Grace Notes

By Paul Gray

THE LETTERS OF JOHN CHEEVER

Edited by Benjamin Cheever

Simon & Schuster; 397 pages; $19.95

Throughout most of his career, John Cheever labored amid the general impression that he was, at best, a minor writer. After all, his specialty was short stories. Never mind that they were clear, sparkling and frequently unforgettable; most of them appeared in The New Yorker and could be dismissed by the grim custodians of literary reputations as well-bred entertainments for the well-to-do. Doubts about his importance dwindled only toward the end of his life. His fourth novel, Falconer (1977), won extensive critical and popular acclaim, and the publication of The Stories of John Cheever (1978) $ prompted general jubilation.

This upswing in Cheever's respectability accelerated after his death in 1982. Two books about him have since appeared: a memoir by his daughter Susan, Home Before Dark (1984), and Scott Donaldson's John Cheever: A Biography, published earlier this year. More collections are on the way. After legal wranglings, a compromise between the Cheever estate and a Midwestern publisher has been reached: a selection of the author's uncollected stories will appear next spring. And Cheever's private journals will surely be made public soon. All of this activity prompts a question. If Cheever's early obscurity was unjustified, might not these posthumous publications be a compensatory case of too much too late?

The Letters of John Cheever provides a quick, easy answer: no. The author believed, as he once wrote a friend, that "the common minutiae of life" are "the raw material of most good letters." Cheever's letters are crammed with everyday details, although such information does not shed much new light on his fiction, which was luminous enough to begin with. To learn more about Cheever is to take a refresher course in the pleasure of his company. He could toss off a letter that made even a motel remarkable: "The furniture was of no discernible period or inspiration and I think if you studied the dressing- table long enough you might go insane." Cheever's correspondence, as selected, edited and annotated by his son Benjamin, amounts to an entirely new story -- long, engrossing and recounted with characteristic grace.

Although he was a faithful letter writer, Cheever assumed that his pen pals would destroy his missives as casually as he did theirs. He was thus startled in 1959 to hear from author Josephine Herbst that she had been saving his mail. "Yesterday's roses," he wrote back, playfully dismissing her collection of his work, "yesterday's kisses, yesteryear's snows." Cheever's unselfconscious approach allowed his imagination and love of language free play. The supposedly ephemeral results of this process were, paradoxically, often memorable. Here is a 1946 description of his surroundings during a vacation in New Hampshire: "The pastures are stony, the mountains are leonine, the natives are taciturn and venal, the sunsets are red, and in the early evenings you can hear, from the shores of the lake, the brave and innocent voices of little children, singing some gibberish song about what a wonderful time they're having at Camp Wonk-a-tonk."

Cheever regularly threw away sentences that lesser talents might have hoarded, had they been capable of writing them at all. As a first-time parent, he confided, "Sending a child off to nursery school is like sending your bottom drawer off to the board of health." He could mock others, wickedly: "Edmund Wilson has printed a collection of questionable short stories and in one there is a long description of carnal copulation which would have done carnal copulation irreparable damage if it hadn't been quite as deeply rooted." And he could make fun of himself, including his diminutive (5 ft. 6 in.) height. Writing from Italy in 1956, where he and his family spent a year, he described his rented palazzo: "There is only one chair in the salon where I can sit and have my feet touch the floor and there are two chairs where my feet don't even hang over the edge."

This sounds like overstatement, and probably was. But Cheever, as he confided in another letter, believed that "interest is the first canon of aesthetics." Whatever he wrote about -- his work, his wife and children, his Labrador retrievers, his problems with alcohol and homosexuality -- he never forgot to keep his correspondent engaged and amused. Those who received his letters were lucky. This book extends the range of their good fortune.