The two best biographies I’ve ever read—indeed, two of my favorite books of any kind—are Emerson: The Mind on Fire (University of California) and Cheever: A Life (Knopf).

The first, by Robert D. Richardson, was published in 1995; the second, by Norfolk resident Blake Bailey, came out just last year.

The appeal of the Richardson book is easy to understand. I’ve been reading Emerson regularly for 35 years; he is my intellectual and spiritual guiding light. Richardson’s book sings to me because no one before or since has more effectively explored Emerson’s passion for ideas and life.

The appeal of Bailey’s book is, for me, more enigmatic. Although I’ve been aware since college that Cheever is considered one of America’s finest short-story writers—“the American Chekhov,” some people have called him—I’ve read very little of his work. But I’ve seen glimmers of his soul, having read selections from his journals, published in 1991, nine years after his death.

In one passage that I find especially resonant, he writes of his desire “to discharge with competence and strength the responsibilities of a family man, to carve for my children something that has moral splendor….” A little later in the same entry, he says that he has “longed to write a story that will be fine, that will be singing, that will have in it all kinds of lights and pleasures.”

What struck me, like an arrow in the heart, was the sense of yearning expressed in these passages—a yearning that was constantly straining against feelings of inadequacy. As the father of a young child at the time (my daughter was just two years old), I, too, yearned to carve for her a space of splendor but worried that I was not up to the task; as a writer, meanwhile, I felt a similar kind of inner tension between my imaginative vision and my inability to produce writing that struck me as truly luminous. ?With this in mind, I noted with interest several months ago that Cheever: A Life had been named one of the best books of 2009 by a number of newspapers and literary publications. I made a mental note to pick up a copy, and last December at Strand Bookstore in New York, I did so.

Now here’s the thing: I’m in the habit of buying a lot of books—and many of them end up on my shelves, never cracked or partially read. Often this happens even with books that I find reasonably engaging. It’s not so much that I lose interest in the book at hand; it’s just that other volumes catch my attention and pull me off course. Not so in this case. From the moment I started reading Cheever, I could scarcely put it down and had no interest in reading anything else until I finished it.

In the end, I was moved to tears, not by any feeling of sentimentality but by a sense of authentic catharsis. Superficially, Cheever had it all: A lovely wife and children, a stately house in an upscale New York suburb and great success as a writer. As a young man, he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker—the dream-platform for most American writers today—and in time he won virtually every major literary award except for the Nobel. In spite of this, he spent much of his life worrying that he was a failure and wrestling with personal demons of various kinds (not to mention chronic financial pressures). Indeed, personal and professional achievements seemed to satisfy him only momentarily. “I don’t remember loving a child so much,” he wrote in his journal, after his second son was born. And yet, even with this feeling in his heart, he reflected on the fact that “a man can be given nearly everything the world has to offer and go on yearning.” Cheever’s yearning troubled him because it sprang not from a simple lust for life and new experience, but from agonizing inner conflict and a hunger for love.

Not long after I finished the book, I learned that Bailey would be the writer-in-residence at ODU for the month of February. I decided to try to get an interview and subsequently discovered that he lives right here in Norfolk.

Bailey was born and raised in Oklahoma City and went to college at Tulane University. He graduated in 1985. For a time, he and his wife—a clinical psychologist— lived in Gainesville, Florida, while she was finishing grad school at the University of Florida, but in June 2005 they moved back to New Orleans and bought a house. Two months later, they lost virtually all of their possessions in Hurricane Katrina.

They spent the next three years in Gainesivlle, then relocated to Norfolk in 2008, after his wife was offered a position at Portsmouth Naval Hospital.

By this time, Bailey had already made his mark in the publishing world with a critically acclaimed biography of Richard Yates (A Tragic Honesty, 2003). The success of that book led to a contract for the Cheever biography.

Anxious to meet the man behind the book that had so absorbed me during my Christmas break, I contacted Bailey and asked for an interview. Last Saturday, we met at Borjo Coffeehouse in Norfolk to talk about the Cheever book and writing in general.

Following are excerpts from our interview, with my questions in bold.

First, I want to tell you how much I enjoyed the Cheever biography. I agree with T.C. Boyle, who suggested in his review that it’s as absorbing as a good novel. Your writing is graceful and engaging, but I never felt that it called attention to itself. It just drew me in. With that in mind, I wonder if you could talk about your influences and the evolution of your writing style.

