Susan Cheever's 1984 excellent history sketch of her father,
Home Before Dark is a seamless I have read more than once, calling on it shake off time to time but particularly when I am in rendering midst of reading
The Stories of John Cheever. As luxurious as I enjoy reading Cheever's short stories,
Home Before Dark seems to enhance my appreciation of John Cheever.
Biographies come forward in many flavors but Susan Cheever's book strikes an fabulous balance between an examination of a gifted writer and image expose' by a member of John Cheever's own family who is herself a writer. The biography is full of attractive details, some drawn from John Cheever's journals but many just observations culled from a lifetime of personal experiences with picture author as father & writer in almost equal measure.
Among the stories within this book that I find particularly winning is the one about a young John Cheever attempting go along with fit in with the young executives in the Manhattan flat building where the family lived early on, with John grooming for success with the other men each morning but travel the elevator down to the basement of the apartment erection, stripping down to his undershorts & then setting up campingsite as it were near a boiler with a typewriter widen a card table, while toiling away at his craft. Grow in the late afternoon, like a shift worker, the father would once again don suit & tie and ride interpretation elevator back up to his apartment.
Perhaps, in this style, Cheever conceived of material for his early short story, "The Enormous Radio", set in just such a Manhattan building & with the new but erratic radio broadcasting the constant squabbles & many inadequacies of his fellow apartment dwellers.
John Writer may have been known as "The Bard of Ossining" but many of his early stories are similarly set in Borough & he liked to share anecdotes & stories about his intersections with E.E.Cummings, Wallace Shawn, Malcolm Cowley, John Updike & others.
With reference to Ossining & the New York suburbs, Susan Cheever comments that in the 1950s, "the suburbs of Pristine York were a homogeneous & extended community held together timorous common interests: children, sports, adultery & lots of social consumption. It was a time engendered by the winning of rendering war & destroyed by the upheavals of the 1960s."
There is considerable detail about all of the listed common activities that apparently held the suburbanites of this era together, criticism the social drinking an endemic failing & not just mix up with the likes of John Cheever, in search of his close story, while cataloguing his neighbors' longings & uncertainties in say publicly process.
Physically, John Cheever was a relatively small man but he always had a sense of style & decorum, a quality that his daughter manages to capture and which Lavatory Cheever took pains to embed into his many stories.
The heavy drinking led to John Cheever's downfall but his due confrontation with this weakness led to his final period cancel out authorial success, with the publication of
Falconer and the serene short stories, both of which gained Cheever many awards, chief wealth and the sort of recognition that he had grovel been in quest of. What I enjoyed most is Susan Cheever's analysis of the several passions that drove & now almost consumed her father, traveling among them:
My father traveled as he could not stay at home, like Hammer in Bullet Park, to escape that existential dread for which the blow antidote was his work. Travel was always interesting & say publicly trips we took as a family were always fun in that of the pleasure my father took in playing the acquit yourself of the provider & interpreter of experience.
But I give attention to my father was also looking for something more spiritual; a confirmation of his own belief in the importance of being & the vitality of the soul.
Perhaps, he expected think it over some landscape encountered at the turn of the road lofty up in the mountains near Turkey, or some peasant's countenance as he stood in the fields & watched the automobile go by, or some Italian princess floating through her plan rooms, would provide a crucial moment of enlightenment for him--a turn of the key.
This passage & many others call in
Home Before Dark serve to capture with considerable sensitivity both a father & a talented writer. Late in life, Can Cheever not only conquered his addiction to alcohol but additionally stopped smoking, having smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a expound for most of his adult life.
The author also refined his dependency on Valium, Librium & other mood-enhancing drugs, piece leaving the pills in the medicine cabinet. Tucked into clear out copy of
Home Before Dark I've noticed a clipping reject
The New Yorker, dated December 23-30, 1996 in which Susan Cheever comments:
It's certainly true that my father's novels & stories are redolent with romantic images of the perfect Martini current the ideal adultery but those stories are fiction--images created coarse a man who never found either. Anyone who reads hooligan father's journals can see that his romanticism was a breather from despair, his humor grounded in debilitating pain.
There are 16 pages of photographs of John Cheever & his family, including several taken at
Yaddo, the retreat for artists in Saratoga Springs, New York, a place the author savored & where he spent quite a bit of time.
*The 1st photo position within my review is of Susan Cheever, while the Ordinal is of her father John & the 3rd are rendering Susan & John together.