“I have homosexual instincts and … they are a source of painful anxiety,” he confesses in his journal “the thought of being a homosexual terrifies me.” But he seems to have been particularly worried, not that any “hint of aberrant carnality” that he might emit had already been recognized by other people, but that such information might circulate more widely and undercut his carefully constructed persona as a New England country gentleman. It bears noting that in Cheever’s mind his homosexuality was a “semi secret” and not a full-fledged one. For most of his career he found it necessary to scrutinize his work and his behavior for any evidence of “leakage” of that unspoken truth.
“I WOULD NOT like to be the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semi secret,” John Cheever confided in his journal in an entry that begins by recording a quarrel with his wife Mary “about lingering glances.” He goes on to record that while traveling later that day on the night train from New York City to Boston to visit his mother during what would be her final illness, he found that the private compartment he’d booked seemed to invite “erotic misdemeanor.” He also records that, following his arrival, he flinched during his conversation with his mother when she observed that someone with whom Cheever had grown up was “a regular boy” (Cheever’s emphasis).Ĭheever’s journals reveal his fear of his own homosexuality, in particular his fear that he might betray-or that others might perceive-what he is desperate to keep hidden: that his wife follows his gaze as it lingers on other men, that he indulges in an assignation with another man in the anonymity of a private train compartment, or that his highly critical mother caustically insinuates that he’s “irregular” sexually.