Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  During its second week at sea the Conte Biancamano stopped at several ports of call. They raised Portugal on October 24, and spent a day in Lisbon. Then it was Casablanca, where their guide from Cook’s seemed dreary and defeated. “Why is it,” Cheever wondered, “that with their command of language, their knowledge of history, their love of beauty and their admirable piety” all such guides seemed down at heel? There was trouble in Morocco, and the Arab quarter was closed because of the riots. Arab boys surrounded them as they waited for their bus. “They make the hoods at home seem gentle, for this is not the contest between youth and age exacerbated into brutality; this is the contest between wealth and grueling poverty, between the Protestant and the Moslem religions, this is the borderline of whole principalities of sexuality, morality, and religion. We return to the boat, our cozy home.” His sympathy was with the Arabs against the French, who were selling their houses and businesses and pulling out. Next there was Barcelona, where at an amusement park he saw a young man use the tip of a very clean handkerchief to remove a bit of soot from his very pretty girl’s eye, and Cannes, cold enough for an overcoat in the early morning, with snow on the mountains already, and then Genoa, Palermo, and Naples, where they caught the train to Rome in the rain and sliced through a mountain to emerge into a sunny day and—his journal concluded—“a landscape so various, so beautiful, and impressed so on my memory by postcards, paintings, and the pictures hanging on the walls of the first classrooms I attended that there is a kind of reunion.”

  The night they reached Rome, Playhouse 90 broadcast a television version of “The Country Husband.” Cheever was not sorry to miss it. He had read the script and knew that “they had changed everything but the title.” Besides, he was trying to get acclimated abroad. For the first ten days the family stayed in a rather elegant pensione. Daytimes John and Mary scouted for a convenient and affordable apartment, and in the evenings the American colony in Rome—including the Warrens, Peter and Ebie Blume, and Bill Weaver—invited them around for cocktails. Then there were the splendors of the city itself: the Forum, the Vatican, the piazzas. It all seemed a blur; not since his first days in the army had time seemed so distorted. Yet by November 10, Mary had located schools for the children, and with the help of Eleanor Clark they had found an apartment.

  Cheever was about to sign a lease for a flat on the outskirts of Rome when Clark stopped him. He mustn’t do that, she advised. The city’s bus service was terrible, and if they lived away from the center they would never see anybody. Taking the problem into her own hands, she found the Cheevers an apartment in the Palazzo Doria across the street from Mussolini’s former palazzo. It cost rather more than they’d wanted to pay, but the apartment was well located and certainly grand. The Palazzo Doria was said to have a thousand rooms, and the Cheevers paid rent along with a hundred other tenants, including banks, stores, offices, one church, and an Englishwoman who daily emerged from a hole in the wall, buttoned up her Inverness cape, and bicycled away. Their apartment, on the piano nobile, was dominated by a huge salon and a huge master bedroom. “It was all built for giants,” Cheever decided. There was only one chair in the salon where he could sit and have his feet touch the floor. The room was drafty and magnificent, with a marble floor and a golden ceiling two stories high. It would make a splendid place for signing treaties, he thought, provided that the kings and generals were tall and did not have to go to the bathroom. And it did make a splendid place for entertaining guests—writers, editors, artists—who were visiting or living in Rome. “Well, it looks just like the Library of Congress,” Bill Weaver’s mother remarked, and it was just about as easy to take care of. For a month the Cheevers were without help, and then the novelist Elizabeth Spencer sent over her maid, Iole Felici, to help out, and it was love at first sight. The next day, Iole called Elizabeth and asked if she could work for the Cheevers and send her sister to the Spencers instead. “I Cheever hanno bisogno di me,” she said, and need her they did. Iole, who had a managerial streak, pretty much took over running the establishment in the Palazzo Doria.

  The Cheevers’ landlady was the Principessa Doria, “an unmarried beauty of about thirty-five” with wens. She was the sole child of a noble father and the Scottish nursemaid he married. The Dorias had been anti-Fascist during World War II. To escape persecution they dyed their hair, stained their skin, and were sheltered by the poor in Trastevere. It was nothing at all like the stories in Scarborough. In due course he would write about it.

