Word: cheever
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...Later Cheever dealt with some of these proscribed items, but never in the tone of the journals. Here they appear in a harsh floodlight, personified by Cheever himself. The author's idiosyncrasies are no longer secret: in Home Before Dark, Susan's ambivalent 1984 memoir, her father is described as "the worst kind of alcoholic." Her brother Ben, who edited a volume of Cheever's letters, recalled that John was "bisexual all his life . . . He liked good- looking younger men." Still, these were posthumous comments, made by members of the family that Cheever alternately cherished and regarded as a self...
When John Cheever died in 1982, he left a legacy of 12 books. Eleven cannot fail to enhance his reputation; one is likely to erode it. The Journals of John Cheever is not scheduled to be published by Knopf until November, but four long excerpts have already appeared in the New Yorker. They have occasioned more chatter and speculation than anything the author published in his lifetime, because they reveal a private face entirely unlike the mask that Cheever contrived for public view...
...gossip is certain to intensify next month, when Treetops (Bantam; $19.95), a book by Cheever's daughter Susan, arrives in bookstores. The volume is ostensibly a history of her mother's extraordinary family: one member was Alexander Graham Bell's assistant; another went to the Arctic with Admiral Robert Peary. But Susan finds it impossible to keep her father offstage. A friend is asked, "So, do you think he was a monster?" Mary, Cheever's wife, wonders, "Maybe he was wicked...
...book, Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, Cheever made a list of subjects he considered off limits. Some seemed frivolous: "All parts for Marlon Brando." Others contained a mix of irony and rue. The author would shy away from explicit scenes of sexual commerce: "How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives as if -- jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts -- we were describing the changing of a flat tire?" He would disdain alcoholics: "Out they go, male and female, all the lushes; they throw so little true light...
...James Joyce (1934 and 1939), Ernest Hemingway (1937 and 1954), Andre Malraux (1938 and 1955), William Faulkner (1939 and 1964), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1968 and 1974) and John Updike (1968 and 1982). Eugene O'Neill appeared four times (1924, 1928, 1931 and 1946). Other writers include Russell Baker, John Cheever, Noel Coward, Graham Greene, Alex Haley, John Irving, Jean Kerr, Stephen King, John le Carre, Norman Mailer, Mario Puzo, J.D. Salinger, Neil Simon, Gore Vidal, Rebecca West, Tennessee Williams and Herman Wouk...