Vodka for Breakfast: On the Melancholy of Cheever’s Journals

Detail from the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of Cheever’s Journals

There is something feckless about a writer’s journals. They are a specialist’s document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming baboons, searching for fleas.  Expecting bohemian excess or stoic grace, we discover instead a life reduced to the fungible poetry of soiled clothes and closely mown grass. A writer’s journal is “neither life exactly, nor fiction,” Elizabeth Hardwick suggested, “but like one of those dreams in which dead friends, with their old crumpled smiles and grunts, their themes, meet you turning a corner.”

The themes of John Cheever’s journals—God, sex, guilt, and nature—manage to instill genteel ennui with the anguished moral passion of a Russian novel. Published in 1990, eight years after his death from lung cancer, and decades after he had been enshrined as America’s premiere bourgeois fabulist, the journals shocked in their revelation of the self-lacerating, booze-addled voluptuary