John Cheever: "Scotch for breakfast and I do not like these mornings."

To grow up as many of us now in our 40s or 50s or 60s did, reading John Cheever's lyrical, luminous, gorgeously wrought stories as they appeared month after month in The New Yorker (the magazine published 121 of Cheever's 180 stories, a figure surpassed only by John O'Hara and John Updike) and his five novels as they entered bookstores, and then to discover in his daughter Susan's memoirs and in his letters and journals, emerging in print since Cheever's death at 70 in 1982, that the writer whose imagination peopled a sunshine-drenched suburbia had behind his wife's back carried on affairs with women (including actress Hope Lange) and men, that he struggled to avoid the gin bottle before breakfast, leaves many of us uneasy. We feel betrayed. How can it be that Cheever's fictional world is so apparently different from the life he in fact lived?

Benjamin and John Cheever, c. 1948 (from The Letters of John Cheever)

Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, second son of a prosperous traveling shoe salesman and socially ambitious mother ("I was conceived mistakenly, after a sales banquet. My mother carried me reluctantly"). Bu the late '20s the Cheevers had fallen on hard times. Cheever's father turned to drink, and his mother opened a gift and antique shop to support the family (Cheever's father complained that she sold their marital bed out from under him). In 1930 The New Republic printed Cheever's story "Expelled." In 1931, sustained by a $10-a-week allowance from his older brother, Cheever was living in New York, beginning what he hoped would be a career as a writer. (Letters Cheever wrote late in life would show that at this time he had become troubled by his sexual longings for men and in 1933 had a clumsy one-night stand with photographer Walker Evans.) Then in spring 1935, The New Yorker bought its first two Cheever stories, paying $90 for "The Brooklyn Rooming House" and $45 for "Buffalo" (the magazine's fiction editor, E.B. White's wife Katharine, urged these stories' purchase. Cheever in 1941 married Mary Winternitz, daughter of the dean of Yale's medical school. He went to war in 1942, saw his first short story collection published in 1943, was mustered out of the Army in 1945. By the mid-'50s, he had fathered two boys and a girl and with many other white middle-class families had bolted from Manhattan to the comfortable Westchester suburbs. Except for a year-long stay in Italy (1956), several semesters teaching in Iowa City (where John Irving was his student), and a penitential ten months in Boston (1974-75) during a trial separation from his wife, Cheever would spend the rest of his life in the suburbia that sere as place for most of his stories. So much a poet of the string of little bedroom towns on the commuters' route along the Hudson River's east shore was he that Time magazine, in its 1964 cover story on Cheever's fiction, titled the story "Ovid in Ossining." And John Updike observed that while many people wrote about suburbia, only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of his Shady Hills and Bullet Parks.

After he came home following World War II, Cheever for the first time regularly began to keep a journal. Perhaps, living again with his wife and children, he needed a space where he could maintain, even hide, a private or secret life. For people who earn their keep with words, journals are the one place where written words are not up for sale (writers, talking among themselves, will say that the difference between writing for publication and writing in a journal is akin to that difference prostitutes must feel between selling love to strangers and making love with a beloved). Whatever. Almost daily Cheever typed out his single-spaced entry onto lined filler paper and then fitted the paper into a 10-by-6-inch three-ring leather binder. When he died he left behind 30 of these binders holding 10,000 pages onto which Cheever had typed some four million words. (Harvard's Houghton Library now has the journals.)

Reading published journals, we feel duped when we sense that the writer contrived entries with posterity in mind, did not write with just himself as audience. Such journals generate an odd, overcrowded, almost unseemly sense of two writers' presence: one is the author whose name gilds the book's spine and whose familiar face gazes out at us drowsily off the jacket; the other is the journal's writing "I." The latter creature, driven by his author to produce, under guise of candor, seemingly artless observation, becomes with each further turned page increasingly an inauthentic narrator, a "character as writer," more fabricated than any fictional persona. But few of us keep a journal with an eye to its being read by strangers. And Cheever (who frequently wrote about himself as "he") surely could not have imagined himself on the morning after a sleepless night as typing out this account for future readers:

There seems to be some excitement in the darkness. There is a little sweat in the armpits. Something is happening, he thinks, and he thinks he hears a footstep in the gravel outside. It is the footstep of a dope addict, armed with an icepick, who has come to murder his children, but listening to the opening of the front door and the footstep on the stairs and hearing nothing, his mind wanders. The ship sinks and he is on a lifeboat.

Or,

On Friday I feel sick, disgusted with myself, despairing and obscene. On Sunday I feel the worst. At a quarter after eleven I write an attack on the evils of drink. Then I look up the number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

Or,

"There are times when I seem to see nothing but that world that lies in the corner of the eye: the leering stranger, the flick of a mouse in the hammered-brass woodbox, the prostitute in the drugstore." Or, "Coming home I throw a beer bottle against the wall of the garage. I curl up on the sofa and weep bitter tears." Or, more bluntly, "I wish half the time to die."

In the '70s, when pages from Anais Nin's and Virginia Woolf's candid journals began to be published, Cheever well may have begun to think of his daily reflections' eventual publication. He might have foreseen some winter evening in a then far-off distance, someone he never knew, reading:

I think that I will have it all back.... I will go out of the dread country where I lie sweating in bed, waiting for the oil burner to engorge the house with fire, waiting to be crushed by my debts, my groin smarting like a wound. I will have it all back.

Or, in 1977:

I go to the diner for supper. The waitresses are all meant for us, and I love them. Bringing me bread and butter and a glass of ice water, she is like the dove bringing a branch to the ark.

Or,

That I will suffer all these agencies again is likely, but, having come through them so many times, I know that they are not a destination.

