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Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press)), by Susan Cheever
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In Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever, daughter of the famously talented writer John Cheever, uses previously unpublished letters, journals, and her own precious memories to create a candid and insightful tribute to her father. While producing some of the most beloved and celebrated American literature of this century, John Cheever wrestled with personal demons that deeply affected his family life as well as his career. In this poignant memoir of a man driven by boundless genius and ambition, Susan Cheever writes with heartwrenching honesty of family life with the father, the writer, and the remarkable man she loved.
- Sales Rank: #966907 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-09-01
- Released on: 2015-09-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Newsweek A fine, very brave book...one of the best portraits of an American writer.
The New York Times Book Review Intimate, deeply felt, and often harrowing.
John Updike Whatever biographers and literary historians of the future make of John Cheever, their ur-text, their indespensible place of beginning will have to be Susan Cheever's beautiful book about her father.
The Washington Post Book World One of the most moving and intimate books I have read in years.
The Wall Street Journal A restrained and haunting elegy.
The New York Times Book Review Home Before Dark clearly demanded more from its author, more courage and force of heart than will be required of any biographer of John Cheever.
Los Angeles Herald Examiner Out of the pain of real life Susan Cheever has created a document that is ultimately a paean to family love, as humane and bittersweet as the best of her father's work, and as completely believable....her depictions of a family, albeit an extraordinary one, in extremis reads like the best fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates A powerful book -- beautifully written....I don't know when I have read anything that absorbed me more.
Chicago Tribune Book World An act of love, a compassionate, well-written account not just of the father, or the writer, but of the whole man -- his exhilerations and his darker impulses.
About the Author
Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
My father was always a storyteller. His home room teacher at Thayer Academy used to promise her class that John would tell a story if they behaved. With luck, and increasing skill, he could spin the story out over two or three class periods so that the teacher and his classmates forgot all about arithmetic and geography and social studies. He told them stories about ship captains and eccentric old ladies and orphan boys, gallant men and dazzling women in a world where the potent forces of evil and darkness were confounded and good triumphed in the end. He peopled his tales with his own family and friends and neighbors from the surrounding Massachusetts South Shore towns: Quincy, Hingham, Hanover, Braintree, Norwell, and Wollaston, where he lived in a big clapboard house on the Winthrop Avenue hill with his mother, an Englishwoman whose family had immigrated to Boston when she was six, his father, a gentleman sailor who owned a prosperous shoe factory in nearby Lynn, and his older brother, Fred, who was going away to Dartmouth in the fall.
My father told these stories over and over again all his life. He wrote them into short stories and novels, and he passed them on to his children. He won the National Book Award, and the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Medal for Literature. He also kept us amused. Still, he never got the stories quite right. Otherwise, how can you explain the way he kept changing them, embroidering some anecdotes and shifting the emphasis in others, adding sequences and even characters, as if he was searching for some ideal balance that might set him free?
As he grew older, my father became increasingly reluctant to talk about his early years, especially to psychiatrists, who invariably zeroed in on his anger at his dominating mother and his identification with his weak father. Later, when he became famous and journalists' questions forced him to talk about his childhood, he patched together a background of suggestions and half-truths that implied a happy youth and a slow but steady progress in his chosen career. It wasn't so.
"It seems that in my coming of age I missed a year -- perhaps a day or an hour," he wrote in his journal twenty years after he left home. "The consecutiveness of growth has been damaged. But how can I go back and find this moment that was lost?"
The critical moment was almost certainly lost in the mid-1920's, when my father was an adolescent and the Cheever family's comfortable way of life began to disintegrate. His father had sold his interest in the shoe factory, Whitteridge and Cheever, and invested the profits in stocks that dwindled in value during the late 1920's and became worthless after the stock-market crash of 1929. By 1926, my grandmother had opened a little gift shop on Granite Street in Quincy to help support the family, but in the fall Of 1928 money was so short that my grandparents could no longer pay tuitions, and my father dropped out of Thayer Academy and enrolled in Quincy High School; his grades slid from gentlemen's C's and C minuses to D's and E's. When he returned to Thayer in 1929 to repeat his junior year, his mother was paying the school bills. Fred left Dartmouth and came home to look for a job. When he arrived, still redolent with the glamour of campus life, he met and co-opted my father's girlfriend, Iris Gladwin.
