The Man, but Not His Voice JOHN CHEEVER: A BIOGRAPHY by Scott Donaldson Random House; 416 pages; $22.50

By Paul Gray

Buried within the lengthy list of acknowledgments at the end of this life of John Cheever is a poignant sentence indeed: "The most important book dealing with Cheever's life is Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark, a sensitive memoir that provides fascinating quotations from his journals and letters." Scott Donaldson, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary, does not go on to explain why his book hardly quotes journals and letters at all, but the reason is obvious. Susan's book about her father was published in 1984, several years before an important glitch arose in the writing of such works: J.D. Salinger successfully sued to prevent Biographer Ian Hamilton from generously quoting or even closely paraphrasing unpublished letters. After enduring that expensive, lengthy and losing litigation, Random House, Hamilton's publisher, grew understandably cautious about forthcoming biographies on its list. One of the first to be scrutinized in light of the new legal landscape was John Cheever: A Biography. Says Gerald Hollingsworth, Random House's chief legal counsel: "As a result of the Salinger case, we paid an enormous amount of attention to the Cheever work. Whether we allowed Donaldson to use less of John Cheever's unpublished material than he would have liked is difficult to answer."

Not for readers of Donaldson's biography. Words made the man named Cheever, both in his fiction and in his elegant, often unsettling comments on himself and everything he loved and hated. Unfortunately, his biographer can offer only sparing, truncated and oblique evidence of his subject's distinctive gift. The snippets that are included simply underscore the absence of so many others. Here is Cheever, taking tranquilizers as a prescribed substitute for alcohol, complaining that the medication made him feel as "stagnant as the water under an old millwheel." On a visit to the University of Utah in 1977, the author grows enamored of a teaching fellow and confides to his journal: "Lonely and with my loneliness exacerbated by travel, motel rooms, bad food, public readings and the superficiality of standing in reception lines, I fell in love with Max in a motel room of unusual squalor." Near the end of his life, Cheever, ill with cancer, appears along with John Updike on The Dick Cavett Show. Donaldson carefully paraphrases Cheever's critique of himself after viewing the broadcast: "He looked like a viper trying to break wind, he wrote Updike."

This biographer can hardly be blamed for the perverse effects of the Salinger case, i.e., the ability of an author who has not published a word since 1965 to squelch other words well into the litigious future. Nor is it Donaldson's fault that Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark scooped him by revealing her father's bisexuality. These handicaps are difficult but not necessarily ruinous. Unfortunately, John Cheever, which is certain to command wide attention because of its subject's fame, displays a range of self- inflicted weaknesses.

The most severe of these is Donaldson's prose style. Before his death in 1982 Cheever had regaled many interviewers and companions with tales of his past. The litany took on anecdotal grandeur: his glamorous New England ancestors, his childhood in Quincy, Mass., as the second son of a failed father and domineering mother, his expulsion from Thayer Academy, his struggles to make his name as a writer during the 1930s, and his growing < recognition as a regular contributor of short stories to The New Yorker; then marriage and three children -- Susan, Ben, Federico -- and the move to the exurbs north of New York City; increasing renown, novels, prizes, alcoholism, depression, extramarital affairs; finally, the kicking of alcohol and the redemption of finding himself rich and famous.

Never mind that many versions of this saga contradicted one another and the facts of the matter; they were invariably pithy and memorable. Donaldson's determination to set the record straight leads him to a repudiation of Cheever's freewheeling manner. Cliches seem to certify sober, scholarly research: "Life was not all fun and games, however" . . . "The New Yorker's taste was genteel, and as time wore on Cheever wrote about everything under the sun" . . . "Fred was the apple of his father's eye."

Cheever would have groaned, or said something quite rude about such stale expressions. He was, after all, capable of describing himself as "intrinsically disheveled." Worse still, Donaldson seems only dimly aware of the discipline and artistry that went into Cheever's fiction. Two early stories, the biographer writes, "were deeply felt semiautobiographical tales populated by characters that the author (and hence the reader) clearly cared about." If "caring about" characters were truly a recipe for literary success, the world would be awash with masterpieces.

Finally, Donaldson reveals an imprecise grasp of the narrative method, the notion that one thing leads to another. He alludes to a reconciliation between Cheever and his son Ben without ever having explained when or why they were estranged. And Donaldson writes, "As his fame grew, so did the local demands on his time from libraries, colleges, and civic and cultural associations." Exactly two pages later, this sentence obtrudes: "Cheever's reputation was at its nadir."

For all its faults, this may be the most detailed biography of Cheever for some years to come. Grudging attention must be paid by all those who value Cheever and his work. But devotees can also look forward to the scheduled publications later this year of the author's collected letters and previously uncollected stories. Cheever's waspish, beguiling voice has clearly not had its last word.