At a panel discussion for the New Yorker Festival featuring Emma Cline, Mary Gaitskill, and moderator Molly Fisher, Cline said John Cheever’s much-anthologized short story “The Swimmer,†which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1964, inspired the ending of her latest novel, The Guest. Gaitskill remarked that Cheever is one of her favorite short-story writers; Cline agreed.
The novelists touched on a wide range of subjects in their conversation, including writing sex scenes, Iceland, Gaitskill’s fascination with hell and Faust, and the most beautiful and most ugly things they’d observed recently (Gaitskill: “If you’re talking societal ugliness, it’s kind of boundlessâ€). But the two lit up the most when discussing the late author.
Cheever attended to “the most ordinary things; he loved to write about domesticity, he loved domestic life — and yet he had conflict, because he was living in the closet, he was more queer than not,†Gaitskill said.
Outwardly, Cheever was a churchgoing family man. In the early ’60s, Time called him “Ovid in Ossining†(as in Ossining, New York, also home to Mad Men’s Draper family). But his suburban idylls, Gaitskill said, belied desolation and loneliness.
“He’s really good at portraying the beauty of that [suburban] world but also this kind of seeping depth — like a dog rummaging in the garbage and running off with a steak. The look in the eyes of a child when she sees something really dark in the eyes of her neighbor.â€
“He’s like a mystic,†Cline added. “Even though the stories are about quotidian scenes … I reread his journals and am so moved by seeing the span of an artist’s life. The despair is moving, but also moments of witness. Witnessing the natural world, or even the feeling of wanting to be in love.â€
Cheever abused alcohol and struggled with his sexuality throughout his life. “He was in so much pain,†Gaitskill said, “but he nonetheless had such a will to see beauty in anything and everything.â€