The Hereditary Aspect

In a letter from July, 1968, John Cheever wrote:

“Some of my difficulties with Time may have been inherited. My brother had three alcoholic breakdowns in his fifties and Time for my father was a tragedy. At one point he was thought to have killed himself. I went to claim the body and found him instead, dead drunk, riding the roller-coaster. A large crowd had gathered to watch the old gentleman.”

He could have added that his grandfather’s death certificate recorded, as the cause of death, “alcohol and opium – del. Tremens.” But the grandfather is one thing. The father is the point.

Cheever himself got sober, seven years later, at the Smithers Alcohol Rehabilitation Center on East 93rd Street in Manhattan. “I am changed violently,” he said. But for most of his life it was touch and go. There was the struggle to hold off on the drink until noon; the vodka for breakfast; and the small matter of a month in hospital with alcoholism-induced pulmonary edema. The latter was in 1972, and, as a result, Cheever quit drinking for six weeks – ten, if you count the weeks in hospital. In the four or five year period around this, he was averaging one short story a year.

At some point in all of this, Cheever was bedridden and he hit his son, Benjamin, for refusing to bring him a drink. He told him: “You’ve always been a disappointment to me as a son.” Thanks, Dad.

In the early 1970s, Cheever attended some A.A. meetings, finding them neither to his taste nor his sense of occasion: “The long speech I have prepared seems out of order and I simply say that I am sometimes presented with situations for which I am so poorly prepared that I have to drink …” Occasionally, when pressed, he would speak with disdain of the “Christers.”

He entered Smithers on April 9, 1975 – “It’s the most terrible place you can conceivably imagine,” he told Truman Capote. “It’s really, really, really grim.” – and left on May 7, never to drink again. Detoxification did not, as he’d imagined, kill him dead, and he took to attending A.A. meetings after all, three times a week.

“I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous early on,” his daughter Susan wrote in 2008, “because it had saved my father’s life and given us all wonderful years of family experience after he got sober.” This is not bad for a man not long before branded a narcissist by any number of therapists and of whom even the Smithers’ counselors noted: “Display[s] much grandiosity and pride,” and, “Very impressed with self.”

Benjamin Cheever edited and published a selection of his father’s letters in 1988. The volume was released with all grammatical errors and spelling mistakes intact. Under the circumstances, this might be a rather modest form of revenge. In the letter quoted above, for example, Cheever wrote some of his difficulties with Time may have been “inheirited.” And it is not perfectly clear, until “the old gentleman” is mentioned, whether he is talking about his father or his brother. It’s the father of course. The father is the point.