How much do we know? How much do we need to know? No one wants to die, but one of the worst things about dying, at least for the famous, is having your sins aired after your death. His journals and diaries are there to be read, as is daughter Susan Cheever's Where to start? The major difficulty facing Bailey must be the fact that Cheever was more than open with the facts of his life. Bailey has been relentless in his task of gathering information, ably assisted by Cheever’s willing children, two of whom are writers and apparently as fascinated by the horrors of what they lived through, as strangers tend to be in the lives of the famous. Biography is a difficult genre, more the job for a forensic scientist than the historian. It is a wry aside but then this book, as indeed was Cheever’s life, is sustained by zany cross references, and sad, at times, squalid anecdotes. Having agreed to deliver a tribute at a service for John Cheever, Bellow remarked that Nathanael West had died on the way to F.Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral. LATE, LATE in this painful exploration of one man’s life, the biographer, Blake Bailey refers to Saul Bellow. BIOGRAPHY: Cheever – A LifeBy Blake Bailey, Picador, 770pp, £25
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