  Throughout the fall, Italy was full of rumors of yet another war. The Russians had stepped in to put down the uprising in Hungary, and Europeans feared that the conflict would escalate. The papers ran maps showing how the Russians could conquer Western Europe in a month. “La guerra, la guerra,” the vendors called as Cheever walked Susie to her bus stop. Still it was difficult, with his Italian, to understand exactly what was going on. A fine linguist, Mary picked up the language rapidly. Meanwhile, John took language lessons at La Società Nazionale Dante Alighieri, but did not progress as fast as he would have liked. Eventually he gained “a fluent but incorrect” command of the language. There were certain wonderfully pithy phrases he loved, like senz’altro (“say no more”) and magari (“I’d like to if I could”).

  Susie and Ben were also learning Italian, along with other subjects, at their Roman schools. Susie went to Marymount International, a convent school where the nuns gave her four hours of homework a night as she struggled through an awkward age. On Sundays, father and daughter went to the Episcopal church on the Via Nazionale. Susie was baptized there one chilly afternoon, with the Spencers serving as godparents. Cheever was alternately proud of his daughter and disappointed that she was not measuring up to his idealized picture of her as a long-legged blond goddess, slim and fetching. When he told Jean Douglas, a friend who took a shine to Susie, that his daughter was not everything he had hoped for, Jean threatened never to speak to him again.

  Ben happily attended the Overseas School in Rome, and made friends with a Burmese boy named Ronald Ang-dingh. Italy was too much for Barbara Fritchie, however. John was supposed to bury the mouse in the Borghese Gardens, but the ground was too hard. To assuage Ben’s sorrow, he was given two more white mice, which smelled bad and used to bite his father on the ankle as he tried to work, behind a screen, in the gigantic salon. Ben’s mice were invited to appear at a Christmas party given by a family from Chicago. Most of the women in attendance were American divorcées. When everyone sang Christmas songs at the end of the evening, some of them cried.

  Only rarely were the Cheevers truly homesick. When a letter arrived from Zeke, the son of Cassie that now belonged to the Boyers, the children felt a pang but laughed at the contents. Susie enjoyed telling people that the letter was “from our youngest dog.” Cassie herself, back in Beechtwig with the Beckers, had a hard winter. She fell through the ice into the frigid Hudson and was about to go down when Steve Becker, crawling flat on the ice, managed to grab her collar and pull her to shore.

  In Rome the Cheevers led a busy social life, though Mary sometimes stayed home during difficult periods in her pregnancy. She wisely chose to do so one day when it rained and poured but the Warrens and Blumes and John drove off anyway on a picnic outing to Grosseto. Eleanor brought the hamburger and Ebie her usual emergency supply of chocolate and whiskey. Soon the travelers were marooned by the flooding Arrone River. Haystacks that looked like bloated sheep came floating down the road toward them. They took refuge in a highway supervisor’s roadside house. Eleanor marched in and in her impeccable Italian asked, “Can we borrow your fire?” They could, and so the raw meat was cooked, the roadside family contributed bread, Ebie passed chocolate all around, and when the waters receded the travelers resumed their journey.

  The American colony in Rome divided neatly into those who were associated with the American Academy and those who were not. Cheever—who had no official connection to the academy—resented the “very chilly” reception he got from director La
urence Roberts. Sometimes, however, he met distinguished visitors to the academy, at least one of whom, Archibald MacLeish, proved to be almost as proper as the academy itself. MacLeish and his wife, Ada, left their room key behind to embark on a late dinner with the Cheevers and Ralph and Fanny Ellison. Afterward John walked them back to their pensione, where the concierge could not be aroused. “Well,” John said, “it looks as if you’ll have to spend the night in the Excelsior or the Hassler.” “Oh, no,” responded the MacLeishes, then in their sixties and as respectable a couple as the desk clerk at the Excelsior had ever seen. “They won’t let us in. We have no luggage.” Cheever loved that story, and was smitten in a different way by the Italian novelist Antonio Moravia, a man less concerned with the proprieties. Moravia and his girl took him to a village whose drawing card for tourists was an exhibition of the foreskin of Christ.

