John Cheever, Finally

Finally, the most famous living American author you no longer remember. In which I profess and explain my love for Cotton and Increase Mather, one of whom loved Cheever's ancestor.

You may not know John Cheever or his work, and no one could blame you. His name is not widely recognized today, his writing not frequently discussed, not now. But he was very famous in his time. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Award. That wasn’t too long ago, either — he died in 1982 — but he has since been largely forgotten among the broader reading public. It makes you wonder who’s next, who from this time, from our time, will be hailed in the New Yorker and by his or her contemporaries and yet unremembered just a few decades later. The long-serving New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt had an answer to that question. I grew up knowing him through a childhood friend, his son, who took an astonishingly smaller interest in books than his dad, so on occasion I had the great good fortune of talking about fiction with him. “Michael,” he told me – I was probably in ninth grade – “Michael, the only contemporary author they’ll remember in a hundred years is Stephen King.” If I am being more precise, Chris attributed that remark to someone else, another writer, I believe, but I don’t exactly recall, and Chris died five years ago, so I can’t ask him. I do hope for a whole canful of reasons that Lehmann-Haupt or his pal was wrong. But the prediction is sobering, and it does make you wonder which among today’s most famous writers will soon be just as forgotten as Cheever.

A leading indicator might be subject matter. Cheever was a chronicler of quotidian life in the American northeast, especially New England, though he wrote frequently of what you could call the length of the Acela Corridor between DC and Boston. He is so conventionally and so closely associated with a particular setting that commentators who want to sound smart often repeat a version of the following braying formulation: “Cheever,” they bleat, “was often known as the ‘Chekhov of the suburbs.’” Some of these people go even further and attribute the characterization to Elmore Leonard, though as far as I can tell that may just be a flat myth that has taken on a life of its own. One example august personage who has laid this sobriquet at the feet of Elmore Leonard is Martin Chilton, the Chief Book Critic of The Independent and formerly the culture critic of The Telegraph – which must make him one of the most insufferable dimwits in the empire. I have found a 1982 book review in the New York Times by John Leonard who calls Cheever “our Chekhov,” but that’s it, and I really have the sense that, over time and for no pin-downable reason, the lore emerged from this book review that Elmore Leonard had named Cheever the ‘Chekhov of the Suburbs.’ I think it’s just that, lore. Perhaps one of my readers can point to the original source, if it exists, and I’ll be glad to update my files. But you get the gist. Cheever was customarily known — is customarily known, among the usual suspect expert class — as a chronicler of Levittown. By now, my glorious and faithful readers – brilliant and perspicacious to a one – will know where I am going. The compliment or charge, be as it is, is not, finally, fair. Cheever was probably at his best in small town New England and pretty strong in the Manhattan setting, too. But as the Bard of Brookline or William Shakespeare of Westchester he is and shall be known. 

To understand Cheever as a writer of place — the best nickname I have found was the “Ovid of Ossining” from a Time Magazine cover story (yeah, he was that big, got his own Time Magazine cover story), and the nexus between him and this town is no less important than the explicitly acknowledged inspiration for Mad Men show creator Matthew Weiner to set his American dramedy in that hip-happening burgh — is to miss his most characteristic quality. Cheever’s longest-lasting observation was that the post-war generations, particularly the second and third post-war generations that found prosperity and alienation in their mass affluence — faced novel and wretched disaffection, the useful and hateful rupture of family bonds and local traditions, and the isolation of social liberation that results in supposed sexual freedoms that, misericordia, cannot yet speak their names.

So far, so good. You might be thinking that some combination of the Birth of Mass Affluence and the literary exposition of suburbia were hallmarks of a solid four decades of American writers. And you’d be right. But Cheever had a more unusual theme, one that wound its way through nearly his entire forty-five year writing career. He was interested in technology.

