That Bailey manages to write with infectious engagement about so ugly (and to a large extent, overvalued) an artist is a testament to his skill. His drinking eventually landed him in the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center in Manhattan, after Cheever’s brother Frend found him “naked and incoherent” in his squalid apartment. But by the mid-1970s he had alienated most of his friends and colleagues through his drinking and destructive behavior: accusing his former New Yorker patron William Maxwell of having swindled him, pursuing covert relationships with his male students, making unwanted passes at faded actress Hope Lange. He produced four subsequent novels, two of which “The Wapshot Scandal” and “Falconer” brought him critical acclaim and commercial success. Bailey cites Cheever, on a trip to Los Angeles, “pray for the surf” to sweep away the city’s gay population days before he sets up a tryst in a bathhouse.Ĭheever had trouble making the leap from short fiction to novel-writing, but his 1957 novel “The Wapshot Chronicle” established him.

Cheever had a destructive effect on those nearest him: “He was constantly engineering situations in which my imperfections would be highlighted,” his daughter, the novelist Susan Cheever, recalls Cheever’s eldest son, Ben, was constantly being told to “speak like a man.” This is to say nothing of Cheever’s lifelong effort to deny or suppress his homosexuality, which made him into something of a homophobe.

Despite self-induced and social impediments, he managed to carve out a niche for himself as a writer of short stories (and one of Manhattan’s premier literary athletes) by his mid-20s.īailey gives us Cheever’s dark side unflinchingly, without conciliation or attempt at excuse. He was a great conversationalist, a heavy drinker and a high-school dropout.

His father invited an abortionist to dinner before Cheever’s birth in 1912, a story that Cheever “couldn’t help telling again and again (often with a slight chuckle),” as Bailey describes. And a rotten man at that.īorn in Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever was the second son of a once-prosperous alcoholic shoe salesman and a domineering mother.

What Bailey exposes, on the other hand, is not Cheever the writer, but Cheever, the man. “It was the heart alone that interested Cheever,” says biographer Blake Bailey of the writer’s work.

Cheever by blake bailey