About 20 miles south of Boston, under a big maple near a white clapboard church, John Cheever is buried next to his parents and brother. He’s also buried under an accretion of myth and myth-busting. A restaurant on the edge of the cemetery, just yards from the family plot, calls itself the Cheever Tavern. Advertising a “tasteful setting,” it invokes the great writer’s mid-1960s public persona as the bard of suburbsville. The author of a dazzling flow of New Yorker stories, he was hailed on the cover of Time as “Ovid in Ossining” and presented in the accompanying article as a monogamously married father of three living in a grand house with the obligatory Labrador retrievers. “I had no idea that my father was anything but the country squire he pretended to be,” Susan Cheever writes in her new book, When All the Men Wore Hats. He himself linked his best stories to “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light,” as he wrote in the preface to The Stories of John Cheever (1978)—a time, he went on, “when almost everybody wore a hat.”
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Forget the hats. Fedoras and bird dogs are not the key to Cheever. But neither is the sordid flip side, the anti-myth that ought to gut any misguided hankering after a mid-century golden age. In Home Before Dark, a “biographical memoir” published in 1984, two years after her father’s death, Susan Cheever outed him as doubly tortured: a closeted homosexual promiscuously unfaithful to his wife with both men and women, and a self-destructive alcoholic who dried out after nearly dying of drink and only then accepted his gay identity. She discovered his “sexual imposture” (his phrase) after he died, when she began writing about him. Her memoir was eventually followed by reams of corroborating evidence, including his private writings, The Journals of John Cheever (1991), and Blake Bailey’s long, excellent, and desperately dismal Cheever: A Life (2009). That biography supplied the final indignity: the surprising news that, less than 30 years after his death, even his best books were no longer selling. In 2012—Cheever’s centennial—the novelist Allan Gurganus regretted that his friend was “now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia.”
For those who love the stories, the shrinking readership is what’s most regrettable. By turns lyrical and satirical, funny and heartrending, they show us a paradise of sorts, a dream America—and then reveal terrible depths of discontent. His own estimation of his fiction, as recorded in the Journals, is itself a hyper-condensed Cheever story: “flighty, eccentric, and sometimes bitter work, with its social disenchantments, somersaults, and sudden rains.”
His most famous story, “The Swimmer,” fits the bill. Sitting by a friend’s pool, one hand dabbling in the water, the other curled around a glass of gin, Neddy Merrill decides to swim the eight miles to his home, traversing the county pool by pool. “The day was beautiful, and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.” But during this quixotic journey, the seasons change—there’s a sudden rain. Lovers grow hostile and old friends make cryptic, damning remarks about his “misfortunes.” He weakens, “stupefied with exhaustion,” and arrives at his house only to find it locked, empty, abandoned—no sign of his wife and four daughters. The meaning of this disturbing tale is suggested when he’s not even halfway home. “He could not go back,” Cheever writes. “He had covered a distance that made his return impossible.” Neddy’s life is a mess; we don’t know exactly what happened to him and his family, but the moral is clear: We cannot recapture remembered bliss or recover bygone happiness.
At the end of his life, in a speech at Carnegie Hall accepting the National Medal for Literature, Cheever insisted that “a page of good prose remains invincible.” His daughter uses that hopeful sentence as an epigraph in When All the Men Wore Hats ; it’s a fair summary of her theme, as is another epigraph, taken from the Journals : “Literature is the salvation of the damned.” Her first book about her father fused memoir and biography; this one fuses memoir and literary appreciation. She aims to help us read Cheever’s best stories, and if in this “sequel of sorts” she seems to be squeezing one last drop, she provides welcome context, clues to her father’s very particular genius.
As a writer and a daughter of a writer, she’s also exploring the wellsprings of creativity, which she does with openhearted elegance. When young Susie, already an avid reader, discovered that little girls very much like her appeared in her father’s stories, she was indignant; he laughed at her concerns. “Fiction is not crypto-autobiography,” he pronounced. And yet Susan Cheever now also knows that “good writing does not require pure intentions.” In the Cheever household, the boundaries between art and life were blurry at best. “Our truths often appeared as fiction; the fiction of my father’s heterosexual nature appeared as truth.”
