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1997 Book Reviews
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The Mourning after
Date: SUNDAY, January 17, 1999
Page: E1
Section: Books
The tawdriness of writers' private lives is a staple of modern American letters, and the last decade's trends in pathography and confessional memoir have taken the field to new levels of both insight and prurience. If Papa Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, too-bright beacons in the early age of celebrity, first revealed to us the glamorous ruin of too much drink and ego, more recent revelations about our literary icons tend to travel the territory of addiction, sexual abuse, and family violence. This is both the good news and the bad, for oft-stated reasons: good because the fields of biography and autobiography are no longer constricted by hypocrisy or puritanical secrecy; bad because the pattern has encouraged every pot-boiler impulse a lot of mediocre writers ever had. The subject matter of memoir in the past century has too often degenerated from the grand and mannered (take Robert Graves's ``Goodbye to All That,'' on the First World War, as a benchmark) to the small and solipsistic (take Elizabeth Wurtzel's comparison of her personal struggles to the war in Bosnia). Monica will be next: As the memoir goes, so goes the nation. To its own great detriment, Susan Cheever's ``Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker'' belongs more to this purplish school of au courant tell-all than to its worthy predecessors. A novelist and the author of two previous books about her family, Cheever helped usher in the new age of memoir with her 1984 ``Home Before Dark.'' For all the controversy it raised about some of its disclosures, that was a lovely story of what it was like to be John Cheever's daughter: Daughter of the cherished chronicler of postwar life in affluent America, where the evenings shimmered in Ossining, N.Y., and the martinis were ice-cold, and the rages were just another word for incalculable sorrow. We cared about ``Home Before Dark'' because we cared about Cheever the writer -- his luminescent prose and his labyrinthine personal struggles. When Cheever fille followed up a few years later with ``Treetops,'' about her mother and the extended family tree, we cared less: What with brother Ben beginning to publish his side of the saga, the Cheevers's collective disrepair was becoming a cottage industry. Very little in ``Note Found in a Bottle'' entices us to care at all. And judging merely from the size and thinness of the content herein, Cheever herself may suspect that the river has run dry. Works about the ravages of self-destruction are popular for a lot of reasons, but they only matter literarily when they have something to offer beyond the barroom retelling of the ghastly deed: some psychic scrutiny or stellar prose or greater context for the author's drive toward despair. Cheever's book possesses none of these qualities; instead, it relies upon sketchy, anecdotal reminiscence and a minimalist tone that's supposed to be drop-dead ironic (see how awful I was?). In post-vino veritas, but the sad truth recounted here -- I got drunk, I got drunker, I got sober -- is mired in solipsism and an appalling lack of reflection. Now in her mid-50s, Cheever got sober in 1991 with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous (where her father had also found solace, before he died in 1982). By the end of her drinking she'd been married three times, had borne two children, had lived abroad, and had published several books, achieving moderate success as a writer. She'd also been hit by her first husband, had been driven half-mad by her third, and had drunk her way through decades of adultery, deceit, and thoughtless cruelty. She confesses that her childhood gang used to fill the pockets of younger kids with worms or gravel, and ``got a kick out of watching them cry for mercy.'' On one page she expresses her disdain for her first husband's ``clinging children''; on another, she recounts the time she helped a lover send a package of dog feces through the mail to William Styron, for a bad review he had written. How on earth are we supposed to like this woman, or even feel sympathetic enough to tolerate her prose? Certainly it's not the sorrows of gin and the havoc it wreaked that present any problem here; handled well, that miserable story could have been agonizing and ruminative. Rather, it's Cheever's tone that's so off-putting: self-important and yet utterly void of self-awareness. My own pity for her went belly-up when she described her involvement in the civil rights movement in the South in the mid-1960s, embalmed in a rich-white-girl's attitude if ever there was one: ``The civil rights movement is now a part of history,'' she writes ingenuously, ``but at the time it was a bunch of us kids from Ivy League colleges, driven by a sense of justice and a desire to be hip, taking a kind of magical mystery tour of the third world.'' Well, yes, dear, but it was also a lot of black people, driven by a tad more than a desire to be hip. After sleeping and drinking her way through the voter-registration drives in Alabama and Mississippi, Cheever flew home to New York and took up with the first man she would marry. ``We explored each other's bodies inch by inch as if we were discovering a hidden treasure,'' she confides. ``We drank sangria at El Faro and beer at Max's Kansas City and martinis at the Harvard Club. I was a long, long way from Meridian, Mississippi.'' You sure were, baby. After a decade, Cheever left that husband for alternating trysts with two married men, both of whom she would eventually marry. One was Calvin Tomkins, the New Yorker art critic and writer, with whom she had a daughter. It is only with the birth of her first child that one's heart begins to thaw toward Cheever -- in the moment she gets out of the way long enough to experience ``the gift of being able to love.'' She got it again with the birth of her son several years later, and finally, the love seems to have won out over the bottomless cruelties of the bottle. She was able to stop drinking, leave her third husband, rebuild a quiet life that now has room for dogs and children and God. ``Now I have whole minutes of peace,'' she tells us. ``Sometimes I have entire days of peace.'' I am glad for her, but it took a painful journey over this rocky landscape for me to find that impulse. I am less glad for some of the people she names in this book, and for the fact of its publication. ``Note Found in a Bottle'' is bathed in the bathos of whiskey and the sins of the past, without ever exhibiting much distance from either.
THE MARTINI CHRONICLES
I began to feel better. The yearning lessened. Outside, the lawns were steaming in the heat, the delphiniums and zinnias drooped on their stems. I could feel myself relaxing, as if I had suddenly become part of the great scheme of things. I could almost feel the earth turning in the rich summer air. There would be many men in my life, I knew. I was young, beautiful, smart. Dust motes in the bright air began to look like stars. My father turned on the record player, and the buoyant strains of Handel filled the room. The barges were moving down the Thames, the sun glinting off the instruments in the horn section. I was swept away in the feelings of the music and the heat and the cool glass under my fingers and the taste of gin. I was swept away from my pain, from those sharp, terrible feelings; I was swept away for many years. SUSAN CHEEVER, from ``Note Found in a Bottle''
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