Cheever, in his journals, claimed he resolved to avoid becoming 'the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semisecret'. Yet it was in his journals that his wealth of well-concealed self-excoriation exploded onto the page, disregarding the sacrosanct narrative of which his New Yorker material was evidently in keeping with. This, as with most sheltered creative minds, was to be expected, especially when you consider how easy it can be to make allusions to Cheever's private life through his professional work as a writer. But herein lies the argument.
That a writer does provide insinuations as to the nature of their own existence behind the published material they proffer is feasible, but not immutably true; that a reader who, with prior knowledge of a particular writer's past and personality, has formed a set of preconceived opinions pertaining to said writer uses them in judging the relationship between the writer's words and their own personal world - a privilege they would not have been entitled to otherwise - is more likely.
Without having read up on any disclosures about a writer's personal life, how is a reader to relate a passage of words written on the psychological toll of alcoholism to the potential suffering of the author from the same condition? Whether or not a protagonist such as Neddy Merrill in Cheever's The Swimmer embodies the personal afflictions of Cheever himself is irrelevant to the reader's undertaking of the narrative. As mentioned already, without prior knowledge of Cheever as a person the reader's focus will be purely on the narrative, as the story of Cheever's life belongs to another curiosity as yet uncultivated in their minds.
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