Interview

The John Cheever
Audio Collection
An Interview with
Ben Cheever

The elegant new collection of stories by John Cheever was, in fact, his son Ben's idea. "I had been asked to narrate part of the Winesburg, Ohio audio for Harper. Knowing that Harper owns the Caedmon Archive of classic recordings, which includes recordings of my father, I asked, "Why haven't you done a production of my father's stories?"

Apparently, Ben says, the idea wasn't a new one. The entire collected stories, published in 1978, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Shortly before his death in 1982, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature. But Harper expected that acquiring the rights to the stories would be very expensive. Thinking at the time that the Cheever estate owned the stories, Ben replied encouragingly.

The world of publishing rights is a complicated one, and, as it turned out, the audio rights to the stories did have to be acquired from various publishers. But the task was well worth the effort, and the result is a stunning collection of Cheever's most celebrated stories narrated by a stellar group of luminaries: Meryl Streep, Blythe Danner, Edward Herrmann, George Plimpton, Peter Gallagher, and two archival recordings by John Cheever himself.

"It's difficult to say what my father would think of a lot of things today, but I know he would have loved this recording," Ben says. "It's an outstanding production that really honors his work. The narration is first-class. The packaging is beautiful. And he would have loved to take Meryl Streep to lunch!"

Cheever very much appreciated the oral tradition of storytelling, and he and his wife read aloud to their three children. Cheever also read aloud parts of his own stories to the family as they were being written.

At first, Harper did not intend to include Cheever's original introduction in the audio collection, but Ben made a persuasive case for its importance in illuminating the body of work. Harper then asked Ben to read it. "That observation in the introduction as my father looked back over the stories of his lifetime is probably the most well-known line he ever wrote: 'These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.'"

Of the various narrations in the collection, Ben says, "George Plimpton is a natural to read my father's work because he has such an upper-class voice. And, of course, Meryl Streep can do no wrong. Edward Herrmann does a wonderful job, particularly with 'The Five-Forty-Eight.'"

Of his father's narration, Ben says, "A writer's life is so much more public than it was in my father's time. But those are the two stories--'The Death of Justina' and 'The Swimmer'--that he would read most often whenever he did read to the public. Of course, he wasn't an actor, so his reading doesn't have the same presence as those of the professionals. But it's important for the authenticity of the collection to hear his voice. And, of course, it's wonderful for me."--Elizabeth K. Dodge

August/September 2003
© 2003 AudioFile Publications, Inc.