One reason for this, according to Timothy Aubry, an assistant professor of English at Baruch College who wrote about Cheever in his dissertation and is currently at work on a book about middlebrow literature, is that Cheever’s work doesn’t lend itself to the scholarly preoccupations that have dominated literary studies in the United States since World War II.
“There have been two major kinds of contemporary fiction that have received the majority of attention in the academy since the 1950s,” Mr. Aubry said. “One is the postmodern experimental meta-fictional kind of stuff, like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Barthelme … and the other is ethnic literature.”
Cheever, Mr. Aubry said, “doesn’t fit into either of them. He’s kind of slipped through the cracks.”
Columbia English professor Ross Posnock, who teaches an undergraduate survey course on postwar American literature, said he feels guilty about leaving writers like Cheever off his syllabus, but must because of time constraints.
“He’s not on my canon list. Why? I guess not influential enough, not important enough,” Mr. Posnock said. “He’s considered a distinguished writer, but not a commanding figure. You can put all sorts of cynical or idealistic glosses on it– ‘he just doesn’t fit into the narratives professors want to spin,’ or ‘he doesn’t fit into the race-gender-class scenario they’re trying to peddle’—or, maybe there’s just a general consensus about his aesthetic limits that isn’t as insidious.”
“Blake Bailey is right in some respects,” he added. “What English professors teach does have influence, because they teach thousands of students in a lifetime and these people are influenced by who they read…. I think if I was Blake Bailey I would also be frustrated at the lack of prestige that Cheever has in the academy. But he should take solace in the fact that his book will bring a lot of readers to Cheever.”
At Knopf, head of academic marketing Keith Goldsmith said he is anticipating a two-year outreach campaign to “get Cheever back on the map for literature courses,” one that involves advertising at conferences and liberally distributing free copies of the biography to professors.
“The stories get adopted a lot, but it tends to be in creative writing programs,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “The sort of attention he has not received is as a writer to be appreciated from a critical point of view. We’re really hoping that with Blake’s new biography, more serious scholars will take a look at Cheever’s work and begin teaching it to students of literature rather than just using it in M.F.A. programs.”
Mr. Bailey clearly wants this to happen as well, but worries that academics may still miss the finer points of Cheever’s work.
“While other fiction writers appreciate and revere the work of Richard Yates and John Cheever and understand the difficulties of achieving that level of craft, I don’t think that academics have the same capacity for that kind of aesthetic appreciation of a writer’s work,” he said. “They tend to look for sociocultural significance and theoretical characterizations, and those are essentially beside the point when it comes to a great writer’s work.”
Whether the Cheever revival reaches Yatesian proportions, Mr. Bailey will know he’s done all he could.
“Anyone can read Cheever and be intellectually and spiritually replenished by the experience,” Mr. Bailey said. “So I think people are going to know that. I hope so. You can only write a good biography, bring out the Library of America edition, and beyond that, I don’t know what one man can do. That’s about it.”
“I hope it will be contagious,” he added later. “I have tried hard to sell Cheever. And if this doesn’t work– if a big Knopf biography, with the publicity apparatus of Knopf behind it, does not sell an enduring Cheever revival, then I don’t know what will.”
neyfakh@observer.com