My grandfather, once a dapper, literate businessman who read Shakespeare to his sons, became desperate and bitterly sorry for himself. In 1930 he was forced to begin borrowing from the Wollaston Cooperative Bank against the fine house at 123 Winthrop Avenue. (In 1933 the bank repossessed the house and tore it down.) The family's financial disaster became a personal disaster. My father's parents were separated, and although they were later reconciled, no one in the family was ever reconciled to their new circumstances. His mother expanded her business to a larger gift shop on Hancock Street and began running a tearoom during the summers. Being supported by his wife was a humiliating experience for my grandfather. At home there were angry fights and terrible silences. My father's parents, locked in their private agonies, hardly seemed to notice him. Had they ever noticed him? The unhappiness of those years cast deep shadows over the past as well as the future.
His parents' separation was symbolized for him by "an afternoon when he returned home from school and found the furnace dead, some unwashed dishes on the table in the dining room and at the center of the table a pot of tulips that the cold had killed and blackened," he wrote in his journal in the 1950s, expressing his feelings through a third-person narrator, as he often did. "The realization that anger had driven them both out of the house, that their passionate detestation of one another had blinded them to their commitments to the house and to him traveled crookedly up through his heart like a fissure made by an earthquake in a wall, leaving on one side innocence and trust and on the other the lingering ruefulness and gloom of an orphaned spirit. He never quite escaped the chill of that empty house, and all the symbols of exile -- the lighted window on the distant farm, the watch dog's barking, the ship going out to sea, the bright voices of children playing in the distance -- held for him so unnatural a force that they could make it seem as if his heart had turned over."
My father's story, as he usually told it, begins with his final departure from Thayer Academy in March of 1930, his junior year, and his flight to New York City. There his first short story, "Expelled," was published by The New Republic in October 1930, when he was eighteen. Typically, there are many different versions of these events.
"It didn't come all at once," the story in The New Republic begins. "It took a very long time. First I had a skirmish with the English department and then all the other departments. Pretty soon something had to be done."
In the story, a boy filled with lively curiosity, quick intelligence, and the love of nature clashes with a school where knowledge is less important than college admissions and curiosity is not allowed. The boy is expelled. He is right, but he is all alone. Autumn comes.
"Everyone is preparing to go back to school," the story explains. "I have no school to go back to.
"I am not sorry. I am not at all glad."
Sometimes my father would say that he had been kicked out of Thayer for smoking. Sometimes he suggested that his attitude as a student had left something to be desired. He once let drop that he had taught himself German in order to show up a mediocre teacher's interpretation of Goethe. Once or twice he told me that he didn't like the quality of the teachers and administrators at Thayer. He had won a scholarship to Harvard, he said, but when his name was read out in morning chapel on a list of students being considered for suspension, he had walked out of the chapel and the school forever.
The Cheevers are very good at walking out. "When I remember my family, I always remember their backs," he wrote in his journal. "They were always indignantly leaving places...They were always stamping out of concerts, sports events, theatres. If Koussevitzky thinks I'll sit through that! That umpire is a crook. This play is filthy. I didn't like the way that waiter looked at me. They saw almost nothing to its completion, and that's the way I remember them, heading for an exit."
At other times, my father would say he left Thayer after the bank foreclosed on the Wollaston house and his family moved temporarily to Aunt Mary Thompson's farmhouse in Hanover -- although in fact this did not happen until a few years later. The world seemed to have gone awry. His father was drinking heavily and had begun the debilitating rounds of unsuccessful job interviews that would go on the rest of his life. At times his losses seemed to be driving him crazy. My father's own aunt Anna Boynton Thompson, once a respected classics scholar, was starving herself to death in the upper rooms of her house in Braintree. It was her protest against Abdul-Hamid II's massacre of the Armenians. And his mother was running a gift shop.
