by John Cheever
Cheever himself was the cause of Miss Barlow’s final outburst. He used to dance a lot with a girl named Hope, and one night she asked the band to play “Diga-Diga-Doo”—so he wrote—and they “went all over the floor until that shrill whistle blew” and he heard Miss Barlow’s confident and stagy voice address him. “John Cheever,” she said, “your dancing is atrocious.” She had seen a great deal of dancing, but never anything like his. “I am ashamed of you, John. I am ashamed of you. I’m glad your mother isn’t here. I will give you an illustration of your dancing.” The illustration was not funny at all, and he did his best to dance on the balls of his feet the rest of the evening.
That night he went home and dreamed that Miss Barlow had died. A week later he found out that the dream had come true. “Of course I killed her,” he wrote in hyperbole, and he thought about it sometimes when he was with a girl who danced as if she had been taught in the assemblies “outside of Buffalo or Baltimore or Boston or Philadelphia.” He thought about the corsage and the whistle, and the dance music that had been popular, and the smell of the locker room, “and the black elms and the mansard roofs, and that whole world that has become … fugitive and strange.…”
He did not so much want to return to that world as to memorialize it, and to understand his feelings. He did not long for his youth, ever. And it was not by accident that he had helped to burst the balloons and had sailed around the dance floor in an exhibition sure to elicit the dressing-down he got. He could not change his family’s circumstances, nor even talk about them. What he could do was to act out his frustration, to rebel not against his parents but against surrogate authority in whatever form it presented itself: the black-clad figure of his dancing instructor, and still more obviously, the teachers and administrators of Thayer Academy.
The most dramatic fact about Cheever’s prep-school experience is that he was expelled in the spring of 1930, during the second term of his junior year. A long history led up to the expulsion, for the academic promise he had shown at Thayerlands seemed to vanish in the upper school. Louise Saul, who taught him freshman English, remembers him as a student who was “sloppy” about punctuation and who “didn’t take well to discipline.” The sloppiness extended to his appearance as well. He looked so shaggy that at least once his classmates collected a few pennies and escorted him to the barbershop.
His grades ranged from mediocre to terrible. In the 1926–27 school year, he got Cs and C-minuses in English and ancient history, but flunked both Latin and Algebra. (“His math was horrendous,” classmate Robert Daugherty remembers.) The next year followed a similar pattern. He earned Cs in English, Latin, and medieval history, and flunked French and math. During 1928–29, whether because of family finances or Thayer Academy policies, he went to Quincy High School, where his grades were 55 in English, 45 in French, o in Latin, and 63 in plane geometry, with a D in physical education. In the fall of 1929, he was back at Thayer as a “special” student on probation, and at the time of his expulsion he had a B-plus/C-minus in an English literature course, a C in grammar, and a D in German, and was once again failing French. This 1929–30 course schedule, without any math or science or Latin, was most unusual and probably designed to give Cheever a chance to shine.
Grading standards were strict at the time, and it was possible for a C student at Thayer, like John’s brother, Fred, to be admitted to Dartmouth, but a failing grade was a failing grade, and eventually the school asked Cheever to leave. He was in his own words “an intractable student” who did the assigned work when and if it pleased him. “John was not happy at Thayer nor was Thayer happy about his lack of achievement or his attitude,” teacher Grace Osgood recalled.
The roster of brilliant people who have failed in school is a long one—Churchill comes to mind, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and every year, hundreds of students are dismissed from American prep schools. But Cheever was probably the only one to use such a rejection as a way of launching his career. He sat down and wrote a story about it, applying a thin veneer of fiction to his own experience. Then he sent the story, called “Expelled,” to Malcolm Cowley at The New Republic and had it accepted for publication.
Surely this was one of the most unusual across-the-transom acceptances in magazine history. A youth in Quincy, Massachusetts, barely eighteen, is kicked out of school and writes a story about it that justifies himself by attacking the dullness and lockstep curriculum of the college preparatory system in general and his own institution in particular. In 999 cases out of a thousand, such a submission would have turned into a political harangue and been rejected without a second glance. But Cheever’s tale was different. There was something about it that caught Cowley’s attention and held it.
