Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  During their ten-month sojourn in Italy, Cheever wrote very little fiction. It was a strange new land to him, and he was too busy soaking it in to write about it. In the long run, though, his work benefited from the shocks to his senses, and to his Yankee sense of the proprieties, that he encountered there. Eventually he turned this material to account in several short stories and in a substantial section of his second novel. In years to come, also, Cheever returned to Italy a number of times. He came back, he said, because he could speak Italian, because he loved the country and the people and swimming in the Mediterranean, and because he had been very happy there.

  In Italy he could restore himself and renew his pleasure in life, yet it was the image of Tasso’s oak that came to dominate his vision of Rome. Torquato Tasso, the sixteenth-century epic poet, lived a miserable life. At the height of his powers he was imprisoned in Ferrara for seven years, either because of his unwise love for the noble Leonora d’Este, or because he would not accommodate his poetry to prevailing political and religious beliefs, or because—the official reason—he was certifiably mad. On his release, Tasso roamed from city to city without a resting place. At last he came to Rome, fell fatally ill, and in March 1595 took refuge at the Monastery of Sant’ Onofrio on the Janiculum. There he finally achieved peace, and spent his last days in quiet contemplation, sitting in the garden. One of his last acts was to plant an oak tree there, and as a pathetic tribute to the poet, the tree—though struck by lightning and obviously dead—has been preserved through the centuries, held up with steel beams and cables to the highest naked branches. Cheever saw this curious memorial and was fascinated by it. He watched with enthusiasm as Peter Blume fashioned his painting—the largest he ever did—of the oak. In New York he came to the opening where the painting was exhibited, and brought the whole family along.

  For Cheever as for the English romantic poets, the story of Tasso had a special resonance. Byron visited the poet’s cell in Ferrara, and later wrote his “Legend of Tasso.” Shelley also took him for a subject. To these romantics, Tasso exemplified the hypersensitive creative artist at odds with society and punished for his differences, loving hopelessly beyond his station, wandering restlessly without a home, chained in a lunatic cell. For Cheever, Tasso combined within himself the homelessness and confinement he dreaded. The dead oak tree, manacled against the forces of nature in eternal bondage, stuck in his mind as an emblem of those twin misfortunes.

  HOUSE

  1957–1961

  The Wapshot Chronicle began a period of remarkable productivity. Between 1957 and 1964, Cheever published five books of fiction: the two Wapshot novels and three collections of stories. This accomplishment brought with it both recognition and responsibility. Cheever was clearly becoming a figure of importance on the American literary scene. He was a director of Yaddo, and soon (1958) was to serve on the committee that decided which artists to admit. He was a member of the National Institute, and soon (1959–62) was to serve his first term on the committee that decided which writers should be admitted to that august body. He was taken into the Century Club (1958) on the nomination of Cabell Greet, who had been his English department chairman at Barnard. The ceremonial dinner of admission went off smoothly, except when—Cheever reported in jest—he clamped his carnation between his teeth.

  A moment of greater glory came on March 11, 1958, when the forty-five-year-old author accepted the National Book Award for fiction for The Wapshot Chronicle. In his brief speech, he described the novel as “one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings, where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.” This, of course, was exactly what the Chronicle in its vivid cheerfulness aimed to do. Cheever also spoke that day about the loneliness of his craft, and one of its consequences. “Most businesses and many professions,” he said, “thrive on good company but the writer asks people to be quiet, asks to be left alone, asks not to be called to the telephone so that he may spin out an interminable tale that will translate the pain and ecstasy of life into understandable terms; and left alone so much he will be insatiable—and rightly so, I think—in wanting to know what value this tale has to others. Most than most people writers desire the good opinion of strangers.” This was in part his way of saying thank you, but that last remark confessed to a hunger that would not easily be appeased. Like Leander Wapshot, like his own father, John Cheever wished to be esteemed.