Well, as far as writing that calls attention to itself, I do think, that for a biographer, that that kind of style in bad taste—to upstage your subject, in other words; to be a Charles Kinbote from Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Andrew Field is perhaps the best example—Nabokov’s own first biographer—which is sort of a poetic irony.

Probably my greatest stylistic influence is [Lytton] Strachey. The reason for this is that he sees his subject through a lens of humor. It’s not a bad way to look at the human predicament…. I could see, while writing about Yates, the pitfall of being maudlin. It’s always present with lives like that. So I find that it’s helpful to take a step back and see the humor, while also [conveying the sadness]…. It gives my writing a tone. I don’t think it gives it a style, per se, but gives it a tone that is engaging. I do allow myself to be more style-heavy in the footnotes.

That’s a testament, in itself, to your writing. I often don’t read footnotes, but I read all of yours.

I’m glad to hear that.  They're very important to me.

I understand that the Yates book evolved from an entry you wrote about him for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Did you set out to be a biographer or was that something you stumbled into?

It was a total fluke. I wanted to be a fiction writer. My first book was a coffee table book about the Sixties. And I had done a lot of freelance stuff, all non-fiction. But I wanted to be a fiction writer. I had written three unpublished novels, two of which were just astoundingly bad and one that was pretty good—not good enough to sell, in itself, but good enough to attract the interest of a literary agent. [My agent] said, you know, you write so well, why don’t you go back to the only thing you’ve ever had any success with, which is nonfiction. She said, “Write me a book proposal about anything that interests you now.” At that moment, it was Richard Yates. All of his books were out of print; but he was to me the brilliant forgotten canonical author. I knew that most of his work was autobiographical and if so, whoa, what a life!?And there was a lot of stuff he never even got around to writing about: he had been Bobby Kennedy’s sole speechwriter at height of civil rights movement—and like Cheever, had been subject of a Seinfeld episode; it just got better and better, and it just clicked. I immediately knew when I sold that book that whatever else I do—and I fully intend to do other things—this is sort of my métier; this is something I’m good at, for whatever reason.

Most critics seem to agree that you’re good at it; in fact, that’s an understatement. Most reviews have been glowing. But a few have not—notably Jonathan Yardley’s in The Washington Post. Yardley had two main complaints—first, that the length of your book is “stupefying,” as he put it, and second, that it’s overly sensational. In the end, he called it “as messy as the life it describes.”

Yes, he is my main detractor, and that was such a vicious review. Cheever ended up on most of the major Best of the Year lists, so I hope Yardley feels bad [about what he wrote].

In terms of its length, the answer is that this was a very eventful life, and by my lights Cheever is a very important writer. I mean, this was a man who was on the cover Time and Newsweek, won every major award except the Nobel, and led a fascinating and very public writer’s life. I had a four-linear-foot, 4,300-page journal, hundreds of interviews, thousands of letters—just a huge [amount] of [primary] material, never mind the incalculable secondary sources. I boiled that sucker down until, I think, it is so tight it squeaks. I went back over and over and over until I felt that every last bit of extraneous material had been pulled out of it.

Beyond length, the second problem that Yardley and a couple of other critics had with the book is that it is too sensational and voyeuristic. What relationship did all the personal drama have to Cheever’s writing?

It had an inextricable relationship. The central dilemma of Cheever’s life was this yawning gulf between his public persona—a very debonair, charming man who relished his role as Westchester paterfamilias with three children and the same wife for 41 years—and his inner life, which was quite torturous. He was [plagued] not only by his bisexuality but also by this feeling that nobody on earth loved and understood him…. He was practically the loneliest man who ever lived….

In his fiction, the theme we see again and again is this disparity between public and private selves—in [the short story] "The Enormous Radio," for example, where they eavesdrop on people’s private lives and hear dreadful things; the other is this conflict between the light and dark in one’s own nature. Often [in Cheever’s writing] these different natures are embodied by brothers, and this culminates in some sort of fratricidal motif—whether it be in Falconer or “Goodbye, My Brother”—which [represents] the desire to extinguish the darkness in oneself.

So, sensationalizing? No. If I were to have included everything I knew about all the liaisons Cheever had, the book would have been twice as long.

Cheever often behaved like a first-class jerk; some of the things he says in his journals about his children are horrifyingly cruel. And yet I felt a lot of compassion for him—presumably because you presented him this way.

