Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  As they worked together, the hired man tried to indoctrinate Cheever in the mysteries of his secular dogma. He would not whip the balky mare which sometimes refused to pull the plow, but he also declined to give her a name. Naming farm animals, he proclaimed, was “bourgeois sentimentality.” One evening he slipped a newspaper headline under Cheever’s door: LUXURY LIVING WEAKENS U.S., it read. Cheever put these incidents into “The Summer Farmer,” a 1948 story that pictures the Communist as unfairly wronged by a young gentleman farmer. Spreading out imaginatively from this experience, he wrote two other stories—“Vega” and “How Dr. Wareham Kept His Servants”—sympathetic to the plight of East Europeans who brought almost nothing to this country except their political passion. These were not really political stories at all, however. The hills of Vermont and New Hampshire were, he observed, full of old Communists from Latvia and Estonia and Russia and Poland and Germany—all of them aliens in a strange land. It was their alienation that commanded his sympathy.

  Back in the city, the Cheevers surmounted the minor crisis of dispatching Susie to nursery school. Each morning they maintained a cheerfully upbeat demeanor before sending her off to the Walt Whitman School. Each afternoon they grilled her, unsuccessfully, on the activities of the day. Social life had its hazards as well. They went to a party at the Fields’ where John performed an “atomic waltz” with Betty Fast, wife of writer Howard Fast. He carried her on his shoulders; she put out her cigarette in his ear; he dumped her on the floor.

  Life was not all fun and games, however. Now that the war was over, the thirty-four-year-old Cheever was a full-time writer again, determined to make a living on the strength of his talent. For purposes of discipline, he established a daily routine. Each morning he dressed in his good suit and hat and rode down in the elevator with the other professional men who lived in the building. They got off on the first floor, however, while he continued to the basement. There he settled to work at a makeshift desk in the windowless storage room. He stripped to his shorts, hung up his coat and pants, and hammered away at his typewriter in the two-fingered style he had taught himself. He put the suit back on at lunchtime and at the end of the day for the elevator ride back upstairs.

  His major project was a novel, and now he had a contract to spur him on. Hoping to build on their investment in The Way Some People Live, Random House gave him $2,400 of a $4,800 advance toward a novel early in 1946. At first Cheever was optimistic about its progress. It’s “coming along nicely,” he wrote editor Robert Linscott in September 1946; the first draft should be done by November. He did not tell Linscott that from the start he harbored private doubts about the value of his novel-in-progress. He felt real pressure to produce the book. “I’m the only man in the east 50s who hasn’t finished his novel,” he wrote John Weaver. At the end of 1947, responding to Linscott’s request, he produced an outline for the Random House sales force.

  The writing itself he was generally pleased with, Cheever observed in his preliminary remarks. He thought of his novel-in-progress as having the polish and charm “of a greeting card with an obscene message.” The New England of his youth came flooding back to him in memory, and it was this that gave his novel-to-be its “greeting card” quality. In subject matter, the book returned to the milieu of The Holly Tree. The story was about the Field family, who in 1936 lived on a farm on the North River south of Boston after losing their house to foreclosure. The Fields’ poverty, though unmentioned, affects everything in their lives. The principal characters are father Aaron, who had once been successful but lost his money; mother Sarah, “a run-of-the-mill New England matriarch” who has given up her beauty without a struggle and dreams of being invited to the White House; and their sons, Eben, “personable and cruel,” and Tom, an “outing-club type” who leaves Dartmouth in his sophomore year to go to work in a textile house.

  The “parochial charm” of the family conceals an impulse to violence. Thus Cheever intended to contrast sentimental scenes of such pleasant rituals as berry picking with others depicting the “lewdness and cruelty” that was also part of the picture. Aaron steals and sells his wife’s jewelry. Eben leaves home. The gulf between Aaron and younger son Tom grows wider when the father attempts to seduce one of the son’s girlfriends. Next Aaron tries to kill himself. Finally he leaves the farm to escape an illegitimate daughter, and the book follows Tom, Eben, Sarah, and others as they search for Aaron in Boston, New York, and Washington. There were some “wonderful girls” in this part, Cheever wrote, “and some wonderful ceremonies.”