If I were aiming for New York Post- or Instagram-type traffic, I’d probably have used the word “obsessed,” as in “Cheever’s Seven Secret Obsessions with Tech.” I might even have said he was “captivated” or “infatuated” with technology. But I don’t know that – perhaps his biographer would – and I think that kind of clickbait characterization might well disserve Cheever’s coruscating intellect. He wrote with essential frequency about new technical innovation, scientific discovery, cutting edge physics and electronics, about war materiel, about pioneering personal and commercial products, about unfamiliar government agencies and military departments and the men and women whose classified labor might or might not protect the United States but undoubtedly destroyed their private lives. He even prefigured search engines and a GPT-type AI by almost seventy years by inventing for one novel a supercomputer that counted the words in John Keats poems with the promise of writing its own. I get the impression, after reading all of his novels and some of his stories, that he found these developments in machinery, nuclear energy, telecommunication, electricity, rocketry, and space exploration more essential to the moment of his subject matter than intrinsically fascinating.

“The Enormous Radio” remains one of his most famous stories. The New Yorker published it in 1947, a few days before Cheever turned thirty-five. Connoisseurs will know both that his work had already appeared in regional and national periodicals, including the New Yorker, in spits and spats since he was in his late teens and that it was “The Enormous Radio” that really made him. In this short story, Jim and Irene Westcott love each other and their simple, beatific lives in their East Side Manhattan apartment, where they listen to music on their radio and from which they go out to concerts to listen to more music and get along hummingly well. The chickens come home to roost when their radio breaks down and they are forced to replace it. The new one is a massive machine – The Enormous Radio – and ungainly and visually unattractive, to boot, and it has a weirdly large number of switches and knobs, and they even glow green, which feature is also off-putting and sensational. What’s worse, this otherworldly device turns out not to be a regular music-listening radio or news radio but instead a kind of universal listening machine that compels the couple to eavesdrop on the private lives of their neighbors. Mrs. Westcott in particular, at first horrified, is quickly seduced and hooked. She starts living her life primarily for the moments she can sit in her apartment and listen in on the daily routines of the other apartment dwellers in her building. Her life is consumed by this – what’s the word for auditory voyeurism? – we shall take the liberty and call it auditeurism – her life is consumed by this auditeurism. Not only does it obsess her, it depresses her. In the end, the happy lives of the Westcotts are disrupted and killed by a new intrusive technology.

Does. This. Sound. Familiar? Are you not entertained? Can you not see the screaming analogy for our own time? “The Enormous Radio” could have been written about Facebook or Tik Tok or Discord or Justin.tv or any one of them. I think this was the first example of Cheever’s postwar interest in technology and its unexpected and unhappy impacts on the Lives of Others. (Get it?! Movie pun! The East German eavesdropping movie with Ulrich Mühe in the performance, literally, of a lifetime?) In this particular story, Cheever chose to illustrate his morality tale with the tools of absurdism, the technique of Nikolai Gogol, a Russian (actually Ukrainian) whose productive years predated those of another Russian, Anton Chekhov, by about three quarters of a century, but, yeah, of course, Cheever is “often known as the Chekhov of the suburbs.” Oy vey.

This, finally, was Cheever’s setting: the lives of people upended and separated from the chores, burdens, and exhilarations of the small town and the farmland and the fishing village and the church with the steeple by the 1s and 0s of computers, the rapidly easing access to airplane travel, the advent of mass communication entertainment, the cog-in-a-wheel individual contributions to phenomenally complicated inventions, the alienating impossibility faced by ninety-nine percent of mankind when seeking to understand the machines they had negligible roles in making or purchasing but which now influence and control them.