  On a subway platform, immediately after the National Book Award ceremony, Cheever met Bernard Malamud for the first time. Malamud congratulated him on the NBA, Cheever spoke admiringly of The Assistant, a contender for the award, and a long though not intimate friendship was begun. A number of radio and television interviews followed, including an appearance on the Dave Garroway morning show with Robert Penn Warren, who had won the National Book Award for poetry. As Cheever recalled the day, both he and Warren were upstaged by another guest on the show, a chimpanzee named Joe who was “much better dressed” than either of the two writers and “much more composed.” The Garroway show was televised in a storefront of Radio City, with people outside mugging for the camera and holding up signs. Garroway in his relaxed baritone asked Warren to explain why he sometimes wrote fiction and sometimes poetry. “Ah scratches where Ah itches,” Warren replied in his Kentucky twang.

  As Cheever’s reputation grew, so did the critical and public desire to fix him within the confines of a stereotype. He had for a while been labeled a New Yorker writer whose stories dealt with upper-middle-class people on the East Side. With the publication of The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories in September 1958, he became known, overnight and always, as a chronicler of suburban life. It did not matter that he moved on to write about Italian expatriates and prison inmates—a great many people had pinned their butterfly to the wall and would not let him free. He was John Cheever, who wrote those funny-sad stories about the suburbs for The New Yorker.

  As a characterization of Housebreaker, that was accurate enough. This is the most unified of Cheever’s collections, and the unifying factor is the suburban experience of cookouts and commutation, dinner parties and dances at the country club. In large part, critics found this subject matter distasteful. Life in the suburbs was dull and conformist, they had been told by social scientists, and therefore unworthy of serious fiction. What right did Cheever have to make suburbia’s inhabitants interesting?

  Still more objectionable, to some critical eyes, was Cheever’s refusal to judge his characters or condemn their way of life. Occasionally he allowed someone to lash out against suburbia’s failings. “God preserve me,” Charles Flint reflects, “from women who dress like toreros to go to the supermarket, and from cowhide dispatch cases, and from flannels and gabardines. Preserve me from word games and adulterers, from basset hounds and swimming pools and frozen canapés and Bloody Marys and smugness and syringa bushes and P.-T.A. meetings.” At this stage the narrator interrupts to assert that “there was absolutely nothing wrong with the suburb from which Charles Flint was fleeing,” yet soon backtracks to admit that “if there was anything wrong with Shady Hill, anything you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library.” In the title story, the housebreaker, Johnny Hake, defends the village he lives in. “Shady Hill is open to criticism by city planners, adventurers and lyric poets, but if you work in the city and have children to raise, I can’t think of a better place.” Still, Johnny Hake steals from his neighbors to maintain his own home in Shady Hill, and one may legitimately wonder how far he should be trusted as the author’s spokesman.

  What seems to be true is that Cheever saw both sides of the argument. Shady Hill, he knew, had its pretensions and was not nearly so stable and burnished as its inhabitants would like to think, but it had its advantages too—blue sky and sunshine and swimming pools among them—and h
e refused to issue any doctrinaire judgments against the people who lived there and were doing their best to develop “an improvised way of life” within commuting distance of New York City. Save for Cash Bentley, who dies in mid-hurdle from his wife’s starting pistol, and the exploitive Blake, who is reduced to groveling before the office girl he has taken advantage of, his characters survive their crises of love and money and are not even punished for their sins. Francis Weed takes up woodworking and forgets his passion for the baby-sitter. Refreshed by a rain shower, Johhny Hake gives up burglarizing. Will Pym knocks down a village roué on the station platform and so disposes of his jealousy. Charles Flint forgives his wife, Marcie, her adultery and comes home after all. And in “The Worm in the Apple,” a final story Cheever wrote especially for the collection, no one can find anything at all to disturb the Crutchmans’ happiness. Everyone in Shady Hill assumes they must have a flaw—sexual recklessness, lack of money, too much drinking, trouble with the children—but in fact no one can find the worm in the apple. The Crutchmans are simply very happy. In this story Cheever thumbed his nose at the prevailing view that existence in the nation’s upper-middle-class suburbs must be either dull or miserable. “A toothless Thurber,” Irving Howe called him, conniving in “the cowardice of contemporary life.”

