Truth Seeker

Rhonda Byrne has a secret. I have a secret, too. My book, Strides, is about running. While writing it, I got a little lighter, a little faster. Maybe reading it will help your running and your weight. But I'm not making you any promises. Ms. Byrne is making you promises. Not just about running, either. Read her bestseller, The Secret, and “you can have, be or do anything you want.” This means that I—approaching 60—can run a marathon in two hours and four minutes, smashing the world record. So that's a great secret. But I have a secret, too. Both parents were writers. Which means I was born to read. I took the road less and less traveled by.

It's hyperbolic to claim that books saved my life. They've been company, though, in times of trouble—witty, loving honest friends.

In life, we motor around one another like Civil War ironclads, firing cannon, raising and lowering flags. Without books, real books, life would be a warlike and lonely venture.

Running, like literature, can shatter the shell of self. I have run distance with both sons, and it's a family axiom that when running hard the brain doesn't get enough oxygen to support a falsehood. I learned, just for instance, that a potent cocktail can be made out of Mountain Dew and lemon extract. A casual acquaintance once told me—during a long run—how his father died. It was while running that I first heard of male impotence.

The longer you run together, the thinner the membrane that separates one soul from another. Cross the finish line at the New York City Marathon as I did yesterday for my 12th time, and you get a taste of world peace. Man, woman, German, Jew, we're all in this together. We're soaked in sweat. Sometimes daubed with blood. We feel wretched and look worse, but nobody's alone. Nobody is unique. Nobody's special, and everybody's exceptional.

Like literature, the long race has stripped artifice away. The suffering is shared. Success we rush to crow about. Failure, doubt and loneliness, we keep to ourselves. Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry alone.

I split with a girl once just after we'd passed that point at which I hadn't another friend in the world. The friend I found was William Butler Yeats. He wrote a poem titled “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.” Here's how it ends:

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

that is most difficult.

To be in such company was a splendid consolation. My sorrow was no longer a solitary, shameful secret.

My father, John Cheever, had a secret he was ashamed of. After he won the Pulitzer, he and I watched him being interviewed on TV. He said that he felt freer communicating with his eldest son (that's me) in fiction than in person. I was sitting on a bed beside a man who had traveled to a studio in Chicago to tell me that if I wanted to understand him, I should read his books.

Indeed his secret—the secret of his bisexuality, in life concealed almost until death, was always there to read about in his books.

And no, I don't think I'm William Butler Yeats. It's just that he's in the game I mean to play. Yeats plays it, as does Pop, Orwell, Thoreau and even Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “And I am waiting happily/ for things to get much worse/ before they improve.”

Rhonda's playing another game. She's not a writer. She's a shrewd salesperson. A bestseller. I've been in sales myself. I've sold Pontiacs. I enjoyed it.

Salesmen ensorcell. “I don't care if your wife beat you, and your shoes hurt,” an older colleague told me, “you've got a smile on your face.” Salesmen conceal the unpleasant truth. Writers—serious writers—don't just avoid deception; they seek the truth, however unpleasant. There's a candor on the page not found on the selling floor, in the dining room or even the bedroom.

When I run alone, I wear an ID necklace. It has my wife's phone number, and my eldest son's cell. And these four words:

Be secret and exult.