the journals of John Cheever

I have never felt as much pity for a writer as I felt reading John Cheever's journals. They are heavier than his letters, as perhaps all journals are heavier than letters, and less informative. They repeat and repeat his questions about his own sexuality.  Until he is past 60, he works hard to suppress his own desires. By the time he admits giving in to them, he is dying.

He uses the word lewd a lot. It is now such an old-fashioned word and a moralizing one that it makes his guilt even worse, to me. He seems to want to be a man who is timid about sex and who wants it less. Or else he is timid and only wants not to have the lewd thoughts, lewd appetites that make him feel himself a contradiction.

The published journals, unlike the letters, have no footnotes. All characters were identified in the letters. Here we have a small defined cast (himself, his wife Mary, daughter Susan, sons Ben and Federico, and Saul Bellow, John Updike) surrounded by a chorus or ensemble of the anonymous.

He repeats: he could leave/should leave his wife and family, but he won't because he loves his children and warm interiors, furnished rooms.

p. 181
"Wanna screw?" I ask. It is, unfortunately, my style.

He is bothered by Mary, by her low moods, by her not being loving, and thinks she is harmed by memories of her father, who was harsh and extended "a feeling of condemnation and doom over his domain." Cheever himself admits to being stormy tempered, often drunk, unfaithful.  He never, that I noticed, mentions himself as a possible cause for Mary's unhappiness. I don't know what to think.  I feel too young to understand. I want them to divorce. I don't want to grow to understand this. I feel childishly frightened of this.

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