A Celebrant of Sunlight

By Paul Gray

John Cheever: 1912-1982

He died, after a long bout with cancer, just three days before the summer solstice and the principal season of his imagination. Author John Cheever, 70, was a celebrant of sunlight, of manicured suburban lawns and shaved ice swimming in gin. Not all of his fiction (five novels and more than 100 short stories) was set in the heat of the year, but his dominant landscape radiated warmth and possibilities. It was filled with earnest people blinking in the glare of sudden and temporary freedom, with winter a chilly reflex of conscience. Seaside houses stimulated the senses: "Lying in bed, you draw on your cigarette and the red glow lights an arm, a breast, and a thigh around which the world seems to revolve. These images are like the embers of our best feelings, and standing on the beach, for that first hour, it seems as if we could build them into a fire." Such summer retreats were also haunted by past and present tenants: "The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure, although in the morning they would all be gone."

Throughout his long career, Cheever kept an elegant account of both the price and value of experience: the piper must be paid, but the music is wonderful. His vision was moral and sensuous at the same time. His heedless libertines do not appreciate what they are enjoying, nor do his cynics know what they are missing. "Oh, what can you do with a man like that?" asks the narrator of one of his stories. "How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life... ?"

The harshness and the beauty came from New England and Massachusetts, where Cheever was born, in Quincy, of sturdy Yankee stock. An ancestor, Ezekiel, had come to the Bay Colony in 1637 and founded the Boston Latin School. Young Cheever maintained family traditions by attending Thayer Academy, but then managed at age 17 to get himself kicked out for smoking and laziness. Within a year, his short story Expelled appeared in the New Republic. He spent some time in Boston with his older brother Fred, then took a cheap room in Manhattan and pounded out short stories to pay the rent. At 22, he sold a piece to The New Yorker, and he and the magazine grew up together.

The work that accumulated over the years was ultimately collected as The Stories of John Cheever (1978), which became a bestseller and revived singlehanded publishers' and readers' interest in the American short story. Along the way, Cheever had also won awards and recognition for his novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Bullet Park (1969) and Falconer (1977). He married, fathered two sons and a daughter, survived a serious heart attack in 1972 and recovered from alcoholism. His last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, was published in March.

Cheever's work drew criticism as well as accolades. Although his career began to flourish in the 1930s, he never joined arms with the social realists who dominated that decade or subverted his art to ideology. His devotion to the short story provoked some to label him a mere miniaturist. Others were irked by his continued attention to the kind of characters who, as in The Worm in the Apple, "got richer and richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily." Only the tin-eared could miss the irony of that description. Cheever's people are imprisoned, often comically, by their station wagons and swimming pools and leafy estates. The constant issue in his fiction is not the disposition of wealth but the quotidian skirmish with spiritual poverty.

This battle rages through his books: in the old fishing village of St. Botolphs, in Manhattan apartments and in privileged communities named Shady Hill, Bullet Park or Proxmire Manor. The warriors drink too much, commit adultery, contemplate and sometimes execute murder. They ride trains, accepting a shuttle in lieu of a destination. They feel themselves inexplicably blessed and damned. Occasionally, they sense redemption in "the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women."

That redolence pervades Cheever's writing, along with the poignant recognition that all the senses are doomed to transience. He won fame as a chronicler of mid-century manners, but his deeper subject was always the matter of life and death. -- By Paul Gray

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