This theme of technology and its externalities appears as the most consistent and distinctive current through the balance of Cheever’s lengthy writing career. It shows up in his stories and nearly all of his novels. In the Wapshot Chronicle, his first book and still the second most reputed after Falconer, the young sons leave the stifling hamlet of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts, for, respectively, a top secret job in Washington DC in the case of the older son Moses and a carpet company position in New York for which the younger son Coverly fails a battery of supposedly sophisticated psychological tests. Following this rejection, Coverly takes computer classes at night and eventually finds his way to a military rocket launching career that requires he live far away from his lady. In his case, technology literally puts him on a tiny Pacific island. All of this is contrasted with the fishing life of their father Leander back in St. Botolphs. Cheever renews and amplifies the argument in the sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, in which there are more missiles, more airplanes, and much, much more discussion of science, including a lengthy United States Senate hearing in which Coverly’s complicated boss is required to defend his work and his temperament. This set piece contains within it the most affecting scene Cheever wrote. Dr. Cameron, the witness, is confronted with the now adult son he abandoned to an long-term care facility. His son, though abused and discarded by the father, cries out only for some attention, some love. Dr. Cameron, who has turned his life toward his ambition, his lust, and the stars, heartlessly and publicly rejects his son yet again. In Cheever’s last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, the protagonist is a computer industry executive who cares deeply about aquifer pollution. These two core elements of his character appear and reappear as he pursues romantic affairs. For Cheever, invention, technology, science, and progress animate and ruin everything.

This theme is perennial, or at least it has become so. Every year sees the arrival of yet another interesting technical innovation that doubles as an atrocity on mankind. Right now it might be Tik Tok or Algorand. Tomorrow it will be AI deepfakes: they are bemusing when Ronald Reagan shows up in a new film but not when he again runs for President.

You would think that this might rescue Cheever from oblivion. Since his time, we have seen only acceleration after acceleration of technology’s knock-on societal effects. Cheever was on to the caper early. Could he, should he, be revived and remembered as the Soothsayer of Silicon, the Medium of Medium, the Augur of Automation?

It’s a good case, and its theory sounds well.

Finally, it will not be enough. Cheever’s work is too tied to his own moment. He never seems to dare limn his opinions or observations classically. He seems almost deliberately devoted to the exact times of his stories. Even when he writes of the physical, professional, and spiritual migrations from unchanging New England towns to the throng of the city, he nearly always – with few noteworthy exceptions – declines to connect his own narratives to the tradition, as just an example, of the American jeremiad. One exception is worth special mention. Melissa, who becomes important to the reader as a central character in one of Cheever’s novels, is introduced more or less thus, as she is looking for someone to dig a trench so a household drain can be repaired:

She went first to the state employment office where eighteen or twenty men were sitting around looking for work but none of them was willing to dig a ditch and she saw as one of the facts of her life, her time, that standards of self-esteem had advanced to a point where no one was able to dig a hole. [And then, in a bit of superb writing, Cheever’s very next sentence, without a paragraph break, is:] She went to the liquor store to get some whisky and told the clerk her problems.

The backsliding continues when she gets drunk on the whisky and has anonymous sex, hours later, with the day worker recommended by the liquor store clerk. It’s all pretty neat. But it is still the exception to the rule, and the exception crisply proves it: even when doing the jeremiad shuffle, Cheever is dancing to his own tune.

There is a lot to admire in this. He must have considered it lazy and incomplete to lament loss of innocence. In the stories he tells, there was not much innocence to lose, just different manners of emotional abuse. His Wapshot boys are commanded by their domineering spinster relative Honora to leave St. Botolphs and find their manhood not on the blue sea like their forefathers but in the virile battlegrounds of commerce and professions. We discover in their journey just how much reason there was to dislike her. In their adventures, the boys find that the elder generations are no more kind, generous, open-minded, nor accommodating than the worst representatives of their own. For Cheever, whatever worthy moment appears to have been lost in the postwar boomtime was either not worth saving or never really there to begin with. The older generations in Cheever’s books are basically the most cruel, the most penurious, the most bigoted.

This last is hugely important because Cheever was bisexual or gay in a time when America made it very difficult to be either, and he wrestled with this dilemma in many stories and every novel. His writing is rather frank on the subject, particularly in the Wapshot duology, in Oh What a Paradise It Seems, and especially particularly in Falconer. A frisson shows up in Bullet Park, too, which is frustratingly misunderstood in some quarters to be high literary but was obviously a kind of pulp bloody sendup, at least we hope it was because it was so inexplicably lightweight otherwise.

