Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. Knopf. 770 pages, $35.
Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings. The Library of America. 1,040 pages, $35.
Cheever: Complete Novels. The Library of America. 933 pages, $35.

At his peak in the 1950s and 1960s, John Cheever was widely considered one of the great living writers, a suburban Chekhov who perfectly realized the life and times of the post-war commuter class, smothering under the weight of their own American dreams.

For others, he was neither new nor interesting. No Salinger, said one, a “toothless Thurber,” said another, a “culture-hero to the barbecue and Volkswagen set,” said yet another.

Cheever survived, and by the time of his death in 1982, seemed guaranteed to endure: the old-school New Yorker writer whose life work was a testament to patient craft. He was the tortoise who had outpaced so many experimentalist hares.

His fall from grace was swift. No sooner was he buried than his seedy private life (revealed in family memoirs and his own journals) crawled from the ground. Cheever had been a raging alcoholic, a closeted bisexual and, like so many of his characters, a man who tried and failed to negotiate some balance between his public and private selves.

In the 1990s, when he became a punch line on Seinfeld, one couldn’t help but wonder if that would be his ultimate legacy to a new generation.
 

Cheever had been a raging alcoholic, a closeted bisexual and, like so many of his characters, a man who tried and failed to negotiate some balance between his public and private selves.

Two beautiful new volumes from the Library of America, published in concert with Blake Bailey’s long-awaited biography, make an excellent case for Cheever, although the preponderance of evidence rests squarely on the stories. Bailey, too, argues for his subject, although he also reveals a great deal more than people may want to know.

Cheever said a novel was “massive, longlived” while a short story “has the life expectancy of a mayfly.” The exact opposite is true in his case. The short story was his true means of expression; a point only reinforced by engaging but episodic novels like The Wapshot Chronicle and Bullet Park.

His best stories compress whole lives and worlds into a few pages, such as in “The Five Forty-Eight,” where we get an acute picture both of an odious employer, who will be forced at gunpoint to pay for his sins, as well as the urban life that has squeezed out his humanity. Another sterling example is “The Country Husband,” which is basically about a man who has sacrificed everything for the good life and then finds himself trapped in it. It’s the texture of his very routine neighborhood that Cheever is really after, though; the startling details as well as the ordinary but funny ones, like the wandering child who never goes home or the dog who steals steaks from outdoor grills, all of which are woven into a truly magical ending.

Best of all perhaps is “The Swimmer,” a real and surreal tale in which a former golden boy swims his way home by way of every pool in the neighborhood. The trip, over the course of a mere 11 pages, takes him through his past and right up to the doorstep, literally, of his disastrous present.

Blake Bailey was given full access to Cheever’s journals, which cover the whole of his writing life. His biography reveals a man both kind and terribly needy — for fame, attention, alcohol and sex — who stayed soused for most of his life and hit on everyone from his teenage son’s girlfriend to students in his writing classes. There’s even a predatory, sex-for-advice relationship with a pathetic, untalented young man that plays out like a Fassbinder film.

It must be said, despite this, that Bailey never aims for sensationalism, that nothing is revealed without a sense of perspective or a duty to the truth, that he’s an excellent researcher, a superb critic and an excellent writer. Cheever couldn’t ask for better.

But this is, also, another compelling example that it’s best not to know much about people you admire. Read the biography, but please, read the stories first.