John Cheever (1912-1982). Biography and Creativity

John William Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on May 27, 1912. His father, Frederick Lincoln Cheever, was a member of an old seafaring family with a strong work ethic and concern for morality; his mother, Mary Lilely Cheever, was an Englishwoman who had emigrated with her parents. The facts of Cheever’s early life are sketchy, the result of conflicting reports he has provided and the fictionalization of his early life in his works. Cheever reports that his father, a successful shoe salesman, owned and operated a shoe factory until the 1929 stock market crash, after which Mary opened a gift shop and became the primary financial provider.

His father’s financial ruin and his mother’s business success and subsequent blossoming independence deeply affected the young Cheever, as he stated in a 1977 interview with Ms. magazine: “I remained deeply disconcerted by the harm my mother’s working did to my father’s self-esteem.” While on one level these concerns are specific to Cheever’s family, on another level these fiscal and familial anxieties are common to the 21st century, especially in light of the second and third waves of feminism that arose after World War II and the continual struggle for women’s rights. Additionally Cheever was obsessed with a story his family told in which his father had invited an abortionist to dinner during his mother’s pregnancy, an incident Cheever included in both The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and Falconer (1977).

While the veracity of such accounts may be questioned, it is clear that Cheever felt neglected and ignored as a child, a formative experience that colored his view of the family and of the interpersonal roles family members play. Though many critics have noted the lack of didactic messages in Cheever’s stories, his works explore relevant political and social themes, such as the power relationships between men and women, the postwar American family, life in American suburbs (John Leonard called him “the Chekhov of the suburbs”), and the decline of moral values in modern society.

Cheever’s Letters (1989) and Journals (1991) portray Cheever as a man consumed with guilt about his homosexual affairs. These important posthumously published sources invite readers to compare the social world and moral terrain of Cheever’s fiction with his life. Recently critical studies of his works have focused on Cheever’s bisexuality; the role his divided, often-at-odds- with-himself sexuality played in his works; and the social view of homosexuality his works present.

Cheever claimed to have begun writing stories when he was six. His parents approved of his chosen vocation, only stipulating that he not work for fame or wealth. In addition to the role his parents had in his development as a writer, Cheever was greatly influenced by his older brother, Fred. Their relationship informed several stories, including “Good-by, My Brother,” “The Low-Boy,” “The Brothers,” and the novel Falconer. Cheever expressed the intensity of their relationship when he said, “The strongest love—not the most exciting or the richest or the most brilliant—but the strongest love of my life was for my brother.” Other references to his brother occur in The Wapshot Chronicle, where the brothers Moses and Coverly leave home together just as Cheever and his brother left home and lived together in Boston.

While family dynamics helped shape Cheever’s fiction, so did his childhood in Quincy, Massachusetts. Many of Cheever’s works deal with New England’s physical setting, moral obsessions, and social traditions, so much so that some critics have falsely classified him as a mere chronicler of modern manners. Despite his religious and moral upbringing, Cheever was expelled from Thayer Academy in South Braintree, Massachusetts, for bad behavior at the age of 17; this ended his schooling.

Though this may seem out of place for a writer who has been called a moralist by a number of critics, Cheever attributed his difficulties to persistent emotional troubles, which stemmed from his parents’ apparent role reversal and the negative effects it had on his father. Furthermore, Cheever’s expulsion enabled him to explore his greatest ambition—becoming a serious writer; he published his first story, “Expelled,” in the New Republic in 1930, the year after he was dismissed from the academy.

During the depression years Cheever worked in department stores and at various newspapers while he continued to write and publish. In the early 1930s, he published short stories in a number of magazines, including Atlantic, Colliers, and the Yale Review. Most importantly, however, he published “Brooklyn Rooming House” in the New Yorker (1935), beginning a lifelong relationship during which he published 121 of his 200 short stories in the magazine. After a short period of teaching composition at Barnard College, Cheever joined the army during World War II; in 1941 he married Mary M. Winternitz, whose father was the dean of the Yale Medical School. Mary and John Cheever, proud parents of three children, had a marriage Cheever called “extraordinary”; his relationship with Mary provided endless experiences and inspiration for his work.

In 1943, two years after their marriage, Cheever published The Way Some People Live, a volume of 30 stories. Though Cheever uses the historical period of World War II as the situational context for eight of the stories, he focuses primarily on human relationships and human experiences, especially the transition from civilian to military life, rather than exploring actual war experiences. Cheever set some of the stories during the depression; such stories as “The Brothers” and “Publick House” closely resemble real events in Cheever’s life, though Cheever has stated that literary works should not be considered “cryptoautobiography.”

Several critics also noted the stories’ similarities to Hemingway’s realistic style, including a heavy reliance on dialogue. While The Way Some People Live received favorable reviews, several critics found the stories stilted, attributing these aesthetic flaws to Cheever’s relationship with the New Yorker, which was thought to insist upon a stipulated formula. Conversely, other critics credit Cheever with establishing the standard story form for which the New Yorker is known.

