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De Maupassant's fiction has been likened to that of "a peasant eating the good side of a wormy apple." It is Cheever's peculiar distinction to make his readers relish the Winesap flesh at the same time as he etymologizes on the worm: the importance of his fiction comes from the urgency of his moral insights. This puts his work in a different order of art from that of John O'Hara, a man of greater technical skill with a harder eye for the surface detail of current U.S. life, but one who is limited to a bleak and ironical view of existence in which nothing can compensate for economic and social defeat or deprivation of status. He has surmounted the limitation which renders jejune the social chronicles of John Marquand; Cheever can place his people as unerringly as Marquand in the social pecking order, but they are seen finally as naked spirits, not ladies and gentlemen at all.
Flawed Memories. The first Cheever in America was a Puritan schoolmaster who was eulogized by Cotton Mather for "his untiring abjuration of the devil" and who believed that "man is full of misery and all earthly beauty is lustful and corrupt." Cheever's mother and her parents emigrated from England, and, he says, "there was a certain air of shabby gentility about the whole thing. I hate to speak about the twilight of Athenian Boston and all that, but Cousin Randall would play two Beethoven sonatas after dinner, and everyone would sit around and belch."
But some of the specifics of Cheever's childhood let him down—a fact which may have something to do with the fact that today he wears Brooks Brothers shirts with their conspicuously missing pockets and would never consider having a mongrel dog. Unlike its St. Botolphs counterpart, the old family homestead in Quincy was not the biggest house in town, and his family was not the first family, and Quincy, of course, is a fairly routine middle-class "suburb" of Boston.
Cheever's father, a model for Leander in the Wapshot books, was a shoe salesman—"a commercial traveler with a flower in his buttonhole," says Cheever. He had a way with and an eye for the ladies, did not marry till late in life. He was 49 when John was born. Soon thereafter he began to have financial trouble.
His mother was tiny (under 5 ft.) but determined. She opened a gift shop to keep the family going, and after the 1929-30 crash his father lost his job and never worked again. Says Brother Fred: "Mother was a madam president, but she was never really the president of anything, always just the second level. But Mother used to throw it around: 'I'm a businesswoman,' she would say. John was very hurt by this." Admits Cheever: "It was one of the reasons I left home so early. I'd be damned if I would be supported by a gift shop."
Divided Loyalty. Cheever obviously was torn. Mother was worthy, but father was a character. Like Leander, he kept a journal, and his style is Leander's