John Cheever’s *Other* Secret Life

John Cheever’s tortured bisexuality gets some more airtime in Blake Bailey’s new Cheever biography, Matthew Price reminds us in Bookforum. Price quotes two of the sadder bits of Cheever’s journals–“The most wonderful thing about life is that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction,” and “If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”

But Price also quotes part of the Bailey book that is possibly even more haunting re the theme of living a double life. It seems that, after Cheever moved to a Sutton Place apartment with his wife and daughter, “Almost every morning for the next five years, he’d put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he’d doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch.”