John Cheever said his favorite book was Madame Bovary, and that his aunt didn’t hold his National Book Award novel against him, since he had a split personality

MADAME BOVARY

Interviewer: Do you have a very favorite book?

Cheever: Yes definitely. Madame Bovary. I’ve probably read it twenty-five times, many of those in French.

Interviewer: Why is it such a great novel?

Cheever: Because the writing is absolutely precise and simply perfect. This book was a considerable turning point in fiction, an innovation. Of course, all great novels are innovations but Madame Bovary was, for one thing, the first account we have of controlled schizophrenia…(1, p. 25).

THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE (National Book Award winner)

Interviewer: One almost has a feeling of eavesdropping on your family in that book.

Cheever: The Chronicle was not published (and this was a consideration) until after my mother’s death. An aunt (who does not appear in the book) said, “I would never speak to him again if I didn’t know him to be a split personality” (1, p. 99).

QUESTIONS

Did Cheever mean “schizophrenia” in its correct usage as the name of a psychosis? Or did he mean a split personality (multiple personality), which is not a psychosis, and something completely different?

Was Cheever’s aunt serious? Did he have multiple personality, and was this common knowledge in the family?

1. Scott Donaldson (Editor). Conversations with John Cheever. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1987.