He was as extreme in the matter of productivity as any other area. The novel was a necessity both to boost Cheever's income (he had children to support and booze bills to pay) and to set the seal on a literary reputation. "The invincible force of nature," he wrote, "demands that we take procreative attitudes", though it seems odd that nature should make it such hard work. Their every gesture expressed capitulation to unmanliness. Homosexuals were everywhere and Cheever did his level best to despise the ones he met. There is heroism here as well as self-deception, though the action of alcohol, not so much damping down impulses as amplifying them in a distorted form, made him anything but a functional family member, while he was busy refusing to want what he wanted.
He would become the ideal man by a process of absorption, from the outside in.Ĭheever resisted sexual temptation for the first 20 years of his marriage, though "every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol". If Cheever surrounded himself with the accoutrements of a successful life, then success would somehow permeate him.
If there was an element of social climbing here, then it masked something deeper and arguably more innocent. Mary was the daughter of a famous dean of the Yale School of Medicine, who had married a society woman after the death of Mary's mother. John added his own love to Frederick's store and there seems to have been a sexual element to their intimacy.Īs Bailey makes clear, this was a life governed by necessary impossibilities, one being homosexuality and another the novel as a form. The crucial family member, though, was his brother (another Frederick), seven years older, and blessed with the love that young John felt he was denied. His father, Frederick, travelled for a shoe company, while his mother set up shop (a gift shop) only when Frederick's work dried up. Both of Cheever's parents, as it happens, were salespeople, though of very different types. His image before the paradoxical enrichment of this tarnishing was of a salesman for the suburban way of life – and a good salesman will buy into the dream he is selling.
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