  Meanwhile, Sarah Field opens a gift shop to support herself and what’s left of the family. Then, “for reasons that involve them all and that should be rooted in the first words of the book,” she commits a terrible murder. Now it is wartime. Tom goes off to serve in the Pacific. Sarah escapes prosecution. Aaron returns home and is drowned while swimming off Cohasset in 1944. The book ends with Tom on his way back for the funeral.

  This outline of a novel—the Field Version, to give it a name—pointed forward to The Wapshot Chronicle and like that book derived much of its physical and emotional authenticity from Cheever’s own background. His grandfather Aaron, like Aaron Field, deserted his family. His own parents lost their comfortable home in Quincy to foreclosure. His mother ran a gift shop. Cheever sometimes thought of older brother Fred, who left Dartmouth to work for a textile firm in Boston, as “personable and cruel.” Obviously both the Field Version and The Wapshot Chronicle are family sagas, with a concentration on the inner dynamics of a family in economic difficulties and a celebration of ceremony reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel.

  Whatever its merits and whatever it promised of work completed—Cheever nowhere mentions how much actual writing he’s done—this outline was greeted enthusiastically by Linscott. “That’s a wonderful presentation,” he wrote Cheever on December 22, 1947. “You have certainly whetted my appetite for the book, and I shan’t be happy until I read it.” A long unhappy period awaited both Linscott and Cheever, who was forced to announce delay after delay. He thought he had finished the book late in 1948, but his publishers thought not. More work was needed, and Cheever did what he could. The number of good, durable chapters was steadily growing, he reported in January 1950. Writing novels, he pointed out nine months later, was still his “principal aim in life.” But progress was fitful at best, for in the short term he had to write stories to support himself and his family and simply couldn’t spare the time or energy to complete his novel. It was a frustrating business, and Cheever became increasingly sensitive about Linscott’s inquiries.

  Most of the new stories dealt with the Upper East Side he was inhabiting. In them he went beyond the spare unemotional prose of his early New Yorker work, and beyond “the funny, funny stories” of the “Town House” series. He was developing his capacity to suggest a whole life in miniature, to connote through significant detail the entire biography of his characters. To this bit of naturalistic legerdemain he now applied his gift for fantasy. In “The Enormous Radio” and “Torch Song,” both stories published in 1947, he artfully managed to combine the mundane and the mystical. So persuasive is the anthropological voice at the beginning of “The Enormous Radio,” with its revelation that Jim and Irene Westcott “went to the theatre an average of 10.3 times a year” and otherwise fit into “that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability” reported in college alumni bulletins, that it seems almost natural when the narrator reveals that the Westcotts’ new radio transmits the unhappy quarrels of other residents in their apartment building. This circumstance, defying electronic explanation, confronts the Westcotts with precisely those things about their marriage that will not be mentioned in college alumni bulletins—and serves to remind us all of our sometime hypocrisy.

  “Torch Song” delves still deeper into psychological aberration. Joan Harris, it is suggested, feeds on the decline and death of the several men she loves and cares for in their final months. But again the world she
lives in is so convincingly recognizable and concrete that her vampirism becomes just as real as the furnished room “in the badlands west of Central Park” where Jack Lorey awaits her return as “the lewd and searching shape of death.” “Torch Song” is also notable for its depiction of a woman who destroys the men in her life. This powerful female character, cruel if not always murderous, was often to reappear in Cheever’s fiction.

  At the beginning of 1947, Mary Cheever started teaching English at Sarah Lawrence two days a week. She liked the work so much that by summer she was planning to get a master’s degree at Columbia. Family matters interfered with this plan. Susie went through the usual childhood diseases. When she had chicken pox, so did her father, and Mary nursed them both. Then it was clear by the fall, when she was to start at Columbia, that she was pregnant again and the master’s degree was abandoned. On May 4, 1948, her thirtieth birthday, Mary gave birth to Benjamin Hale Cheever. A “fine looking, dark-eyed lively boy,” he was very unlike Susan as a baby. John was delighted with his arrival, and from the beginning Mary felt a powerful bond to her first son.