  Once restored to Westchester, Cheever began to write stories about Italy. He published six of these, five in The New Yorker, between March 1958 and May 1960. All of them focus on the clash of cultures, on what it is like to inhabit a foreign culture. His expatriated Americans find everything in Italy different. The rain that pounds on the roof in Nantucket falls silently in Rome. The wind does not sound the same, the light in the sky and the smells of the street are strange, and, of course, the food is not at all what one is accustomed to: one of his forlorn expatriates daydreams about a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. The language difference, most crucial of all, he explored in the best of the Italian stories, “The Bella Lingua.”

  Wilson Streeter is fiftyish, divorced, and working in Rome for one of those companies that go by an acronym. He enjoys the social life and feels a certain sense of release in Italy, but understands neither the country nor the people. Once he masters the language, he feels sure, he will reach such an understanding. So he sets out to learn Italian despite his rusting middle-aged memory and his lack of talent for languages. Streeter runs through a series of instructors before discovering Kate Dresser, a widowed American whose Italian he can almost always understand. She guides him safely past Pinocchio and on to I Promessi Sposi. He is making excellent progress, Kate tells him. Then he takes a weekend trip to Anticoli, where he hears a young woman sing rapturously in the garden outside his hotel. It is a beautiful song, and he cannot make out a word of it.

  Streeter is also troubled by the casual attitudes toward love and death he encounters. One Sunday afternoon in Rome he walks home alone after his language lesson, and is subjected to a series of shocks. A beautiful young whore speaks to him, but he tells her in broken Italian that he already has a friend. Then he sees a man struck by a car, and the driver runs away while a crowd—not solemn at all but garrulous, excited—gathers around the dying victim. Next, a young man offers a cat a piece of bread with a firecracker concealed inside. When the booby trap explodes, the cat leaps in the air, “its body all twisted,” and streaks away while the man and several others who have been watching laugh at his trick. Finally a hearse careens by, driven recklessly by a man who looks like a “drunken horsethief.” The hearse rattles and slams over the stones, and behind it the mourner’s carriage is empty. “The friends of the dead man had probably been too late or had got the wrong date or had forgotten the whole thing, as was so often the case in Rome.” Streeter knew then that “he did not want to die in Rome.”

  Kate Dresser’s fifteen-year-old son, Charlie, has a different problem: he does not want to live there, but instead to go back to Iowa where he can stay with his Uncle George in “a nice clean house [with] lots of nice friends and a nice garden and kitchen and stall shower.” Nothing, not even a shower bath, will keep her from “wanting to see the world and the different people who live in it,” Kate indignantly tells her son. Besides, she knows that in Krasbie, Iowa, people would still call her Roller Coaster for her sharply upturned nose. Nobody in Rome does that. So she lets her son go back to the States while she stays on, giving Italian lessons and thrilling to her occasional contacts with the nobility.

  A more remarkable story, technically, is “Clementina,” told from the viewpoint of an Italian donna di servizio who goes to work for an American family in Rome and then accompanies them to the United States. For Clementina, it is the American way of life that is foreign to everything she has known. She is enchanted by all the labor-saving devices: the washing machine and the dishwasher and the electric frying pan and the frigidario and the deep freeze and the electric eggbeater and the vacuum cleaner and the orange squeezer and the toaster and the TV. Listening to the machines doing all the work makes her feel powerful. She cannot understand, however, why the signora “who in Rome had lived like a princess, seemed in the new world to be a secretary” always talking on the phone and writing letters and raising money for good causes. The religion of the New World also bewilders her—the priest gives her “the tail of the devil for not coming to church every Sunday of her life” and people put up a tree for the festa of the Natale and they take collection three times every Mass.

