Procure Cheever Engineered By Blake Bailey Copy

is an outstanding work of scholarship and a great literary biography, I love Cheever's short stories and truly admire his craft, but I had a very hard time reading this biography.
He was just such a tortured, broken person and his struggles with alcoholism and bisexuality were difficult to read about.
Not that I have a problem with alcoholics or bisexuals I just found it so profoundly sad, and such a waste, that he had to struggle so much with his identity.
I had to force myself to keep reading at times, Am glad I slogged through it, though, Somewhat dryly and harshly written the author doesn't seem that much charmed by Cheever's prose or his personality, which are both luminous.
But this is definitely the definitive biography it makes Donaldson's fairly substantive earlier book look like a puff piece.
It includes new, lengthy interviews with family members, careful chronological tracings of stories beginning and blooming complete with unpublished working notes altho the whole book is rather sadly lacking in literary critical analysis, like most modern biographies of writers, and Bailey claims he is one of the few under ten people to have read through the entire,pluspagelong journal Cheever compulsively kept all his life.
When Cheever is off estimating the arrival of Ezekiel Cheever, 'the first Cheever in America,' by three years or so, the biographer corrects him immediately in a footnote, prefaced with a dry 'For what it's worth' this odd sowhat tone is sounded frequently throughout the immense narrative if 'Fair enough' is dourly repeated after a piece of quoted dubious testimony once, it appears over halfadozen times.
This book reminded me very much of Hilary Spurling's biography of Paul Scott, It was a little hard to love either writer afterwards, especially given the hell they put their wives and children through in their misguided, unswervable attempts to conform to what is nowadays called a heteronormative lifestyle.
And yet after the flesh has ebbed the words remain, and those words are the reasons books like these setting out all those personal flaws and failings are written, after all.
I'd never read any Cheever when I picked up this book, So why was I interested in a biography of him He seemed like an enigma to me in some way, and I'd always meant to read some of his stories.
This bio was very wellreviewed, and I was interested, so I thought I'd give it a go, And I was completely drawn in both by the man himself and his very complicated life, and by the wonderful writing.
Blake Bailey is now my favorite biographer and I will read any book he writes, especially biographies of writers.
I was so disappointed by Max's bio of David Foster Wallace that I emailed Blake Bailey and asked him please to write one.
He wrote me back ! and said he'd just signed up to write another one that I'd soon hear about Philip Roth! I can't wait.
Well, his response made me an even bigger fan,

This book led me to Cheever's stories, and I think I'm glad I knew about him before reading his stories.
Bailey gave me such deep psychological insight to the man, and such compassion for the difficult life he led made difficult by his disgust for a big part of who he was.
Bailey's approach to writers' lives is now my idea of what a biography ought to be,

If you have any interest at all in John Cheever or shoot, even if you don't think you do! I heartily recommend this book.
And I can't recommend Bailey's books enough I'm about to read A Tragic Honesty, his biography of Richard Yates.
I know how esteemed this biography of Cheever is, My biggest problem with the book was the length rather than with Bailey's portrayal of Cheeverin other words, not with the detail sordid or not but with the repetitiousness of it.
It shows that with a biography, too much information can be as much of a problem as too little.
Having the microscopic selfexamination of a life which is Cheever's journal at hand, how does a biographer pick and choose.
I don't think quite so many repeated encounters with Cheever at his worst or most conflicted was necessary to show the troubled and brilliant man as he was.
This highly praised biography gets a mixed critique from me, Bailey does a good job of invigorating the spirit of Cheever, so one truly understands his complicated psyche.
Yet, his writing as a whole is often awkward e, g. rather than use the name of a individual stated in a prior sentence, he will say "the man" or "the woman" which tends to stop the reader in his tracks.
Beyond awkward, it is confusing, This is just one example of Bailey's difficulty with usage, His descriptions of people sometimes seem overwrought,but often he is attributing them to Cheever, so perhaps it is deliberte while not being exact quotes.
Cheever was a talented short story writer, and I even liked The Wapshot Chronicles though I woud not call his novels typical of the form.
Yet in his personal life, he was often a fraud, which he confessed to his private journals, not just embellishing his c.
v. , but making things up out of wholecloth, He was obsessed with family and position, though while the Cheevers were early New Englandd settlers, his own father was a failed salesman and drunkard, and his mother was a domineering entrepreneur, whose efforts to salvage the family after the father's departure caused Cheever embarrassment, Partly, this emotion was linked to his hidden homosxuality which he blamed on the psychologically typical passive fatherdominant mother.
He had many affairs with women and a longterm marriage producing several children, while yearning after men, He at last came to terms with his homoerotic needs in his later years and was more openly gay.
While his relaitonship with his children was problematiche wanted them to be the perfect Wasp children and he lamented that both Susan and Fred his favorite nonetheless had weight problemshe was perfectly honest about his feelings for them and his expectations.
His relationship with his wife Mary was tempestuous, As time passed and his drinking got out of line, Mary became disgusted with his behavior while still being supportive in her role as handmaid to a great writer.
Cheever taunted and lambasted her, then turned sorrowful and penitent, As Mary found her own niche in life as a teacher and poet, Cheever turned to friends, other women with whom he frequently claimed to have sexual relations,these claims being dubious and the bottle.
One wonders what he would have accomplished had he not been a raging alcoholic whether in fact, alcohol fuled his talent, as sometimes happens, but then as time passes both physical and mental acuity declines.
His journals reveal a melancholy man full of selfdoubt,but to his friends he presented a facade of bonhomie and wit.
In the latter stages of his life,he garnered many awards and accolades and seemingly became more comfortable with his identity.
This biography Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey won the Francis Parkman prize in, John Cheever, the subject of this biography, was called the American Chekhov because of his mastery of the short story.
A prolific writer who wrote from thes tos, Cheever won major literary awards for The Wapshot Chronicle, Falconer and The Stories of John Cheever.
Stories published ina few years before his death was a collection of short stories including many that he had previously published in the New Yorker.


This is a critically acclaimed biography for good reason, There is little that we dont find out about Cheever in this impeccably researched and chronologically arranged tell all that was authorized by his children.
Bailey had access to many letters and conducted many interviews,
It also turns out that one of Americas greatest writers kept personal diaries as in thousands of pages.


For those who knew Cheever, his alcoholism was hardly a revelation in this biography, It is a common disease and much more common in the waspy society of theth century that Cheever lived in.
He was married for more than forty years and had three children with his wife Mary, He was not a good husband by most measures, I will get to that part in a bit,

One will find that Cheevers stories, with some rare exceptions, are largely devoid of any explicit descriptions of sex.
He was not exactly a prude but when compared with authors like Updike he certainly seemed like one.


So it was a surprise that we learned from his journals and the exlovers still around in, when the biography was written, that Cheever had many affairs almost exclusively with men.
His journal entries were quite sexually explicit and rarely did he mention women, He told two of his children about his bisexuality on his deathbed believing the news would come out anyway after his death.
The biographer does not say if Mary knew,

stars. As good a biography about a writer that I have read, I dont presume any famous writer to have been a moral role model so Cheevers failings were not that surprising.
But boy there were a lot of them, .