Reading journals published after their writers' death, while entertaining and instructive, can leave a reader feeling he has trespassed. But evidence suggest that late in life Cheever decided he wanted his journals printed posthumously. In summer 1990, when excerpts from Cheever's journals (edited by Robert Gottlieb, presently The New Yorker's editor and previously Cheever's editor at Knopf) began appearing in Gottlieb's magazine, Cheever's son Ben told interviewers that in 1978 his father had given him several binders to read and asked him to promise the journals would be published. "He always felt," Ben Cheever went on to say, "that a piece of writing can be useful to readers and make them feel less lonely, less disappointed in themselves. And I think he realized that his journals offer the rare instance in which readers can conclude they neither violate an author's privacy nor suffer at least mild authorial fraud.

In his afterword to the journals, Gottlieb wrote: "The journals afford a distressing reminder that turmoil can exist inside even so contained, so polished a man as John Cheever.... This is a life from the inside."

Reading these journals, I speculate on the man alone, 5'7", flat stomach, rounded shoulders, brownish hair brush cut above the big-eyed, small-mouthed Yankee face, typing out with stubby nicotine-stained fingers his heart's cries (his spelling poor, Gottlieb said) onto the lined notebook paper. So much of what Cheever writes in his journal looks up from its page at the reader as prayers, rising up, must look to God.

I go back and try to imagine him, cotton-mouthed from hangover, "as touchy as a triggered rattrap" and afraid that he has no talent. ("John O'Hara comes to tea and I find him a fine gentleman but I run up against the old feeling that in the end I will turn out not to be varsity.") He fights with his wife Mary ("I am not allowed a kiss; I am barely granted a good morning"). He worries that the children hear him and Mary quarrel ("We often heard more than we wanted to," Ben Cheever told a Cheever biographer). He wonders how to keep enough money coming in from stories to pay his children's school bills and repair the basement pump. There is always — until 1975 when he quits, once and for all — the drinking. (This, from the mid-'70s when Cheever, with Raymond Carver, taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop: "Scotch for breakfast and I do not like these mornings.") Also, desire: "...his male member, bristling with usefulness and self-importance, takes the center of the stage. Then thoughts of such lewdness cross his mind that he rolls onto his side and sends up toward Heaven an earnest prayer.... Up goes his cod again, followed by his prayers, and so forth and so forth, ad nauseam" or on a happier day, "my old dick stirs in the sunlight like a hyacinth."

One morning in the mid-'70s, Cheever wrote to himself, "What vast amounts of misery the spirit can absorb and still rebound." Another time, he noted, "Standing the driveway with my son, I see, from the top of the hill, the color of the sky and what a paradise it seems to be this morning." He is by no means always unhappy in his journal pages. He skates on the frozen pond near his house and observes that "in the pinewoods the last light flows like coals." He swims, plays scrub hockey, touch football, Baroque music on the recorder. He breeds black Labs, drives the Mack engine for the volunteer fire department, wins at badminton, prunes grapes, "feeds the tomatoes as well as the Swiss chard," and goes to garden parties. He almost never misses Sunday Mass at whatever Episcopal church is closest. ("At church this morning I think that the Mass ends not with a prayer or an amen but with the extinguishing of the candles, like the scattering of fire that closed the congregation of savage"). His daughter Susan, married in the early '70s, comes to visit. He says to her, "I think of the richness you and your brothers have brought into this house." He travels by train from southern Italy back to Rome and feels he'll burst with joy when he sees "fruit trees that seem to make their own light in the dusk." He and Mary fight and part and come back together, and he writes, "There are juicier orifices, more musical laughter, vaster and darker fields of comprehension, but I was born in this country and shall serve under this flag."

Novelist Mary Gordon, reviewing Cheever's journals in The New York Times Book Review, took up the question that troubled me — "How can it be that Cheever's fictional world is so apparently different from the life he in fact lived?" Gordon answered the question thusly: "Critics failed to note the crouching beast dangerously hidden in the shrubs behind the well-kept houses."

Gordon's comment led me back to re-reading Cheever's short stories, his novels Bullet Park and Falconer. What I concluded, reading these, is this. The stories occur in houses so lovely (with "marigolds shining like fire around the doorsteps") and so lovingly decorated, on such gorgeous broad green lawns across which "the morning light is as gold as money" and the stories end so satisfactorily, drenched by brilliant light pouring into the valley and freshets of welcome rain, that we hardly notice in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" Johnny Hake's terror at losing his job and becoming a thief or in "The Country Husband" Francis Weed's discovery that no one in his family much cares that he barely survived a plane's crash landing. And Cheever tells these stories in such a calm, perfectly modulated voice that it becomes difficult to believe that anything that couldn't eventually be righted would be wrong.

Cheever's fiction (which won him the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Medal of Literature) is rather like those women we know whose skin is so flawlessly poreless, hair such an Iowa cornsilk blonde, and eyes so cornflower blue, women who seem so lucky in love and inventive in industry or the arts that we do not notice anguish tightening their brows. We are shocked when late one night our phone rings and such a woman, her voice ravished with strain, confesses, as John Cheever might have, "I am not happy."

"But you look happy," we say to ourselves, "and you seem happy, and you are lovely to look at and must be delightful to hold."

What we say aloud to such a caller is something like the message borne by many of Cheever's stories. We say, "I'm sure, any day, any moment now, you'll feel better." If we didn't make ourselves believe this statement to be true, as many Cheever stories convinced us it was, despair would cripple us, we couldn't go on. Cheever wrote stories that would give hope to a person precisely like himself. He wrote the story he needed to read.