  Back in the United States, Cheever’s reputation was thriving. Early in December, Farrar, Straus & Giroux brought out a book called, simply, Stories, and containing the work of four New Yorker hands: five stories from Jean Stafford, four from Cheever, three each from Daniel Fuchs and William Maxwell. Originally J. D. Salinger had been contemplated as one of the four; when he backed out, Cheever suggested Maxwell instead. He and Stafford conceived the idea for this curious volume, somewhere between a collection and an anthology, while drinking gin and water at a party. They regretted, Cheever’s preface read, that their number was so small, “but the colleagues they admire[d] were asleep or in Rome [Warren] or Mississippi [Eudora Welty] or at some other party.”

  It was assumed that the stories would somehow complement each other, and so they did, according to Richard Sullivan in the New York Times Book Review. Each of the writers was distinct in temperament and style, yet overall the fifteen stories exhibited “a remarkable consistency of craft and general feeling,” he wrote. William Peden, in the Saturday Review, gave the book an unqualified endorsement. It contained “more intelligence, more entertainment, and more effective writing” than a dozen highly publicized and commercially successful novels. Best of all were Cheever’s stories, “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” “The Country Husband,” “The National Pastime,” and “The Bus to St. James’s.” “There is no finer present-day writer of short fiction than John Cheever,” Peden asserted.

  That view gained gratifying confirmation late in January when a letter arrived from the National Institute of Arts and Letters announcing Cheever’s election “as a member in the Department of Literature.” Jacques Barzun proposed him for membership, with John Hersey and Robert Penn Warren as seconders. Barzun’s citation placed Cheever within “the tradition of the New England Observers.” His short stories displayed “the penetration of the microscopic eye, combined with the spare writing of the born dissector.” As his daughter, Susan, has reported, he made light of his election in a humorous ditty, “Root tee toot, ahh root tee toot, oh, we’re the members of the Institute.” But the recognition meant a great deal to him, and almost at once he exercised his prerogative as a member to nominate another, slightly younger writer for election: Saul Bellow. “No one has done so much to display, creatively, the versatility of life and speech in this country,” he said of Bellow. Cheever later twice served on the institute’s grants committee for literature. He also nominated or seconded for election or proposed for grants or wrote citations for a number of other writers whose work he admired, among them William Maxwell, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Edward McSorley, Jean Stafford, Daniel Fuchs, John Hawkes, Vladimir Nabokov, Hortense Calisher, Thomas Pynchon, Richard G. Stern, Frederick Exley, John Updike, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Schultz, James McConkey, Tom Wolfe, and Bernard Malamud.

  Election to the institute established Cheever among the nation’s literary elite, and in making decisions about his career, he began to consider questions of reputation as well as monetary gain. In New York the Book-of-the-Month Club was hesitating about whether to make The Wapshot Chronicle a monthly selection. Ralph Thompson at the club called Mike Bessie and said they liked the book but had one request, one passage the club would like removed—Moses’s saying to his wife, when she stalls his lovemaking, that “you’ve talked yourself out of a fuck.” When The New Yorker ran that section of the novel, Thompson pointed out, the offending phrase had been removed. Bessie relayed the request to Cheever, who objected to the deletion. “It’s different with The New Yorker,” he pointed out. “They sustained me when I was just starting out.” He did not, of course, want to throw away the additional money from the Book-of-the-Month Club, but what Moses said was in character and part of his natural idiom. “Does it really mean the club won’t take the book if I won’t change it?” he asked Bessie. Mike said he thought they would take it anyway, and that’s the way it worked out. The club’s members were offered the novel, unexpurgated.

