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| Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey | Book review Adam Mars-Jones finds much to relish in Blake Bailey's life of John Cheever – a writer who had an immense capacity for joy but none for happinessBlake Bailey seems to specialise in writing the lives of self-destructive American writers – first Richard Yates, now John Cheever. He may have a full biographical career ahead of him. Cheever breaks the general pattern by virtue of a late recovery after stupendous alcoholic wallowing. He stopped drinking in 1975 and ended his life in a blaze of literary glory. His 1977 novel, Falconer, was hailed as a masterpiece, though previous attempts at long-form fiction had been oddly inconsequential. His collected stories won major prizes and sold exceptionally strongly the next year.Susan Cheever published a memoir, Home Before Dark, in 1984, only two years after her father's death; this drew on the immense wealth of his journals (more than 4,000 pages, typed and single-spaced) and showed the repetitive agonies behind the sunlit public image. It was bad luck as well as talent that made Cheever an exemplary figure, the bad luck of being so deeply divided.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. Both of Cheever's parents, as it happens, were salespeople, though of very different types. His father, Frederick, travelled for a shoe company, while his mother set up shop (a gift shop) only when Frederick's work dried up.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. John added his own love to Frederick's store and there seems to have been a sexual element to their intimacy.As Bailey makes clear, this was a life governed by necessary impossibilities, one being homosexuality and another the novel as a form. Cheever married Mary Winternitz in 1941. 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. If there was an element of social climbing here, then it masked something deeper and arguably more innocent. If Cheever surrounded himself with the accoutrements of a successful life, then success would somehow permeate him. He would become the ideal man by a process of absorption, from the outside in.Cheever 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". 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.Homosexuals were everywhere and Cheever did his level best to despise the ones he met. Their every gesture expressed capitulation to unmanliness. "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.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. He was as extreme in the matter of productivity as any other area. As a young man, he could easily write 20 pages of a story in a day, yet it took decades to process a version of family history into the unsatisfactory form of The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). When Blake Bailey wonders, on behalf of Cheever's editor at Random House, how Cheever "could compress the material for four or five novels into 20-odd pages and yet not be able to complete a novel per se", he presumably realises that the answer is there at the heart of the question. An artistic form has to have something to offer to the practitioner – this isn't a one-sided process, the filling of a jug.The sustaining of a mood wasn't any more of a possibility for Cheever on the page than it was in life, where he had an immense capacity for joy but none for happiness. In a short story, he could exploit his temperament, so that narratives turn unpredictably by way of stylised mood swings towards sunlight or darkness. But the marathon has nothing to offer a sprinter except exhaustion.This is an exhausting book in its own right, though very well managed. There are some incongruously informal touches – "stoned out of his gourd", for instance, or "glommed on to" to mean "monopolised socially" – but also some excellent phrase-making. "Bravura candour" well conveys Cheever's impersonation of frankness in conversation, and "almost laudable bravado" seems exactly the right description of his using a razor to cut himself out of a webbed straitjacket while being dried out.In Falconer, the newly sober Cheever was able to address his themes most fully and darkly: fraternal hatred as well as love, sex between men, the need for both transgression and punishment. But the tide of gin, as it receded, revealed a man who had lost any sense of humour about his pretensions and a shabby sexual operator into the bargain. The job of impersonating the ideal man had now devolved on his love object, who should therefore (since ideal men don't have sex with men) be straight. His choice was Max Zimmer, an aspiring writer estranged from his Mormon family. The element of blackmail (break with me and you'll never get published) wasn't quite explicit but this is a ghastly, artificial scenario. Just two regular guys, doing what came naturally to one of them.From another angle of vision, it was heterosexuality that was the impossible necessity and Cheever didn't pay anything like the whole of the price. Mary was attuned to his growing achievement, critical but occasionally overwhelmed. When she first read his masterly story, "The Enormous Radio", it made a big difference, she has said, "in how I felt about the man I was married to and how he was spending his time". These marital epiphanies are nowhere near as common as artists hope. In time, Mary gave up quarrelling with her husband, knowing that any sharp comment would end up in his fiction, perhaps years later, on the lips of some dreary monster.Mary Cheever is still incisive and embattled, providing Blake Bailey with one memorable chapter ending: "'[Bellow and I] share not only our love of women but a fondness for the rain,' said Cheever. Or, as his wife would have it, 'They were both women haters.'"Her children have all in different ways accepted their father's contradictions, but she seems to combine the roles of keeper of the flame and witness for the prosecution, saying: "I must miss him. Because why am I living this way, if I don't miss him?" She seems unreconciled on principle, a monument to the fact that the life closest to John Cheever's was the one he could least imagine.Three to read: Cheever storiesThe Five-Forty-Eight An office worker's sins revisit him when, on the commuter train home, a woman he mistreated decides to get her revenge.Reunion In this classic story, only four pages long, a son describes an unhappy lunch encounter with his father.The Swimmer In one of Cheever's finest works, a suburban man undertakes an odd quest to swim home via his neighbours' swimming pools.BiographyAdam Mars-Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Je vous salue, Paris Review For 56 years, this giant among 'little magazines' has provided intimate reports on how great writers go about their jobsIn the literary world, there is one kind of interview that's as rare and precious as the purest opium. Addicts will know already that this month a new batch became