A Troubled Life with Father

By Paul Gray

HOME BEFORE DARK by Susan Cheever; Houghton Mifflin; 243 pages; $15.95

John Cheever died at age 70 in 1982. Near the end of her "biographical memoir" of the late writer, his daughter Susan, the author of three novels, recalls a visit to her father's grave in Massachusetts: "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 to be anything else to do here."

If there is a hint of hostility in this gesture, Susan Cheever does not acknowledge it. And this graveside vignette, reported with admirable candor and scant introspection, is typical of nearly all of Home Before Dark: a loving memorial journey accompanied by the unexamined impulse to throw something.

Life with father, as Susan recounts it, was never dull and rarely easy. As the daughter, born in 1943, and her two younger brothers grew up, they had to accustom themselves to dramatic swings in their domestic circumstances. Cheever earned his living by writing short stories for The New Yorker; it was a precarious trade, subject to editorial quirkiness in the matters of rejection or payment: "He was rich sometimes and he was poor sometimes, and both of these conditions were as dependent on his mood as they were on his net worth (which also fluctuated pretty wildly)."

Publication of The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), his first novel, brought Cheever the first of his many awards and a period of relative financial security. Susan remembers these heady times, which stretched through the 1960s: "His marriage was still exciting, his children were thriving, and we all made a lot of 'Will success spoil John Cheever?' jokes. Later, success and celebrity took a big toll on my father and he became quite pompous about himself."

Given this judgment, it is hard to imagine what Cheever could have done to please his daughter. She suffered when he was exultant and when he was miserable. The mixed reviews and lackluster sales of Bullet Park (1969) sent him into a tailspin that nearly killed him. His drinking accelerated: "It became clearer and clearer that my father was the worst kind of alcoholic. He seemed intent on destroying himself." The strains in his marriage to his wife Mary broke violently into the open: "When we children were at home during these years between 1969 and the mid-1970s, my parents would have dinner together at the long table in front of the downstairs fireplace as they always had, but they could rarely get through the meal without a fight. She would leave the table in tears, or he would get up in a cold, self-righteous rage." To get away from home, he took teaching assignments at the University of Iowa and then Boston University and philandered openly: "My father had discovered groupies." In Boston, he was visibly and often embarrassingly drunk. Notes Susan: "We stayed away from him, and so did most people."

Then, in short order, Cheever underwent a successful treatment for alcoholism, completed the novel Falconer (1977) and won increased fame and wealth with the appearance of The Stories of John Cheever (1978). Looking back at this remarkable resurgence, Susan finds her memory locked mostly on pomposity: "He dropped names shamelessly. It was no longer safe to tease him about favorable reviews. In restaurants, he let headwaiters know that he was someone important." She also reveals the information, garnered in part from his private journals, that her father had worried about his homosexual impulses for much of his adult life and finally established in his last years a satisfying physical and emotional bond with a younger married man.

"I was always afraid of my father," Susan notes at one point. Home Before Dark represents an attempt to replace this emotion with knowledge and understanding. All elegies say more about the living than the dead, and in telling her father's story Susan tells her own. But the reason that thousands outside the immediate family will care about this account is that Cheever made enduring art out of the miseries and demons that haunted him. Susan knows this, of course, but chooses to emphasize the costs rather than the achievements. A full account of Cheever's life demands honest recognition of both. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"My father was drawn to strength. .. He never spoke about feelings or allowed himself to speculate on the inner mechanics of the family. 'I love you all equally,' he would say, or 'I adore your mother.' People remember my father's candor. 'Although his manner was reticent, there was nothing John would not say about himself,' Saul Bellow recalled in his eulogy at my father's funeral. In a way, that was true. He would tell you exactly what he had done to this or that mistress in a room at the St. Regis or in a motel in Iowa, and he would tell you that The New Yorker had paid him less than $1,000 for a story, and he would tell you that he took two Valiums and drank a pint of gin every day before noon. That was different, though. He did not like to talk about how these things felt; he did not like to talk about human emotions. He did talk, often eloquently, about human behavior. Are they really the same? I don't think so."