Cheever’s male protagonists routinely consider or undertake affairs with other men, and in Falconer, Ezekiel Farragut (one should be forgiven for wondering about the intentionality of the last name and its quasi-homophone the classic gay slur) importantly falls in love with a fellow prisoner. The writer’s frankness – his casualness, too – should certainly not be taken for granted, not in the 1950s when he started the Wapshot narrative nor in the 1970s and early 1980s when he published Falconer and Paradise. This was, broadly speaking, the coming out moment for avant-garde America, but homosexuality and bisexuality were still largely not out in most of the country. His writing on sex was brave, both in its substance and in its ease, and his work clearly stirred some pots. Scholars of gender history or of Cheever would be able to confirm or disaffirm, but it seems to me that he was of a generation who might have had a hard time – like his characters – living as gay men, rather than as bisexual men. That may not matter, not now. But the mood of his decades appears self-evidently in the pages of his own books. Farragut, a college professor and a drug addict, receives his wife during prison visiting hours early in the novel. Her name is Marcia, and she is quite horrible. They exchange the following dialogue (which is not, to be clear, even close to the most important example of her being horrible) when she asks him about his drug habit in jail:

‘I’m down from forty milligrams to ten. I get methadone at nine every morning. A pansy deals it out. He wears a hairpiece.’

‘Is he on the make?’

‘I don’t know. He asked if I liked opera.’

‘You don’t, of course.’

‘That’s what I told him.’

‘That’s good. I wouldn’t want to be married to a homosexual, having already married a homicidal drug addict.’

In case it’s not clear, the dialogue between them is acidly witty and cutting, not humorous.

This is indeed the milieu, even among college professors and their wives, even in the late druggy, swingy 1970s, in which Cheever’s gay and bisexual characters – and he – lived. One can cast one’s mind back to earlier years when one regularly saw, heard, or made “funny because he’s gay” jokes on TV, at the movies, at standup, or on the playground. Cheever was publishing his frank discussion of sex and sexuality during these decades.

There is another side to this historical, contextual coin. We can – we should – appreciate and admire Cheever’s writing on sexuality as an artifact of bravery for its time. But the flip side of this admiration is that we are admiring an artifact. As I read his many examples of homosexual or curious encounters, interests, and loves, I couldn’t help remembering Ringo Starr’s cameo at the end of the “Equal Rights” music video from the 2016 Andy Samberg vehicle Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, in which Starr explains the big joke just in case you missed it: “He’s writing a song for gay marriage, you know, like it’s not allowed. It’s allowed now.”

We can set the aperture a little wider and make a similar observation. Cheever was very interested in sex. Or he was very interested in writing about sex. Or he found success in writing about sex so he kept delivering what sold. He wrote sex scenes, lust scenes, tumescence scenes, masturbation scenes, frustration scenes, aggression scenes, consummation scenes, aftermath and afterglow scenes, scenes of breasts and breathlessness, of penises and playfulness. It must have, back in the day, as the kids say now, hit hard and hit different. You can imagine young men and women in black turtlenecks and cocktail dresses dragging cigarettes in 1970s New York brownstones murmuring their stimulation after reading or pretending to read his latest pages.

Nothing about this prurient interest is, any longer, scandalous, arresting, or interesting. Nor is it, by the measures of our own time, salacious. I wonder if it ever was. When I came across these portions of Cheever’s work, I was reminded of John Updike, whose writing I have always found dull. We can thank David Foster Wallace for the observation that Updike was a “penis with a thesaurus.” One could be forgiven for thinking similarly of Cheever. Research quickly reveals that Cheever and Updike were friends, which should surprise no one. It makes sense. They must have talked with each other about cocks more than Mark Wahlberg and his thunder buddy toy Ted.

