literary biography/john cheever

By Robbie on February 2, 2010

I got a doorstop of a book for Christmas, a 700+ page life of the writer John Cheever. Looking at the beautiful black-and-white cover design, and remembering a delightful January spent cozying up to the short story collection "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow," impelled me to tear into the biography right away. But stepping back from the cover to look at the book's third dimension -- depth -- made me recoil. 700+ pages is a month in the life of a slow reader like me. If that's time spent in the hotblooded company of, say, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sir Richard Francis Burton, or Dian Fossey, that's one thing. But writers are known to lead dull, cloistered, self-centered...writerly lives. And when you consider that a life like Mr. Cheever's was devoted to leaving posterity a shoebox's worth of brilliant sentences, hacked out at substantial cost, is it fair or reasonable, no matter how intense your curiosity about another man's mentality and misfortunes, to dilute his accomplishment by dumping on a second shoebox full of lesser sentences?

The first 257 pages of Blake Bailey's book have fairly zipped by, despite the impression made by the table of contents: chapter 1, "1637-1912," chapter 2, "1912-1926," chapter 3, "1926-1930," and so on. A man pulls himself out of a troubled childhood and up into literary high society, without the benefit of money, family connections, or any particular education: a happy story. Mr. Bailey's on-page persona is amicable, judicious and reasonably restrained. But when Cheever's words appear on the page (he documented his own doings thoroughly and dispassionately) Mr. Bailey's shrink into grayness. Of his hometown, Quincy, Mass., Cheever observes: "The difference between the legend and the present has always been amusing. It is now the most despicable, contrite tract of Dutch Colonial houses I have ever seen. I've always wanted to go down there with a jug of firewater and a couple of sluts and raise a maypole." I imagine it's hard to create writing that can share a page with this voice without being upended by it.

You read a literary biography, manifestly, for the kind of thing that is due to happen in the next two-thirds of this one, the drinking and kid-ruining and carnal mayhem and, in Cheever's case, the eleventh-hour rehabilitation. The sordidly "dramatic" bits. I doubt that watching this miserable parade through the eyes of the biographer and the surviving family members (whose accounts of events are allowed to stand at face value more often than the dead subject's) will provide as blunt and as tinglingly transcendent a picture of alcohol-eaten souls in crisis as the stories in "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow." Once you've immersed yourself in the land of Mr. Cheever's invention, the details of his real-world sorrows are unshocking and comparatively banal. The words he left are the thing; words, like music, are the hedge of a superior mind against an all-engulfing banality. The biography of a wordsmith trains a light on the flotsam and leaves a shadow on the created work, returning me to the question: why does the life of a writer need to be written about, or read?