Cheever Journals: Do Writer's Personal Details Help Understanding of Art? FINAL Edition

• Published in: The Sun (Baltimore, Md. : 1837)
• Main Author: Warren, Tim
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore, Md Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 13.10.1991
• Subjects: Cheever, John; Donaldson, Scott; Mencken, Henry Louis (1880-1956)
• ISSN: 1930-8965; 2573-2536

His 1954 short story, "The Country Husband," which Vladimir Nabokov (a hero of [John Cheever]'s, no less) praised as "a miniature novel beautifully traced," merits one mention in the "Journals" -- Cheever tells of giving the story to friends to read and watching their reaction. There are intermittent references to "The Wapshot Chronicle" and "The Wapshot Scandal." "Falconer," considered by many to be Cheever's finest novel, merits hardly a nod, except for this passage in 1977: "Waiting for another photographer and interviewer, I operate at a thoughtless level. Phil Roth calls to say that he received `Falconer,' and could I give him John Updike's address. The rivalry among novelists is quite as intense as that among sopranos." Perhaps most surprising is that Cheever makes no reference to having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for "The Stories of John Cheever." Cheever's biographer, Scott Donaldson, tells us that it "meant a great deal to Cheever," and in the "Journals" the author tosses in this aside in 1953, "To tell the truth, I bemuse myself at three in the morning with the day I win the Pulitzer Prize." [H. L. Mencken]'s situation is different from Cheever's in that he was much more a public figure -- Mencken was a leading editor, as well as a literary and social critic, thus, "since Mencken's work in a sense is his life, his prejudices have to be considered, re-evaluated after reading the `Diary,' " says Fred Hobson, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, whose biography of Mencken is due in late 1992. In that sense, his diaries do contribute to our understanding him as a literary force."