He knew how to start, for one thing: with a promise of revelations to follow and an economy of language and incisive wit reminiscent of the early Hemingway stories Cheever had been reading. “It didn’t come all at once,” “Expelled” begins. “It took a very long time.… The first signs were cordialities on the part of the headmaster. He was never nice to anybody unless he was a football star or hadn’t paid his tuition or was going to be expelled.”
The eighteen-year-old author also understood that it would be wrong to issue any diatribes. Instead, he drew a series of portraits that illustrate the school’s problems far more effectively than he could possibly describe them. A former army colonel comes to make the Memorial Day speech. Usually a politician did the job, and told the boys that theirs was the greatest country in the world, and they should be proud to fight for it. But the colonel has seen his friends die in the Great War and cannot supply the expected sentiments. He describes the terrors of battle, then breaks down and begins to whimper. Everyone is embarrassed. Next Memorial Day, the school will be sure to invite a mayor or governor to speak. The charismatic Laura Driscoll, a history teacher who refuses to acknowledge that history is dead, is dismissed for speaking out in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. English teacher “Margaret Court-wright was very nice,” but she “pulled her pressed hair across her forehead” to hide the fact that she was slightly bald; her interpretation of Hamlet “was the one accepted on college-board papers,” so that no one had to get a new interpretation.
As for the headmaster himself, his is the inside world of the office, with chairs arranged in a semicircle and “gravy-colored” brocade curtains. When he tells Cheever of his dismissal, the youth gazes longingly out the window. “I was tired of seeing spring with walls and awnings to intercept the sweet sun and the hard fruit.… I wanted to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows.” The tension is strong between the confinements of school and the freedom of the natural world. The pull of the outdoors, “elegant and savage and fleshly,” would stay with Cheever always, and nearly always it would be opposed in his mind to the limitations imposed by ordinary existence, by house and workplace, commitment and duty.
Finally, the writer of “Expelled” knew how to win the sympathy of his audience. It is August now, he writes, and he is At Home as the fall approaches:
Everyone is preparing to go back to school. I have no school to go back to.
I am not sorry. I am not at all glad.
It is strange to be so very young and have no place to report at nine o’clock.
When the story appeared in the October 1, 1930, issue of The New Republic, a left-wing periodical rarely consulted by Thayer students, their parents, or the faculty, it outraged the sensitivities of all three groups. Cheever had not been fair to the school, they felt. He had distorted the truth, they insisted: there was no crying colonel, and the history teacher had not been fired for political reasons. He had been cruel to Harriet Gemmel (Margaret Court-wright) and Stacy Baxter Southworth (the headmaster), they maintained. The only good thing was that he had not mentioned Thayer by name. The school’s partisans were right to object, perhaps, that Cheever had taken liberties with the truth, and exaggerated the school’s stagnation. But it was a story he was writing, after all, and a remarkable one coming
from a student who had been expelled in his junior year. Without Stacy Baxter Southworth, Cheever was to say many years later, he might have ended up pumping gas. And “Expelled” might as well have been called “Reminiscences of a Young Sorehead,” he also observed. But that was to minimize the accomplishment of the story, an achievement so unusual as to make one wonder whether the failure in the classroom was his alone.
The evidence of “Expelled” and of Cheever’s transcripts strongly argues that he was dismissed for poor scholastic performance. As he reconstructed the story in later years, however, the immediate offense became smoking. He was caught with a cigarette ablaze and, he maintained, he wanted to be caught. He did start smoking young. As he wrote in “The Jewels of the Cabots” (1972), a bluestocking came to the school to make a choleric chapel speech against the vice. Could the students imagine Christ on the Cross, lighting a cigarette? Could they picture the Virgin Mary smoking? Didn’t they know that a tiny drop of nicotine would kill a full-grown pig? In short, she “made smoking irresistible.” Smoke he did, undoubtedly, but there is nothing in the records at Thayer or in the memories of those there at the time to suggest that it had anything to do with his dismissal.
