The Father Behind the Fiction
Susan Cheever’s new book confronts the complicated overlap between John Cheever’s fiction and his family life
This review by Rand Richards Cooper was originally published on Thursday, April 16 in Arc Magazine.
The 1978 bestselling publication of The Stories of John Cheever took the U.S. literary world by storm, its huge success defying conventional publishing wisdom while winning its author the money and fame he had long coveted. By then, John Cheever had spent four decades portraying the lives of well-off New Yorkers, via deftly-wrought stories set in Manhattan and later in the bucolic precincts of Westchester and the Hudson Valley. His was a world of cocktail parties around swimming pools, commuter trains tracing the gleaming river, the routines of career and domestic life, all depicted with a mastery of the short-story form that earned him the accolade “Chekhov of the suburbs.” Clocking in at 700 pages and containing no fewer than sixty-one stories, the Big Orange Book, as I always thought of it, conferred on Cheever’s fiction a prominence other short-story writers could only dream of.
In the prologue to her new book about her father’s career, When All the Men Wore Hats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025), Susan Cheever traces the ripples sent out by that collection to far shores of the culture—like the hilarious Seinfeld episode in which George’s fiancée discovers a cache of long-ago love letters from Cheever to her father, or the “wild swimming” movement in the U.K., inspired by Cheever’s story, “The Swimmer.” More famously, Mad Mencreator Matthew Weiner used Cheever’s fiction as a primary source for his blockbuster TV series. “I am Sally Draper twice removed,” Susan Cheever proudly notes.
Her book is a companion piece to her 1984 memoir, Home Before Dark (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), and together the two cover the classic subjects of a literary biographer: the life and the work. When All the Men Wore Hats charts John Cheever’s long and sometimes vexed relationship with The New Yorker, and evokes his daily life as a homebody writer—first, in a rented cottage on the Hudson estate of the wealthy Vanderlip family, and later in the gracious house in Ossining that Cheever managed to buy (with editor Malcolm Cowley guaranteeing the mortgage). Susan Cheever describes how her father’s childhood in a downwardly mobile Boston Brahmin family sparked lifelong insecurity about money and status, and explores the basis of his fictions in his family relationships—with his brother Fred, his long-suffering wife Mary, and with Susan herself. Sporting chapter titles that are alternately biographical and thematic—“Becoming a Writer”; “My Parents’ Marriage”; “Sexual Punishment”—the book has an unusual format, part memoir, part critical study, part mini-anthology. It reprints six of Cheever’s best-known stories, all written in a dozen-year stretch from the early fifties to the mid-sixties: “Goodbye, My Brother”; “The Sorrows of Gin”; “The Five Forty-Eight”; “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”; “The Swimmer”; and “Reunion.”
Forty years ago, in Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever laid bare her father’s demons—his raging guilt and denial over his sexual ambivalence; his titanic struggles with alcohol and depression—and found herself pilloried by critics for besmirching him. (“Blatant exploitation,” a dyspeptic Roger Kimball railed in The New Criterion; “essentially an exercise in gossip.”) To my mind, Home Before Dark seemed just what Susan Cheever called it, “a book born in love and anguish,” and, in its attitude toward John Cheever, essentially kind.
Not so the current book. Whatever animus she was keeping in check the first time round, this time Cheever gives herself free rein. Her list of complaints is lengthy. The baseball mitt her father buys her in fourth grade is “cheap” and “sleazy,” and schoolmates sneer. The dog he finally gets her, after years of her begging for one, is not the frolicsome black lab of his fiction, but a mere poodle. He selfishly refuses to get her braces, because it will force him to write a short story for the cash, while he is trying to write a novel: “My crooked teeth,” she comments, “were compromising his transcendent vision.” It’s unsettling to encounter the kinds of gripes typically aired by twenty-somethings set down so bitterly by an eighty-two-year-old.
This is not to say Susan lacked real grievances. She resents Cheever for using the family in his stories, then upbraiding them when their feelings were hurt. There was her father’s deception about his gayness—a “lifelong lie,” she says, that damaged the family, and that she discovered only after his death, when she delved into his voluminous journals. One senses that a still graver sin was his inattentiveness. Looking back at the month she spent reading those journals, she notes that “in the millions of words he wrote, I was mentioned less than a dozen times.” Clearly, it still hurts. “I frequently encounter readers who assume that my father—an excellent and inspired writer—must also have been an excellent and inspired father,” she tells us. “Talking to these people is difficult; inside I am shouting obscenities.”
Anger vibrates throughout When All the Men Wore Hats, and nowhere more than in the astonishing choice of her all-time favorite among her father’s stories, “Reunion,” in which the middle-aged protagonist, seen through his teenager’s eyes, is revealed as a pompous, boorish drunk—“exactly a portrait of my father as we all experienced him,” Susan Cheever reports, praising the story for revealing her father as “the perp” he was in life. What to make of this assessment? “Good writing is often done by bad people,” she sums up, blandly and bluntly.
It’s unsettling to encounter the kinds of gripes typically aired by twenty-somethings set down so bitterly by an eighty-two-year-old.