  The comforts of American life prevail, however, and Clementina decides to marry an old paisano named Joe in order to remain in the United States. Her American master tries to stop this marriage, for she does not love Joe and he thinks it is wrong for her to marry without love. Clementina is more practical than that. He talks like a boy with stars in his eyes, she tells the signore. “If people married for love, the world … would be a hospital for the mad.” So she marries Joe, makes him happy and herself comfortable, and one day when she meets her former signore at the racetrack she finds that he and the signora have divorced. “Looking into his face then, she saw not the end of his marriage, but the end of his happiness. The advantage was hers, for hadn’t she explained to him that he was like a boy with stars in his eyes, but some part of his loss seemed to be hers as well.” At that moment the Italian maidservant and her American signore share a moment of recognition, linked by their common humanity across the barrier of alien backgrounds.

  The actual experience of Iole Felici, the nursemaid-cook who came to the United States with the Cheevers, bore some resemblance to that of Clementina. She left a lover behind in Italy, but he died soon thereafter, and she wanted to stay in this country. One evening at dinner, she spoke of the possibility of marrying Saverio (Sam) Masullo, an old gardener who worked on the Vanderlip estate. If she did marry him, Iole said, she would clean his house and cook but would not make love to him. At this news Cheever became angry. If not love, marriage at least demanded cohabitation, he declared. She would have to sleep with Sam. On that understanding they got married, and despite occasional fights—once Iole persuaded Sam to sign a document promising not to be jealous—they stayed married for the remaining twenty years of Masullo’s life. Though she had a house of her own, Iole remained an extraordinarily loyal and vigorous family retainer to the Cheevers. Federico especially was devoted to her, and she to him. He saw so much of her during his first few years that he grew up bilingual, with a preference for Italian. “See the horsie,” his father would say. “Non c’e un horsie,” the two-year-old would correct him. “C’e un cavallo.”

  Shortly after their return from Italy, the Cheevers began to consider different living arrangements themselves. They had been tenants at Beechwood for nearly a decade, and Mary yearned for a house of her own. “I wanted it so badly,” she recalled. “I was tired of living in someone else’s playpen.” Besides, John was sensitive to some people’s assumption that he was the pet writer of the rich Vanderlips, who rented him his outbuilding at reduced rates. “He hated that,” Mary said, and s
o did she. On the other hand, as a child of the Depression he could hardly forget the disaster that had befallen his parents in Wollaston. He regarded a mortgage as a pernicious document, and they certainly did not have enough money to purchase a house outright, particularly in upper Westchester. Houses in Saratoga Springs were much cheaper, and periodic visits to Yaddo to attend board meetings and to write revived his love affair with the place. He began to lobby for a move to Saratoga.

  It seemed to Cheever that nothing about Yaddo ever changed. Even the flowers in the vase looked as they had when he first came there in 1934. He was treated rather like the lord of the manor. “Only dogs, servants, and children know who the aristocrats are,” he joked, and imagined the help saying, “Master John’s back, Master John’s back.” Over the years he developed close relationships with practically everyone who worked there—with Elizabeth Ames herself, who defied nature by continuing to bloom as she grew older; with Pauline (Polly) Hanson, for many years Elizabeth’s assistant; with caretaker George Vincent and his wife, Helen; with Minnie Woodward the laundress. It became a ritual for him to invite Minnie for a dinner date at the New Worden Hotel. There she would say strange and wonderful things. “People don’t realize how intelligent and loving cows are,” she said. “Just look in their eyes.” She also told John about the carrot shaped like a man’s parts, and that anecdote went into The Wapshot Chronicle.

  Another Chronicle episode led to some embarrassment, first at Beechwood and then at Yaddo. Mrs. Vanderlip, reading about Moses clambering over the roofs of a mansion to make love to Melissa, assumed that Cheever was writing about her mansion, and became rather upset with him. At the Yaddo dinner table, Cheever spoke about this, and of how he had insisted to Mrs. Vanderlip, “No, no, that is not your place at all, that’s Yaddo,” only to realize that Elizabeth Ames was regarding him narrowly. At this point he rapidly reversed himself. It had been Beechwood all along, he assured Elizabeth, and he’d only mentioned Yaddo to quiet Mrs. Vanderlip’s suspicions. Elizabeth seemed satisfied, and in any event Cheever was a favorite with her.