On rare occasions Cheever proposed yet another explanation. According to this version—and it was not unusual for him to supply alternative accounts of events in his own life—he was expelled for homosexuality, or as he once said extravagantly, because he had seduced the son of a faculty member. Probably he meant to shock his audience. But whatever the merits of this interpretation, and again there is no hard testimony in its support, it is significant that Cheever articulated it at all. Smoking was a subject that might be taken lightly. For a man of his generation, homosexuality was not. The issue troubled his last decades.
BROTHER
1930–1934
John Cheever grew up at risk. From a father dominated by his wife, he inherited a propensity to strong drink, an extraordinary sense of smell, a talent for yarn spinning, and a nagging fear of failure. His mother, fiercely independent, left him her vast fund of energy and strength of will, along with an acute social sensitivity and a deep resentment of powerful women. Both parents shared in bequeathing their second son the most unfortunate legacy of all: the conviction that he was not loved. As Cheever’s wife, Mary, came to believe, “that was the trouble” with her husband. “He never had any love. His parents never paid much attention to him.”
In part, this was simply the Yankee way. In the Massachusetts of Cheever’s youth a chilly formality reigned. Even within the family, physical contact was taboo. This restraint had its effect on most New England writers. Emily Dickinson’s brother bent to kiss his father in his coffin, something he had never dared do while his father was alive. In inland Maine, E. A. Robinson wrote in some exaggeration that “children learn[ed] to walk on frozen toes” and thought passion “a soilure of the wits.” No more than fictional cousin Honora in The Wapshot Chronicle would John’s parents have wanted to be caught in “an open demonstration of affection.” When drinking, his father would sometimes fondle his mother and blow down her neck, but these attentions were not encouraged. For the most part his parents did not hug, did not kiss. John was brought up not to touch his face, much less any other part of himself, much less anyone else.
In the case of the Cheevers, the physical reserve mandated by New England mores worked to conceal even as it confirmed the split within the family. At least in public, John adopted a similar conspicuous restraint (and later extended it to his own marriage and family). Understanding the cost of the coolly turned cheek, he turned his own first.
There were times when he would gladly have repudiated his heritage. When Leander Wapshot smokes a cigarette in church, his son Coverly—the character in the Wapshot novels most closely modeled on Cheever himself—wishes he were the child of Mr. Pludzinski. Issuing from a position comfortably inside the dominant culture, the remark bespoke something of the author’s sense of alienation. His mother often cautioned him not to forget that he was “a Cheevah,” but neither parent had provided him with a clear image of what that was. He had no sure sense of himself, or of his own worth.
The problem of identity was complicated by confusion about sexuality. From the perspective of hindsight—the knowledge that Cheever became vigorously bisexual during the last decades of his life—it seems likely that he must have had both homosexual and heterosexual stirrings in his youth. His journals confess as much, and so did his fatherly advice to his son Federico at thirteen. “You are coming to an age,” he told the boy, “when you won’t know who you want to go to bed with, but you’ll get over it.” So it must have been for him, except that he did not entirely get over it.
His parents, who did not much concern themselves with young John otherwise, were troubled by what they regarded as his tendencies toward homosexuality. In a number of ways, he fit into patterns associated in the public mind with growing up gay. He was the product of an unhappy marriage in which the mother had become the dominant figure. He was short (about five feet five at full growth) and as his boyhood pudginess disappeared rather slight. He was not very well coordinated, and played on no athletic teams, preferring to swim or hike or skate or bike in contact with the natural world. In the only hint of effeminacy about him, he spoke in rather curious mid-Atlantic tones that blended his mother’s English with his father’s Yankee accent. He was interested in—even passionate about—the arts, as both a participant and a spectator. Dorothy Ela remembers him as a tease who used to pull her curls at Thayerlands, but there seem to have been no memorable girlfriends during his high school years. His closest friend was Fax Ogden; he missed him a good deal when Fax was sent off to Culver Military Academy in Indiana. John’s parents thought any such attachment unhealthy. “I did not respond consciously to the anxiety my parents endured over the possibility that I might be a pervert,” he wrote in 1968, “but I seem to have responded at some other level.… had they been less anxious, less suspicious about my merry games of grabarse I might have had an easier life.”
