New Ways to Kill Your Mother

a corporal in a line rifle company, as a stockade guard, as a traveller confined for 36 hours in the Leningrad airport during a blizzard, and for as long again in the Cairo airport during a strike. I have known emotional, sexual and financial confinements, and I have actually been confined to a dryout tank on 93rd Street for clinical alcoholics.

In the next entry, he ends with a remark that is one of the few endearing remarks in his journals and should be the motto of every writer alive: ‘All right, I want something beautiful, and it will be done by June.’

Cheever enjoyed being famous and dry for the last few years of his life. Since there was something petulant and childish about him when he was a drunk, now merely the child remained. Susan wrote about these years, as he basked in late success.

Wealth and fame and love had an odd effect on my father… He went through a kind of adolescence of celebrity. At times he seemed to be his own number one groupie… In restaurants, he let head waiters know that he was someone important. Since this kind of behaviour was new to him, he wasn’t particularly graceful about it.

Federico, whose remarks on his father are notable for their wisdom and general good humour, has the best line on his father’s fame: ‘When you’re a musician, people can ask you to play, and when you’re a movie star, people can ask for your autograph, but what does it mean to be a famous writer? Well, you get to say pompous things. You get to talk about aesthetics and things like that. That’s the goodies you get.’

As he made an effort to repair the damage he had done to his family, Cheever was aware that his journals, 4,000 pages of them, lay in a drawer like a lovely toy time bomb. Two weeks before he died he phoned his son Ben: ‘What I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters. I thought I’d tell you that, because sooner or later somebody’s going to tell you and I’d just as soon it came from me.’ Ben wrote that he was ‘forgiving’. ‘But mostly I was just bewildered, and I remember now that my reply came almost as a whisper: “I don’t mind, Daddy, if you don’t mind.”’ After his death, when Susan read the diaries, needing to flesh things out for her memoir, she was pretty surprised by the general tone and content, and ‘not only’, as Bailey writes, ‘because of the gloomy, relentless sexual stuff’. The New Yorker and Knopf paid $1.2 million for the rights to publish the diaries and they appeared in 1991. Mary Cheever, who had stayed with him until the end, did not read them. ‘I didn’t have any strong feelings about whether they were published or not. I can’t read them. Snatches of them I’ve read, but I can’t sit down and read that stuff. It isn’t my life at all. It’s him, it’s all him. It’s all inside him.’

Baldwin and ‘the American Confusion’

In December 1962 The New York Times asked some of the year’s best-selling authors to write a piece describing ‘what they believe there is about their book or the climate of the times that has made [their book] so popular’. In reply, Vance Packard, for example, explained that his book The Pyramid Climbers had been successful because, he believed, ‘there is a growing uneasiness among Americans about the terms of their existence, and many tell me that I often articulate their own apprehensions’. Patrick Dennis, author of Genius, wrote: ‘I can’t imagine what it is that makes my books sell and any author who claims to know is a fool or a liar or both.’ This did not deter Allen Drury, whose book A Shade of Difference was on the list. ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘those readers who like what I have to say like it because it is honest, well-expressed and pertinent to the world in which we live.’

James Baldwin’s Another Country had also been a best-seller, and Baldwin used the occasion to position himself ambiguously in two of the central pantheons of American beauty. ‘I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire,’ he wrote,

Miles Davis and Ray Charles — but I would like to think that some of the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing. These artists, in their very different ways, sing a kind of universal blues… They are telling us something of what it is like to be alive. It is not self-pity which one hears in them but compassion… I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound… I am aiming at what Henry James called ‘perception at the pitch of passion’.

Baldwin was claiming for his prose style and the structure of his novels something of the heightened, melancholy beauty of Davis and Charles; he was suggesting that the rhythms of his own diction took their bearings from the solitary pain, the uncompromising glamour that these two American musicians offered the world. But just in case anyone reading him wanted thus to place him as a primitive, a writer who did not plan his work but merely let it soar, a writer not steeped in a writerly tradition, Baldwin needed to invoke as well the high priest of American refinement, an author known not for his passion, however pitched, but for the rigour of his controlling imagination.

Baldwin the best-seller in 1962 wanted to have it both ways. This need was first of all a way of unloosening him from any easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist that he carried in his temperament a sense of James’s interest in consciousness as something glittering and also as something hidden and secretive, a concern with language as both mask and pure revelation. But Baldwin also had a fascination with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence. The list of what had made him such an interesting stylist would be long. Over the years he would vary its ingredients. Sometimes, he would do so to distract the reader from his own artistry and sophistication; other times, he would do so because he liked the list for its sound and variation, as in the list he provided in Notes of a Native Son: ‘The King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech — and something of Dickens’s love for bravura.’ But the style itself did not come simply; it could not be easily defined because it varied and shifted. It had real bravura moments, like a set of famous riffs, or an encore, such as this passage in part 1 of Another Country when Rufus and Vivaldo arrive at Benno’s Bar in the Village:

The bar was terribly crowded. Advertising men were there, drinking double shots of bourbon or vodka, on the rocks; college boys were there, their wet fingers slippery on the beer bottles; lone men stood near the doors or in the corners watching the drifting women. The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention, but succeeded only in attracting each other. Some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women — who wandered incessantly from the juke box to the bar — and they faced each other over smiles which were pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt. Black-and-white couples were together here — closer together now than they would be later, when they got home. These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers. Only the juke box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated synthetic laments for love.

It is easy to sense in this passage the rhythms of jazz, but also of the prose writers of an earlier generation, the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby, the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises. Baldwin was not afraid of repetition (‘some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women’), or setting up patterns of beat and sound (note the constant use of ‘were’), or using punctuation with care and control (note the comma before ‘when they got home’; note the semicolon after ‘rolled through the bar’), and then striking home with a phrase or an observation utterly surprising, and full of delight (note ‘gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity’ or ‘pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt’).

While Baldwin was in full possession of this bravura tone, he was also able to write quiet and effective and emotionally charged sentences. The sixty-one words in the opening paragraph of Go Tell It on the Mountain have only one word — the first — with more than three syllables and forty-one words with only one syllable.