by John Cheever
When he did go to Yaddo, he usually came back home restored. In the winter of 1959, for instance, he wrote two stories in two weeks, skied every afternoon, and put on ten pounds. There was no place he worked better: he followed a schedule, and there were no interruptions. Invariably he was the first one down for breakfast, which he would eat very quickly with very little talk. Then he went back to his room or studio to write. At one-thirty or two in the afternoon, he emerged and, in most weather, made the six-mile-round-trip walk into Saratoga to buy a bottle. “John goes into town and out to deserve his pint,” Elizabeth said, and that was all right with her too. Alternatively, depending on the season, he got his exercise and put “some blue sky” back into his head by skiing or swimming in the afternoon. Then there was conversation at dinner, Ping-Pong afterward, a spell of reading, and early bedtime.
This routine invariably helped him work, but it also separated him from his family. At Yaddo he missed the disturbances of home—a dog in his lap, a baby in his arms—and at Scarborough he missed the fields and the quiet. If they only lived in Saratoga, he came to believe, he could combine the pleasures of home life with the pleasures of writing. So he looked around and found an inexpensive old three-story house on Union Avenue with a porte co-chere out front and a carriage house in back where he could work. The whole family drove up one sunny day to see the house, and drove right back to Scarborough. The schools were not good enough for the children, Mary thought. The house was in sad repair. They did not move to Saratoga.
In the summer of 1959, Dr. Winternitz fell desperately ill at Treetops, and Mary made a number of visits to his bedside during a long siege marked by sudden relapses and temporary recoveries. By this time the relationship between Cheever and his father-in-law had soured. Mary’s father, John decided, was a tyrant whose dark spirit compromised their marriage. “I have come to think of Winter as the king of a Hades where M. must spend perhaps half of her time,” he confided to his journal. “There is no question that he is a source of darkness in our affairs.” At midsummer he escaped the vigil to attend a writers’ congress in Germany and revisit Italy. Everything in Europe looked healthy and cheerful. An old lady sold roses in a Frankfurt doorway. Little girls in dirndls gathered mushrooms near Kitzbühel. Alan and Lucy Moorehead put him up in their beautiful house in Asolo, and sent him off to swim in the Adriatic at the Lido. Finally he returned to Rome, this time as a guest at the American Academy, where he had felt himself snubbed two years earlier. On the flight back an engine caught on fire, but nonetheless the trip had been invigorating. Why did he like Italy so much? Mike Bessie asked him. “When I walk down Fifth Avenue,” Cheever replied, “I know all the faces. She’s Vassar ’46, and I know where and how she lives. But in Rome it’s not like that at all—the faces are mysterious, and fascinating.”
In September, Mary’s father died, and with the passing of that dominant male figure John assumed full responsibility for his wife and family. What he and Mary wanted out of life was what most middle-class Americans wanted: a comfortable and fulfilling life for themselves and the best possible opportunities for their children. A house of their own was part of the package, and so were the best schools for Susan and Ben and Fred. In all three cases, this meant expensive boarding schools and private colleges. The advertising man and the investment banker and the network executive managed to provide these advantages, so why shouldn’t he? This was not the sort of existence, to be sure, that most American writers were able to or in some cases even wanted to achieve. But Cheever was convinced—and by his example demonstrated the validity of his conviction—that a real writer did not need to be “an outlyer, like a gypsy” (Ernest Hemingway’s prescription). “Genius did not need to be rootless, disenfranchised, or alienated,” Cheever persuaded young poet Dana Gioia by example. “A writer could have a family, a job, and even live in a suburb.” But he could not do these things—at least Cheever could not—without arousing powerful tensions. A conventional life imposed restrictions, and even as he forged his bonds he was driven to loosen or untie them. In addition, he was almost always under severe financial pressure. This strain was directly involved in his looming confrontation with The New Yorker.
During most of their first twenty-five years together, Cheever and The New Yorker got along extremely well. Usually his stories were accepted, printed, and paid for as fast as could be expected, and three days later he would start getting appreciative and intelligent letters from readers. No magazine had better or more responsive readers, and few could have had better editors.