The truth is that over his long career (which began at age eighteen, when Malcolm Cowley picked a story of his out of the slush pile at The New Republic), her father produced not just good writing, but great writing. Cheever’s best stories are cordial, gripping narratives that propel his mostly male protagonists toward implacable punishments and unexpected exhilarations. To mid-century readers, he was an avatar of the wealthy WASP sensibility of The New Yorker, which published a remarkable 121 of his stories. And indeed, some of those stories present a buttoned-up, buttoned-down aspect—like “The Bus to St. James” (1956), which evokes the Evan Connell of the novels Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, its decorous formality infused with quiet irony. Yet “The Bus to St. James” does not remain a gentle satire, but rather ends with an explosion, its marital disaffection deepening into an annihilating intimation of emptiness. Repeatedly in his stories, Cheever put forth some version of this annihilation. His daughter notes that his descriptions of “the comforting veneer of suburban lives” made him “famous for his surfaces: the leafy streets and charming houses, the buzz of gaiety coming from the neighbors’ cocktail parties, Daddy’s daily homecoming on the commuter train to his adoring children.” But that veneer of comfort was a mirage, she tells us; “these surfaces were just bait for the traps he laid for his readers—traps that, with a dreadful snap, often catapulted them into the darkness of secrets, misery and death.”
Secrets, misery and death: Susan traces the dark strain in her father’s fiction to his tormented gayness, citing stories that “run on the energy of illicit sex and unwanted desires” and culminate “in shame for the men who feel those desires.” She excoriates him for disguising his own sexual torments as marital unhappiness, and it’s fair to say that his stories are steeped in marital rancor. “You have no idea how much you hate me,” Julia tells her spouse in “The Country Husband” (1954), even as he arrives at his own realization of an “intolerable bleakness” that “no amount of cheerfulness or hopefulness or valor or perseverance” can dispel. Such stories of domestic resentment “paint the pastel watercolors of the suburbs,” Susan Cheever notes, and then “descend into horror.” Indeed, “The Hartleys” (1949)—in which an unhappy couple on a family ski vacation explodes in drunken despair and recrimination (“Why in Christ’s name did we ever begin such a wretched thing? Why isn’t there an end to it?”)—becomes an actual horror story, via the gruesome death of the couple’s seven-year-old daughter in a ski-lift accident and the closing image of a hearse carrying her corpse away from the resort.
This kind of grim melodrama—call it Hudson Gothic—was the exception in Cheever. More typical were stories like “The Season of Divorce,” which sets up a glum stasis in a couple’s marriage, explodes it with an eruption of acrimony, and ultimately lapses back into an even more deeply resigned unhappiness. Cheever’s friend and fellow bard of the suburbs, John Updike, construed marriage as a fertile field of contending desires, in which infidelity and even divorce presented, along with guilt, openings for new life. For Cheever, in contrast, marriage was a prison, with no escape possible—only confinement and despair, mitigated by intermittent, evanescent blisses.
Those blisses figure in a 1977 appearance Updike and Cheever made on The Dick Cavett Show. Wryly noting that the two Johns were often confused with one another, Cavett asked for their take on each other as writers. Updike’s insightful answer zeroed in on a defining quality of Cheever. “John is more of a transcendentalist than I am,” he commented. “There’s a kind of radiance that he feels and conveys that I’m not sure I do.” This was something coming from the writer of a novel like Rabbit Run, which labored to endow its inarticulate jock-hero with precisely the hope of transcendence. Updike, however, meant transcendence not as Cheever’s subject, but his sensibility. Indeed, one of the great thrills of Cheever’s stories is their capacity for Joycean epiphanies—hallelujahs that seem to come from nowhere to create some of the greatest closing lines in all of American literature. Consider the jolt of myth that ends “The Country Husband”: “[I]t is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” Or the rapture at the close of “Goodbye, My Brother,” whose middle-aged narrator, after a holiday weekend spent with squabbling siblings, takes an early morning calm-me-down walk past the beach, cueing up a luminous vision:
The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.
One source of Cheever’s powerful appeal to readers is the almost bipolar aspect of his fiction—the way it mires us in unhappiness, only to rescue us with an exalted intimation of light, joy, and the sublime. Cheever was a faithful churchgoer (Updike once described him as “a regular, indeed compulsive, communicant at Episcopal morning Mass”), and one senses a gleam of Christian redemptionism in the vicissitudes of his fiction. His stories offer a vicarious salvation—damning us and then saving us again and again, at the literal last second, via a kind of writerly Hail Mary.
As his daughter makes clear, those vicissitudes were no mere writerly strategy, but the emotional chiaroscuro of a man so familiar with depression, he had pet names for it (“depresh,” “the megrims,” “cafar”). “Life for my father was either unbearable or transcendent,” Susan Cheever observed in Home Before Dark. “Sometimes he was too depressed by the banality of his life to work, and other times he was ecstatic.” Cheever’s journals were the arena where he wrestled with his demons—fighting “bloody battles,” his daughter reports. But they were also where he dallied with his angels. A typical passage evokes the beauty of a summer night near the Hudson that he had experienced years before as a younger man. The sound of a freighter passing on the river; a plane overhead, “with all her gaudy landing lights still burning”; tree frogs singing; a cat “that began to howl like a demented child”; a presentiment of winter cold on a hot night: “whatever it was,” Cheever wrote, “I seemed to step into a pleasant atmosphere of goodness, a turning in the path that seemed to state clearly; Joy to the world, lasting Joy.” Such romantic effusions read like an urgent attempt at rescue, in his fictions and in his life.
In an insightful 1973 essay in The New York Review of Books, the critic Alfred Kazin pegged Cheever’s fictional habitat as “a prosperous suburban world whose subject is internal depression, the Saturday night party, and the post-martini bitterness”—a world of “amazing sadness [and] futility,” in which “loneliness is the dirty little secret, a personal drive so urgent and confusing that it comes out a vice.” A decade before the posthumous revelation of Cheever’s closeted sexuality, Kazin was onto his abiding unhappiness and the way in which that unhappiness powered his fiction, bestowing the special quality of radiance that Updike referred to. “My deepest feeling about Cheever is that his marvelous brightness is an effort to cheer himself up,” Kazin wrote. “Feeling alone is the air his characters breathe.”
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