by John Cheever
Bless their tact, their grace, their glories,
And teach this neighbor to write better stories.
Much of the partying was impromptu, spur-of-the-moment. “You always wanted to be with the group,” as Jinny Kahn says. But there were more formal occasions as well. Dances were occasionally held in the Beechwood mansion. Christmastime summoned forth so many cocktail parties and open houses and tea dances that it was hard to get any work done in Westchester. The grandest party of all was the New Year’s Eve dance in the old stables the Swopes owned up in Croton. This was always a costume party with a theme, and preparations were extensive. Cheever didn’t much like these parties. He could never find a decent costume himself. And once there was a crisis when Mary drove off with Rod Swope. So at least he recollected twenty years later, at a time when he was often jealous of Mary.
Cheever’s own behavior during those early years in Scarborough was circumspect enough. He was flirtatious but also gallant. He disapproved of off-color jokes around the women, and was a stickler for proper manners. “He was certainly the most gentlemanly of anyone in our group,” Jack Kahn remembers. “He was the sort of person you would sit next to the dreadful aunt or boring sister-in-law at dinner. He might have too much to drink, and he would probably mumble—for he mumbled even when sober—but he would certainly be polite and do his best to please his dinner partner.” Usually he succeeded. Cheever was wickedly funny in conversation, with a keen eye and ear for the pretentious. He loved gossip, and in retailing it used his storyteller’s knack to improve on the original version. Mumbling aside, it often struck his listeners that he spoke much as he wrote—in beautifully crafted language. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his patrician accent, more pan-Atlantic than Yankee; some assumed that he had acquired the accent as his fortunes improved, but Mary points out that in her forty-three-year experience he always spoke in those rather gargly tones. He dressed well, favoring Brooks Brothers clothes. He had excellent manners and knew all the forks. With his small and wiry frame—he was about five feet five and weighed 140 pounds—he looked rather like Burgess Meredith. All his life he had great charm.
Other talents he lacked, though: vocal talent, for example. Their first Christmas in Scarborough, Mary was asked to sing in a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Presbyterian church just across Route 9 from the Cheevers’ house. So too were Phil Boyer and the Boyers’ daughter Linda. Mimi Boyer and John Cheever were not asked to sing, and on rehearsal evenings they consoled themselves in the Cheevers’ living room by giving private concerts on their recorders. John had an alto recorder and Mimi a “very cheap soprano” one. Neither was anything like expert, but gradually they learned the notes and labored through “800 Years of Recorder Music.” They also “drank quite a lot of whiskey during those evenings,” Mimi recalls. After the Messiah had been duly performed, John and Mimi continued their duets, except that now she determined to stop drinking. She doubts that she would have made it through that first dark and difficult month of January 1952 “had it not been for John and his recorder.”
Their relative lack of skill was brought home to them when they went to a musical evening for recorder performers in Croton. The other players opened velvet cases and carefully removed their recorders. “What kind of recorder is yours?” someone asked Mimi as she drew it forth from her purse, in two pieces. “It’s a six-dollar recorder,” she answered. She and John limped along as accurately as they could, often getting left behind. Halfway through the evening, a loud and very sour note silenced the whole group. “Who did that?” someone asked. Blushing, John acknowledged the crime. “My name is John Cheever and I did that.” He and his recorder were quiet for the rest of the session.
His adventures in music were not ended, however, for with Susan he began to take piano lessons from a woman named Levina McClure. One of the first stories he wrote about Westchester, “The Music Teacher,” tells of a piano teacher who gives her male pupils a simple and annoying finger drill whose maddening repetition brings their wives to loving surrender. In the end the teacher is found strangled to death. In actuality, Levina was a genteel lady who served juice and cookies at her annual party for her pupils. Then they all gathered around the piano and sang the words to old songs off yellowed sheet music.
The music lessons did not last long. Neither did the civic activities Cheever took part in upon moving to Scarborough. (Mary was far more energetic in local politics, especially where environmental issues were concerned.) He was for a while a volunteer fireman with the Scarborough Fire Company—“a brotherhood of 29 manly, hard-drinking, courageous fellows.” Activities, according to Cheever’s friend Arthur Spear, “included instruction, exercises in the field, putting out fires and beer at meetings.” Like his character Nailles in Bullet Park, Cheever rejoiced in riding the fire truck over hill and dale, ringing the bell and blowing the siren. But the appeal wore off when word was circulated that he was a writer and his fellow firemen elected him secretary of the company. Shortly thereafter he recruited Jack Kahn to the cause, saw that Kahn was elected secretary, and retired.