The difficulty was, of course, that he shared his parents’ revulsion against homosexuality. He had heard the words of opprobrium even before he knew what they meant. Queen, queer, fag, fairy, pansy—these were the epithets used to describe others, and others at a distance. It was unthinkable that they should apply to oneself. The attitude of Coverly Wapshot, in his comic preemployment interview with the psychologist in The Wapshot Chronicle, probably paralleled Cheever’s own.
“Well, I guess I know what you mean,” Coverly said. “I did plenty of that when I was young but I swore off it a long time ago.… There’s one in this place where I’m living now. He’s always asking me to come in and look at his pictures. I wish he’d leave me alone. You see, sir, if there’s one thing in the world that I wouldn’t want to be it’s a fruit.”
He has also had “bad dreams,” Coverly admits. “I dream I do it with this woman” who looks like the women on barbershop calendars. “And sometimes,” he adds, blushing and hanging his head, “I dream that I do it with men. Once I dreamed I did it with a horse.”
In retrospect it is clear that homosexuality formed a central element in Cheever’s fiction both before and after the trials of Coverly Wapshot. But often—as in the example above—the topic is treated humorously, as if it were of slight importance. Cheever assumed much the same posture in discussing his own situation. “Well, have you ever had a homosexual experience?” his daughter, Susan, asked him in a 1977 interview, taking over the role of the Chronicle’s psychologist. “My answer to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, all tremendously gratifying, and all between the ages of nine and eleven,” her father answered. Elsewhere he spoke casually of rolling off “his last naked scoutmaster.” Such humorous hyperbole was contrived to shock and amuse, and to forestall inquiry. It also provided the mature Cheever, who like most men of his generation had been raised to despise homosexuals, with a way of confessing his inclinations. As a boy he could say not
hing at all.
Though uncertain about his sexuality, he knew very early what he wanted to do with his life. He had made the decision to become a writer at eleven, and it lasted. Books became his consolation, as he began educating himself for his chosen career by reading among authors not taught at Thayer. He found the books downtown at the Thomas Crane Public Library, a handsome Romanesque building designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. There he discovered Joyce, whose explorations of human sexuality had appalled Miss Gemmel. He read Flaubert in translation (or possibly, as he later said, in the original). Madame Bovary, whose protagonist seeks to escape from an ordinary marriage in a provincial community, became his favorite book, his “Yale College and his Harvard.” He read the Garnett translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as they came out. He started reading Proust, who both enchanted and shocked him. Through John Donne he fell in love with poetry, and read Yeats and Eliot and the Romantics. He read Hemingway, and appropriated some of the taut sarcasm of his early writing for “Expelled.” He had yet a great deal to learn, but had already found out that he would have to teach himself and that his masters would be those who spoke from within the covers of a book.
The other great solace of Cheever’s adolescence was provided by his brother, Fred, who came home to Quincy in the spring of 1926 after two years at Dartmouth. (With his father unemployed, Fred’s college tuition became a real burden.) The two years apart had changed the relationship between the two brothers. Now the difference in their ages seemed of less consequence. They began going to the beach together, and hiking into the hills for long talks about sex and art and politics. Fred reassured his younger brother that his sexual development was perfectly all right, and encouraged him to venture into Boston for the burlesque shows at the Old Howard. In effect they formed their own bond as their parents’ marriage unraveled before their eyes. As the autobiographical story “The Brothers” put it, “in trying to make something of their lives, to bring some peace and order into the household, they became deeply attached to each other.”