BOOKS

By Stefan Kanfer

When John Cheever died in 1982, he left a legacy of 12 books. Eleven cannot fail to enhance his reputation; one is likely to erode it. The Journals of John Cheever is not scheduled to be published by Knopf until November, but four long excerpts have already appeared in the New Yorker. They have occasioned more chatter and speculation than anything the author published in his lifetime, because they reveal a private face entirely unlike the mask that Cheever contrived for public view.

The gossip is certain to intensify next month, when Treetops (Bantam; $19.95), a book by Cheever's daughter Susan, arrives in bookstores. The volume is ostensibly a history of her mother's extraordinary family: one member was Alexander Graham Bell's assistant; another went to the Arctic with Admiral Robert Peary. But Susan finds it impossible to keep her father offstage. A friend is asked, "So, do you think he was a monster?" Mary, Cheever's wife, wonders, "Maybe he was wicked."

In his 1961 book, Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, Cheever made a list of subjects he considered off limits. Some seemed frivolous: "All parts for Marlon Brando." Others contained a mix of irony and rue. The author would shy away from explicit scenes of sexual commerce: "How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives as if -- jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts -- we were describing the changing of a flat tire?" He would disdain alcoholics: "Out they go, male and female, all the lushes; they throw so little true light on the way we live." And homosexuals were to have no place in his pages: "Isn't it time that we embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the flesh and moved on?"

Later Cheever dealt with some of these proscribed items, but never in the tone of the journals. Here they appear in a harsh floodlight, personified by Cheever himself. The author's idiosyncrasies are no longer secret: in Home Before Dark, Susan's ambivalent 1984 memoir, her father is described as "the worst kind of alcoholic." Her brother Ben, who edited a volume of Cheever's letters, recalled that John was "bisexual all his life . . . He liked good- looking younger men." Still, these were posthumous comments, made by members of the family that Cheever alternately cherished and regarded as a self-inflicted wound. In his notebooks, the author discloses himself in passages that seem to have been meant for an audience of one.

"Drank a good deal of whiskey, trying to relax," he begins, and that prescription is followed through the 1940s and '50s. Occasional grace notes occur, but hangovers and revulsion are usually the order of the day: "I feel sick, disgusted with myself, despairing and obscene. I have a drink to pull myself together at half past eleven and begin my serious drinking at half past four." And: "Evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. I could very easily destroy myself. It is ten o'clock now and I am thinking about the noontime snort."

More than a decade later, Cheever is still awash in remorse, denial and booze. He bullies his wife Mary, terrifies his daughter and reflects, "I have the characteristics of a bastard." Cheever's sexuality escapes from the closet: "His soft gaze follows me, settles on me, and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch. If he should put a hand on my thigh I would not remove it; if I should chance to meet him in the shower I would tackle him." He also has affairs with women and asks himself, "Would I sooner nuzzle D.'s bosom or squeeze R.'s enlarged pectorals?"

Rereading his early notebooks, Cheever accurately observes that "what emerges are two astonishing contests, one with alcohol and one with my wife." He gives Mary a typewriter. She acknowledges it 11 months later. They reconcile. They argue violently about his affairs. One entry says volumes about the temperature of this family crucible: "I find on the floor of Ben's room an unmailed letter . . . He is alone, he says. He is crying. He is alone with Mum and Dad, the two most self-centered animals in the creation."

With a comparatively small body of work, Cheever established himself as the Chekhov of the American suburb, investing railroad stations, tract houses and their owners with an amalgam of poetry, comedy and pathos. But that was in his fiction. The journals written before his renunciation of liquor, if not infidelity, reveal a blundering father, a conniving lover and a narcissistic mind. Noting that John Updike has made the cover of TIME, Cheever grumbles, "My own stubborn and sometimes idle prose has more usefulness." When the "estimable" Saul Bellow publishes a breakthrough novel, the diarist petulantly notes, "I have written first person slang long before 'Augie March' appeared."

Mary and the children are Cheever's literary executors. Why would they allow him -- as well as themselves -- to be so unflatteringly exposed? Is it a measure of revenge against the man who caused so many injuries? Or a matter of royalties? According to New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, Cheever wanted his notebooks to be published; the family is simply honoring his wishes. How much honor accrues to the request will be debated for years to come.

Was Cheever an artist? A monster? A tragic clown? Journals indicates that he was all three, suggesting that his life could provide the basis of a provocative and controversial film. Take away a hundred pounds, and Marlon Brando might be ideal for the title role.