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John Cheever (1912-1982) | |
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American short story writer and novelist, called the "Chekhov of the suburbs". Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision. Although he often used his family as material, his daughter Susan Cheever has reminded that "of course none of us expected accuracy from my father. He made his living by making up stories." "He looked at us all bleakly. The wind and the sea had risen, and I thought that if he heard the waves, he must hear them only as a dark answer to all his dark questions; that he would think that the tide had expunged the embers of our picnic fires. The company of a lie is unbearable, and he seemed like the embodiment of a lie." (from 'Goodbye, My Brother' in The Stories of John Cheever, 1978) John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachussetts. One of Cheever's ancestors was Ezekiel Cheever (1615-1708), the author author of Accidence: A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue. His father, Frederick, owned a shoe factory and was relatively wealthy until he lost his business in the 1929 stock market crash and deserted his family. The support the family, Cheever's mother, Mary Liley, ran a gift shop; she drank herself to death. The young Cheever was deeply upset by the breakdown of his parents' relationship. His formal education ended when he was seventeen. After leaving home, Cheever studied at Thayer Academy, but was expelled for smoking. The experience was the nucleus of his first published story, 'Expelled' (1930), which Malcolm Cowley bought for New Republic. For a time Cheever lived with his brother in Boston. He wrote synopses for MGM and sold stories to various magazines. After a journey in Europe, Cheever returned to the US. He settled in New York, where he was acquainted with such writers as John Dos Passos, Edward Estlin Cummings, James Agee, and James Farrell. In 1933 he attended the Yaddo writers' colony in Saratoga Springs. A number of Cheever's early works were published in The New Republic, Collier's Story, and The Atlantic. In 1935 he began a lifelong assocation with the New Yorker. He married in 1941 Mary Winternitz, and published two years later his first book, THE WAY SOME PEOPLE LIVE, which depicted the life of Upper-Eastside and suburban residents or dealt with Cheever's own experiences as a recruit. Originally the stories had appeared in magazines. During World War II Cheever had served four years as an infantry gunner and member of the Signal Corps. After the war Cheever worked as a teacher and wrote scripts for television. In 1951 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. Most of the stories in Cheever's second collection, THE ENORMOUS RADIO AND OTHER STORIES (1953), were set in New York City. The title story bears some similarities with Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window (1954), in which the theme was voyeurism; in Cheever's story a woman eavesdrops on her neighbors' private conversations through a magic radio. In the mid-1950s Cheever began writing novels. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE (1957) was strongly autobiographical, based on his mother's and father's relationship, his family's genteel decline, and own life. The book won the National Book Award in 1958. "Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." (from The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957) In the 1960s Cheever worked briefly as a Hollywood scripwriter on a film version of D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl from 1920. In 1964 Cheever spent six weeks in Russia as a part of cultural exchange program. Next year American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Howells Medal for THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL (1964), in which he describes some of the characters familiar from his first novel. From 1956 to 1957 Cheever taught writing at Barnard College – a work he never liked much. However, he was teacher at the University of Iowa and at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University (1974-75). In Boston Cheever became depressed and had drinking problems. He was a month at the Smithers Rehabilitation Center in New York City. These experiences found later place in his novel FALCONER (1977), a story about college professor who makes a journey to personal rebirth during his year in Falconer Prison. In the story Ezekiel Farragut kills his brother, Eben, and becomes a heroin addict – or addicted to illusions. Farragut's discovery of religion and his escape from the prison, from the violence and despair, can be interpreted as a kind of redemption. At the end of the novel an ordinary bus stop become Farragut's passport to reality. "You are a professor and the education of the young – of all those who seek learning – is your vocation. We learn by experience, do we not, and as a professor, distinguished by the responsibilities of intellectual and moral leadership, you have chosen to commit the heinous crime of fratricide while under the influence of dangerous drugs. Aren't you ashamed?" – "I want to be sure that I get my methadone," Farragut said. (from Falconer) Cheever's other major works include the experimental BULLET PARK (1969), an allegory of the struggle between good and evil, in which Eliot Nailles, a chemist, meets Paul Hammer, who is not the ordinary citizen he seems to be. "We're the Hammers," The stranger said to the priest. Nailles did not think this funny, anticipating the fact that almost everyone else in the neighborhood would. How many hundreds or perhaps thousands cocktail parties would they have to live through, side by side: Hammer and Nailles." Hammer is the illegitimate son of a kleptomaniac, and he plans to awaken the suburban world – by burning Eliot's son Tony in a church. THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. Cheever died of cancer in 1982, at the age of 70, in Ossinning, New York. His widow, Mary, signed in 1987 a contract with a small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle, and a book of 13 stories by the author, publishd in 1994. Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, became novelists. Cheever's posthumously published letters and journals revealed his guilt-ridden bisexuality. Cheever contrasted often the ordinary suburban milieu with the chaotic or hidden emotional states of his characters. Several stories, such as "The Five-Fourty Eight," about the revenge of a humiliated woman, were set in the fictional suburban commuter town of Shady Hill, a fallen Paradise. Eventually Cheever's middle- or upper-middle-class characters come to face their own shortcomings. In three novels Cheever used two brothers to represent different values of modern life. One of his most famous stories, "The Swimmer" (1964), portrays a man, who refuses to acknowledge his failures. The protagonist, Neddy Merrill, swims his way home from one pool to another. The story inspired Frank Perry's and Sydney Pollack's film from 1968, starring Burt Lancaster in his trunks. At the end of the film the swimmer's stories about his success turn out to be a fantasy – his home is both locked and empty.
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