Simultaneously acknowledging and trying to dispel such criticisms, Cheever described his longtime editor at the New Yorker, Harold Ross, as a father figure and their partnership “a creative, destructive relationship from which I learned a great deal” (quoted in Grant 53). The magazine continued to publish his stories and allow him to refine his literary abilities while also sustaining him financially. In 1953, Cheever published his second short-story volume, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, which, although it contained only 14 stories, was nearly as long as The Way Some People Live. Not only are these stories more fully developed narratives, but also they display a greater variety of settings and topics. In several of the stories, such as “Torch Song” and “The Enormous Radio,” Cheever’s more innovative narrative abilities and genre-bending talents emerge.

Blending ordinary details with mythic transformations and seemingly magical, or possessed, objects, Cheever moves into a realm of extreme subjectivity, which is often cited as a hallmark of postmodern style. Here the mind’s inner reality and the world’s outer reality clash, setting off unexpected conflicts and drawing out the troubled and sometimes violent feelings that lie beneath his characters’ placid exteriors. Though the volume received more favorable reviews than The Way Some People Live, some critics, such as Paul Pickrel, noted that Cheever’s stories were “too uniformly excellent,” another critical stance that seemed to relate to Cheever’s association with the New Yorker.

Despite his success with short story collections, Cheever was determined to publish a novel. In 1957, he published The Wapshot Chronicle, a loosely connected, episodic novel that explores the family life of the Wapshots and their attempts to reconcile their domestic lives with those of their seafaring, adventure-seeking ancestors. The novel won the 1957 National Book Award for fiction, and, until the publication of Falconer, it was Cheever’s best-selling work. Many critics wrote respectfully of the work, but others connected the episodic form to his prior penchant for writing short stories. Though Cheever publicly denounced autobiographical remnants in the novel, many of the situations and familial relationships parallel his life; Cheever refused to publish the novel until after his mother’s death.

Cheever published his third volume of short stories, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, in 1958. Because all of these stories take place in the suburb of Shady Hill, other similarities of theme, place, and time have prompted critics to call the work a novel. Many of the stories explore what happens when an individual undergoes a “temporary crisis” and deliberately tries to express himself or herself differently or to test a yet-untried freedom. The individual, however, is often drawn back into the situation that initially catalyzed the temporary conflict, despite its apparent restrictive or negative qualities. Some of his most widely reprinted stories are found in this volume, including “The Country Husband,” which won an O. Henry Memorial Award, and “The Five- Forty-Eight,” which garnered the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award.

In 1961, Cheever published his fourth volume of short stories, Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, which met with mixed critical reception. This volume opens with “The Death of Justina” (quoted at the beginning of this entry), with its philosophical statements about art’s overcoming chaos; however, Cheever also includes a false preface that states his growing frustration with many contemporary literary themes and his ideas about how literature can fail us. Many of these stories use America or Italy for their settings, though few of them contain the type of direct sociological and philosophical commentary found in “The Death of Justina.”

This volume contains some of his darkest work. Frank J. Warnke called it “Cheever’s Inferno.” Such criticism reflects the shift in tone, plot, and character development of the stories; instead of finding characters who fulfill audience expectations, as in so many of his earlier works, the reader finds characters who exist in an absurd world, one in which they have little or no hope of finding a clear way of making meaning out of their lives.

Three years later, Cheever published both his fifth volume of short stories, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and the sequel to his first novel, The Wapshot Scandal (1969). Diverging from his earlier work, many of the short stories focus on women, and some readers see The Brigadier and the Golf Widow as a preliminary exercise for The Wapshot Scandal. However, in keeping with a significant portion of his work, Cheever explores the themes of family dynamics, suburbia, and the delicate balance between the real and the surreal. In this volume, we also find “The Swimmer,” a Kafkaesque tale of a young man’s attempt to realize his own heroic abilities and ultimate failure, which is the sole Cheever story ever to be made into a movie. Many of the stories also become darker and more sinister, further preparing his readers for his next novel, Bullet Park (1969), which is set in suburbia, where madness and death are ubiquitous and undeniable.

In the years after publishing Bullet Park, Cheever fell into alcoholism, suffering from alcohol-related health problems and depression, and began having serious marital problems. Despite these personal problems, Cheever published his sixth volume of short stories, The World of Apples (1973); this volume was highly praised in literary circles, including the New York Times Book Review. Several critics noted the “transfiguring experience” of the work; for the first time Cheever allows the characters’ feelings, motivations, and morals to override the factual circumstances in which they find themselves, leaving the reader with an impression of optimism and rejuvenation. Under pressure from friends and family, he admitted himself to Smithers Alcohol Rehabilitation Center in 1975 and successfully gave up drinking before publishing his last complete novel, Falconer (1975).

Falconer explores the issues of justice, alienation, and confinement through the protagonist’s experience in prison. The Stories of John Cheever (1978), a collection of his best short stories, earned Cheever an honorary doctorate from Harvard, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward McDowell Award. Cheever had begun working on a final novella, Oh What a Paradise It Seems when he died of cancer in 1982, leaving it unfinished. Nevertheless, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature just before his death.

An author who has been compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne for his moral focus, to William Faulkner for his keen sense of place, and to Franz Kafka for his ability to blend subjective perception and reality, Cheever warrants recognition and further critical consideration. Despite his categorization as a moralist, Cheever’s lyrical style, narrative innovations, commitment to the human truths of everyday experience, and unfailing ability to imbue the mundane with mythic undertones make him one of the most careful observers of contemporary America, a gifted writer whose works have not received the attention they deserve.