Word: cheever
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Your reviewer takes Susan Cheever to task [BOOKS, Oct. 29] for emphasizing "the costs rather than the achievements" of life with John Cheever-a sensitive, talented, but alcoholic father. I am the daughter of an alcoholic fundamentalist minister who gave much to the world prior to his early death. Yet I question if this world might not be better had his four children not endured the awful duplicity required in such circumstances...
...there is a hint of hostility in this gesture, Susan Cheever does not acknowledge it. And this graveside vignette, reported with admirable candor and scant introspection, is typical of nearly all of Home Before Dark: a loving memorial journey accompanied by the unexamined impulse to throw something...
Life with father, as Susan recounts it, was never dull and rarely easy. As the daughter, born in 1943, and her two younger brothers grew up, they had to accustom themselves to dramatic swings in their domestic circumstances. Cheever earned his living by writing short stories for The New Yorker; it was a precarious trade, subject to editorial quirkiness in the matters of rejection or payment: "He was rich sometimes and he was poor sometimes, and both of these conditions were as dependent on his mood as they were on his net worth (which also fluctuated pretty wildly...
Publication of The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), his first novel, brought Cheever the first of his many awards and a period of relative financial security. Susan remembers these heady times, which stretched through the 1960s: "His marriage was still exciting, his children were thriving, and we all made a lot of 'Will success spoil John Cheever?' jokes. Later, success and celebrity took a big toll on my father and he became quite pompous about himself...
Given this judgment, it is hard to imagine what Cheever could have done to please his daughter. She suffered when he was exultant and when he was miserable. The mixed reviews and lackluster sales of Bullet Park (1969) sent him into a tailspin that nearly killed him. His drinking accelerated: "It became clearer and clearer that my father was the worst kind of alcoholic. He seemed intent on destroying himself." The strains in his marriage to his wife Mary broke violently into the open: "When we children were at home during these years between 1969 and the mid-1970s...