Brock Clarke has such a good essay about John Cheever in The Rumpus, in which he passionately writes of his disgust that the publication of Blake Bailey's biography of the writer--and the ensuing so-called "reassessments" of Cheever's legacy--have overshadowed the fiction itself. And this isn't a mere annoyance; Clarke is clear in his belief that the loss and lack is ours, rather than Cheever's.
Clarke writes:
The publication of a great writer’s collected works should be a cause for celebration, and or at least a measured reassessment. How disturbing, then, that the Library of America’s two-volume publication of John Cheever’s stories and novels has also been cause for reluctant admiration, backhanded compliments, outright dismissal, petty personal attacks, and disingenuous exclamations of surprise of how little this important writer matters anymore. As though the reporters “reporting” how little Cheever matters anymore have nothing at all to do with creating the sense that Cheever doesn’t really matter anymore.
These reporters (who are sometimes reporters masquerading as book critics, and sometimes book critics masquerading as reporters) are wrong: Cheever does matter: he’s one of the greatest twentieth century American fiction writers, and one of the three (along with Flannery O’Connor and Donald Barthelme) most important American short story writers of the same period. This is a fact. It’s a fact because I say it’s a fact, and so you should accept it as such, in the same way you’re supposed to accept it as a fact when biographer Blake Bailey claims in his Cheever: A Life that “Cheever is hardly taught in the classroom,” and then when a “reporter” like Malcolm Jones in Newsweek quotes Bailey claiming it without bothering to ask apparently anyone if Bailey is right. Likewise when Charles McGrath claims in the New York Times Magazine that Cheever “is for the most part not on the syllabus,” we’re supposed to accept this as a fact, rather than wonder, “Whose syllabi have you seen, exactly? Is Cheever really not taught in the classroom anymore?” Because he is, at least by me. That is also a fact, among other facts.
If it sounds as though I’m angry, it’s because I am. Although not necessarily at Blake Bailey. True, many ... of the recent “reassessments” of Cheever are really just slightly queasy, prurient plot summaries of Bailey’s new biography. If Bailey hadn’t written the biography, then perhaps some of the reassessors would focus more on the fiction than on the life. ...
... if some of the recent magazine and newspaper pieces on Cheever are any proof, then reading Bailey’s biography immediately turns some readers of said biography into preening, judgmental, condescending assholes who, in not properly executing their reportorial or critical duties, reveal far more about their own limitations than they do about Cheever’s.
Take, for example, Jones’s March 9, 2009 Newsweek piece, “Suburban Stall.” Feel free to save your annoyance over the lame title, for there will be lameness aplenty ahead. ... Restrain yourself from pointing out, after Jones asks, “Why should Cheever suffer eclipse while an author such as the late Richard Yates enjoys a renaissance?” that Richard Yates’s “renaissance” can be attributed almost wholly to the fact that someone has just made a movie starring famous actors and actresses out of one of Yates’s novels. Save your outrage for when Jones admits that, after reading Cheever: A Life, “mostly I just wished that Cheever hadn’t been such an alcoholic bore.” Such a careful, measured, critical response to a fellow human being’s troubled life story deserves a response in kind: Fuck you.
Ah, the anger is compelling fuel for the essay, though I admire it most as Clarke smoothly shifts into a loving, text-based reading of Cheever's fiction, especially "The Cure." Clarke is most eloquent in his fight for Cheever when he is offensive, rather than defensive--though, by god, the whole damn bout is a fantastic one.
Image Credit: The Rumpus
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