Anyone who’s shocked by the “revelations” in the journals can’t have been paying attention. The letters included mash notes to young men that induce blushes as much for their prose as for their anatomical explicitness; an account of a tryst with the photographer Walker Evans (“I was ravening … “); a series of bulletins from the detox center. Courtesy of his last lover (who blabbed to Donaldson) and his children, the world already knows about the terminally ill writer’s final assisted orgasm (in his bathroom), about his legs kicking under the sheet on his deathbed and about the catheter that had to be extracted from his corpse. We’ve been told of Cheever’s unconsummated crush on writer Allan Gurganus and his consummated crush on actress Hope Lange (who found him “the horniest man I’ve ever known”), and about the time his much-admired rival John Updike came calling and Cheever, near alcoholic rock bottom, answered the door buck naked. Cheever himself told interviewers that he and his wife, Mary, had contemplated divorce for 40 years.

So by the time the journals began appearing in The New Yorker in 1990, Cheever had little privacy left to invade. Anyway, he’d been a man who suffered so from repressing himself that “privacy” had become a prison. Ben Cheever writes that some acquaintances were “hurt and bewildered” by the New Yorker excerpts, but he convinces us that John Cheever wanted the journals published–after his death. (We could’ve guessed that without Ben’s testimony: Cheever’s journals have the all the artfulness of a writer who knows posterity is reading over his shoulder.) Mary Cheever, her husband’s literary executor, gave the go-ahead despite the many journal entries in which he “mounts” her–among the malign results of Cheever’s repression was a taste for icky euphemism–and the many other times his “love muscle is restive” but she’s “maldisposta.” If she or the children have secretly creepy motives for letting him expose himself, it’s their business; since they’re acting grown-up about these painful truths, why shouldn’t everyone else? After all, Cheever was one of the great storytellers. And his life is the template for such tales as those in which an enormous radio broadcasts shameful secrets to the neighbors and a weary swimmer comes home to find his house empty, his family gone.

Cheever kept journals from at least the early ’40s (he was born in 1912) until shortly before he died, of cancer, in 1982. He typed them, badly, on loose-leaf notebook pages and apparently showed the books to no one until he handed one to Ben in 1980. “At one point I looked up, and I could see that he was crying,” writes Ben-in grief over their content, we wonder, or in sheer relief? “The Journals of John Cheever” is only about one twentieth of this whole output. The quality of Cheever’s writing gives the book its weight-each entry is complete, as he wrote it–but Robert Gottlieb gave it the density. Gottlieb, former editor in chief at Knopf, worked on Cheever’s last five books; his decision not to annotate the journals gives them the unmediated impact of fiction. But the reader who’s not already in the know can get lost. Spotting “A.” as Gurganus and “H.” as Lange isn’t crucial: Cheever’s feelings are sufficient. Nor does it matter why he’s at the White House in 1965, where the Johnsons’ weariness suggests “the exaltations and backaches” of a long marriage: he’s a famous writer. But the uninitiated may be slow to realize a series of 1975 entries must have been written in a drug and alcohol clinic.

They’ll also miss some of the fun if they don’t know the fiction, for which the journals were a workbook. “Sauced, I speculate on a homosexual romance in prison,” he writes in 1972, a first intimation of what would become the 1977 best seller “Falconer.” “Sober, it doesn’t seem to amount to much.” Some journal entries got toned down, to their detriment, in the stories and novels. When the agoraphobic narrator of “The Angel of the Bridge” drives across the George Washington, he says “the strength went out of my legs.” In the journal, the symptom is “an excruciating tightening of his scrotum . . . and a painful shrinking of his male member.” Elsewhere in the journals we meet “Mrs. Zagreb,” perhaps a pseudonymous neighbor, perhaps pure invention, whose “tits were as big as turkeys”; aficionados know her from the story “Marito in Citta,” where a straying husband lusts after Mrs. Zagreb’s “front.” One 1966 entry features Mr. and Mrs. Nailles, of the 1969 novel “Bullet Park,” cleaning up after their dog; but the scene itself turns up in “Falconer,” with Ezekiel Farragut and his wife doing the cleanup–and delivering lines spoken by the Cheevers in another journal entry.

“Of course I cannot judge the book’,” a praise-hungry Cheever quotes an exquisitely icy Mary as saying when she reads “Bullet Park,” “because I know in every case the facts on which it is based.” This is the pattern of their domestic rows: Mary cold and furious, and Cheever, usually drunk, flipping from needy to nasty. “What emerges,” writes Cheever on reading some old journals, “are two astonishing contests, one with alcohol and one with my wife.” Before finding Alcoholics Anonymous in 1975-he never drank again-he’d pretty much lost both. “On waking … I imagine that the water glass on the table beside my bed is full of whiskey … At about half-past nine my hands begin to shake so that I can’t hold a paper or type correctly. At about ten I am in the pantry making my fix. Then my shaken carcass and my one-track mind are miraculously joined, and another day begins.” His abjectness before Mary is equally profound. “… Covering my poor, poor cock with my hands I kiss her good night, take a Nembutal and check out.”

But even at his worst, Cheever’s self-knowledge prevented him from fully savoring his self-pity: “I must say that had I been given a loving and uncomplicated woman I might very well have run.” He knew early on, as every writer does, that his truest life was a secret life. So this son of a bankrupt shoe salesman determined, as he wrote in 1948, “to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy.” His successful stories and novels were his ticket into Westchester County commuter country; they were also his reports from behind the lines. Yet his family, his dogs, his 18th-century stone house in Ossining weren’t just there to sit for their literary portraits.

“I am most deeply and continuously involved in the love of my wife and my children,” he wrote in 1958, long before H., A., and AA. “There is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living, and one is not exempted by being a poet. You have to manage your money intelligently and respect your emotional obligations. There is another world–I see this–there is chaos, and we are suspended above it by a thread. But the thread holds.” The image derives from Jonathan Edwards; the wishful thinking is Cheever’s own. He turned out to be right: John Cheever died in bed, in his beautiful house, surrounded by the family he’d grievously wronged and dearly loved. The tension in the thread is the journals’ underlying theme. You don’t have to be an alcoholic, a secret sexual outlaw or even a writer to empathize.