  In the meantime, work had been going forward on a stage adaptation of Cheever’s “Town House” stories. By the fall of 1948, the play was finally ready to open on Broadway. Bernie Hart had purchased the rights as early as January 1946 and put Herman Mankiewicz to work on the script. When this effort failed to pan out, Hart sold the rights, and the play that opened on Broadway was written by Gertrude Tonkonogy, staged by George S. Kaufman, and produced by Max Gordon. With such professionals behind the venture, Cheever had hopes that Town House would make his fortune.

  In Boston, where the play had its out-of-town opening on September 2, the auspices looked good. Cheever went up in advance to generate hometown author publicity. In a long article he wrote for the Boston Post, he radiated enthusiasm for the production. Tonkonogy had done an excellent job of playwriting. Mary Wickes brought “a richness far beyond the ordinary pathos of comedy” to her portrayal of the awkward and shy intellectual housewife. June Duprez was “just right” as the beauty, and Hiram Sherman and James Monks materialized onstage exactly as he “realized them in the stories.” Max Gordon called it “one of the funniest plays I have ever had the honor to produce.” The Boston audience, full of family relations and former cleaning women, seemed to agree. There was optimistic talk about a big Hollywood sale. At this stage, according to Cheever, Kaufman decided to add more jokes, with disastrous results.

  Opening night on Broadway was an absolute frost. The Cheevers went with the Ettlingers and Gus Lobrano, and “the play was terrible,” Don recalls, “not at all what John had in mind.” The set, which “cost as much to build as a twenty-room house with running water,” was magnificent. Mary Wickes was excellent. Otherwise the play was a disaster. Town House closed on September 30, after twelve performances. Cheever made fifty-four dollars. The producers lost a hundred thousand.

  Even this experience was not a dead loss, however. In three separate stories, Cheever drew on his observation of the New York theatrical scene. All three contrast the simple unpretentiousness of ordinary people—twice playwrights from the country, once a teenager without affection—with the glossy world behind the footlights. One of these, “The Opportunity,” sold to Cosmopolitan for $1,750 in July 1949. That was “a good deal more than I’ve gotten before,” he wrote Edith Haggard of Curtis Brown Associates, the agents he had just hired to replace Lieber. He was still free-lancing precariously, without a successful novel or play or movie sale to bolster the family finances, and he stuck to his daily writing regimen in the basement.

  Often he talked with the men who worked in the building—the super, the doorman, the handyman—as he made his daily way to his subterranean cubbyhole. Never were these men so unified and happy as on the day after Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey in November 1948. Every inch a Democrat, Cheever sat around in the basement with the building employees, gleefully exchanging stories about how stricken the Republican apartment dwellers looked.

  President Truman’s election did little to halt the advance of the postwar Red scare. Earlier that year the left-wing Partisan Review began a brouhaha over the award of the Bollingen Prize to the pro-Fascist Ezra Pound. In the summer the Russians blockaded Berlin. In August, Whittaker Chambers publicly accused Alger Hiss of treason. The climate was right for witch-hunts: in February 1949 Robert Lowell accused Yaddo’s Elizabeth Ames of harboring Communists. Ames was “a diseased organ, chronically poisoning the whole system,” he declared, and he went to the Yaddo board to ask for her dismissal. Lowell, then in one of his manic phases, persuaded three other colonists to join him in bringing his indictment. Cheever was among those who rallied to her defense.

  The trouble began with a news report alleging that Agnes Smedley served as a contact for a Soviet spy ring. Smedley, a social scientist with a particular interest in the Far East, had in fact lived at Yaddo for almost fifteen years as the close friend and confidante of Ames. But Ames had sent her away nearly a year before the story broke in the New York Times. By the time Yaddo’s board of trustees met late in February, the Times had withdrawn the accusation against Smedley. Lowell persisted in demanding Ames’s dismissal anyway. She had consorted with Leonard Ehrlich, a “proletarian novelist,” it was alleged. Suspicious jokes had been made about “Molotov cocktail parties.” Ames’s private secretary, for five years a paid FBI informant, had heard “people talking very brilliantly red,” and reported them. After thirty pages of testimony of this sort, the board decided to postpone a decision until a meeting in New York on Saturday, March 26.

