Sour Plums

John Lanchester

• The Letters of John Cheever edited by Benjamin Cheever
  Cape, 397 pp, £14.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 224 02689 5
• Mary McCarthy by Carol Gelderman
  Sidgwick, 430 pp, £12.95, March 1989, ISBN 0 283 99797 4
• The company she keeps by Mary McCarthy
  Weidenfeld, 246 pp, £4.50, October 1989, ISBN 0 297 79649 6

In 1964, Time published a profile of John Cheever which, in a sub-heading, described him as ‘The Monogamist’. Subsequent events have proved that not to have been the fact-checkers’ finest hour. In 1984, two years after his death, Susan Cheever published Home before Dark, a memoir which portrayed her father, whose public image was that of an impeccably upper-middle-class monogamist suburban WASP, as a promiscuously bisexual alcoholic. One memorable scene had John Updike, a friend and rival – Norman Mailer called Cheever and him ‘the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender of the New Yorker’ – ringing the doorbell and being answered by Cheever, bombed out of his mind and stark naked. Home before Dark struck some people as devotedly filial, sensitive and moving etc, and struck others as an upmarket Mommy Dearest. But Cheever’s children hadn’t finished with him, and now The Letters of John Cheever, edited by the writer’s son Benjamin, means that he has become the victim of a familial double whammy.