This, then, is the second blow to Cheever’s staying power. In the same way he treated technology and his time, he treated sexuality in his time. In the first case intentionally, in the second case who knows, the bulk of his work was forever unforever. I would not press the angle too far, but I repeatedly recalled when reading Cheever’s work the writing assignments my kids routinely brought back from elementary school. Small Moments was the theme for a couple of years at a clip. Small Moment Writing, they called it. What does it feel like to sit on a park bench and look at the pond? What does the character experience when he wakes up in the morning? What does she think of when she ties her shoes? These are writing exercises that – some childhood development person would know better than I – have age-appropriately or make-it-easier-for-teachers-to-do-their-jobs-ly become vectors of pedagogy and understanding for young children in the English-speaking world. Cheever is a This Moment writer. What comes after is less important – far less important – than what is now. The world is to be viewed through the lens of This Moment. This is both locally and broadly true. He was unmistakably attentive to the subject matter du jour. You can see Marshall McLuhan’s fingerprints all over Cheever’s interest in media and physics. Falconer, his famous prison novel, was written soon after he took employment as a creative writing instructor at Sing Sing, the large jailhouse near his home in Ossining. He also started writing it not very long after the momentous Attica prison riot of 1971, which seared a new set of social problems into the American mind. Cheever’s last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, reflects emergence of the environmental movement into the national consciousness. He really was interested in whatever was going on Right Now. It makes you wonder which writers Cheever most admired.

I’ll reiterate: I won’t press the angle too far, the one between Small Moment elementary school writing education and This Moment Cheever, but but but . . . there is something to it. It’s almost as if American children of today are the progeny of the This Moment writing of which Cheever – and Updike, for that matter – were excellent examples. Today’s kids are not encouraged, at those tender young ages, at least, to take on grand gestures with their stories or to write in big sweeps. Small Moment writings are seen as building blocks on which later arcs may or may not be constructed. Cheever, similarly, even in novels taking place in the corridors of the American Space Race and Cold War, is not writing about those subjects but rather nearby them. In some important sense, though he was clearly interested in technology, he could have replaced missile farms with circus tents and substituted law firm secrecy for government secrecy and not much would have changed. Had he wanted, he could have made his stories more universal, more classical. He had the talent and evidenced the power from time to time. But for whatever reason, he chose not to do it.

Cheever is at his best not when he is writing for This Moment but when he writes, in fact, a Small Moment, when writing scenes and vignettes. He can tell a whole story of class or backhand a central casting fairy tale with a handful of sentences. Strikingly, he often does it in reference to an exceptionally minor character who is there and gone in the blink of an eye. This may be why he’s best remembered, such as he is, as a short story writer.

In the Wapshot Chronicle, the likeable young protagonist Coverly is subjected to a deep psychological profile that might be suitable for a senior or secret job but is in fact for an entry level role at a household goods company. The interview with the psychologist is an excellent invention, a device now familiar to us, to get the character to open up about his history and personal secrets, to demonstrate his unsophistication. It’s quite funny, proto-Woody Allen. Here's an example. Coverly explains to the shrink:

‘Well, whenever I had a good time with Father – whenever he took me out on the boat or something – she always seemed to be waiting for me when we got home with this story. Well, it was about, it was about how I came to be, I suppose you’d say. My father was working for the table-silver company at the time and they went into the city for some kind of banquet. Well, my mother had some cocktails and it was snowing and they had to spend the night in a hotel and one thing led to another but it seems that after this my father didn’t want me to be born.’

‘Did your mother tell you this?’

‘Oh, yes. She told me lots of times. She told me I shouldn’t trust him because he wanted to kill me. She said he had this abortionist come out to the house and that if it hadn’t been for her courage I’d be dead. She told me that story lots of times.’

‘Do you think this had any effect on your fundamental attitude toward your father?’

‘Well, sir, I never thought about it but I guess maybe it did.’

I don’t think it’s terribly important, but this appears to have been an amplified tidbit from Cheever’s own life. When his parents found out they were expecting him, his father invited an abortionist over for dinner.