available; many, no doubt, are already blissfully mainlining it. I speak, of course, of the "Art of Fiction" interviews that have run in the Paris Review since that magazine was founded in 1953, and which trace a line through English-language literature from Forster and Hemingway through Bellow, Roth and Updike, to Peter Carey and Kazuo Ishiguro. Taken together — and this month the fourth volume of the collected interviews was published – they are a remarkable literary artefact, surely the greatest collection of first-hand testimony on the writing life, and craft, ever assembled. But what else would we expect from the Paris Review? It is without doubt — and with apologies to the wonderful Granta, its closest competitor – the King of the Little Magazines, a quarterly with the most noble of intentions, as intelligent as it is prestigious. Look close, and the Review always seems to have lived a charmed life. It was founded amid the electricity of the American books and arts community in 1950s Paris, by three young literary men – George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Harold Humes – with a simple mission to bring readers "good writers, and good poets … the non-axe-grinders, so long as they are good". The first edition contained an interview with EM Forster: quite a get, for your first attempt. Plimpton remained editor until his death in 2003, and set about making the Review an indispensable part of the literary culture. Amid the short stories, reportage and the photo essays, the Art of Fiction series was quickly established as the Review's most famous child. Why all the fuss about these long, spacious, unsigned pieces of journalism? They're exceptional because of the intelligence, and the closeness, with which they examine the craft of fiction-making. Their subjects (and only the most eminent are called) entertain questions – what is your daily writing schedule? How much do you re-write? How do you approach plot? – that are often waved away when posed by lesser publications. For aspiring writers, and any curious reader, the feeling is a heady one: that of being magically whisked behind the thick curtain that separates reader and writer, text and the mysterious creative process that gave rise to it. Across 50 years, the Art of Fiction pieces amount to a remarkable history of imaginative writing in English. Indeed, some of the insights they have produced have themselves become legendary, such as Ernest Hemingway's 1958 revelation that he re-wrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times, a fact now habitually wheeled out in front creative writing students, presumably to impress upon them the importance of self-editing, and of commitment to the craft. When I first became aware of the Paris Review, back in 2000, the Art of Fiction interviews were not easy to get at. Though a few were (and are) available in full at the website, there was no collection in book form. All that changed, thankfully, with the appointment of Philip Gourevitch in 2005. The new editor – best known for his brilliant writing on the Rwandan genocide – quickly realised the value of the asset he had inherited, and Volume One was published in 2006. What with this, a re-vamped look, a broader spread of non-fiction, and a more vibrant web presence, Gourevitch's editorship is held to have been a wholehearted success. News this week, then, in the wake of Volume Four, that he is to stand down in April was greeted with understandable surprise. Indeed, Gourevitch's resignation makes the editor's chair vacant for only the second time in the magazine's 56-year history. But he is feeling the magnetic pull, it seems, of his reporter's notebook: he's standing down to concentrate on a new book about Rwanda.He vacates what is surely one of the most coveted jobs in all journalism. Listen closely and you can hear the distant clatter of the literati typing their CVs. The new editor will be selected, as Gourevitch was, by the Paris Review Foundation, and via an opaque process that seems akin to the deliberations by which cardinals appoint a new pope.Certainly Gourevitch's successor faces a stiff challenge: how do you improve on what is already considered, by so many, to be perfect? We await the appearance of white smoke over the New York offices. FictionDavid Mattinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Nonfiction Chronicle Books by Michael Goldfarb, Mark Mazower, Malalai Joya and Paul Johnson. feeds.nytimes.com |
In praise of… Lucy Prebble From John Osborne with Look Back in Anger to Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette, young British playwrights often start off by writing about what they know; certainly, careers in drama are not usually made by tackling Texan energy firms (honourable exception made for one 80s saga about the Ewings of Dallas). So Surrey-born Lucy Prebble took a risk writing about the woes of Enron, the conglomerate that was in everything from natural gas to broadband – until it came crashing out of everything in financial ruin in 2001. This was a subject that took two years of research, starting in the archives of the Houston Chronicle. From dusty beginnings, Prebble has constructed perhaps the best new play of 2009 – one that has transferred from the Minerva in Chichester to the Royal Court and is now playing in the West End. It is a drama about globalisation; a musical about bankruptcy. Most of all, it is a feat of imagination: off-balance-sheet vehicles turn into dinosaurs that take over the basement of the headquarters; the Lehman Brothers show up as two brothers crammed into one giant suit. In the course of all this, the audience gets the kind of insight into the workings of modern business that any number of set-piece interviews and TV documentaries have struggled to provide. All this is an impressive achievement for any 28-year-old dramatist; but it is the fearlessness with which Prebble has tackled a complex and technical subject that particularly stands out. One to watch in 2010.West EndTheatreJohn OsborneHanif KureishiEnronLehman Brothersguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Precious by Sapphire | Book review Recently adapted for film, Precious is the fictional diary of Claireece Precious Jones. Obese, illiterate and sexually abused by both her parents, Precious gives birth, aged 12, to a "Down sinder" daughter, and is expelled from school when her second incestuous pregnancy is discovered. Sapphire is unflinching in her exploration of ignorance and deprivation yet Precious's painful progress is leavened by moments of searing innocence and instinctual tenderness, and gradually her stunted prose begins to vibrate with energy and warmth. However, Precious's emotional integrity is threatened by an increasingly insistent ideological subtext: Alice Walker's The Color Purple is a looming presence and ultimately risks making Precious appear a heavy-handed social critique.FictionLettie Ransleyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |