When Benjamin Cheever set his sights on the Boston Marathon, an elite event requiring a qualification time of under three hours in another accredited marathon, he finished the New York Marathon in 2:59:33. “My father celebrated my acceptance by taking the whole family to spend the eve of the Boston Marathon at the Ritz Carlton,” Cheever writes in his recently published Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete (Rodale Books).
The year was 1979. After conquering the notoriously hilly Boston course in 3:02:02, an exuberant Cheever returned to an empty hotel room. The phone rang and rang: first the Associated Press, then UPI, asking to speak to John. Benjamin writes, “I drew a bath. My father came into the hotel room and then into the bathroom. ‘You finished the marathon?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘And you won the Pulitzer Prize.’”
The novelist son of John Cheever may have some big shoes to fill, but he’s certainly fleeter of foot. Though the elder Cheever was an ardent walker and bicyclist—“We share an interest in rudimentary forms of transportation,” he once told his son—he never ran 26.2 miles with a number pinned to his chest. After their shared win in Boston, John Cheever wrote to a friend, “Ben came in gallantly under three hours which is considered winning and when I returned to the hotel he was sitting in the bathtub, holding in his teeth a wire from the Pulitzer Prize Committee.”
“He’d chopped three minutes off my time,” Cheever notes with amusement. (He’d also added the telegram between the teeth; the Pulitzer winner couldn’t resist a good fictional detail.)
Running and writing might seem like entirely different endeavors, one making extreme demands on the body and one on the mind, but Cheever sees them as kindred pursuits. “Writing and long-distance running both respond to stamina and application,” he asserts. “If you write two hours a day for ten years, you’re a writer.” And if you log 1,500 miles a year, as Cheever has done for over three decades, you’re definitely a runner. With Strides, he has brought these two passions together. The result is a joy to read.
Cheever has chosen Pleasantville’s Dragonfly Cafe for an interview, partly because its sidewalk tables allow him to bring his beloved dog, The Schnoodle. Clearly the man and his schnoodle are regulars—everyone from the Moroccan barrista to a local designer stops by to tell stories about them. Cheever, who seems at once pleased and abashed by the flow of attention, is dressed in a navy blazer, blue button-down shirt, tan chinos, and New Balance sneakers: Westchester classic with a bit of extra bounce. Articulate and gracious, with a frequent laugh that crinkles his eyes to inverted half-moons, he’s clearly a man who relishes good conversation. He’s hosted a literary talk show on cable station PCTV, called “On Writing,” for several years, with on-camera guests including Frank McCourt, Alan Furst, Da Chen, Laura Shaine Cunningham, Rafael Yglesias—“my friends, my sister, my mom…” There’s that laugh again.
And there’s that family. Cheever’s sister Susan is a prolific memoirist and novelist; their mother, Mary, a poet. The third Cheever sibling, law professor Fred, is also a skilled writer. “I grew up in a household in which writing was revered, which is both good and bad,” Cheever says. Though he worked as a journalist and magazine editor for many years, he didn’t feel ready to think of himself as an author. (He still prefers “writer,” noting wryly that “author” adds nothing but grandiosity, “like calling yourself an attorney instead of a lawyer.”) His first book project was editing his father’s letters for publication, a task many sons would find daunting. Though John Cheever was uncommonly frank about many things, including his alcoholism and many affairs with women, his journals and letters also recorded his secret life as an active bisexual.
“The experience of reading them was revelatory, and often uncomfortable,” says Cheever, whose introduction to The Letters of John Cheever is titled “The Man I Thought I Knew.” Though he told his family he wanted his journals published posthumously, John Cheever urged them to throw his letters away, saying that “Saving a letter is like trying to preserve a kiss.” Describing himself as an obedient son, Benjamin Cheever nonetheless felt that his father’s letters deserved publication, and that “his duality was essential to who he was as a man, as a writer. And as a father.”
Cheever pauses to stroke his dog’s head. “He thought of himself as very different, extraordinary, simultaneously blessed and cursed, both by being a writer and by his bisexuality. He put on a mask every day.” John Cheever’s letters and journals (over a million words) also revealed how hard he’d struggled to become a writer, and that even after achieving critical and popular acclaim, he continued to face rejection and financial hardship. For his son, who’d grown up thinking of literary achievement as a God-given gift, this was a revelation. “I realized that success as a writer is more about desire and stamina than what you’re given,” he says.
So the editor started to write. He published his first novel, The Plagiarist, in 1992, following up with The Partisan. Both won glowing reviews for their wit and acuity. “I thought I was made,” Cheever says dryly. But as he’d learned from his father’s journals, literary stardom is fickle. When he finished his third novel, the mordantly funny social satire Famous After Death, nobody wanted to publish it.
Cheever found himself at loose ends. His wife, New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, earned a good living, but being a stay-at-home husband and father to two teenage sons made him feel idle and gnawed at his self-esteem. This being the crash-and-burn ’90s, he started to see his reflection in downsized executives, middle-aged men who were forced to reenter the workforce in any way they could manage. He decided to write about downsizing—from the inside.
“Instead of interviewing people about their troubles, I thought I’d share theirs with them and see what they said to a colleague,” he writes in the introduction to Selling Ben Cheever: Back to Square One in a Service Economy, in which he describes his five years in the entry-level workplace. Cheever took jobs as a sidewalk Santa and Halloween spook; as a salesman at CompUSA, Nobody Beats the Wiz, and a car dealership; as a fast-food sandwich maker nicknamed by colleagues “Slow G” (for grandpa); and a fearful security guard. Like everything he writes, the book is extraordinarily funny, but also sounds deeper notes. In chronicling the indignities of the workplace, Cheever somehow extols the dignity of work itself. It’s telling that even after he landed a publisher for Famous Afer Death—and for Selling Ben Cheever—he kept showing up for day jobs.
After publishing his fourth novel, The Good Nanny, Cheever turned to a subject close to his heart. He’d started jogging as a senior editor at Readers’ Digest (gleefully skewered in The Plagiarist) and eventually started writing for Runner’s World. “I was in the awkward spot of a man starting to observe a sport he’d been participating in on an almost-daily basis since 1978. I felt a little like a trout who has taken up fly-fishing,” he writes in Strides.
The book is an exuberant blend of memoir, sports reportage, and history. Cheever details the marathon’s origins in ancient Greece and some of its exotic offshoots, like the Medoc Marathon in Bordeaux, where fine wines are offered at water stations. He goes on training runs with world champions in Kenya and ground troops in Baghdad. John Cheever makes several appearances, exhorting his clumsy son, “For Christ’s sake, stop apologizing,” when he drops a softball. (“I’m sorry,” poor Ben replies automatically.) Adult Benjamin observes, “Walking is safe. Running is more satisfying. This is a vast oversimplification, but I would argue that I get from running what my father got from walking and gin.”
Cheever also describes running with his own sons, and calls his wife getting her shoes out to run on his 59th birthday, “my best present.” Running, he writes, is a literal cut to the chase: “It’s a family axiom that while running, the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen to sustain a falsehood.”
“Running and conversation are a twofer—you’re getting the exercise, but you’re also getting an amazing level of intimacy. People tell me things on long runs,” he reports with a knowing smile. “Mile five is the equivalent of 3am at a bar.”
Cheever looks at his watch, a high-tech runner’s gadget. For some time after John Cheever’s death in 1987, Benjamin took to wearing his father’s gold Rolex. “It’s a motion watch, and he didn’t know how to set it when it stopped—he would take the train into New York and go to the Rolex company—so he wore it all the time. He used to sleep naked in what had been my sister’s bedroom, so sometimes at night you’d see this naked man with a gold Rolex darting across the hall to the bathroom.” He smiles with affection, recalling the image, then adds that he now keeps the gold watch in a safety deposit box. Benjamin Cheever, it seems, has made peace with a heritage that is both weighty and precious, and he’s got his own race to run. In Strides, he describes the post marathon high:
“I noticed that the mass of humanity has a post-race murmur very like recordings I’ve heard of whale songs. It’s as if we’re a single organism, not a sophisticated one either, maybe a giant sponge. We seemed more tide than crowd….These were my people. I adored them all. I caught the sharp smell of excrement in the air. We were packed so tightly that if I’d died, my corpse would have been carried for yards, like a cork in the ocean. I crushed a paper cup under my shoe. We gimped along in our silvery capes. ‘Good race,’ we told each other. The air was thick and had substance to it, as if the runners had been set in aspic. I was hurting. I was ecstatic. I was serene. I was wide, wide awake, but also deep in the folds of an ancient dream.”
This article appears in May 2008.