The redoubtable Harold Ross, for example, read through Cheever’s submitted typescripts, littering the margins with his queries and suggestions. Often his queries were maddeningly literal-minded. If a character sat down, he would inquire, “On what?” If a story covered twenty-four hours or longer, he would want to know what had been eaten and whether people had slept. But there were also times when he supplied exactly the right nuance. In “The Enormous Radio,” Ross made an amendment that Cheever not only accepted but applauded. A couple discover a good-sized diamond on their bathroom floor after a party. “We’ll sell it,” the husband says, “we could use a couple of hundred dollars.” Ross switched “dollars” to “bucks,” an “absolutely perfect” change.
For the most part, Cheever was very lightly edited at The New Yorker, since his copy came in clean and spare. William Maxwell, who succeeded Gus Lobrano as fiction editor, recalls discovering that Gus had not made a mark on “Goodbye, My Brother.” And Maxwell also remembers the day when he was lying ill with bronchitis and Cheever came by with a story and waited, talking to his wife Emmy, while Bill had the joy of being the first person in the world to read “The Country Husband.” In stories like these, ending with a flourish of celebration, Cheever seemed to communicate “a joyful knowledge that no one else ever had,” Maxwell thought. For many years their professional connection approached the ideal in editor-author relationships. The men were close friends, and each respected the work of the other. Cheever admired Maxwell’s stories, and his novel of adolescence, The Folded Leaf; Maxwell counted it a privilege to edit Cheever’s fiction.
Two things eventually compromised the relationship. First, when he was strapped for funds, Cheever often felt that the magazine was underpaying him. Second, Maxwell sometimes had to turn down a Cheever story, either because of its subject matter (The New Yorker’s taste was genteel, and as time wore on Cheever wrote about everything under the sun), or because of his increasing drift away from realism and toward the fantastic, or—worst of all—because some of the fiction, written under the influence of alcohol, simply did not measure up. It was Maxwell’s job to say no, and though for a long time Cheever tried to keep his editor-friend and the rejections separate, in the end he could not.
The problem of finances came up first. The New Yorker’s policy has always been to keep a certain number of fact writers on the payroll, but to buy its fiction at space rates from outside contributors. Hence Cheever never had a salary from the magazine. Instead he was paid by the story, with annual bonuses depending on how much he had contributed during the year. There were times, however, when he became convinced that the magazine should support him the same way it supported its fact writers. But The New Yorker could not well afford to put all the fiction writers who contributed stories more or less regularly on a living wage, and it could not make an exception of Cheever without making everyone else furious. As it was, Maxwell understood Cheever’s very real need for prompt payment and did what he could. Stories were paid for according to their length in print, but Maxwell would ask the accounting department to make an estimate from the manuscript and issue a check for 75 percent of the total, with the rest to follow after the story was set up in galleys. Cheever could also borrow against future work, like other regular contributors of fiction. He was paid an average of more than a thousand dollars for the 121 stories he wrote for the magazine. But these payments, which varied according to length and to a changing scale of rates,
hardly sufficed to support Cheever and his family.
The trouble began, Cheever thought, with what he characterized as Harold Ross’s feeling that too much money was bad for fiction writers—that if they stopped eating in cafeterias, they might become “prideful, arrogant, and idle.” Cheever strongly disagreed, and occasionally the issue flared up. One day in 1959 he marched into The New Yorker’s offices on West Forty-third Street and managed to extract a sum of cash from treasurer Hawley Truax. Later that year the Maxwells came to dinner in Scarborough, and left hurriedly in the wake of a quarrel during which Mary declared, with fervor, that the magazine ought to give her husband more money. These disputes encouraged Cheever to explore other markets. In 1959, he published six stories in The New Yorker (including a first fragmentary section of The Wapshot Scandal) and one in Esquire. In 1960, he published two stories in The New Yorker and two in Esquire, one of them the superlative “Death of Justina.” Wherever he published his stories, however, the marketplace reminded him that only novel writing made sound economic sense.
Early in 1960 he applied for his second Guggenheim grant to help finance his second novel. Cheever’s letter of application was remarkably brief: seven short sentences, half a page in total. His project was to write a novel, he declared, but he said nothing about what kind of novel. He was relying on the merit of his last two books—The Wapshot Chronicle and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill—and on the eminence of his sponsors—Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, Ralph Ellison, and Cowley—to carry the day with the Guggenheims, and so they did.
The novel he settled down to work on was The Wapshot Scandal, a dark sequel to the cheerful Wapshot Chronicle. As Cheever immersed himself in the book, his sense of the world around him deepened and dimmed. Everywhere he encountered heedless, headlong change—change that in its rapidity and power transmogrified people as they moved from one abode to another, one job to another, one marriage to another, only to gaze emptily at the ruins of what had been their way of life. This constant mutability promised to rob us of our roots, and without these the wind could blow us away. In short, Cheever’s cockroach returned, his cafard came back, his depression reassumed control.
In October 1960 he traveled to northern California to participate in an Esquire-sponsored symposium titled “Writing in America Today” with Philip Roth and James Baldwin. Each of these writers struck a pessimistic chord during his appearance on a college campus. Roth, speaking at Stanford, described a bizarre Chicago murder trial as an example of the difficulty of “Writing American Fiction” in a society where the awfulness of reality so often outstripped the imagination. Baldwin, at San Francisco State, was incandescent about the fire next time. “To be a Negro in this country,” he said, “is to be a fantasy in the mind of the republic … and where there is no vision there is no people.” Cheever, at Berkeley, deplored the “abrasive and faulty surface” of the nation during the last twenty-five years. “Life in the United States in 1960 is Hell,” he said, and the only possible position for a writer was one of negation. “The Death of Justina,” which came out the following month in Esquire, illustrated what he meant.
The characters in the story come from the Wapshot provenance, but Cheever chose not to subsume “The Death of Justina” in The Wapshot Scandal. It stands too well on its own as a devastating satire on contemporary life, and specifically, on the pervasive climate of commercialism. In an opening reflection, the narrator defines art as “the triumph over chaos (no less)” but questions his ability to achieve such a triumph in a world where “even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night.…” Moses—presumably Moses Wapshot, though the last name is not used—is at work writing commercials for Elixircol when he hears of the death of his wife’s cousin at their home in suburban Proxmire Manor. His boss insists that Moses finish the commercial before he takes the train home, and in response he submits a horrendous parody of modern advertising copy:
Are you growing old? Are you falling out of love with your image in the looking glass? Does your face in the morning seem rucked and seamed with alcoholic and sexual excesses and does the rest of you appear to be a grayish-pink lump, covered all over with brindle hair?… Is your sense of smell fading, is your interest in gardening waning, is your fear of heights increasing, and are your sexual drives as ravening and intense as ever and does your wife look more and more to you like a stranger with sunken cheeks who has wandered into your bedroom by mistake?
If any of these things are true, Moses writes, you need Elixircol, “the true juice of youth” that comes in a small economy size for seventy-five dollars and a giant family size at two hundred and fifty. It’s a lot of scratch, but you can always borrow from your neighborhood loan shark or hold up a bank. He sends this copy in to his boss and catches a train to Proxmire Manor, where he finds a village government trying to legislate against death much as Elixircol purports to stave off the process of aging.
Moses and his wife live in Zone B of Proxmire Manor, where her cousin Justina has just passed away, illegally. The laws of the community specify not only that you can’t have a funeral home in Zone B (two-acre lots) but also that you can’t die there. Dr. Hunter, who gives Moses this information, suggests that he put Justina in his car and drive over to Chestnut Street, where Zone C begins and it is permissible to die. Otherwise, he’ll have to get an exception to the zoning laws from the mayor. Moses next goes to see the mayor, who explains how strict zoning laws protect investments in their homes and is disinclined to grant an exception until Moses threatens to dig a hole in the backyard and shove Justina into it. That night, Moses has a dream in which a crowded supermarket becomes a modern Hell. The shoppers bring their wares to the checkout counters, where brutes push or kick them through the door into the “dark water and … terrible noise of moaning and crying” beyond. As he watches in his dream, “thousands and thousands pushed their wagons through the market, made their careful and mysterious choices, and were reviled and taken away.”
