Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's Journals via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories. Depending on your point of view, that audience's loyalty had already been tested or its curiosity whetted by his daughter Susan's memoir, Home Before Dark, and the selection of letters edited by his son, Ben. This "rapid posthumous invasion of [Cheever's] privacy", as John Updike deemed it, seemed modest in the face of the relentless, remorse-filled exposure of the Journals. For more than 40 years, it turned out, Cheever had subjected his liver-damaged soul to a daily regimen of self-excoriation.
All of this – memoir, letters, journals and, to bring things right up to date, Blake Bailey's excellent new biography – would normally be regarded as retrospective trellising around which the great works could be shown to have blossomed. A degree of shock, in such circumstances, is not unusual. In Cheever's case, the gulf between the received image of the revered author and the revealed truth – as one American editor put it – of "a writer who had just masturbated, doodling in the margins of his despair or boredom or occasional euphoria while waiting to hit the bottle" was, in some quarters, a cause for profound dismay.
But the Journals disturb readers' assumptions in another, more subversive and complex way. For Cheever was in that weird minority of writers whose private, unpublished writings contained much that was as good as, possibly even better than, the stuff that made their posthumous publication feasible.
Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading The Naked and the Dead made him despair of his own "confined talents". He worshipped Bellow, admired and bitched about Updike, fretted that while Roth was "playing stink finger and grabarse I admire the beauty of the evening star". Not surprisingly, these admissions of literary inadequacy were always tempered by a wounded defensiveness. Firmly rooted in "the genteel tradition", his "old-fashioned fiction" about "the country-club set" served as a tacit rebuke to the unfettered excesses of "the California poets". Actually, some of the fiction – the 1962 story "A Vision of the World", for example – is stranger than one imagines it to be, or remembers it being, and often has the quality of "violet-flavoured nightmare" that Cheever admired in Nabokov's Pale Fire.
The Journals reveal the germs of much that will eventually be transformed in the fiction. The reflections in "The Death of Justina" (1960) about how the soul might not leave the body but "lingers with it through every degrading stage of decomposition and neglect" is there, almost word for word, in a journal entry from the previous year. After you have read this passage in the starker context of the Journals – Cheever has run out of booze and is thinking of his dead mother while drying dishes – its force in the story is reduced by the knowledge that it has been craftily insinuated into the narrative. Time and again, things we admire in the fiction – the eye for "travelling acres of sunlight", the telling psychological detail, exuberant lyricism tinged with a residue of the last (or anticipation of the next) hangover – are spilled straight on to the pages of his journal.
The Journals also contain numerous hints of a kind of writer we do not expect Cheever to be. It's no surprise to find that he can do proto-Carver – "On Sunday afternoon my only brother comes to call. He is told that if he drinks again he will die, and he is drunk" – but we don't expect him, reflecting on Shea Stadium in 1963, to anticipate the famous opening of Don DeLillo's Underworld: "I think that the task of the American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony . . . The sense of moral judgements embodied in a migratory vastness."
Cheever is here describing a specifically American trajectory; other fragments are like the abbreviated fables Kafka might have written had he been born 30 years later, in Shady Hill or Bullet Park. The neurasthenic strain in modern European literature – a strain that reaches breaking-point in Kafka's Diaries – could be conveniently arranged under a quotation from Kierkegaard's journal entry of 1836: "I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me – but I went away – and the dash should be as long as the earth's orbit and wanted to shoot myself."
Cheever was all too familiar with the gin-sodden, mid-20th century residue of this sentiment: "you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody's wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning you were dead." His milieu may seem circumscribed – martinis, swimming pools, lawns – but it has the infinite brevity of that Kierkegaardian dash. The comfortable specificity and familiarity of the setting – the way rows are routinely and silently choreographed around the morning's toast and eggs – is part of a larger torment. Cheever's flickering back and forth between a yearning for light and the destructive lure (alcoholic, carnal) of darkness is rendered on a scale at once "ingrown" and vast.
Any reader of the Journals will quickly notice that Cheever's inventories of light and landscape have their own peculiar resonance. Once it becomes evident that he is talking about "the moral quality of light" or "an emotional darkness", then the signature evocations "of light and water and trees", of corner drugstores in summer twilight, begin to hum with a dangerous current. A "hint of aberrant carnality" is never far away. Entire landscapes, however idyllic-seeming, become coded expressions of longings and dread: "The morning light is gold as money and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting, the light that cannot be defined." As the years pass the message becomes steadily more explicit, unavoidable. On Easter Sunday 1968, thoughts of "life everlasting" are interrupted by intimations of obscenity: "All those cocks and balls drawn on toilet walls are not the product of perverse frustrations. Some of them are high-hearted signs of good cheer."
