The Demons of Wapshot : THE JOURNALS OF JOHN CHEEVER <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 399 pp.)</i>

In his later years, and looking back over his work, John Cheever wrote that his stories expressed “My feeling of life as intense and profoundly broken encounters.”

So do these intense and profoundly broken journals. Stretching over the last half of his life, they are a train ride through scenery that is bright and dark by turns, but always infected by the terrors of the journey and the destination.

“The contemptible smallness, the mediocrity of my work, the disorder of my days,” he wrote in his basement study, even as he was turning out some of the most haunting American short stories of our time. “Haunting” is appropriate. He loved his house, his family, the folkways of his half-rural Hudson River suburb. But he loved them as a ghost does; yearning, cut off, bloodstained. The ghost in the basement and later, in a larger house, the ghost in the attic.

Seldom have a writer’s journals fused so closely life and art in their molten states. In these tormented entries, we see Cheever as both potter and clay; his emotions and their literary shaping churn in a continual mutual metamorphosis.

Almost every entry is spontaneous and almost every entry is utterly shaped. There are the hellish angers and silences of his marriage and its perduring bond, his agony and love with his children, his bisexual adulteries, his tormenting lust for alcohol, his lacerating and golden memories of childhood, his obsessions, literary insecurities, a disabling loneliness and the mystical comfort he drew from the natural world. All these things slip in and out of a state of art.

“In notes and letters many writers of astonishing talent will let down their guard, and one can see them blundering along like the rest of us,” Cheever’s son, Benjamin, notes in his beautifully written foreword. They are afraid of encountering themselves. As for his father, “He couldn’t write a postcard without encountering himself. But he’d write the postcard anyway. He’d encounter himself, transform himself and you’d have a hell of a postcard.”

The decision to publish these most private journals was made by Mary, his widow, and his three children because Cheever, toward the end of his life, made clear that he wanted them to appear after death. It made dying easier, Benjamin suggests; as if death, by releasing them, were another way to write. The difficulty of the decision is evident; the content is lacerating.

The editing has reduced the journals to one-twentieth of their original length but, apart from the masking of many names, it has not softened them. Often, the masking--by the use of sometimes random initials--is legitimate; sometimes it obscures unnecessarily. It would have helped to put in a few explanatory footnotes or, better, a modest biographical page or two at the start of each decade’s journals.

The editor is Robert Gottlieb--now editor of The New Yorker--who worked with Cheever on his last three novels and, more important, was the man who persuaded him to collect his best short stories in a book. The collection’s appearance, in 1978, blazoned a somewhat fading reputation. It did more than anything else to confirm Cheever’s position as a major American writer.

Worry that his work was small-scale--in length and in its suburban settings--runs through the journals. Cheever wistfully envies the massive Saul Bellow; he even envies the microscopic Irwin Shaw for his “big” novels. The worry runs touchingly and comically into his distaste of his own small size. There is a Randy Newman-like outburst about how disgusting little people are. Casually elegant--in a shabby Wasp way--and graceful despite his modest height, Cheever was afraid that, growing old and less elegant, he would begin to resemble a janitor.

In his sense of solitude, he prized camaraderie with other writers. He felt a particular and complex bond with John Updike, who also wrote of transcendence in the lives of the suburban upper-middle class. Updike’s writing is more subtle, prolific and varied. He can verge on silliness. Cheever is darker and, at his best, more magical and profound. He can verge on madness. He is the hermit saint to Updike’s humane and worldly cardinal.

When Updike gets on the cover of Time magazine, Cheever writes a discerning line: “I defend myself by saying that he has developed an impractical degree of sensibility and that my own stubborn and sometimes idle prose has more usefulness.” But when a practical joker phones at night to tell him that Updike has died in a car crash, he pays moving tribute. At another point, though, he dreams that Updike is holding a tennis ball and when he drops it, he, Cheever, will die.

Even his dreams are an artful mix of malice and innocence. He would like to be famous; he dreams that President Eisenhower is reading “The Wapshot Chronicle” while Mamie reads the newspaper. Another time: “I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.” Fame--and smallness.

Over the years, we see him writing in shame and self-hatred about early homosexual experiences and later yearnings. As he grows older, he tells us, with more detail and more acceptance, about various encounters and one or two longer-term relationships--notably with the writer who would come and help nurse him when he was dying.

He alludes to unspecific flirtations with women and, specifically though without names, to two brief but intense affairs. One is with an actress who has been identified elsewhere as Hope Lange, who starred in the movie version of “The Swimmer.” And there are periodic undetailed references to his sexual relationship with Mary.

The unsparing account of his life with his wife is the most naked and horrifying theme in the book; his alcohol addiction--which he overcame in his later years--runs second, some ways back.

He writes of Mary’s long, cold silences, and of her brutally cutting remarks. He writes bitterly of having to breakfast alone and hearing his wife “screaming obscenities at the refrigerator.” He tells of her mocking him for impotence and ugliness. He also writes of sporadic tenderness and occasional warm lovemaking.

In many ways, it sounds like 20 years of a hell that ranges from Sartre’s stony “No Exit” to something closer to Gustave Dore’s illustrations for “The Inferno.” Here is one of the stony passages. He wakes at night and hears her weeping; it has begun to rain. As he sometimes does, he uses the third person--Life? Art?: “The loudness of the rain wakes her. ‘You were crying,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had a nightmare.’ She moved away from him and fell asleep again.”

He can write brutally. “I wake . . . mount my wife, eat my eggs, walk my dogs. It is the day before Easter.” It is, of course, a role he is trying on: arrogant 18th-Century squire. But it is also real. Their married life teemed with Cheever’s roles. He lived them and he wrote them. And, we surmise, they are part of the connubial hell and of Mary’s silence and rage.

Almost never does he try, in his journals, to put himself in her place. He treats her as a force: malevolent, cherishing sometimes, inscrutable. We speculate, of course. No doubt Mary had her own demons. But we get this startling sense that Cheever needed to place her in the role of dark deity, perhaps, in part, to create. Like Job, perhaps, whose lyrically desperate voice flourishes out of God’s silence.

One of the long, recurring, rending images in the journals is of Cheever’s warring needs for solitude and companionship. In his basement or attic, he would sense the life of his family, long for it, and register his separation. He would make sorties; he would play with his children, scythe the lawn, take long walks. Despite the agony with Mary, he writes that he could never leave these things he loved so much. Besides, “people named John and Mary never divorce.”

As in his stories, so in his journals: Beyond the pain, lusts, degradations, quarrels, fears, there is something else: his pagan gods. It is Cheever’s homosexual encounters that suggest his famous Satyrs: lusty, amoral, free. His heterosexual encounters seem milder and more passive.

Writing of nature, the weather, the light, Cheever’s journals express a sense of otherness that is both joy and renewal. It rains one night, and in the morning, the lawn is covered with yellow leaves. “I looked up the river into the mountains. They were covered with snow . . . the quality of the air is omniscient.” There are days of subzero temperatures. “A white sky at eight, white as the snow, cloudless and so brilliant that it lifts one’s eyes, with a faint pain, upward. . . . It is that fine cold that seems to frost the hair in your nostrils and that has some subtle fragrance of its own. . . .”

The light of the Hudson Valley inspired a whole school of 19th- Century painters. Cheever, in his Ossining home above the river, is a Luminist. The Hudson, its far blue promontories and big skies are full of ghost legends; Washington Irving wrote about them. What, one wonders, would have become of the spirit of immanence that possesses Cheever’s work had he lived on the other side of Westchester County, the flat side? Larchmont, say, or Scarsdale?