Long before Don Draper, there was John Cheever. The master of the American short story was the original purveyor of midcentury mystique, especially its darker facets.
The endless drinking, ever-present cigarettes, infidelities, secrets of suburban life and anxiety regarding America’s place in the postwar world — they’re all in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Stories of John Cheever.”
That book is getting an updated edition from Random House come May 27, on what would have been Cheever’s 100th birthday.
Another centennial celebration will take place Thursday, when the 92nd Street Y hosts “John Cheever at 100,” an event featuring his children; biographer Blake Bailey; and novelists Michael Chabon and Allan Gurganus.
Cheever’s centenary comes at a time when the decades roughly between the end of World War II and Woodstock have returned to the forefront of popular imagination.
Maybe our national anxieties are similar to what they were back then; more likely, it is simply a testament to the genius of “Mad Men,” which Bailey claims Cheever “would have loved.” Especially since Don and Betty once lived in a house on Bullet Park Road, a winking reference to Cheever’s 1969 novel “Bullet Park.”
But it is stories, not novels, that made Cheever famous. Alhough he was not to the manor born, Cheever was endlessly fascinated with the lives of the patrician class, whether on the upper East Side or bedroom communities like his fictional Shady Hill.
Cheever’s work mirrored a profound psychological unease that many Americans were coming to share — but which Cheever was the first to express with artistic eloquence.
“Nobody depicts that particular sort of malaise better than Cheever,” Bailey says of the author’s stories. Indeed, no less than Time magazine put him on its cover in 1964, branding him “Ovid in Ossining.”
His own life, tragically, mirrored that of his characters: Cheever was an alcoholic and closeted homosexual.
Nor was his fame quite as great in his own time as it might seem today. Despite our notion of Cheever as a great writer, he sometimes had trouble getting stories printed. The New Yorker hesitated to run some, afraid they were too sexually frank.
Despite that, Cheever’s daughter Susan, who has published several books of her own, says that her childhood was “wonderful.” Little surprise: As a young girl, she was entertained by New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell; Robert Penn Warren got down on the floor to imitate FDR’s dog; Ralph Ellison played Beethoven on the recorder.
Most surprising to those accustomed to Cheever’s brand of pathos is his daughter’s description of his sense of humor.
“We were laughing all the time,” Susan Cheever says. “My father was one of the funniest men in the world.”
Her brother agrees, saying, “It wasn’t his default position to be a pompous ass.”
Ben Cheever hopes that the changing world does not leave his father behind — although he fears that it already has: “He’s not taught anymore because he’s a white guy without a cause.”
For plenty of readers, however, John Cheever will always be a bold-faced name for his time and for New York.
New York was central to his work, even if only as a phantasmal presence looming in the characters’ psychic background.
He said so himself in the famous preface to his short-story collection:
“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner of the stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”
YOU SHOULD KNOW
“John Cheever at 100” will take place Thursday at the 92nd Street Y, Lexington Ave. at E. 92nd St., $27; (212) 415-5550, 92y.org.
THE BEST OF JOHN CHEEVER
“The Swimmer” (1964) — One of his most quoted stories, thanks to protagonist Ned Merrill‘s decision to reach his house in Bullet Park by swimming through all the pools in his way. The suburban malaise is as strong as the drinks Ned consumes on his journey. Nothing will prepare you for the ending.
“The Enormous Radio” (1947) — A tale of Sutton Place, near which Cheever lived, this story burrows into the surreal depths of upper-crust existence.
“The Country Husband” (1954) — Francis Weed survives a plane crash only to return to an unsatisfying suburban life. A story so good, Hemingway woke up his wife to read it to her.
“Goodbye, My Brother” (1951) — The Pommeroy family vacation goes predictably awry thanks to Cheever’s trademark cocktail of alcohol and family angst. Features one of his best-known lines: “Oh, what can you do with a man like that?” which Cheever uttered to a doorman before jotting it down.
“The Journals of John Cheever” (1991) — The diary as art, showing Cheever’s longstanding aspirations to greatness, but also his struggles with alcoholism and repressed homosexuality. A must for any student of literature.