Once Justina is safely buried, Moses goes back to his office and fashions another mock commercial. “Don’t lose your loved ones because of excessive radioactivity. Don’t be a wallflower at the dance because of Strontium 90 in your bones.… You have been inhaling lethal atomic waste for the last twenty-five years and only Elixircol can save you.” His boss is not amused. Rewrite the commercial, he demands, “or you’ll be dead.” At this command, Moses writes out the Twenty-third Psalm and leaves the office for the last time. In the end, then, he achieves a kind of victory, but at the cost of his job and in a society whose most symbolic gathering place, the supermarket, has been transformed into an updated version of the inferno.
From San Francisco, Cheever went to Hollywood for his first and only screenwriting job. He took the assignment to help finance the house that Mary had at long last found and persuaded him to buy. She had been looking around northern Westchester for three years, but most of the places cost at least fifty thousand dollars, substantially more than they were prepared to pay. Then in September 1960 Mary discovered a beautiful stone-ended house in a valley behind Ossining, with a brook and large trees and a field to scythe, and the search was over. The house with its six acres cost $37,500, and the problem of financing was not easily solved. Cheever was extremely uneasy about going into debt, and when he finally was persuaded to ask the bankers about a mortgage, they ascertained his occupation, considered his prospects, and folded their hands. To warm his reception with the bankers he referred them to The New Yorker, where legal counsel Milton Greenstein was anything but supportive. What made a writer think he could afford a house like that? he asked. At this juncture, Dudley and Zinny Schoales came forward to cosign the mortgage, the bankers smiled, and the Cheevers prepared to move the four miles north to their new home on Cedar Lane. First, though, there was a down payment to come up with. Mary contributed some funds from her savings, and the rest came from film producer Jerry Wald.
Two years earlier, in the fall of 1958, John had been prepared to go to Holly
wood. The rumor was that David Selznick was going to call him about a screenplay for Tender Is the Night, but the phone call never came. In 1960, Jerry Wald did call, or rather Cheever’s agent Henry Lewis let Wald know that Cheever was available, and so he was put to work on a screen treatment of D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl. In Lawrence’s novel, a girl from England’s industrial midlands meets and falls in love with a penniless young Italian and abandons her provincial roots to marry him and go to live in a bleak mountainous region of Italy. Cheever, with his recent exposure to Italian scenes, was a logical choice to try to transplant the story from the page to the screen. During five weeks in November and December 1960, he produced his treatment. This did not result in a motion picture, but Wald—an extremely energetic producer who often had half a dozen projects going at once—thought enough of Cheever’s work to offer him two thousand a week to return. He said no. He had his own writing to do. Hollywood was not his cup of tea.
He was put up during his 1960 stay at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where the management never let him forget he was living in a suite once occupied by Mitzi Gaynor. (Twenty years later, John Belushi died in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night bungalow at the Chateau Marmont.) He did not lack for company. John and Harriett Weaver lived only a few minutes away, and the three of them had dinner together almost every night, either at the Weavers’ or at a nearby Japanese restaurant. At Twentieth Century-Fox he was given a cubicle to write in, and a secretary who spent most of her time taking naps. He was delighted to see that Danny Fuchs, an old friend from the early days at Yaddo, was also on the lot. Over lunch, Fuchs advised him to treat Wald “like a demented child.” Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, colleagues from Astoria, relieved his distress at finding that alcohol was unavailable at the Fox commissary by sharing their emergency rations of gin. At a party at Wald’s house, a disembodied voice from beyond the closed front door asked Cheever to state his name, please. He refused, and banged the contraption that issued the request with his shoe. At another party—the highlight of his trip—he met and kissed Peggy Lee, a singer he greatly admired.