His writing, because they cover important topics of the 20th century, can almost be viewed in a historical context. These topics include suburbia, the middle class, and modern relationships. Cheever’s voice, usually clear and stark, stands in front of the deeper meaning to his stories. “The Swimmer,”  often seen as Cheever’s magnum opus, includes all of the elements spoken of above. The meanings behind “The Swimmer” seem endless, and are open to any amount of interpretations. Another strong story of Cheever’s, “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” again details aspects of class, loneliness, and materialism in the 20th century. Also detailed in Cheever’s writings are details of his own life. To understand Cheever his history, aspects of his life, and his personality must be addressed. A detailed analysis of Cheever’s writing style will reveal the intent, purpose, and individual aspects of his life. A close reading of the stories “The Swimmer,” and “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” will help reveal why Cheever writes what he does and see the greater meaning behind these stories.

John Cheever lived the life of a troubled man, battled with promiscuity, bisexuality, alcoholism, and depression. John Cheever, born on May 27, 1912,  as the second child of Frederick Lincoln Cheever and Mary Liley Cheever. Frederick Cheever owned a shoe business that filled John Cheever’s early life with wealth. The shoe business proved a blessing as well as a curse in the life of the Cheever’s when their shoe business, as well as many others of the time, began to decline Frederick Cheever began to drink. Mary Cheever in an attempt to alleviate help the now worsening financial situation of the family, opened a small gift shop. Cheever, despite the turmoil of his family’s situation, began attending Thayer Academy, a prestigious private school, in 1926. During his short stay Cheever performed poorly and transferred to Quincy High, a public school, in 1928. After winning a short story contest in 1929 sponsored by The Boston Herald, Thayer Acadeny invited Cheever back to Thayer. This second entrance into Thayer, although, mirrored the fist with poor grades and expulsion. A local newspaper published the story Cheever wrote about his expulsion, adding to his writing achievements. Cheever’s family life continued its volatile nature when his parents lost their home to foreclosure. John’s brother, Fred, returned from Dartmouth University to help with the crisis. When Cheever’s parents separated, Cheever and his brother roomed in an apartment together in Boston. Cheever grew to detest this relationship, which may have been sexual. After many attempts Cheever, in 1934, gained acceptance to live in the Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. This new residence helped shape the rest of John’s adult life.

Cheever , in a Model A Ford, moved between Saratoga, Manhattan, Lake George (part of Yaddo), and Quincy near the residency of his parents between 1934-1937 and had no permanent residence. Cheever had the first story of his professional career in 1935 by the New Yorker. This helped him become an editor for the WPA Guide to New York City in 1938, but in his characteristically troublesome fashion quit after a year because he doctored the writings of earlier contributors. Soon after quitting his editing job, Cheever met his future wife, Mary Winternitz, the daughter of the dean of Yale Medical School and granddaughter of Thomas A. Watson. The couple married in 1941.World War II began soon after their marriage and Cheever enlisted in 1942. He published his first collection of stories, which he later came to despise, soon after enlisting. Although Cheever hated the book, and attempted to destroy every copy of it later in life, the writing amazed Major Leonard Spigelgass, and had him transferred to a former Paramount Studio in Astoria, Queens, which proved a blessing as most of Cheever’s former infantry died in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Cheever saw little action the rest of the war and after its conclusion, moved with his family to an apartment building in Manhattan. For the next four years he wrote almost every morning in a maid’s room in nothing but his boxers. A positive career sign, Cheever accepted a 4,800 advance from Random House in 1946 to resume his novel, the Holly Tree, which he quit during the war. In 1947 The New Yorker published “The Enormous Radio” which proved to be one of Cheever’s most memorable stories. The story proved an omen of things to come because after the birth of his son Benjamin in 1948, his work became more complex in contrast to his former stories. After years of writing short stories that were usually published in The New Yorker Cheever published his second collection in 1953 titled, The Enormous Radio to mostly positive reviews. Cheever, still in a contract with Random House for a novel, was freed from it by Mike Bessie of Harper and Brothers.  Cheever finished this book titled The Wapshot Chronicle in 1956. Proceeds from the sale of film rights to one of his stories allowed him and his family to spend the following year in Italy. The couple’s second child, born in Italy on March 9, 1957, named Fredrico, instead of Frederick, because of the lack of the letter K in the Italian alphabet. When Random House published The Wapshot Chronicle in 1964, it recieved the best reviews of Cheever’s career. During this very prosperous time of Cheever’s career, “The Swimmer” became another one of Cheever’s stories published in The New Yorker. This become known as one of his best stories. Cheever appeared in a cameo based upon the book in 1966. This prosperity of course included disparage. In 1966 Cheever decided to confront the personal problems of his family. He consulted a psychiatrist because of stresses from his alcoholism and bisexuality but chose to blame the problems on his wife. He terminated the consoling when the psychiatrist blamed the problems on him. The pressures of Cheeer’s life, so long neglected, began to mount.