Perhaps the eeriest example, noted in Bailey’s biography but more powerful in Susan’s first-person account, is her interview with her father when she was a 33-year-old working at Newsweek; the cover story was a profile of him just after he’d published Falconer (1977), which features a love affair between the protagonist, incarcerated for fratricide, and a fellow inmate. The journalist daughter asked, “Did you ever fall in love with another man?” The novelist father artfully replied that it could indeed happen, “but I would think twice about giving up the robustness and merriment I have known in the heterosexual world.” Robustness! Merriment! She then asked point-blank if he’d ever had a “homosexual experience.” Instead of answering in the negative as she expected, he said, “I have had many, Susie, all tremendously gratifying.” A dreadful pause before he continued, laughing, “and all between the ages of 9 and 11.”
She took that as a no and soldiered on with the interview; the curious exchange was printed in the magazine. And she continued to think of her father as straight until she started reading his journals a couple of months after cancer killed him, at age 70. She decided that she should be the one to reveal his sexuality, and resolved to find “a loving way to do it.” Tender, sad, and respectful, Home Before Dark is a proud daughter’s elegy for an unhappy parent.
But there’s no loving way to present the torment he endures in the journals, whose posthumous publication he approved. Gurganus called the several million words—mostly typed, stashed away in 29 loose-leaf notebooks—“a ten-thousand-page suicide note.” Only about one-20th of it has been published, the winnowing expertly done by Robert Gottlieb, Cheever’s editor at Knopf, who described the work as the most difficult editorial project he ever attempted—because “it was disturbing to be so immersed in the hell of Cheever’s inner life.” The landmark features of that hellscape are resentment of his wife, a losing battle with alcohol, and his “galling otherness.”
Cheever desperately wants to honor the vows made to his wife and children, he writes, “but my itchy member is unconcerned with all of this, and I am afraid that I may succumb to its itchiness.” Here’s what happens when he does (hardly for the first time): “We sped into the nearest bedroom, unbuckled each other’s trousers, groped for our cocks in each other’s underwear, and drank each other’s spit.” His postcoital detachment is clinical, merciless:
I remember the acute lack of interest with which I regarded his nakedness in the morning when he returned to bed after having taken a piss. He was merely a man with a small cock, a pair of balls, and a small ass suitable for cushioning a chair or a toilet seat and for nothing else.
And yet he believes he’s in love. “Lunching with friends who talked about their tedious careers in lechery, I thought: I am gay, I am gay, I am at last free of all this. This did not last for long.”
The writer and critic Geoff Dyer believes that in the “shapeless privacy” of the published Journals, Cheever most fully plumbs “the complex depths of his being.” Psychologically acute and full of glorious lyricism (“incessant inventories of light and landscape”), they are his greatest work, according to Dyer, “his principal claim to literary survival.”
Susan Cheever puts her money on the short story as the form in which her father’s vision found its most exact and astonishing expression; in an appendix she reprints six of them, all among those Gottlieb selected for the massive Stories of John Cheever, a runaway best seller and the winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as a National Book Critics Circle Award. She calls attention to sexual ambivalence as an essential creative catalyst and theme (noting Gottlieb’s alertness to it), and indeed it’s hard to argue against the idea that Cheever’s sexual charade generated tension in his life that helped produce some brilliant fiction. But there were other tensions squeezing him.
In “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (it’s in her appendix and surely the inspiration for the new television series Your Friends & Neighbors), money is the root of Johnny Hake’s troubles. A businessman with an archetypal suburban lifestyle, he loses his job and, to avoid bouncing checks, starts sneaking into wealthy friends’ houses in the middle of the night to steal cash. (It turns out that an 11-year-old Susie, though she never stole a thing, also enjoyed slipping into neighboring houses: She “liked watching rich people sleep”—“an inherited taste,” she writes, bending the laws of genetics to establish a link between her father’s fiction and a childhood eccentricity.)
