The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 284

Until about five vears ago, Blake Bailey taught English at the Robert M. Lusher Alternative School in New Orleans. Todav. after his widely praised 2003 biography of Richard Yates and with a new contract to write the life of John Cheever two of Boston's literary legends Blake Bailey is one of America's foremost literary biographers, this year winning a $42.000 Guggenheim fellowship. On one of his research trips to Boston, Bailey explained how a Southern schoolteacher came to chronicle the lives of two of the Northeast's finest writers.

-groomed and wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, white oxford-cloth shirt, and penny loafers, Bailey, 41, who lives in New Orleans with his wife and daughter, has a selfdeprecating sense of humor and an as-vet-unrealized desire: to be seen as a roguish man of letters like his subjects. "I certainly never thought of myself as a biographer," he says, betraying just the trace of an accent. Maybe it's a residue of Oklahoma City, where he grew up, or perhaps he picked it up as an undergraduate at Tulane University or teaching in New Orleans. "Accent? I thought I'd purged the last whiff of that red-state stigma during my Okie childhood. partly thanks to a German mother who spoke impeccable English with.

if anything, a vaguely British accent." Bailey was established as an educator he was Louisiana Humanities Teacher of the Year in 2000 but what he really had wanted to do was write however, Yates had a very good sense of humor." Bailey savs. "I deliberately cultivated an ironical voice in the book, because I knew Yates wouldn't want a mawkish account of his life. It was always more depressing to other people than it was to Yates. He thought his life was kind of funny. So I took a bemused and ironical approach to his life, but I treated his work with the utmost gravity and the reverence I felt it deserved." When A Tragic Honesty was published.

New York Times critic Janet Maslin announced that "the arrival of Blake Bailey's great. perceptive, heartbreaking Yates biography is a landmark event." Maslin's enthusiasm led her husband, John Cheever's son, Ben. to suggest that Bailey take on his father. Bailey was at first reluctant, because there had already been a Cheever biography that the family had not liked: they felt Cheever's Keeper Biographer Blake Bailey has found a specialty: Boston's tortured literary greats. Look who's next.

BY EDGAR ALLEN BEEM PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BOSTON GLOBE it reduced Cheever to a besotted bisexual. Bailey came around. The nadir of John Cheever's life and career, according to Bailey, came in 1974 and '75 while he was teaching at Boston University and drinking himself into a rehabilitation center. "But the last seven vears of his life. Cheever never took another drink." savs Bailev.

"He wrote Falconer, published his collected short stories, and won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, a and the National Medal for Literature." So while Yates died in obscuritv. Cheever went out on top. Thus. Bailey intends to write Cheever's life as "a redemptive novels. When his fiction failed fable." With an advance on this to attract a publisher, he took biography that is 20 times what an agent's advice and turned to nonfiction.

He wrote book re- he got for Yates, Bailey has until December 2007 to deliver views, contributed to the satirical magazine Spy. published a a manuscript, but he has already interviewed half of his 150 coffee-table book called The Sixties, and. more to the point. sources and has read all 28 volumes of the writer's private jourwrote The Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Richard nals. "Cheever recorded every day of his adult life from 1940 on.

Yates, the mid-20th century author of the excellent if depress- Every dav!" says Bailey, noting that the Cheever journals at Haring novels Revolutionary Road and Easter Parade and the bril- vard's Houghton Library run to 5 million words and 4 linear feet. liant short-story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. With Yates (1926-1992) and Cheever (1912-1982). Bailey is Bailey began floating a biography proposal in 1999, but it on somewhat similar literary ground. Both men drew on their took two vears to land a contract.

Then he faced another hur- own unhappy childhoods to peel back the veneer of respectabildle: winning the trust of his subject's family, who blamed schol- ity covering the suburbs of New England and New York to reveal ars and critics for the failure of Yates's career. the despair and disappointment beneath the surface of middleIn A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Pica- class American lives. But Bailey sees a profound difference: dor. 2003), Bailey describes "a gaunt, stupefied, ragged old man "Yates basically believed our failures were hard-wired into us staggering around the streets of Boston." where Yates lived from from the get-go. We spend our lives trying to get away, coating 1976 to 1988, teaching briefly at Emerson College but spend- ourselves in illusions of grandeur.

Cheever has a more optimising most of his time drinking at the Crossroads Irish Pub. tic view. With Cheever, it's not as important that we fulfill ourR Bailey, who says he is "a cheerful pessimist." believes the key selves personally. He believed the world is a blessed place, but 0 to writing a good biography is "an intuitive interconnectedness we're distracted from the transcendent beauty of the world." he with found your a subject, kindred spirit. knowing "For what all his his attitude problems," is." and Bailey so in insists, Yates.

his At man, a cemetery posing for in a suburban snapshot beside Norwell, the Bailey slate finally headstone. gets to He meet will "Yates was a decent, kind human being." spend the next two years explaining how Cheever got there. BG The strength of A Tragic Honesty is that Bailey did not reduce a man and his work to the sum total of his twin pathologies, Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer living in Maine. Send alcoholism and mental illness. "Yates's life was extremely bleak: e-mails to 22.