If Dave Eggers hadn't already used the title, the story of John Cheever's life could have been called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This occurred to me while reading Blake Bailey's magnificent Cheever: A Life (Knopf), one of the most (yes) heartbreaking and well-written literary biographies to appear in years.
The particulars of Cheever's life are, on the surface, the building blocks of the American dream: hardscrabble childhood in Quincy, Mass.; shoe salesman father tossed out of work during the Great Depression; mother pulling family together by opening a gift shop; money eked out to send the two Cheever boys to private school so they'll scoot upward, rather than downward, in New England's hierarchical social strata.
John Cheever (born 1912) was the youngest son. Though kicked out of high school for smoking, he was blessed with a facility with words and overflowing with personal charm. After he got his first story published in the New Republic as a teenager, he moved to New York City to make it as a writer. This high school dropout—who often claimed writing saved him from "pumping gas"—would later affect the manners of a country squire in Westchester County, N.Y. But in these years, before he created the character called "the Ovid of Ossining" by Time magazine, his digs were so squalid that Walker Evans photographed his room as an example of subpar living conditions in the 1930s. Add to this Cheever's slow and steady descent into alcoholism, which would put any rock 'n' roller's tell-all memoir to shame.
The Cheever we know today—the well-mannered, sweater-wearing, martini-sipping suburbanite with the big house overlooking the Hudson, gifted children, elegant wife, passel of golden retrievers—was an invention as complete as the one in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Nonetheless, "Cheever Country" has been a phrase widely used to describe the suburbs of Connecticut, Westchester County and even parts of Boston's outer boroughs. It was through Cheever's lens that many of us gained our impressions of suburbs as a smug, self-satisfied facade covering the desperation of living above one's means and fear of losing it all in the blink of an eye.
The question remains whether Cheever created this "country" as a personalized projection of his own ideas and pathologies, like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or if he got something real down on paper, like a correspondent sending dispatches back from a foreign country. In the wake of the Wall Street collapse and its financial fallout, this is not just an academic question. The landscape of Cheever Country today is, literally, a facade of a facade—mini-mansions with foreclosure signs, unsellable gas-guzzlers with ludicrous names like "Explorer," kids in private schools their parents can no longer afford. Every day, it seems, there's an example of something that would be perfect in a John Cheever story: former executives turned bank robbers or counterfeiters. What is the difference, really, between Bernard Madoff and the narrator of Cheever's story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" besides the size of their thefts?
It's ironic, perhaps, that when Cheever got his honorary degree from Harvard in 1978—the most prized of his honors—he stood on the dais with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who'd taken refuge in Vermont for the previous two years. Solzhenitsyn's commencement speech turned into a jeremiad against the West. Though in part an anti-socialist rant, it aimed far more anger at the West for not providing a viable alternative, rather than just another totalitarian state based on the vagaries of money.
"The human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor and by intolerable music," he railed. Cheever did not disagree with the man.
