Going through some of the secondary literature on John Cheever in preparation for a class in which I assigned the students to read his 1954 story
"The Country Husband", I was surprised to find no discussion of the story within a queer context. My search was not comprehensive, but the connection seems so obvious to me, and so illuminating for the story, that I'm surprised it isn't mentioned by most people who write about Cheever's tale.
Paging through Blake Bailey's comprehensive
biography of Cheever makes the connection even more obvious than the story itself does, for Bailey
notes that Cheever's journal "in the early months of 1954 was filled with self-loathing on the subject" of homosexual desire. It's a running theme throughout the book, as Colm Tóibín points out in
an insightful essay on Cheever and Bailey's biography for the
London Review of Books:
The problem was partly his intense inhabiting of the domestic sphere and
the suburban landscape, as though this were a way of shutting out the
wider world, and partly his refusal even to recognise his own
homosexuality as anything other than a dark hidden area of the self
which could not be explored. ‘For Cheever it would always be one thing
to have sex with a man,’ Bailey writes, ‘another to spend the night with
him. The latter was a taboo he would rarely if ever violate until a
ripe old age.’ In his journals he wrote: ‘If I followed my instincts I
would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely
man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a
loaded pistol.’ One of his best friends in his twenties was Malcolm
Cowley, through whom he had briefly met Hart Crane. Cowley’s wife had
been on the ship with Crane when he committed suicide in 1932. A
homosexual lifestyle, Cowley had warned Cheever, ‘could only end with
drunkenness and ghastly suicide’. As one of Cheever’s colleagues in the
Signal Corps in World War Two remarked: ‘He wanted to be accepted as a
New England gentleman and New England gentlemen aren’t gay. Back then
you had no idea of the opprobrium. Even in the Signal Corps, even in the
film and theatre world, you were a second-class citizen if you were
gay, and Cheever did not want to be that.’
Of course, in 1954 Cheever could not write a short story about his desires and have it published by
The New Yorker, even if he had wanted to (Alan Gurganus's
"Minor Heroism" is reportedly the first openly gay story the magazine published, a story sent to the magazine by Cheever, who had been Gurganus's teacher and was, rather to Gurganus's chagrin, in love with him. It appeared 20 years — almost to the day — after "The Country Husband"). But the torment of the story's protagonist, Francis Weed, is one entirely familiar to anyone who has ever repressed socially unacceptable feelings.
