Word: cheever
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...first great flowering of his career, in the 1950s and '60s, John Cheever was, to all appearances, the crown prince of normality. The wife and three children, the faithful retrievers, the rambling old house in Ossining, N.Y. - in all its outward signs, his life was commensurate with his role as the man who was, with John Updike, the esteemed chronicler of the postwar suburbs. But if you came to his fiction expecting sunlit scenes of American life, you were mistaken. Though his work was shot through with the beauty and abundance of the world, of suburban "nights where kings...
...wasn't entirely surprising to discover, after his death at age 70 in 1982, that for much of his life Cheever was miserable, a petulant, belittling husband; a difficult father; and a severe alcoholic tormented by his secret bisexuality. We learned a lot about this from his journals, 400 pages of lyric abjection published eight years after his death, in which he fears becoming the "lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality." But we get a much fuller and more reliable picture in Blake Bailey...
...Cheever grew up in the Greater Boston shore town of Quincy. His father was a traveling shoe salesman successful enough for a while to keep his family in middling Yankee splendor - a big house, good schools for John and his older brother Fred. But by the mid-1920s, as Cheever reached his teens, the shoe business was tanking, and his father was increasingly drunk and adrift. To make ends meet, his mother opened a gift shop that Cheever would describe as "an abysmal humiliation," at least for him. The big house would be lost anyway; his mother would shed...
...When Cheever flunked out of Thayer Academy at 17, it was the end of his formal education. He promptly fictionalized the experience into a story that was purchased by the New Republic. One year a dropout, the next a published writer - and within a decade, a fixture in the pages of the New Yorker. By the mid-'60s the prizes and (sometimes) money were also rolling in from his first two novels. But by that time, on most mornings he was scuttling to the liquor cabinet right after breakfast to "scoop" the day's first...
...Cheever's troubled nature was his fear of being "a small and dirty fraud," an impostor in his social pretensions and, especially, his sexuality. The suburban squire was just a shopkeeper's son. And though he took a sincere, even intense, sexual interest in women, it was impossible to superintend his wayward libido, which kept pointing him toward...