And here’s a good snapshot of South Coast Massachusetts life, in which the elderly cousins Leander and Honora, and her maid, battle for the symbolic possession of a clearly unimportant household object:

‘It’s mine. It’s my rug.’ He pulled the folds of the rug, which was long and so dirty that the dust from its warp made him sneeze, toward the door. Then Honora went on to the other end of the rug, seized it and called for Maggie. When Maggie came out of the kitchen she grabbed Honora’s end – they were all sneezing – and they all began to pull. It was a very unpleasant scene, but if we accept the quaintness of St. Botolphs we must also accept the fact that it was the country of spite fences and internecine quarrels and that the Pinchot twins [some barely referenced half-characters] lived until their death in a house divided by a chalk line. Leander lost, of course. How could a man win such a contest? Leaving Honora and Maggie in possession of the rug he stormed out of the house, his feelings in such a turmoil that he did not know where to go, and walking south on Boat Street until he came to a field he sat down in the sweet grass and chewed the succulent ends of a few stalks to take the bitterness out of his mouth.

It gets much better. Elsewhere in his work, a sketch of a passing character of no significance gives us a volume:

[A] much stranger figure took her attention – a tall man with unusually long arms. He was a stray, she decided; he must live in the slums of Parthenia. In his right hand he carried an umbrella and a pair of rubbers. He was terribly stooped and to see where he was going had to crane his neck forward and upward like an adder. He had not bent his back over a whetstone or a workbench under the weight of a brick hod or at any other honest task. It was the stoop of weak-mindedness, abnegation and bewilderment. He had never had any occasion to straighten his back in self-esteem. Stooped with shyness as a child, stooped with loneliness as a youth, stooped now under an invisible burden of social disregard, he walked now with his long arms reaching nearly to his knees. His wide, thin mouth was set in a silly half-grin, meaningless and sad, but the best face he had been able to hit on. . . . Carrying his umbrella and rubbers, although there was not a cloud in the sky, he duck-footed out of sight.

That’s it. That’s all we get. This is bullseye Cheever. On the less favorable side of the ledger, we see him gamely but ungainly play with the narrative viewpoint. The observation-in-chief is made from the vantage of the female protagonist. But in order to get inside the head of the man, and in order to tell his story, Cheever hopscotches from her eyes to omniscience and to the fellow’s own point of view. It doesn’t quite work. It isn’t seamless and clean. On the other hand, consider how much Cheever accomplishes in just a few sentences. Here is not an interesting older gentleman whose years and wrinkles reflect the wisdom of experience. Never mind your stereotypes. Never mind your canned Hollywood barroom extras. Never mind your nostalgia. Here is a fearful, scuttling nobody, his whole life a wafer. I get the sense that Cheever was having his most fun, was most himself, when he was giving us these Small Moments.

The funniest such sketch I came across when reading Cheever was of a married couple whose entire continental travel history was told through the device of laundry. Our hero meets them on a ship on the way to Europe:

She shared a table with a Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield, from Rochester, who were going abroad for the second time. They were traveling with orlon wardrobes. [Orlon is an synthetic fiber.] During dinner they told Honora about their earlier trip to Europe. They went first to Paris, where they had nice weather – nice drying weather, that is. Each night, they took turns washing their clothes in the bathtub and hanging them out to dry. Going down the Loire they ran into rain and were not able to do any wash for nearly a week, but once they reached the sea the weather was sunny and dry, and they washed everything. They flew to Munich on a sunny day and did their wash in the Regina Palast, but in the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and all their clothing, hung out on a balcony, got soaked. They had to pack their wardrobes wet for the trip to Innsbruck, but they reached Innsbruck on a clear and starry night and hung everything to dry again. There was another thunderstorm in Innsbruck, and they had to spend a day in their hotel room, waiting for their clothes to dry. Venice was a wonderful place for laundry. They had very little trouble in Italy, and during their Papal audience Mrs. Sheffield convinced herself that the Pope’s vestments were made of orlon. They remembered Geneva for its rainy weather, and London was very disappointing. They had theater tickets, but nothing would dry, and they had to spend two days in their room. Edinburgh was even worse, but in Skye the clouds lifted and the sun shone, and they took a plane home from Prestwick with everything clean and dry. The sum of their experience was to warn Honora against planning to do much wash in Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland and the British Isles.

