What an unenviable posthumous career John Cheever has had! In 1984, two years after his death, his daughter, Susan, rushed into print with a tell-all memoir; in 1988 came a dull biography by Scott Donaldson and a collection of letters that made Cheever seem almost doltish. The correspondence was edited (and outfitted with an astonishingly self-indulgent running commentary) by the author’s son Benjamin; for the journals, the family has wisely called in a pro, Robert Gottlieb. The book, which covers the years 1948 to 1982 and contains only the twentieth part of Cheever’s journals, proves to be as vibrant, poignant, and authentic as much of his fiction and as beautifully written, at its best, as anything he ever published.
It is also, alas, unrelievedly depressing. Cheever tirelessly proclaims his anxiety and gloom; his intermittent expressions of joy seem desperate. The sense of doom is awesome—he predicts that “I will end up cold, alone, dishonored, forgotten by my children” (ha!)—and awesome too is the self- hatred: “Oh, to be so much a better man than I happen to be.” The main reason for this self-hatred was his homosexuality, which he saw as profane and unmanly, couldn’t reconcile with his role as paterfamilias and Westchester country squire, and, as late as 1966, wouldn’t even discuss with his shrink. He agonizes endlessly about the threat his sexual urges represent to his family life (“Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol”),