Word: cheevers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...John Cheever died at age 70 in 1982. Near the end of her "biographical memoir" of the late writer, his daughter Susan, the author of three novels, recalls a visit to her father's grave in Massachusetts: "I look down at the snowy earth where my father lies. There are footprints under the maple tree that grows over his grave. People have been here, although the snow around the other graves is untrammeled. It was June when we buried him-the summer solstice. The day I return is Ash Wednesday. He lies there in the cold winter ground...
...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...