The Cheever Misadventure Revisited

On 30 June 1988 John Cheever: A Biography was published by Random House, six years to the month after Cheever’s death and fve and a half years after I first proposed the book to his widow, Mary. It was the fourth biography of the eight I’ve written—and by far the most diffcult to bring into print. Midway through the process the Cheever family decided to fght the book. Their opposition, in the form of a possible lawsuit, as well as judicial fndings in the similar J. D. Salinger case combined to require considerable revision, hold up publication for an extended period, and keep me and my publishers jumpy both before and after the book came out. When I wrote an article about that experience, in the summer 1990 issue of the Sewanee Review, I blithely claimed I had done nothing to warrant the family’s disapproval. Not so, I realize now. I should have said less, listened harder, and read more closely. Yet, even if I had, the problem might not have been averted.

What follows is substantially a reprise—rewritten and curtailed—of my 1990 “Writing the Cheever” article, with italicized comments about my mis-takes added.

According to the great biographer Justin Kaplan, who died in 2014, “shoot the widow” stands as the first axiom of literary biography. He had in mind the roadblocks that surviving spouses were liable to place in the path of overzealous inquisitors. Most of the trouble I encountered, however, came not from John Cheever’s widow, Mary, but from their children, Susan and Ben in particular. Which brings to mind a dictum propounded by Edgar Johnson, biographer of Dickens: “never write a biography of someone whose children are still alive.” Sensible advice, perhaps, but hardly achievable for someone like myself whose subjects, save for Edwin Arlington Robinson, were only a generation or so older.

The prospect of writing a biography of John Cheever had been on my mind for several years before his death in June 1982. Like many others I had been reading his superb stories in the New Yorker, and his novels as well, with a conviction that his writing refected and illuminated the times—particularly the experience of the middle-class suburbanite—with greater power and accuracy than those of any other author. In the late 1970s I wrote three articles about Cheever and his work. One of these was the 15,000-word critical-biographical entry in the American Writers series (1978) devoted to canonical American writers. In preparation for that project I read everything he’d published and had my sole meeting with him on Nantucket. While driving me back to the ferry he remarked that “most people have mothers and fathers; I had a brother”—his older brother and sole sibling, Frederick. This startling observation, coming out of the blue, would eventu-ally provide a guiding principle for my biography.

Some six months after Cheever died, spurred on by a rumor at the MLA convention that another enthusiast was already doing a biography, I wrote Cheever’s widow and executor, Mary, expressing my interest. No one was “entrenched and at work” on a biography, she replied, although her daughter Susan was in the process of writing a memoir. On the other hand she cautioned that no biography could be undertaken until the family made a decision “about the disposition of John’s journals,” a massive quantity of notebooks and manuscripts on fimsy paper, then reposing in a vault. “We survivors,” she said, had yet to decide whether to donate these journals or sell them or both. And meanwhile they were off limits to outsiders. My vita looked impressive—I had by that time written biographies of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the poet Winfeld Townley Scott—but, not having read any of my work, she could hardly make a judgment about my eligibility “for the job when the time [came] to do it.”

Well, I thought, she didn’t say no. So I sent Mary Cheever the long essay on Cheever for the American Writers series and a copy of Poet in America...