Happy Birthday John Cheever
May 27, 2009
John Cheever would have been 97 today. This year saw the publication of Cheever: A Life, a comprehensive (and well reviewed) biography by Blake Bailey. It’s next on my list of books to read– I’ll start it this weekend while we’re in Cincinnati visiting Ted’s mom.
Cheever said, “A page of good prose remains invincible.”
Cheever once described the writer’s task as to evoke “the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock and the breasts of women.”
And he wrote, “The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.”
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June 4th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I’ve been working through it at the breakfast table, up to the 1951 to 1952 chapter; they just moved to Scarborough. In many ways, Cheever was a very tragic figure who, for a variety of personal reasons, might not have achieved the success he did.