Cheever’s Bullet Park, released in 1969, received scathing reviews with helped to deepen the alcoholism that are away at his life. The alcoholism nearly claimed Cheever’s life in 1973 when he suffered from pulmonary edema. Despite, Cheever kept teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where he recently began instructing. Cheever moved onto Boston University where he received a professorship. His drinking became suicidal and his marriage continued to collapse. In 1975, Fred again helping the family in times of need, drove John back to Ossining, New York where he admitted himself to the Smither’s Alcoholic Rehabilitation Unit. After his wife Mary drove him home he never drank alcohol again. In 1977, John Cheever’s Falconer reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller List. The Stories of John Cheever, released in 1978, became one of the best selling story collections ever. A tumor was discovered in Cheever’s right kidney in 1981, which soon spread to his femur, pelvis, and bladder. His last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems, received reviews that although negative, were respectful. Cheever received the National Medal for Literature at Carnegie Hall. He made a strong appearance for such a sick man. Soon after he died on June 18, 1982.

After reviewing the life of John Cheever, reviewing his writing style will reveal even more about his personality. Understanding the tendencies of John Cheever in his writing, the motifs, the themes, and the settings, will be easier after having learned about his troubled life. The writing style of Cheever, as well as his writing topics, have come to be some of the most influential of his time.

John Cheever wrote about the world during his time. In Cheever’s writing we often see stories with well thought out , good comedy that could make his readers laugh out loud. The subject of Cheever’s stories often becomes an allegory of suburbia or the middle class.  Cheever, by writing stories of the inhabitants of suburbia and the middle class, became their advocate. The ambiguousness of his advocacy made it all the more interesting. Cheever would often contrast mythic images and symbols with the affluent and mundane. The subject of Cheever’s stories often comes in the form of a situation that betrays the basic “unreality” of some character’s life. Just as often however, he reveals the quality of communal living and the goodness of the fellow man. The home for Cheever had not been a place he always associated with comfort in his life. Cheever, throughout his life, had an unstable home life and this was clearly reflected in his writing. Unlike other authors, Cheever did not associate the home with safety but with anxiety and disappointment. Cheever utilizes main themes of poet W.B. Yeats: the passion for decorum and ceremonies of innocence in the face of  the drowning of decay and disruption; those emotions of manic desperation that accompanies one’s realization of aging, death, and unhappiness.

The suburbs, a phenomena that was occurring in Cheever‘s time, was suitably his favorite setting. The land of the affluent and wealthy. The most acceptable members of society that are strangely outcast from the majority of society. The eccentricities of the suburbs has interested many authors and people since their development in the 20th century. The most popular image of Cheever’s suburbs takes the form of Bullet Park in “The Swimmer.” Cheever settings, which include St. Botolophs, Shady Hill, Bullet Park, are emotional constructs, not social symbols.

Cheever’s writing style reveals itself as distinctive and interesting; a number of reviewers and critics identify this as the unifying element in his fiction. He possessed a strong willed writing voice expressed clearly with lucid language. Cheever developed his literal, figurative, and lyrical style and created a less factually realistic and nearly musical prose. The style sometimes became lyrical and idiosyncratic. This style served as a bridge between the realms of the literal/prosaic and the visionary/poetic. In the stories that Cheever utilized this style in the mood deepens and increases the emotional intensity, and herein lies the remarkable effectiveness of the particular story, and his fiction in general. Cheever’s stories often focus on a single incident, but in the telling suggest echoes from the past and subtle omens for the future. Cheever’s style can be described as “episodic” in that the narratives move swiftly and almost in linear fashion from one glimpse, one incident, one snippet of conversation to another. As a result of this, Cheever became known for being better at a particular scene than stringing those scenes together. His short fiction is generally of higher quality. Cheever’s stories also contain a fair deal of humor. Cheever’s comic technique, like his usual style, entails; a continual and abrupt shifting of stylistic gears from fantasy from realism. Cheever’s humor exposed itself most clearly in his earlier work, as his later work transformed into more serious work. Technically Cheever makes use of narrative parallelism, echoing, juxtaposition, counterpoints, incremental repletion, thematic repetition, and narrative lines. Cheever‘s stories, often, do not show its resolution through the resolution of conflict, but from the tension he creates by putting various parallel elements, including characters, scenes and moods, against one another.