  The delay gave Ames’s friends and supporters time to mobilize under the leadership of Eleanor Clark. A group of five—Harvey Breit, Cheever, Clark, Alfred Kazin, and Kappo Phelan—composed a letter to former colonists asking them to sign a petition on behalf of the director. They were firm “anti-Stalinists,” the petition proclaimed, but were also “outraged” by the “smear-technique” that threatened the welfare of the Yaddo where they all had lived and worked. Seventy-five letters went out on March 21. Five days later, the group had fifty-one signers lined up. With these documents in hand, the five defenders went down to Wall Street on March 26 and saved the day for Ames and Yaddo. Cheever had been sought out as one of the five organizers, Clark recalled, because of his own apolitical stance and because of his deep sense of loyalty to Elizabeth Ames. “He was wonderful in his loyalties,” she said.

  Back in his tawdry basement workroom, Cheever managed only an occasional swipe at his novel. What he really wanted to write were some long stories in which he could build on the progress he’d made in “The Enormous Radio,” “Torch Song,” and others. In November 1950 he applied to the Guggenheim Foundation to sustain him while he wrote these stories. He had been trying to support himself writing fiction since he was twenty-one, Cheever pointed out, and it had been a chancy enterprise at best. His connection with The New Yorker helped, but still there was a terrible “financial uncertainty.” He was confident that he’d grown in his craft over the years. Now, though, he needed a block of time to make a further advance. He proposed to write four or five long stories, using the material that another writer might put into a novel.

  In supporting Cheever’s candidacy for the grant, Cowley pointed out that his stories were already “much better than they would have to be to be sold to The New Yorker.” And he stressed that the thirty-eight-year-old writer was at a turning point in his career. “He can go on to new things or go back; he can’t stand still.”

  SCARBOROUGH

  1951–1955

  “I got the horse right here,” one of the gamblers in Guys and Dolls insisted on the phonograph. There was bean dip and vegetable curry to eat, and whiskey and gin to drink. No one in the spring of 1951 served wine or water. Like most parties at Margot Morrow’s, this one was attended by a mélange of the successful and promising, mostly from the theatrical and literary worlds. The party was for the John Cheevers, who were moving to the sub
urbs the next day. The William Maxwells were there, as were John Becker, Dr. Dana Ashley, the Paul Osborns, perhaps a dozen others, and the hostess, of course—an attractive divorcée who danced and acted and was for the time “more or less camping out” at her house at 4 Riverview Terrace on New York’s East Side.

  It was a beautiful May evening, and some of the guests spilled out onto the sidewalk, admiring the view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. Cheever sat on the outer sill of a first-floor window, with his legs dangling over the areaway, talking to those outdoors. Then, suddenly, he came flying out of the window and narrowly missed being impaled on the spear-sharp iron fence that enclosed the areaway. His injuries were not serious: he suffered only a bruised knee and twisted ankle. But he might have been killed.

  As in all cases of defenestration three possibilities obtained. Cheever knew he had not fallen. He also knew he had not jumped, though in a 1960 magazine article he wrote that he had. He had been pushed, though by whom and why were questions he never knew the answers to. As time wore on, he became convinced that whoever had done it wanted him dead. Perhaps, he speculated two decades later when his long and close association with The New Yorker and his friend and editor Bill Maxwell was drawing to an end with a series of story rejections, Maxwell himself had pushed him. But like everything in his experience, the incident was subject to alteration for artistic purposes. In his 1976 novel Falconer, his protagonist, Ezekiel Farragut, attributes a similar malevolent act to his brother, Eben, the dark brother—a pervasive figure in Cheever’s fiction and thoughts—for whose murder he was serving time in prison.