It’s pitch perfect. Or maybe, veering a little too far into cavil, it is perfect just until that last gratuitous sentence, which is easy to say here, because it does serve as a link to Honora’s response to their account. But either way, the unavoidable question is whether, given these immense powers, Cheever was really in the business of stitching together these vignettes with novel stuffing.

Finally, it is in his short scenes, his asides, his sketches, his Small Moments that Cheever breaks out of his contemporary time and into something more durable and universal. Here is his depiction of yearning for his lover:

Farragut lay on his cot. He wanted Jody. The longing began in his speechless genitals, for which his brain cells acted as interpreter. The longing then moved up from his genitals to his viscera and from there to his heart, his soul, his mind, until his entire carcass was filled with longing.

How good is that? Who among us cannot understand this flash and crescendo?

The inevitable question becomes, finally: What could this writer have accomplished?

That question occurred to me several times when reading Cheever’s work but never more starkly than when I encountered his insight on the American social class and the workplace. Not just social class, not just “the people in the suburbs” vs the people in the old New England mill towns, not just the rich vs the strivers with their enormously different homes, no. I mean the essentially American nexus between social class and the office.

Cheever made a recurrent observation that, in America, class stratification both gets imported into the workplace from daily social life and gets reformulated through its own professional weight. Here is a prime example, which Cheever reveals, again, through the sketch of an extremely minor character:

Griza was the son of a Polish immigrant but he had been raised in Lowell and his wife was the granddaughter of a Yankee farmer. He was one of the technicians who serviced the big computer and might have been recognized as one. There were no mandates for dress in the computation center and no established hierarchies but over the months the outlines of a society and a list of sumptuary laws had begun to emerge, expressing, it seemed, an inner love of caste. The physicists wore cashmere pullovers. The senior programmers wore tweeds and colored shirts. Coverly’s rank wore business suits and the technicians seemed to have settled on a uniform that included white shirts and dark ties. They were separated from the rest of the center by the privilege of manipulating the console and by the greater privilege of technical knowledge and limited responsibility.

I love this. Cheever was on to something. He understood the lurking “inner love for caste” that has managed to find its place in the contemporary office age just as it has every other. Think of the legendary Building 42 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, where the coolest chosen few were invited to sit. Think of badge culture in Washington D.C.. In office life, the Princeton WASP with a straight back and a trim cut suit might enjoy an initial deferential advantage up until the moment she is met with the nerd quant who makes the firm all the profits. The halo always seems to follow the people closest to the seat of power, which is at once both obvious and at least a little silly, in that they’re all still employees, like everyone else in the room.

It is probably hard to overstate how important – and how American – this particular social trend, now quite global in its footprint, has been in shaping the daily lives of billions of people. The American office has recreated and created and recreated its own intriguing and stunningly powerful class dynamics for decades – what are MeToo and DEI if not ongoing convulsions of the same? – and Cheever was, I believe, on to this exceptionally early. He understood that there is a natural inclination toward an in-group and out-groups, toward cool and uncool, toward the anointed and the unwashed, and that this perhaps primal instinct and perhaps miserable condition continued to thrive in the hallways of gleaming city offices as it had on the cobbles of charming country towns. I wish he had made more of his insight.

