The Journals of John Cheever

Arrived yesterday. 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. Prager wrote one. Podhoretz wrote one.

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, Updike, and Yates, phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.  Social climbers like Cheever look down on regional writers such as Edward Abbey, whose journal is entitled Confessions of a Barbarian.

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

Comments

[Dmitri]

Hi Bill

This old article about Cheever and his biographer Bailey (before the latter was accused of sexually assaulting women) maybe of interest to you. Cheever was quite a character... https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/18/john-cheever-blake-bailey

[BV]

Thanks so much, Dmitri. I hadn't read that Guardian piece. But I read it just now with considerable interest since Bailey's bio of Cheever arrived a few weeks before Cheever's journals.

I now own three of Blake Bailey's literary biographies (some will call them pathographies). They are fabulously meticulous and well-written. He has another on Philip Roth which i will eventually get. If Bailey is not king of the literary biographers at the present time in the Anglosphere, who is?

But who has time to read all these damned books? I remind myself: "Forever reading, never read."

Trivia question: whence the quotation?

As for accusations of sexual assault, the presumption of innocence applies.

[Dmitri]

You are welcome Bill and I must say it feels good to recommend something useful to someone who provided countless recommendations and shares with the readers -- for free -- his rich intellectual world on a daily basis for such a long time.

Re quotation - I had to cheat and googled. The closest that shows up is the quote from Alexander Pope's poem "The Dunciad" by Schopenhauer in his Essays and Aphorisms. The quote says "Forever reading, never to be read", not an exact quote you brought up, so I am not sure that you had it in mind.

Re literary biographies -- and I am not sure this one counts as one -- I enjoyed the biography of Simone Weil by Francine du Plessix Gray. In particular, her insights about strong Jewish (in the sense of Talmudic) elements in Weil's style of thought that Simone herself was apparently not aware of left a lasting impression. And the book is short and reads fluently.

[BV]

Thanks for the kind words, Dmitri.

Yes, the quotation is from Pope. For a long time I labored under the misapprehension that it came from Schopenhauer where I first encountered it.

I don't believe I have read du Plessix Gray's bio on Weil, but I did read her bio of the Marquis de Sade, and what struck me was how someone could write about such a moral monster with nary a hint of moral condemnation.

I have six bios of Weil in my library. The most extensive and detailed is is Simone Weil: A Life by Simone Petrement. Weil is one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th cent. She generates fascination among a diverse bunch: the analytic philosopher Palle Yourgrau wrote a book about her fairly recently. In Coles' bio she is described as a "transcendent schlemiel."

You may enjoy this comparison by me of Weil and Bukowski: https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/charles-bukowski-meets-simone-weil