Cheever's Keeper
Biographer Blake Bailey has found a specialty: Boston's tortured literary greats. Look who's next.
Until about five years ago, Blake Bailey taught English at the Robert M. Lusher Alternative School in New Orleans. Today, after his widely praised 2003 biography of Richard Yates and with a new contract to write the life of John Cheever - two of Boston's literary legends - Blake Bailey is one of America's foremost literary biographers, this year winning a $42,000 Guggenheim fellowship. On one of his research trips to Boston, Bailey explained how a Southern schoolteacher came to chronicle the lives of two of the Northeast's finest writers.
Well-groomed and wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, white oxford-cloth shirt, and penny loafers, Bailey, 41, who lives in New Orleans with his wife and daughter, has a self-deprecating sense of humor and an as-yet-unrealized desire: to be seen as a roguish man of letters like his subjects.
"I certainly never thought of myself as a biographer," he says, betraying just the trace of an accent. Maybe it's a residue of Oklahoma City, where he grew up, or perhaps he picked it up as an undergraduate at Tulane University or teaching in New Orleans. "Accent? I thought I'd purged the last whiff of that red-state stigma during my Okie childhood, partly thanks to a German mother who spoke impeccable English with, if anything, a vaguely British accent."
Bailey was established as an educator - he was Louisiana Humanities Teacher of the Year in 2000 - but what he really had wanted to do was write novels. When his fiction failed to attract a publisher, he took an agent's advice and turned to nonfiction. He wrote book reviews, contributed to the satirical magazine Spy, published a coffee-table book called The Sixties, and, more to the point, wrote The Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Richard Yates, the mid-20th century author of the excellent if depressing novels Revolutionary Road and Easter Parade and the brilliant short-story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.
Bailey began floating a biography proposal in 1999, but it took two years to land a contract. Then he faced another hurdle: winning the trust of his subject's family, who blamed scholars and critics for the failure of Yates's career.
In A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador, 2003), Bailey describes "a gaunt, stupefied, ragged old man staggering around the streets of Boston," where Yates lived from 1976 to 1988, teaching briefly at Emerson College but spending most of his time drinking at the Crossroads Irish Pub.
Bailey, who says he is "a cheerful pessimist," believes the key to writing a good biography is "an intuitive interconnectedness with your subject, knowing what his attitude is," and so in Yates, he found a kindred spirit. "For all his problems," Bailey insists, "Yates was a decent, kind human being."
The strength of A Tragic Honesty is that Bailey did not reduce a man and his work to the sum total of his twin pathologies, alcoholism and mental illness. "Yates's life was extremely bleak; however, Yates had a very good sense of humor," Bailey says. "I deliberately cultivated an ironical voice in the book, because I knew Yates wouldn't want a mawkish account of his life. It was always more depressing to other people than it was to Yates. He thought his life was kind of funny. So I took a bemused and ironical approach to his life, but I treated his work with the utmost gravity and the reverence I felt it deserved."
When A Tragic Honesty was published, New York Times critic Janet Maslin announced that "the arrival of Blake Bailey's great, perceptive, heartbreaking Yates biography is a landmark event." Maslin's enthusiasm led her husband, John Cheever's son, Ben, to suggest that Bailey take on his father. Bailey was at first reluctant, because there had already been a Cheever biography that the family had not liked; they felt it reduced Cheever to a besotted bisexual. Bailey came around.
The nadir of John Cheever's life and career, according to Bailey, came in 1974 and '75 while he was teaching at Boston University and drinking himself into a rehabilitation center. "But the last seven years of his life, Cheever never took another drink," says Bailey. "He wrote Falconer, published his collected short stories, and won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the National Medal for Literature."
So while Yates died in obscurity, Cheever went out on top. Thus, Bailey intends to write Cheever's life as "a redemptive fable." With an advance on this biography that is 20 times what he got for Yates, Bailey has until December 2007 to deliver a manuscript, but he has already interviewed half of his 150 sources and has read all 28 volumes of the writer's private journals. "Cheever recorded every day of his adult life from 1940 on. Every day!" says Bailey, noting that the Cheever journals at Harvard's Houghton Library run to 5 million words and 4 linear feet.
With Yates (1926-1992) and Cheever (1912-1982), Bailey is on somewhat similar literary ground. Both men drew on their own unhappy childhoods to peel back the veneer of respectability covering the suburbs of New England and New York to reveal the despair and disappointment beneath the surface of middleclass American lives. But Bailey sees a profound difference: "Yates basically believed our failures were hard-wired into us from the get-go. We spend our lives trying to get away, coating ourselves in illusions of grandeur. Cheever has a more optimistic view. With Cheever, it's not as important that we fulfill ourselves personally. He believed the world is a blessed place, but we're distracted from the transcendent beauty of the world."
At a cemetery in suburban Norwell, Bailey finally gets to meet his man, posing for a snapshot beside the slate headstone. He will spend the next two years explaining how Cheever got there.
Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer living in Maine. Send e-mails to magazine@globe.com. 