As I was researching this piece, I learned that Cheever’s journals either confirmed or revealed, after his death, that he had been a petty and committed social snob. He was a descendant of Ezekiel Cheever who was eulogized by Cotton Mather. (Hat tip to Jonathan Dee, the writer and Syracuse professor.) That is to say Ezekiel, known in his lifetime as the greatest American colonial schoolmaster, died in 1708 and was eulogized by the most important theologian and scientist of his generation. These guys were running around during the proto-resistance to overseas British rule, during the Salem Witch Trials, during the passing of the Puritan hat from Harvard to Yale, all of it. I love Cotton Mather and his father Increase – like I love them, I have studied them for a quarter century, they are two of the people I wish I could meet if they could come back to life. I’d put them up against John Adams and John Quincy Adams as the most influential father-son pairing in American history. Ideas that continue to permeate our national identity – including the jeremiad, the Protestant work ethic, American exceptionalism – find their way through the centuries back to Increase Mather and his son Cotton. They were both giants. And Cotton thought Ezekiel Cheever was something special.

Four hundred years later, John Cheever took special interest, in his personal life, in his own social standing. Reading about his life, one quickly finds that he was, finally, a rather dislikable fellow with grubby class pretensions that governed his private turmoil perhaps nearly as much as his discomfort with his own homosexuality. Cheever’s rather raw and unbridled social affectations and aspirations reminded me of John O’Hara, about whom I have written in this space. But if we pass over Cheever’s personal life for a moment, we see that he mostly just flirted with his class insights when it came to his writing. What a miss. He was on to something. He was so close to a unique and lasting contribution, one worthy of his literary power, of his ancestor, and of his ancestor’s friends. America’s gifts to the world are many, and we should not place contemporary office life at the top of the list. But the DNA of the office work experience that has taken up the great majority of the waking hours of billions of people around the world can be traced to the meritocratic, fast-paced, individualist, hard-pressed, ambitious corporate life of the United States. Cheever could have made it his Canterbury.

Now for a coda. For reasons I can’t quite explain, I did a search for “John Cheever” and “Christopher Lehmann-Haupt” and found an article from Sunday April 27, 1969, on the New York Times TimesMachine in which Chris interviewed Cheever after the publication of Bullet Park. Lehmann-Haupt had just been appointed book critic of the Times that year. It must have been one of his earliest pieces in the newspaper. I have read a lot of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s book reviews over the years, like a lot. I have read one of his novels and even got to read some draft pages of unpublished non-fiction. I got to know Chris’s tone and style, his interests, his turn of phrase. But this article surprised me. The first half appeared to have been written by another person entirely. Instead of his usual – no stopping now – droning book report and anecdote, this was a production of Gonzo journalism, in which Chris announces his trip up to Ossining for the interview and his unexpected hunt from station to station, in Cheever’s red car, for a valise that Chris had mistakenly left on the train. The balance of the article turns into an interview of question-and-answer format, but the beginning is lively, bouncy, and fun. I wish he had continued in that idiom for the rest of his New York Times career instead of careening into Gray Man at Gray Lady. Ah well.

But I also noticed something else. Lehmann-Haupt was obviously utterly charmed by Cheever. His prefatory Gonzo story and the interview itself drip with admiration. He lets Cheever get away unchallenged with, for example, an apparent claim that he had memorized the entirety of Bullet Park (though forgotten it in the intervening months), and he does not follow up on a repeated assertion that Cheever made a “deal with the devil” to finish that novel. Not only that, Lehmann-Haupt’s entire background assumption in the article is that Cheever is the bard of the suburbs. He situates Cheever in that milieu without any apparent interrogation. It’s like the myth of Cheever was already well afoot in the pages of the New York Times even then, and I felt I had stumbled upon one its chief proponents. And then, upon consideration, yet another part of the Cheever arc appears, too. Lehmann-Haupt thrills to their shared adventure searching for the missing valise, finding it at a train station, fishing it out of a metal box after waiting too long for someone to bring the key. Lehmann-Haupt loves the set piece. He says it’s just like one of Cheever’s vignettes or short stories. It must have put them both in a delicious mood before they spent the day with scotch and stories and a tape recorder that ran out of tape.

Chris was enthralled. I suspect that’s the deal. I suspect Cheever’s contemporaries were enthralled by his short writing, by his sketches, by the best of his Small Moment passages. This, combined with Cheever’s contemporary bravery on sex, made him the most famous American writer in his lifetime.

Finally, it is not enough.