  Victor Gollancz, who had published The Enormous Radio and Other Stories in Britain, enthusiastically signed up English rights to the Chronicle in mid-January. Cheever “writes like an angel and must be a good and beautiful person,” he wrote agent Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown, along with his offer of two hundred and fifty pounds. That was fine, but Cheever soon showed he was no longer willing to accept payment for anything less than his best work. In March, Cosmopolitan offered Collier’s five hundred dollars for resale of a story called “The Ways of Love on Shady Lane.” (Collier’s was going out of business.) Was that all right? Edith Haggard at Curtis Brown inquired. It was not, Cheever replied. He’d never liked the story and now they could scrap it once and for all. He also turned down an offer from a German firm that wanted foreign rights to The Way Some People Live. In effect, he repudiated that first book of stories as apprentice work. He wouldn’t want to see it in German, he wrote his agents.

  Medical complications developed as Mary’s pregnancy neared term. With about two months to go, Mary’s doctor put her on a diet of greens. When Mary complained that she couldn’t stand spinach every day, the doctor said, “But I have gout and that is all I eat.” He was not going to have a baby, Mary pointed out. “It is not my role in life,” the doctor replied with dignity.

  Late in February it looked as if II Baby was about to be born, but that was a false alarm. The eight-and-a-half-pound baby boy arrived ten days later, on March 9, at the Ospedale Salvador Mundi on the Janiculum. Mary, who had been reluctant to go to the hospital, was in the delivery room only half an hour. A German nun in a white serge habit brought the news to the expectant father. “Un maschio,” she announced. It took four days to provide the baby boy with a name. The parents had decided to call him Frederick after John’s father and brother, but they did not reckon with the Italian bureaucracy or the fact that there is no k in the Italian alphabet. So he was registered in the books of the Comune di Roma as Federico Cheever. The offices of the Comune were “like Gogol.” There wasn’t a typewriter or filing cabinet in sight. Instead, a small army of clerks laboriously copied Rome’s vital statistics into massive ledgers.

  From the beginning, father was smitten with son. Federico was a very good-looking boy, he thought. “I love him as much as I ever loved Susie,” he declared. Perhaps because they were both late-begotten sons, John felt especially close to Federico. Always he looked back on the evening he was born with joy and gratitude. He was never cruel to Federico as he sometimes was to the other children, Mary said, and Federico was the only child who dared talk back to him.

  Iole was also enchanted with the new Cheever. He looked like Il Duce, she said, “piccolo piccolo Mussolini,” or like a prince, “un principe inglese.” She attached herself to the baby and became fiercely protective of him. It became clear that she would not easily be parted from Federico.

  Two weeks after Federico’s birth The Wapshot Chronicle was published. The dust jacket featured advance encomiums from Jean Stafford, Francis Steegmuller, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, and Malcolm Cowley. “Wonderful,” they called the book, “compelling,” “beautifully written,” “a continual delight,” with St
afford’s comment the most laudatory of all. “This gamey, witty, sad and truthful novel is an admirable, a splendid achievement by probably the most original writer in America,” she said. A few reviewers were willing to accept the book on these terms, without quibble. As one of them observed, “The Wapshot Chronicle must have been fun to write, it is wonderful fun to read.” There, stated exactly and simply, is the reason this novel seems as likely as anything Cheever wrote to survive the test of time. It is great fun to read, enlivened throughout by the author’s unique “blend of gusto, nostalgia and profoundly innocent ribaldry.” In a very real sense, as Joan Didion remarked, The Wapshot Chronicle was nothing less than “a celebration of life.”

  Most reviewers, however, faulted the book on one of three different grounds. First, while acknowledging its comic merits, they were disturbed that it did not seem to have an underlying seriousness of purpose. What was the message, anyway? Second, they criticized the book for what they regarded as its lack of a coherent structure. “One gets the final impression of a series of related ‘sketches,’ which do not quite achieve either the impact of the short story or the inner growth and development of a novel,” Maxwell Geismar wrote in the New York Times. Finally, the book was sometimes regarded as sentimental for glorifying a departed past at the expense of the present. Each objection had some justification. Each misunderstood and undervalued Cheever’s accomplishment.