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.
The 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."
In his 1961 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 on the way we live." And homosexuals were to have no place in his pages: "Isn't it time that we embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the flesh and moved on?"
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-inflicted wound. In his notebooks, the author discloses himself in passages that seem to have been meant for an audience of one.
"Drank a good deal of whiskey, trying to relax," he begins, and that prescription is followed through the 1940s and '50s. Occasional grace notes occur, but hangovers and revulsion are usually the order of the day: "I feel sick, disgusted with myself, despairing and obscene. I have a drink to pull myself together at half past eleven and begin my serious drinking at half past four." And: "Evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. I could very easily destroy myself. It is ten o'clock now and I am thinking about the noontime snort."