presented such a devastating picture of his wife, Mary. The journals could never be made public I was assured, while Mary Cheever was alive. Well, she is alive and here are the journals, and they are just as devastating as advertised.
Characteristically, Mary Cheever has done nothing to soften the blows. I can hear her, in my mind`s ear, reacting with scorn to the very idea that she might be tempted to tamper with her husband`s prose. Yet standing aside must, as her son Ben remarks, have taken courage.
As with the sad story of alcohol, Cheever`s account of the marriage traces a downhill path. Initially he notes only that ”some part of her . . . is not gregarious nor affectionate.” As matters worsen, though, he speculates that ”her equilibrium depends upon an unusual degree of nastiness.”
In particular, Mary seems unwilling to applaud or share in his accomplishments. A letter comes announcing that he has sold two stories. John tells Mary the glad tidings. ”I don`t suppose they bothered to enclose any checks?” she asks. At times, she looks at him with such revulsion that he feels physically ill.
To some extent, Cheever realizes, his wife`s maldispositions are related to his drinking, but they continue even after he is sober. The fault lies in her unhappy childhood, he thinks. There is little he can do, except to walk through the woods ”pouring into the ears of his dogs the griefs and frustrations of his marriage. . . Oh, why does she spit in my face? Why does she knee me in the groin? Why has she not spoken to me now for eighteen days?”
It is useful to remember that in these journals we are hearing only one side of the story, from a man who was himself deeply depressed and wounded in his childhood.
His parents did not want him born, he reflects, and theirs was a miserable marriage. Though both in his fiction and personal life John Cheever pretended to a certain status, in his journals he admits that he ”was born into no true class” and decided ”to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy.” His father hung his underwear on a nail he hammered into the back of the bathroom door. His mother ran a down-at-the-heels gift shop to make ends meet. Going back home to Quincy, Mass., to see her only brought back the unhappiness of the past.
Growing up, Cheever showed signs of effeminacy, and his parents were duly disturbed. His father feared that he had ”sired a fruit.” His mother said of a neighbor lad, ”he`s a regular boy.”
Johnny Cheever flinched at that, and continued to flinch at any suspicion of latent homosexuality well into adulthood. The inclination, it appears, was always there, but it was not something he could bring himself to confess-not to a psychiatrist, not to his everyday companions, not to his readers. ”I would not like to be the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semisecret,” he observes in 1956.
Four years later, he spends the night with C., and is hard put to justify the fact. ”I trust that what I did was not wrong. I trust that I have harmed no one I love.” Not until his 60s could he write unashamedly and openly of his love for other men. ”I fell in love with M. in a motel room of unusual squalor,” he records in 1978.
It is probably significant that within the family Cheever feels the strongest ties to male relatives. ”My own true love was my brother” Fred, he comments. And the child who could ”deliver” him from darkness into light was his late-begotten son Federico.
Ben Cheever suggests that young writers might want to read his father`s journals. One thing they would learn there is to be honest with themselves. Hard as he can be on others, Cheever is just as tough with himself. With exquisite sarcasm, he congratulates himself on winding an armature with Ben, who ”is not tremendously interested in electrical motors. What a nice father I am! How wise and patient!”
Later that same day, he accuses himself of the sins of anger, pride, carnal self-admiration, lustful fancies and drunken sloth. With biting self-disparagement, he recounts his dreams of glory during 1957. He wins the Pulitzer, he imagines. His picture appears in Life. In the White House bedroom, ”Mamie is reading the Washington Star. Ike is reading `The Wapshot Chronicle.` ”
”Oh,” Cheever fervently asks, in a mantra worth adopting, ”to be so much a better man than I happen to be.”
When he taught writing classes, Cheever invariably encouraged students to keep a journal. Doing so could be useful in several ways, as the example of this book shows. In his journals, Cheever warmed up for his fiction, refined and polished anecdotes that he included in his letters, confessed his guilt and so purchased a measure of absolution, and above all tried to explain and understand his own life. And troubled though the story of that life may be, it is told in the same luminous prose that characterized his stories and novels. He takes us on a journey to the depths, but we could not want a better guide.