Cheever’s more serious plunge into community activity came as a member of the board of Scarborough School, the progressive private school his children attended along with those of the Schoaleses and the Kahns and the Reimans and a number of other families living between Dobbs Ferry and Croton. At one school board meeting, he realized that Scarborough had much the same potential for social comedy as “the village of Z in the province of X” in a Russian novel.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald in this way as in others, John Cheever was ambivalent about the very rich. Equipped with a strong sense of social class acquired in his Quincy boyhood, he could easily see the ridiculousness of social pretension. He was amused, for example, when the Scotswoman who served as Mrs. Vanderlip’s secretary and collected the rents and paid the servants dropped her “very classy social manner” with Angelo the gardener and said things like “shadup” and “bullshit.” But for Mrs. Narcissa Cox Vanderlip herself, he felt a certain respect and admiration. She had married into money—the rumor was that she had started as a physical education instructor—but had not taken advantage of this circumstance to pursue indolence. Instead she became a suffragette who used to go out with her six children in her chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow and say to other women, “Look, I can raise six kids and still stand up for women’s rights. Why don’t you?” Eleanor Roosevelt, she thought, was an amateur at such causes. “Eleanor never passed the sophomore stage,” she said.
Mrs. Vanderlip accepted Cheever as she accepted few others—an acceptance he had also won from such other commanding women as Elizabeth Ames at Yaddo and Mary’s stepmother, Polly Whitney Winternitz, at Treetops. When Mrs. Vanderlip died, after sowing discord among her children as to their due inheritance, her daughter Zinny—who was to become Cheever’s intimate friend—told him some of her recollections. There was the night, for instance, when the children put a dime-store pearl in a dinner guest’s oyster. Mrs. Vanderlip felt sure that the pearl belonged to her—she’d supplied the oysters, after all—and when the guest did not volunteer to give it up, she pointedly snubbed him for the rest of the evening. Those who know Cheever’s fiction will recognize that story. In The Wapshot Chronicle, Mrs. Vanderlip and her daughter Narcissa appear, transformed by art, as the five-and-ten-cent heiress Justina Wapshot Molesworth Scaddon and her ward, Melissa Scaddon.
Fictional representations were one thing; at one stage the Vanderlip clan feared far worse from their renter. In the summer of 1953 a rumor circulated that Cheever was gathering material for an exposé of the Vanderlips. This led the family to do some checking into his background; when Cheever heard about this detective work, he indignantly demanded an apology. None was forthcoming. The rich felt no obligation to apologize. (“Never complain, never explain,” as Henry Ford II put it when discovered in a compromising position.) Eventually Zinny Schoales intervened to calm tempers on both sides, and the crisis passed.
Cheever’s attraction to the world of the rich was accompanied by his realization that he did not belong there. Part of him liked living on the fringes of the great estate (years later, his daughter, Susan, and her husband, Rob Cowley, actually rented the Beechwood mansion, before it was turned into one of Westchester’s most expensive condominiums), but another part stood back and smiled at the spectacle of the middle-class writer mingling with the swells. He was within and without, dancing in the ballroom and staring in from the windows like a child.
His attitude toward life in Scarborough, the magnificence of Beechwood aside, was similarly complicated. In the beginning he hardly knew what to make of the climate of equanimity. No one wanted to quarrel, and he missed the city’s spirit of contentiousness. At times, he wrote Eleanor Clark, he longed to break free of Westchester. People kept asking him how it felt to put some roots down, and he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to be rooted. Both Herbst and Clark were liberals whose bias would lead them—as Cheever must have sensed—to regard life in the suburbs with a jaundiced eye. Yet among his correspondents it was Malcolm Cowley who most strongly encouraged Cheever to leave Westchester.
In a January 1953 letter, Cheever characterized his fellow suburbanites as aging children, determined to stay youthful in their middle years. How could he possibly write about their trivial lives, he rhetorically asked, when atomic bombs were threatening whole civilizations? There were, he rhetorically answered, “some damned good reasons.” But Cowley was not so sure, and throughout 1953 the two debated the issue in correspondence.
Cowley urged Cheever to read David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and to go abroad. Riesman’s concept of “other-directedness,” he believed, summed up the lack of inner conviction and consequent oversensitivity to what others thought that Cheever was encountering among his immature neighbors. These were the people he was living among and writing about, and it seemed to Cowley—reading between the lines—that Cheever was getting tired of them and needed new subjects for observation. He ought to go abroad for a year and take the kids; it wouldn’t cost any more than living in Westchester and would open his eyes. The idea certainly had its appeal, John wrote back, but he wasn’t really tired of the suburbs yet and not at all sure of the validity of Riesman’s conclusions. He was reluctant to leave until he felt “saturated” in his Westchester surroundings. In response Cowley argued that it would be all right to get saturated “in the life of the ten-thousand-a-year-plus, upper East Side and Westchester, other-directed segment of American society” if John really liked the people. But from the stories, Cowley suspected he didn’t like them or at least didn’t like the men, though he had a grudging respect for the women who kept their Smith diplomas framed above the kitchen sink.
