Some Thoughts on Blake Bailey's Biography of John Cheever

 

Last night I finished Blake Bailey's Cheever. Here are a few random thoughts I had about the book:

At a ceremony, William Styron said,

John Cheever's position in literary history is a immovably fixed as one of those granite outcroppings which loom over the sunlit terraces in the land of his own magic devising.

Blake also notes that

In a Philadephia Inquirer survey of the living American writers whose work was expected to "endure and be read by future generations" he was ranked third behind only [his friends] Bellow and Updike.

So, the list (circa 1982) would be as follows:

1. Saul Bellow
2. John Updike
3. John Cheever
4. E.B. White
5. John Gardner
6. Bernard Malamud
7. Joseph Heller
8. Isaac Bashevis Singer
9. James Michener
10. J.D. Salinger

Bailey notes that "to be ranked so well ahead of Salinger must have pleased Cheever."

Of course, now in 2021, the list seems a bit odd. I would not like to comment on who to take out of the list, but I would note that there are authors that one might include now on such a list. Philip Roth comes to mind and one would ask about the lack of women and perhaps add Susan Sontag, Flannery O'Connor, or Alice Munro. And one might also ask about the absence of writers of color and ask about Zora Neal Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, or Toni Morrison. There is a long discussion one might have about why humans are so fond of list making, what the use of such lists might be, and how to compose and update such lists. But looking at lists, including reading lists for class syllabi and reading lists for Ph.D. exams in American literature, or the Modern Library's list does tell us something about how culture, the academy, publishers and others view the experience of reading.

But coming back to an assessment of John Cheever, Bailey notes that while he was viewed as a giant of American letters at the time of his death, he is not read much now. His books, while still in print, sell only a few thousand each year. And only a handful of dissertations have been written about his work in the last few years. Bailey suggests that an important reason for the lack of interest Cheever's work now generates is the difficulty categorizing his work.

As Bailey says:

If Cheever were eligible for such a survey today ... it's unlikely he would appear anywhere in the top twenty. One can only hazard a few guesses as to why. It bears repeating that it's hard to determine Cheever's niche in our national literature, and academic canon-makers are fond of niches; in other words, the very fact that he was a "self-transformer," as Bellow put it, ... would seem to have worked against him. The scholar Robert Morace covered the spectrum nicely: "Groping about for ways to understand... Cheever, reviewers and critics have called him a satirist, a transcendentalist, an existentialist, a social critic, a religious writer, a trenchant moralist, an enlightened Puritan, an Episcopalian anarch, a suburban surrealist, Ovid in Ossining, the American Chekhov, the American Trollope for an age of angst, a toothless Thurber." Who are Cheever's influences? Arguably too many (and too assimilated) to say. Whom did he influence? Ditto, and the manner of his influence ... is hard to trace. At any rate, academics tend to throw up their hands: Cheever is hardly taught at all in the classroom, where reputations are perpetuated...