Johnny Hake steals because financial disgrace would undoubtedly end his life in Shady Hill and exile him from his wife and four children. In a bravura sentence, Cheever gives us the measure of Johnny’s enchantment:
We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.
After his fall, dismayed by his thievery, he exclaims: “Oh, I never knew that a man could be so miserable and that the mind could open up so many chambers and fill them with self-reproach!”
In 1956, Cheever sold the movie rights to “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” for $25,000—a rare windfall. Still, he was chronically plagued by financial anxiety, in part because The New Yorker consistently underpaid him. He could plausibly exclaim, Johnny Hake, c’est moi! But his daughter is inclined to see the story as springing from a different kind of anxiety. She quotes Blake Bailey: “Beneath it all, of course, was an escalating terror of homosexuality, and living among the dauntingly normal citizens of Scarborough didn’t help.” In this reading, Cheever’s “galling otherness” is more worrisome than money troubles, though the son of a traveling shoe salesman who lost his job in the 1920s and his investments in the Crash will always be sensitive to financial stress. It was a crucial ingredient in his cocktail of anguish and inspiration.
“The Country Husband” is a coruscating story about love and death, or, anyway, about infatuation with the babysitter and a near-fatal airplane crash. It features an indelible description of “public chastisement” for sexual misconduct. The protagonist, Francis Weed, sees a waitress passing drinks at a Shady Hill party and realizes that he recognizes her from the war. He’d seen her once before, at a crossroads in a village in Normandy. She’d been condemned for sleeping with a German officer, and he’d watched with the crowd as her head was shaved. Then she was forced to strip naked. “One woman spat on her, but some inviolable grandeur in her nakedness lasted through the ordeal.” Her sexual crimes, and the grim punishment, resonate powerfully, though Francis recognizes that “the atmosphere of Shady Hill made the memory unseemly and impolite.”
Can Cheever’s fear of being outed, of public chastisement for his “sexual imposture,” have been the sole impetus for this story, which Vladimir Nabokov singled out for praise as “a miniature novel beautifully traced”? I would argue that economic anxiety was at work here too—and Susan Cheever supplies evidence to back me up. “The Country Husband,” she tells us, was written to pay for her orthodontics. “I am proud,” she writes, “to have had the crooked teeth that inspired it.” Her “expensive overbite” gave us a story in which a pilot sings, “I’ve got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence. I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life” as the plane he’s flying drops out of the sky and the panicked passengers see “the spreading wings of the Angel of Death.”
Angst is angst, whatever the cause. Circumstance may constrain, ambivalence paralyze, but great artists—miraculously, mysteriously—transform ambient pressure into exquisite cultural artifacts. In her two books about her father, Susan weighs every ounce of the burden of stress he carried; she takes note of his literary alchemy and also of the emotional bruises inflicted on his wife and children.
“The lens through which he saw the outside world for the purposes of his work was as sharp as the light on a cold winter day,” she writes; “the lens through which he saw his family was hot, blurry, and sometimes self-serving.” She herself is both clear-eyed and compassionate. She gives an astute reading of a story she loves, “Reunion,” about a divorced father who meets an estranged teenage son for lunch and gets drunker and drunker and never orders food. She recognizes her father’s voice: He is the dreadful drunken boor. “I am outraged at this portrait of him, until I remember he wrote it.”
“My deepest feeling about Cheever,” the critic Alfred Kazin wrote, “is that his marvelous brightness is an effort to cheer himself up.” That may sound dismissive—Susan Cheever finds it “mean”—but I think it points to the secret engine of his best work (yes, it’s the stories; his daughter is right). His anguish and his piercing joy are inseparable. When we strip away all the extratextual padding, the myth and the countermyth, we discover, reading slowly and lovingly, a writer whose tremendous talent for emotional oscillation allowed him to traverse, in a sentence or even in a clause, the gamut of human hope and despair—as in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” which ends, “and off I went, whistling merrily in the dark.”
This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “John Cheever’s Secrets.”
When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever
By Susan Cheever
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