Cheever was utterly consumed with this darkness in himself. He had this childhood, where he had an embarrassing family that had fallen from grace and didn’t want him in the world and didn’t love him as he should have been loved, and he was morbidly sensitive as a child.

Part of his later life was a desperate quest to distance himself as far as possible from that. He wanted to be considered first-class, socially, and he wanted his children to be brilliant and not [socially] inappropriate. So he was horrible to his children [when he felt they were falling short of this ideal]. And yet, I hope it stirs the reader’s compassion that he berated Ben, for example, about being effeminate as a child because he didn't want Ben to suffer what he'd suffered. It was a terrifying thing—a terrifying thing—to be homosexual in America at mid-century. It was against the law, for one thing. Absolute disgrace awaited you if that became publicly known. He lived every day of his life with that terror, and it informed everything he thought and everything he did.

But there’s a lot to admire in Cheever. His work ethic, for example—and the beauty and the love that comes across in his fiction.

So what’s next for you?

The guy I’m working on now, Charles Jackson, has been dead a long time and is totally forgotten. Jackson wrote The Lost Weekend.

After writing two densely researched biographies in nine years, I didn’t feel like doing another major literary biography. I was even thinking of doing something non-biographical. What I finally decided to do, sort of as a lark, was something like Strachey’s Portraits in Miniature, about literary failures. In the course of researching Yates and Cheever, I came across so many writers who were forgotten but in many cases, they were quite talented and even sort of prolific….Nathan Asch, for example—was just a terrific writer, although he got flakier and flakier as he got older. So I was going to write profiles of these writers, and I thought I’d include Charles Jackson because I’ve always loved The Lost Weekend. I’ve read the book five or six times. Not only is it a pioneering study of the inner life of the alcoholic, which really hadn’t been done, but it’s a book of considerable literary merit; it’s really gripping….?The introduction to the paperback edition that I owned noted that when Charles Jackson first published the novel in 1944, he denied that it was autobiographical, but that he had since come clean after 22 hospitalizations and so forth. It says something like, Charles Jackson is now the doting father of two loving daughters and chairman of the Alcoholic Anonymous chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey. So I Googled Charles Jackson, and it turned out he had died of a pill overdose at the Chelsea Hotel in 1968 where he’d been living with this Czech laborer named Stanley; I thought, this is really interesting…. It is the real story of closeted homosexuality in midcentury American. It is the story of the dawning consciousness of the alcoholic problem in America, and the story of a very interesting writer.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, I have to ask whether you are you especially drawn to chain-smoking alcoholics. I mean, Richard Yates was also a drunk who smoked up to five packs of cigarettes a day, and Cheever, needless to say, nearly killed himself with liquor and tobacco.

[Laughs.] It’s not white guys who are drunk all the time that really excite me.   It’s more this idea of the highly compartmentalized personality. That was certainly evident in Yates’s life. He was a different person with different people. He could be very courtly; he had this sort of shy stammer and dressed beautifully. He really believed in this ideal of the gentleman with manners. But he also had a terrible temper, had a very foul mouth and lived in these apartments of just Dostoyevskian squalor. The Cheever book speaks for itself as far as what a hive of paradox his life was. And Jackson—his great Proustian multi-volume masterpiece that he was working on his entire life was the whole Don Birnam saga [the main character in The Lost Weekend], i.e., the whole of Jackson’s life. Jackson had lived so many different lives. How do you reconcile all of these various personae?

That said, I also had an older brother whose life was just a mess who killed himself in a jail cell. I think that his life is something that I’m always trying to see in the round. So that has to have something to do with it.

Before we wrap up, I want to ask you about your experience in Katrina. How did that affect you?

One of the things it did was make me lower my head and say, I’m going to work twice as hard. I’ve almost never worked as hard as I did after Katrina. So many things are flying at your head at a time like that; you’ve lost all your possessions, you’ve lost your house; you have to deal with the insurance companies and your creditors. Meanwhile, I had [Cheever] to finish researching; and I had all these other writing assignments. So, really, I was too busy to worry about it. My last word on Katrina, I guess, is that we lost everything. My wife never came back [to New Orleans] so I personally lugged everything—every piece of furniture, every book, every photo album, all my papers to the curb. What was surprising is how little it all mattered to me. It was just bunch of shit; you can always get new shit.