The Journals of John Cheever

More interesting to me than any of his novels

I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this question. Dennis Prager wrote one. Norman Podhoretz wrote another.

Cheever lets it all hang out with brutal honesty. Auto-paralysis through self-analysis on the rocks of self-loathing. I open at random to p. 96:

I am a solitary drunkard. I take a little painkiller before lunch but I really don't get to work until late afternoon. At four or half past four or sometimes five I stir up a Martini, thinking that a great many men who can't write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at bar stools. [. . .]

He's thinking about Kerouac, I'll guess. The entry is dated 1957, the year On the Road was published. Two pages later, Cheever lays into Jack in a long entry which begins, "My first feelings about Kerouac's book were: that it was not good . . . ."

Who is the better writer? Cheever. Who cuts closer to the bone of life and left more of a cultural mark for good or ill? Kerouac.

Too much of the preciosity of the Eastern Establishment attaches to such superb literary craftsmen as Cheever, John Updike, and Richard Yates, phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such. No one would accuse Kerouac of craft. He was “Jack Crackerjack” to Updike and Truman Capote said of Jack’s “spontaneous prose,” “that’s not writing, that’s just typewriting.” Social climbers like Cheever looked down on regional writers such as Edward Abbey, the Thoreau of the American Southwest, whose journal is appropriately entitled Confessions of a Barbarian. Cheever despite humble origins fancied himself a suburban squire. Here is Cactus Ed on Jack:

Some of Abbey's most entertaining letters involve skirmishes over literary reputation, one of his enduring obsessions. In a letter to the Nation, he contrasted Kurt Vonnegut's "concern for justice, love, honesty and hope" with "novels about the ethnic introspection project (Roth, Bellow)" and "the miseries of suburban hanky-panky (Updike, Cheever, Irving)."

He disparaged Jack Kerouac as "that creepy adolescent bisexual who dabbled in Orientalism and all the other fads of his time, wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanastic [sic] books and then drank himself to death while sitting on his mother's lap, down in Florida." He called Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist little fop" but later defended "Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "novel that reminds us, in the end, that defiance and resistance, manhood and honor, are still possible."

I read 'em all, even boozer Bukowski whose novels I consider trash. Some of his poetry, though, I think is good; Bluebird for example.