The main characters of Cheever can be described as distinctive, and often tell of the average American with a college degree, or other dwellers of the suburbs. These characters, often disillusioned and disabled with their way of life, suddenly acted out of inner subversion. Cheever’s characters seem to be men of feeling, not of action. Plot becomes unimportant, unlike themes, and deeper meanings. In Cheever’s most artistic and important works, much introspection defines in the main character. Cheever embarks his main characters down journeys fraught with moral perils, and he judges those who fall by the wayside according to convention and traditional standards. This reflects his Christian background. The sense of morality in his characters sometimes proves ambiguous. Using these characters and style Cheever inveighs against standardization of culture, the decline in sexual mores that confuse love with lust, and the obliteration of nature by the engines of technology. All of these qualities constitute an extraordinary writer and his style. Cheever’s “extraordinary gift for hope” and the luminosity of prose resembled that of  F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Cheever’s writing reflected Fitzgerald’s, a comparison has been made between himself and later authors John Updike and Ann Beattie.

The analysis of John Cheever’s writing style above better allows us to closely analyze passage from his stories or his stories as a whole. Typically, Cheever’s use of style took a backseat compared to his use of themes, morals, symbolism, motifs, and setting. A prominent exception to this, “The Swimmer,” involved over one hundred-fifty pages of notes. As a result, the story contains many deeper meanings and a strong stylistic effort, as well as the common Cheever themes. The short story “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” focuses more on themes and values than on writing style.

The superintendent fired Charlie and took over the elevator himself. The news that he was out of work stung Charlie for a minute. It was his first contact with human meanness that day. He sat down in the locker room and gnawed on a drumstick. His drinks were beginning to let him down, and while it had not reached him yet, he felt a miserable soberness in the offing. The excess of food and presents around him began to make him feel guilty and unworthy. He regretted bitterly the lie he had told about his children. He was a single man with simple needs. He had abused the goodness of the people upstairs. He was unworthy.

In “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor” we hear the story of Charlie, a man down on his luck that has an unfulfilling job, no family, and little money. He works as an elevator operator and knows the tenants (which are all much more fortunate than himself) of the building he works in. Charlie must even work on Christmas. The story details his Christmas, in which he receives gifts from the tenants he has come to know. Overwhelmed by the giving spirit of Christmas he gives some of his new belongings to people even less fortunate than himself. This story does not include Cheever’s best stylistic effort but instead includes a very clear example of Cheever’s main themes. These themes being the middle class, loneliness, and confusion. In the passage above when we hear about Charile’s dismissal, it reveals human meanness that was absent the rest of the story. This marks a return to realism, which proves rarely absent in the writings of John Cheever. The happiness that Charlie obtains in “Christmas” comes from the generosity of others, but it also involves materials. Materials are important in Cheever’s writing, as he often portrays the middle class as materialistic and empty. The line that speaks of a “miserable soberness” reflects Cheever himself. Cheever, a known alcoholic, would know the emotion that he describes in that line. This serves as a clear example of Cheever implanting his life experiences upon his writing. The “excess of food and presents” that made Charlie feel guilty again exemplifies Cheever’s feelings on rampant materialism and the false happiness it provides. The regret that Charlie feels provides an example of the regret, pain, and confusion in Cheever’s characters and himself. Cheever, often plagued by unhappiness and feelings of displacement, passed this trait onto his character he created. Cheever helped introduce new, morally ambiguous characters that reflected common feelings on society during his time. The “simple man,” that Cheever described Charlie as, fit very well into the mold of people that Cheever wrote about. Again with the mention of Charlie’s “unworthiness,” we see regret and introversion in Cheever’s main characters. This small passage serves to illustrate the common themes and the tendencies of the main characters in Cheever’s writing.

