About 20 miles south of Boston, under a big maple near a white clapboard church, John Cheever is buried next to his parents and brother. He’s also buried under an accretion of myth and myth-busting. A restaurant on the edge of the cemetery, just yards from the family plot, calls itself the Cheever Tavern. Advertising a “tasteful setting,” it invokes the great writer’s mid-1960s public persona as the bard of suburbsville. The author of a dazzling flow of New Yorker stories, he was hailed on the cover of Time as “Ovid in Ossining” and presented in the accompanying article as a monogamously married father of three living in a grand house with the obligatory Labrador retrievers. “I had no idea that my father was anything but the country squire he pretended to be,” Susan Cheever writes in her new book, When All the Men Wore Hats. He himself linked his best stories to “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light,” as he wrote in the preface to The Stories of John Cheever (1978)—a time, he went on, “when almost everybody wore a hat.”
Forget the hats. Fedoras and bird dogs are not the key to Cheever. But neither is the sordid flip side, the anti-myth that ought to gut any misguided hankering after a mid-century golden age. In Home Before Dark, a “biographical memoir” published in 1984, two years after her father’s death, Susan Cheever outed him as doubly tortured: a closeted homosexual promiscuously unfaithful to his wife with both men and women, and a self-destructive alcoholic who dried out after nearly dying of drink and only then accepted his gay identity. She discovered his “sexual imposture” (his phrase) after he died, when she began writing about him. Her memoir was eventually followed by reams of corroborating evidence, including his private writings, The Journals of John Cheever (1991), and Blake Bailey’s long, excellent, and desperately dismal Cheever: A Life (2009). That biography supplied the final indignity: the surprising news that, less than 30 years after his death, even his best books were no longer selling. In 2012—Cheever’s centennial—the novelist Allan Gurganus regretted that his friend was “now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia.”
For those who love the stories, the shrinking readership is what’s most regrettable. By turns lyrical and satirical, funny and heartrending, they show us a paradise of sorts, a dream America—and then reveal terrible depths of discontent. His own estimation of his fiction, as recorded in the Journals, is itself a hyper-condensed Cheever story: “flighty, eccentric, and sometimes bitter work, with its social disenchantments, somersaults, and sudden rains.”