TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031891/0318470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 124 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 80

"Jack, Wrench, Hubcap, and Nuts"


The intimate journals of John Cheever are full of conflicts
about marriage, writing, drinking and sex

By STEFAN KANFER


    When John Cheever died in 1982, he left a legacy of 12
books. Eleven cannot fail to enhance his reputation; one is
likely to erode it. The Journals of John Cheever is not
scheduled to be published by Knopf until November, but four
long excerpts have already appeared in the New Yorker. They
have occasioned more chatter and speculation than anything the
author published in his lifetime, because they reveal a private
face entirely unlike the mask that Cheever contrived for public
view.

    The gossip is certain to intensify next month, when Treetops
(Bantam;  $19.95), a book by Cheever's daughter Susan, arrives
in bookstores. The volume is ostensibly a history of her
mother's extraordinary family: one member was Alexander Graham
Bell's assistant; another went to the Arctic with Admiral
Robert Peary. But Susan finds it impossible to keep her father
offstage. A friend is asked, "So, do you think he was a
monster?" Mary, Cheever's wife, wonders, "Maybe he was wicked."

    In his 1961 book, Some People, Places and Things That Will
Not Appear in My Next Novel, Cheever made a list of subjects
he considered off limits. Some seemed frivolous: "All parts for
Marlon Brando." Others contained a mix of irony and rue. The
author would shy away from explicit scenes of sexual commerce:
"How can we describe the most exalted experience of our
physical lives as if -- jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts -- we
were describing the changing of a flat tire?" He would disdain
alcoholics: "Out they go, male and female, all the lushes; they
throw so little true light on the way we live." And homosexuals
were to have no place in his pages: "Isn't it time that we
embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the flesh and
moved on?"

    Later Cheever dealt with some of these proscribed items, but
never in the tone of the journals. Here they appear in a harsh
floodlight, personified by Cheever himself. The author's
idiosyncrasies are no longer secret: in Home Before Dark,
Susan's ambivalent 1984 memoir, her father is described as "the
worst kind of alcoholic." Her brother Ben, who edited a volume
of Cheever's letters, recalled that John was "bisexual all his
life . . . He liked good-looking younger men." Still, these
were posthumous comments, made by members of the family that
Cheever alternately cherished and regarded as a self-inflicted
wound. In his notebooks, the author discloses himself in
passages that seem to have been meant for an audience of one.

    "Drank a good deal of whiskey, trying to relax," he begins,
and that prescription is followed through the 1940s and '50s.
Occasional grace notes occur, but hangovers and revulsion are
usually the order of the day: "I feel sick, disgusted with
myself, despairing and obscene. I have a drink to pull myself
together at half past eleven and begin my serious drinking at
half past four." And: "Evening comes or even noon and some
combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what
whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual
well-being. I could very easily destroy myself. It is ten
o'clock now and I am thinking about the noontime snort."

    More than a decade later, Cheever is still awash in remorse,
denial and booze. He bullies his wife Mary, terrifies his
daughter and reflects, "I have the characteristics of a
bastard." Cheever's sexuality escapes from the closet: "His
soft gaze follows me, settles on me, and I have a deadly
itchiness in my crotch. If he should put a hand on my thigh I
would not remove it; if I should chance to meet him in the
shower I would tackle him." He also has affairs with women and
asks himself, "Would I sooner nuzzle D.'s bosom or squeeze
R.'s enlarged pectorals?"

    Rereading his early notebooks, Cheever accurately observes
that "what emerges are two astonishing contests, one with
alcohol and one with my wife." He gives Mary a typewriter. She
acknowledges it 11 months later. They reconcile. They argue
violently about his affairs. One entry says volumes about the
temperature of this family crucible: "I find on the floor of
Ben's room an unmailed letter . . . He is alone, he says. He
is crying. He is alone with Mum and Dad, the two most
self-centered animals in the creation."

    With a comparatively small body of work, Cheever established
himself as the Chekhov of the American suburb, investing
railroad stations, tract houses and their owners with an
amalgam of poetry, comedy and pathos. But that was in his
fiction. The journals written before his renunciation of
liquor, if not infidelity, reveal a blundering father, a
conniving lover and a narcissistic mind. Noting that John
Updike has made the cover of TIME, Cheever grumbles, "My own
stubborn and sometimes idle prose has more usefulness." When
the "estimable" Saul Bellow publishes a breakthrough novel, the
diarist petulantly notes, "I have written first person slang
long before `Augie March' appeared."

    Mary and the children are Cheever's literary executors. Why
would they allow him -- as well as themselves -- to be so
unflatteringly exposed? Is it a measure of revenge against the
man who caused so many injuries? Or a matter of royalties?
According to New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, Cheever wanted
his notebooks to be published; the family is simply honoring
his wishes. How much honor accrues to the request will be
debated for years to come.

    Was Cheever an artist? A monster? A tragic clown? Journals
indicates that he was all three, suggesting that his life could
provide the basis of a provocative and controversial film. Take
away a hundred pounds, and Marlon Brando might be ideal for the
title role.