Above, in “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” we clearly see Cheever’s strong use of themes and the characteristics of his main characters, while noticing a weaker use of style than he sometimes uses. “The Swimmer,” however, contains extensive use of style.

He dove in and swam the pool, but when he tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder he saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds-some stubborn autumnal fragrance- on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.

“The Swimmer” tells the story of Neddy Merrill, a confused, youthful middle-aged man that swims the length of pools in a sort of connected chain. Neddy often consorts with the wealthy owners of the pools, and involves himself more with the members of the neighborhood than he does with his own family. When reading the story, a feeling that time passes faster than it seems, grows. Leaves fall, the air becomes chilled, and Neddy notices the changing of the constellations. Also, when Neddy returns to his house he finds it empty. In the above quote when we read “the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone,” it becomes clear that he has suffered a long “day” and more time may have passed than it at first seems. The description of Neddy climbing feebly out of the pool contrasts strongly with the early description of him “slid[ing] down his banister that morning and giving the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack.” The description of a “young man,” also seems strange. Neddy, although Cheever describes him as “middle aged,” retains a youthful state of mind and demeanor. We would not expect him to describe someone else as middle aged. When we read of “some stubborn autumnal fragrance,” we are again reminded that the passage of time in the story defies an easy examination. Neddy seems bewildered. Throughout the story he appears to be losing his grip on reality which also makes it hard on the reader to make literal sense of the story. Cheever uses alliteration with the phrase “some stubborn autumnal fragrance,” to bring attention to the fact that the story has shifted from summer to autumn and what once seemed like a day in the life of Neddy Merrill may be much longer. Also the description of the flowers infuse an almost romantic sense to the story. Cheever tells the story of Neddy in his usual realist prose, but the surreal feel to it allows for a different interpretation of the story. Neddy’s notice of different constellations in the sky again add to the ambiguous sense of time in the story. The names of the stars themselves mark a motif in “The Swimmer,” of mentioning Greek gods and goddesses such as Aphrodite and Andromeda. It may be that Cheever attempts to place his character in the realm of the Gods. The weeping of Neddy shows yet another example of Cheever implanting sorrow upon his characters. In the story Neddy cannot find a complete sense of comfort or home much like many other characters of Cheever’s creation.

One of the strongest writers of the 20th century, John Cheever created many period pieces that are viewed as classics today. Cheever’s works, easily viewed in a historical context, highlight many of the events of the mid 20th century. Cheever lived a troubled life that suffered from an unstable home life, sickness, alcoholism, and displacement. He, throughout his life, had domestic and personal troubles. He used the conflicts in his life to compliment his writing and improve it. Drawing influence from writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cheever crafted a clear writing voice that he used to tell the stories of his time. Cheever wrote of the suburbs, the middle class, and modern life. Cheever wrote as an advocate of the middle class and the suburbs. The advocacy can be viewed as ambiguous as he sometimes seemed to criticize his subjects. Cheever’s writing reveals aspects of his personality that he implants upon his characters. Cheever’s characters are often sorrowful and have regret for their actions. They are often sad and even alcoholic, much like Cheever. The main character are also often affluent and of the middle class, also like Cheever. Two examples of the writing style and themes of Cheever are “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” and “The Swimmer.” These stories deal with men that are confused, trying to find their way in life and riddled with guilt. They are, or are directly involved with, members of the middle class and involve many aspects of the 20th century. They illustrate the reason Cheever become so well known and renowned. John Cheever, an exceptionally strong and gifted writer, lived a life that begs detailing. He lived during a time of materialism, an uprising social class, and changing views on society. Cheever’s writing complemented his troubled life and the time period he lived in.

Works Cited

Alfred, Kazin. New York Review of Books (1973): 14-18.

Burr, Struthers. “Saturday Review 26.” Saturday Review 24 April 1994: 9.

Cheever, John. “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor.” The New Yorker 24 December 1949: Print.

Cheever, John. “The Swimmer.” The New Yorker 18 July 1964: Print.

Donaldson, Scott. John Cheever: A Biography. New York; Toronto: Random House.     2004

Donaldson, Scott. American Writers: A Collection of Library Biograpies (1979):

Hunt, George. Commonwealth 19 January 1979: 20-22.