Cheever, then, was wrong to talk about his talent being "confined"; but it is entirely appropriate that this was a word to which he insistently returned. As he explained in 1976, the novel Falconer did not come from his experience of prison but from the myriad different kinds of confinement he had experienced "as a man". What he does not say – how could he? – was that the forms in which he gave dramatic expression to this sense could be enlarged manifestations of confinement, that the hard-won craftsmanship that stood him in good stead at the New Yorker worked against his being able to plumb the complex depths of his being. Only in the shapeless privacy of his journal could he do that. If he was "writing narrative prose" Cheever believed that "every line cannot be a cry from the heart". So he stopped crying. In the journals, meanwhile, he wept "gin tears, whiskey tears, tears of plain salt" and stopped worrying about narrative. The irony is that, while he was instinctively hostile to the splurging of "the California poets", his own best writing would derive from a sustained 40-year word-binge with no thought of form or – at least until very near the end – of publication. A further irony follows: the consummate craftsman ended up being reliant on the posthumous intervention of an editor to turn this repetitive mass of bellyaching, "booze-fighting" and self-lament into a book with immense narrative power. This power derives from three, closely intertwined sources.
One is the story of a marriage with its epic sulks and sexual lockouts: "Looking for a good-night kiss, I find the only exposed area to be an elbow." The second is the author's descent – already under way by the time the Journals begin – into (and eventual recovery from) alcoholism. It must have been a form of insanity – albeit a madness Cheever shared with an extraordinary number of American writers – to have been as drunk as this for so long. The unanswerable questions remain: even if, by 1972, he seemed, in Bailey's words, "permanently impaired by alcohol", was booze integral to what he ultimately achieved? Did he need its blurry delirium?
The third strain is Cheever's struggle to overcome, satisfy and understand his sexual urges. He resolved, in 1959, not to become "the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semi-secret", thereby announcing what, precisely, was in store. Cheever's slow discovery and eventual acceptance of his sexual identity conforms to the larger story of homosexuality in the 20th century. In rough chronological order we have: memories of adolescent horsing around with his friends; sustained attempts to bury the allure by aping the censoriousness he fears would be visited on him if people only knew; periodic failures to resist the promptings of the body, followed, predictably, by crippling remorse and renewed determination to suppress those urges; gradual acceptance ("I am queer, and happy to say so"), celebration and realisation that real harm was caused not by one's sexual nature but by "the force that was brought to crush these instincts and that exacerbated them beyond their natural importance".
Cheever's eventual accommodation with his sexuality is not merely the story of personal rehabilitation; consciously or not, he is the beneficiary of a larger political struggle waged by and on behalf of men and women like him. In 1967 Cheever wonders if he will ever be "caught up helplessly in the storms of history and love". The irony is that the Journals of this self-absorbed, allegedly "friendless man" are freighted with history. And not only in the area of sexual orientation.
In 1962 there is a description of a scene in which, at the end of the day, people leave a beach: "It is always, for me, a moving sight, to see people pick up their sandwich baskets, their towels and folding furniture, and hurry back to the hotel, the cottage, the bar. Their haste, their intentness, is like the thoughtlessness of life itself . . ." Lovely, exact, poignant, it displays the observational grace and sweep typical of Cheever. But it is preceded by these two sentences: "I spend the day, as do many others, in watching Glenn orbit on TV, and I torment myself for not working. Once the man is in orbit, the crowds leave the beach." So that timeless description of beach-life and its aftermath was Cheever's take on a specific historic event. Most entries lack that introductory, establishing context but, thus alerted, we wonder how many more of these free-floating fragments are imbued with undated history. Combine that with the way in which the landscape and houses are an encoded inventory of psychosexual currents and you have a sense of why so many entries in the Journals are possessed of "something much more mysterious than [the] bare facts" that occasioned them.
Cheever knew that his journals contained some of his very best writing. He also knew that the bare facts could only be understood through a lifelong attempt "to disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about my sexual clumsiness . . . the depths of my discouragement . . . my despair".