The Lives of John Cheever

JOHN CHEEVER never beat his daughter with a coat hanger: he never made her eat raw meat on her hands and knees: and he never hit her over the head with a bottle of bathroom cleaner.

So why did Susan Cheever write Home Before Dark, a "biographical memoir" of her father -- published a mere two years after his death, and revealing his hidden triad of dark sins: alcoholism, marital strife, and homosexuality?

The cavillers cry out against such an alleged "Daddy Dearest," but don't listen to them. Home Before Dark might unearth some spicy secrets, but it is not sensational: and while it may occasionally embarrass some friends and relatives, it remains loving and sincere to the memory of America's great short story writer and novelist, John Cheever.

At forty-one years old, Susan Cheever is the eldest of the Cheever offspring, and apparently the one most intimately involved with her father. She has published three well-reviewed novels, and worked as a journalist for Newsweek. In 1977, she wrote the cover story Newsweek ran on Cheever that painted him as a cultivated literary bonhomme exuding all the charm and complacency of the Boston Brahmin upbringing he never had.

That was the church-going, dog-loving country squire facade that John Cheever loved to present. The complex and difficult man Susan Cheever unravels in Home Before Dark is of a different breed altogether.

JOHN CHEEVER, we are told, always loved to tell stories. As an adolescent in the prestigious Thayer Academy, his teacher used to reward the class for their good behavior by having John tell them a story. Later, he told his own children so many legends about his life that they seldom knew what to believe. The fact is, John Cheever glided effortlessly into a world of fiction and, according to his daughter, he sometimes stayed exclusively in his imaginary surroundings for months. Suicidal drinking bouts, long talks with his canine companions, and a career steeped in fictional fantasy tell the story of a man often incapable of facing reality.

And the reality of this writer's beginnings was none too efficacious. Cheever was born the son of a prosperous shoe-merchant and a strong minded Englishwoman, in Wollaston, Massachusetts, in 1912. Bad deals and the depression destroyed his father and left the family dependent on the mother's quaint foreign gift shop. Young John, whose successful older brother Fred had begun at Dartmouth, found himself associating with his embittered, self-pitying father, while his mother grew increasingly distant.

One of the book's most elucidating portraits is that given of the influential and psychologically loaded relationship that developed between John and Fred Cheever. After Fred graduated college, the two began living together in Boston, with Fred supporting his kid brother until the latter broke the ice as a writer. The attachment conjured up some pretty strong feelings for John, who soon felt compelled to cut the arrangement short. As Cheever later told his daughter, his love for his brother was the most complicated and powerful in his life: "When it became apparent that it was an ungainly closeness, I packed my bag and shook his hand and left." But the relationship triggered Cheever's emotional obstinacy, his unwillingness to let people in close, and foreshadowed his omnivorous sexual appetite; falling romantically for a sibling helped form Cheever's character.

In addition to providing choice literary gossip, Home Before Dark is good, though brief, literary criticism. By examining her father's personality, Susan Cheever throws an interesting light on his stylistic preoccupations:

[Father] did not like to talk about how these things felt: he did not like to talk about human emotions. He did talk, often eloquntly, about human behavior. Are they really the same? I don't think so. My father's intense concentration on what you can see and hear and smell and touch was at the core of his gift as a writer. He focused on the surface and texture of life, not on the emotions and motives underneath. In creative-writing classes, teachers always say that it is important to "show" and not "tell." My father's work describes the way people live, and the way he lived. I never tells.

Susan Cheever her father's life according to his success as a writer. In the early 1960s, when Cheever's first novel. The Wapshot Scandal, began winning awards, and when his reputation as a New Yorker short story staff writer seemed assured, he felt himself on top of the world. But success and celebrity took big toll on Cheever. His daughter claims he became "quite pompous about himself," and his drinking, which had always been heavy according to the socially acceptable fashion of New York literati, became increasingly so. And as Cheever became aware of his homosexuality, his embarrassment over the fact, and his fear of being discovered, further intensified his alcoholism: "I think it was partly his fear of his own desires that kept my father drinking."

Each of the twenty-five short chapters that make up Home Before Dark seems to be written as a separate diary entry, with the daughter warmly circling around the ghost of her father until she has "worked him out for herself." There is a feeling in this book that everything was meant as a therapeutic exercise for one daughter's unusually strong affiliation with her dad.

But Susan Cheever is too unblinking, too unabashed as dredging up the most compromising tidbits recorded by her father in his unreleased journals, to ever lose her credibility. Although enormously self-absorbed, the John Cheever we get here made a very positive impact on his daughter: "We had wonderful times. A simpler way to put this is that my father loved his children. The three of us were, as he said, 'the roof and settle' of his existence. As individuals we often displeased him, but as a unit we were cherished and indispensable."

The sweetest surprise of Home Before Dark is how much of John Cheever's magical voice has been inherited in Susan Cheever. At the end of the book, the daughter evokes the her melancholy after John Cheever's death in 1982--the tone is vintage Papa:

I look down at the snowy earth where my father lies. There are footprints under the maple tree that grows over his grave. People have been here, although the snow around the other graves is untrammeled. It was June when we buried him--the summer solstice. The day I return is Ash Wednesday. He lies there in the cold winter ground. I make a snowball with my hands, pack it firm, and lob it gently at the grave. There doesn't seem anything else to do here.

Perhaps this passage provides a good analogy for the book as a whole: some of the time Susan Cheever feels like cutting her father's legend down to size, and she's right on target, but she's only pitching snowballs; as the ice melts into water and slides off. John Cheever's name emerges again, still carved firmly into stone, but the outlines are somehow clearer, fresher.