There were times when Cheever was inclined to agree with his mentor Cowley. During the summer of 1953 Cheever left Treetops to do some work at the Hotel Earle in New York. The weather was unseasonably pleasant, and the city seemed “glorious and healthy.” By fall he was writing Cowley about “the relative unimportance of northern Westchester.” For the most part the people led insignificant lives, and many of them were not as content as they seemed. When the Scarborough stationmaster, an old man who looked like a turtle, retired, Mrs. Vanderlip had a tea in his honor. “I didn’t like it when I first come here,” he said. “I said to my wife, ‘I can’t stand that bunch.’ But I stuck it out for forty years so I guess I must have liked it.”
Cheever was also troubled by the facade of gentility that concealed a fierce acquisitiveness. This emerged the Day the Banker Stole Browning, the bronze boar from Florence that Josie Herbst had given Ben. Ben had been playing with the banker’s son and left the much-prized trinket behind. Mary found it at the banker’s house but returned home empty-handed. The boar belonged to him, the banker told her, and had sentimental value besides: it was a gift from his mother.
Then there was the pervasive conformism that led, one day, to Cheever’s being arrested for vagrancy as he walked in his working clothes—a rather sloppy outfit of old sport shirt and torn jeans—down to his office in the station plaza. What was a man doing, in old clothes and on foot, in the middle of the day in this commuting exurb? Had he been more tractable, there would have been no arrest. But Cheever carried no identification with him, and was angry enough at being stopped for no reason that he stonewalled and refused to say who he was and where he lived until he’d actually been taken in and booked.
Such were the dubious joys of suburbia as Cheever sketched them in his correspondence. Yet the actual fact was that except for trips he was not to leave the patch of northern Westchester where he settled—first in Scarborough, then in Ossining—for the rest of his life. A few years later, when he wrote his Esquire article about the move from city to suburb, he was committed to the area. “The truth is that I’m crazy about the suburbs and I don’t care who knows it. Sometimes my sons and I go fishing for perch in the Hudson, and when the trains for the city come bowling down along the riverbanks I salute the sometimes embarrassed passengers with my beer can, wishing them Godspeed and prosperity in the greatest city in the world, but I see them pass without a trace of longing or envy.” In his fiction, as opposed to his letters, he rarely pilloried the neighbors whose self-importance and narrowness of outlook offered so many opportunities for ridicule. It would have been easy to look down on their foolishness, but Cheever—or part of him—could not help identifying with the situation of his characters. He knew better than to set himself above them, for he shared their hopes and dreams and fears even as he saw how silly these sometimes were. That duality of outlook furnished his suburban stories and novels with much of their potency. Life in Westchester opened up a new vein of material. And he realized, as he told Cowley, that the suburbanites he encountered deserved their own chronicler.
CAREER
1951–1955
Cheever came up to Scarborough in the spring of 1951 with his career at a stage of financial and critical stasis. He was well known as a writer of beautifully crafted stories: “The Pot of Gold,” for instance, won an O. Henry Award for 1951. But in his twenty years as a professional writer he had not yet produced a novel. Still, he was determined to make his living writing fiction. More than that, he felt compelled to provide a comfortable middle-class existence for his wife and children. (Mary’s inheritance, in time, was to contribute from eight thousand to ten thousand a year toward the family expenses, but that was not yet available.) Pursuing his precarious occupation with the example of his own father ever present in his mind, Cheever was often afraid that he might fail as a provider.
In actual fact, he did not fail at all but succeeded at an extre
mely difficult task. It is rare in the United States for a writer to make a financial success as the author of what the trade calls “literary” books as opposed to more popular and often inferior ones. This is exactly what John Cheever managed to accomplish, but when he first moved to Westchester such a future was by no means assured. Financial emergencies continually loomed on the horizon. The New Yorker’s five thousand dollars a year or so hardly sufficed, and the Guggenheim provided only temporary relief.
The fiction writer’s way to wealth, Cheever knew, was through the novel. He might get a thousand or even two thousand for a story, but that was the end of it. A novel might possibly bring in fifty thousand and keep selling for years. Besides, a novel could command the kind of serious critical attention rarely granted short stories. Yet he remained for the time being an advocate of the short story as the appropriate medium for the times. The novel, he thought, depended on a stable social ambience, while the short story was determined by moving around from place to place, by “the interrupted event.” That was the way he’d lived his life, so far. Stories also possessed a kind of intensity that the novel, in its sustained length, could hardly achieve. As always in his thinking about fiction, he saw the story as fulfilling an important function in life. “It’s the appeasement of pain … in a stuck ski lift, a sinking boat, a dentist’s office, or a doctor’s office … at the very point of death, one tells oneself a short story—not a novel.”
So it was that practically his first literary act on reaching Scarborough was to write Bob Linscott at Random House and propose a collection of fourteen stories, all of them having appeared originally in The New Yorker. The editor, still waiting for the novel Random House had signed up in 1946, was disinclined to settle for anything less. “A book of stories—even yours,” he explained to Cheever in June 1951, “is a pretty costly venture for a publisher” and was usually undertaken “either to keep an author who is profitable or as a last desperate expedient to get an author who may eventually be profitable.” Since Random House had his novel under contract, it would prefer to publish that first and then think about a book of stories.