Mary Liley Cheever had always been a cheery "make-do" sort of woman, with tiny deft hands and a passionate dedication to Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. But she also had her dark side: claustrophobia, impatience, a stubborn desire to control. She insisted on self-reliance, and although she had been a nurse before she married, she did not believe in medicine. (My father had a childhood bout with tuberculosis that wasn't even diagnosed until his lungs were X-rayed and showed the scar tissue years later.) When she broke her leg in a fall in the bathtub when she was a middle-aged widow, she refused medical care and let the bone heal itself. A broken leg can be excruciatingly painful, but she did not want medication. She limped for the rest of her life.
"And thinking of mother, while I shave, it seems to me that she lived her life by a set of values that I never understood: fire, water, loneliness and prayer," my father wrote soon after she died in 1953. "Many things that were close to the earth: the smell of new bread, lilacs, earth; the sound of running water. It seemed to me at times I was not meant to understand this set of values; that they were intentionally arcane; that their strength was in their complexity."
But one thing that his mother told him, my father understood too well. They had not wanted another child before he was born. His conception was a drunken accident between two people who no longer cared about each other. When his mother found out that she was pregnant, his father had tried to force her to have an abortion.
* * *
After my grandfather had lost the shoe factory and his life savings, it might have seemed a natural thing for his wife to open a little shop. My grandmother had a genteel English manner that made her the perfect teashop ho...
Most helpful customer reviews
37 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
A Terrific Book
By Charles Slack
Home Before Dark is a beautifully written, moving book that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. It helps that Susan Cheever's subject, her father, was (and remains long after his death) one of the finest fiction writers in the history of American literature. What distinguishes John Cheever's stories, outside of his magical touch with words, is the passion and love he brings to illuminating his small corner of the world -- life in the New York suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s. Most writers who explore the suburbs do so with an arm's length superiority -- taking pains to distance themselves politically, emotionally, and intellectually from their characters. What makes Cheever's stories such a joy it that he loves the world he writes about -- even as he recognizes its banalities and limitations. In Cheever's hand, the commuter life becomes a sad, beautiful symphony of lost hopes and desires. The 5:45 train, the clinking of cocktail glasses, the smell of meat cooking on an outdoor grill are not just dull routines of modern life, but thrilling and exotic elements of that peculiarly American optimism and quest for success that flowered after World War II -- all the more alluring because the quest is so often doomed.
In the same way, Susan Cheever brings passion and honesty to the telling of her father's life. In her hands, John Cheever's own outwardly unremarkable search for the suburban dream life of wife, kids, dog and station wagon in Ossining, New York becomes a dark romantic quest of longing, passion, success and disappointment. She is thoroughly honest (sometimes brutally so) in detailing Cheever's alcoholism, philandering, phobias and parental shortcomings -- so it is all the more remarkable that the final portrait of Cheever that emerges is so rich and full of love.
This book is the perfect companion piece for Cheever's indispensible Collected Stories (with that famous red cover). Think of Home Before Dark as a sort of lexicon to John Cheever's world. I keep both books on a special bookshelf -- easily accessible -- containing the books I come back to again and again, like old friends.
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Cheever Still An Enigma
By Ted Ficklen
As a memoir of a daughter's relationship with her father, this is very touching, but there is little here that sheds much light on John Cheever, the writer. Given the various levels of family dysfunction and unhappiness in Cheever's stories and novels, it is gratifying that his daughter found so much to love in her father. For a more abrasive, but still admiring view of the man, you might also enjoy reading Benjamin Cheever's novel, The Plagiarist.
29 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
A true synopsis of the Panthers, that should be read by ALL
By A Customer
The Black Panthers Speak is the BEST book out for Americans who want to know what the Panthers stood for. Nobody's interpretation of what the Panthers were about, but only the speeches, letters, and court transcripts of Black Panther members. This book should be read by Americans of ALL ethnicities. Use it to understand that the Black Panthers were a party for ALL people in the struggle for freedom.
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