john cheever's life in the closet

been reading about john cheever, the brilliant writer who lived the life inside a closet, got married, had children, but remained lonely, depressed and found solace in alcohol and younger men.

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"The journals contain some of the best sentences Cheever ever wrote, but, my God, they are horrifying. The pain, the loneliness, the secrecy, the shame: Cheever, an imposter in his own life, turned self-loathing into an art form. His image as the poet of suburbia – the Ovid of Ossining,Time magazine called him  – was thus dealt a possibly mortal blow, the moments of darkness in his stories now taking on new menace; the moments of grace, a sudden emptiness. Was ever a man's outward appearance so at odds with his inward condition? His friend John Updike thought not, and shook his head sadly at this psychic chasm, hoping against hope that Cheever's fiction, with its startling glimmers of optimism, its sense always of moving towards the light, would somehow prevail. 

"Now, nearly two decades on, there is Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey, previously the biographer of another suburban drunk, Richard Yates (a coincidence: before their move to Ossining, the Cheevers rented a house in which Yates had also once lived). Bailey's book is almost 700 pages long, and so tirelessly detailed, even Cheever's children have found surprises within its tidy bulk. "When I first got the manuscript, I did so electronically," says Susan. "I'm ashamed to say that I used the 'find Susan' method of reading it, first off. That took about an hour. OK, I thought: there's nothing too awful about me. Then I read it from the beginning. It sounds narcissistic to say so but I found it fascinating. My memory only kicked in when he came home from the war. So his childhood: that was new. And then, I didn't know how much gay activity there'd been…"

"Susan loves the book; she thinks Bailey's version of her father is truthful and unflinching, and that it captures him in some essential way. But she wonders about its diminuendo ending: the chapters which cover the last seven years of his life when, against all the odds, he dried out. "For me, the end of his life is triumphant. He stops drinking. He writes what I think is his best book [Falconer, a novel about a drug addict, serving time for the murder of his brother, who has an affair with another prisoner ]. He became the man he meant to be."

"It's certainly true that Bailey, though both a devoted admirer of Cheever's writing and a compassionate biographer, does not present the end as jubilant; his late Cheever is, in some ways, as imprisoned as his early Cheever. But there is one obvious reason for this. "Rip', Cheever's last lover, whose real name is Max Zimmer, co-operated with Bailey on the book, and described to him his relationship with the older writer in painful detail, presenting himself as a poor and desperate young man with no other place to go but his patron's bed (Max, who comes from a Mormon background and is now married with children, had been a student of Cheever's, and longed to be published).

The sex, he tells Bailey, disgusted him. But, he implies, he was subtly coerced into it. What's more, Cheever continued to be conflicted and clandestine about the relationship, treating Max like little more than a servant in company."

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why do some men find it so difficult to  accept who they really are - in the case of mr. cheever - his homosexuality? i don't want to judge him. but imagine the pain he had inflicted on himself, his wife and children? his lovers?

thankfully, the kids did pretty well. both are successful writers like him.

oh well, what can i say?

we all survive our demons. children, are in fact, the strongest of god's creations.

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to read the entire article, click herehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/18/john-cheever-blake-bailey

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p.s.

i just finished reading the wapshot chronicle and its sequel the wapshon scandal. the first book had a chapter on the brief, near homosexual experience of one of the two main characters. the second book totally forgot all about it, as if mr. cheever had regretted touching about the subject in the first book.

by the way, i bought cheever: a life last year in hong kong. but i was so busy at that time that i never found the time to read it. sadly, i left it at a friend's flat along with other books, blue rays and dvds when i left hong kong in december.

falconer, sadly, is elusive. i continue to hunt for it.