The Success of a Late-Bloomer : Author Susan Cheever Works From Her Ethic of Failure

John Cheever published his first short story, “Expelled,” in the New Republic when he was 17. At the same age, his daughter chose not to become a writer.

“That was one of the first decisions I made when I became an adult,” Susan Cheever said. “My English grades were never very good, I could never get on any school literary magazine, and I didn’t want to compete with my father. I just wasn’t strong enough. I just didn’t want to do it.”

Susan Cheever’s dark hair, streaked with bronze, fell in a curtain across her face. She spoke in a mild voice, laced with the expressions and intonations of her suburban childhood, an accent quite different from John Cheever’s Boston Brahmin broad “a”s. As a young girl, Susan Cheever endured her father’s disappointment that she was not the striking society debutante he wanted her to be.

‘Constant Conflict’

“I’m still afraid to leave the house in the morning because of how I feel about my looks,” Cheever admitted. “I think to some extent all fiction writers are outcasts. You have this constant conflict in writers who can never be ‘normal’ and yet are happy that they’re not because then they can write about it.

“That’s why my father set himself up with a manor house and three children and two dogs,” she continued. “That’s why I wear a dark suit and pearls. We’re both trying to be what we’re not.”

Only a desperate search for employment forced Susan Cheever to reconsider writing as a career. After graduating from Brown University in 1965, she married and taught high school English. Cheever later gave up teaching to follow her husband to a new job in London and when the couple returned to the United States in the early 1970s, she took--as a last resort--a job as a reporter for the Tarrytown (N.Y.) Daily News. She was 30 years old.

“I thought, ‘Why not, I’ll try it.’ I loved it,” Cheever recalled warmly. “I loved running out in the morning, following the cops around, going to school board meetings, all the romance of newspapers. And I learned how to write.”

In five years, Susan Cheever rose to an editor’s post at Newsweek and published her first novel, “Looking for Work,” in 1979. Two other novels, “A Handsome Man” (1981) and “The Cage” (1982) soon followed, as well as the widely acclaimed memoir of her father, “Home Before Dark,” which appeared last year.

Pain and Promise

Susan Cheever’s novels address the pain and promise of life as an American woman, and “Home Before Dark” searingly examines the father-daughter relationship. “The Cage” tells the story of a man imprisoned, literally, in an animal cage by his wife. In “Looking for Work,” which she based on journals from the period when her first marriage was disintegrating, Cheever captures on the page the sexual upheavals of the 1970s. The main character takes a roller coaster ride between being single and being one half of a couple. This decade, Cheever said, is just as difficult a time for American women.

Disheartening Patterns

“The ‘80s are rotten; the ‘70s were, too,” Cheever said. “If you look at one of those countries where motherhood and children are really adored and considered terribly important, I think the women are much better off. In this country, the things that women have traditionally done, and still do, even though they’re also now at work, are not valued.”

A careful look at the quality of life for American women, Cheever said, reveals disheartening patterns. Older men often marry much younger women, she pointed out, but the reverse case is very rare.

‘We Value Age’

“What do we value? You can’t argue that we value age,” said Cheever. “Women in this country age very fast, much faster than men, and you see a lot of loneliness and unhappiness. If you’re willing to be honest about a few basic things, then you can see it’s not a great situation.”

Susan Cheever’s next novel, which she expects to be published in early 1987, will focus on doctors and patients and the emotional conflicts generated between them. The novel began as a nonfiction profile of doctors at New York’s Sloan-Kettering Hospital, which specializes in treating cancer. John Cheever died of cancer in June, 1982, an illness, Susan Cheever wrote in “Home Before Dark,” that “seemed so unfair, so arbitrary and cruel, that I am sure it will take the rest of our lives for my family to understand how it could have happened.”

Susan Cheever explained how the pull of fiction drew her away from her original journalistic intentions.

“I felt myself thrown back into a lot of feelings I had about doctors. There are about 20 doctors in my immediate family, and I’m really trying to focus on what doctors represent. They are a symbol of authority for many people.”

Emotional Doctors

If physicians are authorities on the body, are novelists the doctors of our emotional lives? Cheever shook her head. “A novelist reports more than a doctor does,” she said. “A novel isn’t a diagnosis, it’s more an analysis. And in a novel, you don’t proceed to say, ‘what you should do is this.’ ”

Journalism, the root of Cheever’s career as a writer, remains important to her, and she continues to publish nonfiction in magazines. A portrait of the novelist Louis Auchincloss appeared in October’s Vanity Fair, and Cheever is preparing an essay on children’s cartoons for TV Guide.

“I don’t want to lose my journalism,” Cheever said. “A novelist, like any artist, ought to be trained in every aspect of writing. I learned to write on newspapers. I think that makes me like the painter who can also draw.”

In her days as a reporter for a small-town daily, Cheever saw her writing affect people’s daily lives, and she relished that immediacy. She recalled surreptitiously watching “an enemy on the school board” who one afternoon was walking down the sidewalk keenly reading Cheever’s account of a recent board meeting.

“He was so intent on my prose, he forgot where the curb was and he tripped,” Cheever said. “I’ve never seen someone so involved in my writing ever since. Newspapers have that immediacy. At Newsweek, you never saw your readers.”

A latecomer to fiction--she did not begin her first novel until she was 35--Susan Cheever expressed some jealousy for the literary whiz kids who published novels in their early 20s.

“I could never have done that,” she confessed. “I didn’t start to write until I was ready to do it. It’s the stability, it’s learning how to write, it’s knowing who you are, and having the confidence to make things up--you need all those things.”

From the early failures and conflicts that kept her from writing, Susan Cheever has developed an ethic of failure as “the start of something interesting.” As she moves away from the long shadow of her father’s work, Susan Cheever remains wary of success.

“To succeed at something, that’s the end, the closed door,” she said, “Whenever I’ve failed, it always turned out for the best because it kept me going. My failure to be a writer when I was young was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Kenneally lives in Alston, Mass.