Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  Hollywood, he feared, was “a sort of literary graveyard” that consumed talents like those of Fuchs and Weaver, Al Hayes and Harry Brown and John Collier. Yet it was homesickness that most afflicted him there as the Christmas season came on. The smog was terrible for the Santa Claus parade the day before Thanksgiving. Santa wore a mink beard, a choir sang “Joy to the World” as the roses bloomed in a climate—he was told—very like that of Bethlehem. A jazz combo played a “knockabout version” of “Good King Wenceslas.” It all seemed wrong somehow. He was glad to get home in time for a cold Christmas among the fir trees.

  In February 1961 the Cheevers moved into the house in Ossining that was to be his home for the last twenty-one years of his life. Situated alongside the Hudson, Ossining derived its name from an Indian word for “stones.” The same word was responsible for the name of the town’s most famous structure, Sing Sing prison. The township, ten square miles in area and thirty miles upriver from New York City, was decidedly not fashionable: “an unchic address,” in the words of People magazine, when compared with upriver estates and affluent bedroom communities to the south. The Hudson provided the town with its economic rationale, and during the nineteenth century a downtown community rare in Westchester sprang up to serve the needs of river commerce. Ossining was also unusual among the county’s homogeneous suburbs because of its wide socioeconomic mix. The town was divided between the old-line professional white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who commuted to the city, the blacks who did the heavy work of the town, and the Italian-Americans who ran the shops and stores and served as guards at Sing Sing. In her poem “How Much Time Is a Village?” Mary Cheever traces the breach between the WASP commuters who live on the river bluffs and the proliferating black population downtown.

  Wonderful vistas opened up from the bluffs: the Palisades far to the south, the vast span of the Tappan Zee Bridge, the triple-headed High Tor rising 850 feet above the river to the northwest, and the rugged Highlands farther north. Except for the Bay of Naples, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked from the heights at Sing Sing, “the world has not such scenery.” And there were also country roads and hills and trees and lakes and—for Cheever the most ravishing sight of all—the massive Croton dam and reservoir to gaze upon. “Nobody knows how beautiful this place is,” he said. His new house shared in the natural beauty, with the Hudson edging the west and the woods and fields and a brook still closer at hand. It rather looked, he thought, like Josie Herbst’s place at Erwinna.

  The Cheevers’ house, Afterwhiles, is located near the Cedar Lane exit off Route 9A. Commanding an enclave of other early-American homes, the house itself features a pergola near the brook in front, and a stone terrace to the right. The woods beyond lead toward the river. Originally constructed in 1798, the house was redesigned in 1920 by the architect Eric Gugler. Irregular stones are massed to form the ends, with the rest clapboard. Inside there is no entrance hall, so that you walk into a dining room-living room at the left and a good-sized kitchen to the right. In one corner of the living room a sideboard displays the Canton china brought back by Benjamin Hale Cheever. A Paxton on the wall, depicting a woman on the veranda of a summer place, is on permanent loan from Arthur Spear. There’s also a winter scene by Phil Rosenthal and a Seth Thomas clock. On the second floor is the master bedroom, a small bedroom, and a library-living room featuring a lowboy from Newburyport with a handsome tortoiseshell finish to the wood, a painting of John Cheever as a boy of eleven or twelve in an artist’s smock, drawn by Aunt Florence Liley, and his grandmother’s Chinese fan, under glass. The third floor contains two more bedrooms and a storage area. As his children moved away, Cheever shifted his workplace from one abandoned bedroom to another. In Ben’s room he tacked a print of Thayer Academy to the wall. There is no trophy case attesting to Cheever’s various honors and awards. Though the highway traffic roars by a few hundred feet away, the house on Cedar Lane seems more rural than suburban, an impression seconded by the active presence of the family’s large and frisky retrievers. The place has a sense of rootedness about it.

  In the first months, though, Cheever found it difficult to take possession of his new home and to enjoy it. But as he lived there and put his labor and mortgage payments into it, he eventually forged a symbiotic bond with the place that involved a mutual possession. Time and again in the years ahead, Cheever was to comment on the hold the house had over him. He could contemplate divorce with equanimity, he would say, but—like the protagonist in “A Vision of the World” (1962)—he could not bring himself to leave the rooms he had painted and the soil he had turned. His chains, made “of turf and house paint,” bound him in a confinement he both wished for and resented. He was always worried about meeting payments on the house, and paid off the mortgage prematurely, losing some tax deductions in the process. He and the house owned each other.

  Saul Bellow was surprised by the regularity of the world that Cheever chose to occupy: the fine house, the well-kept grounds, the family heirlooms. On the surface he led a rigorously conventional life, while Bellow knew—as he came to know Cheever better—that he was drinking and having affairs. It was the old story, he supposed, of trying to escape from restrictions that one carefully crafts for himself.

  OSSINING

  1961–1963

  An innocent motorist, angling his car between the stone gateposts of Afterwhiles to catch a glimpse of the handsome house below, would be unlikely to think it the home of a writer. It looks more like the house of an advertising or PR man (Cheever bought it from an “exploded” public relations executive) or perhaps a banker (a banker sold it to the PR man). Writers were supposed to suffer and create in unheated garrets: how could anyone suffer and create in such a lovely setting? The answers were that genius could not be circumscribed geographically, that after all Cheever started out in a cold-water flat on Hudson Street a quarter of a century earlier and worked his way up to Cedar Lane, and that there was plenty of misery to go around even in the most comfortable of upper-middle-class environments. Cheever could write there as he could write—had to write—anywhere. Every time he put his foot out the door a story started to unfold in his imagination, and he could not conceive of running out of tales to tell.

  Westchester had its quota of prosperous Philistines, but Cheever rarely wrote about them. It would have been too easy to satirize them in print; instead they became the victims of private jokes. There was the stockbroker in plaid trousers who used to tell Cheever how much he envied him, being a writer. If only he could find the time, the broker said with a sigh, he’d be a writer too. And at one party he had the following dialogue with his dinner partner.

  “What is it you do, John?” the beautifully gowned woman asked him.

  “I’m a writer,” he admitted.

  “How interesting,” she said. “What do you write?”

  “Oh, stories, mostly.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I only read The New Yorker.”

  Yet there were also a number of gifted and intelligent people around, beginning with his wife, to stimulate his imagination. Ossining was also the home of actors José Ferrer and Howard da Silva, and over the hill from Cheever’s was the house where Aaron Copland used to live, now occupied by a charming Italian writer named Antonio Barolini. Barolini had some difficulties with the English language. “I am loving the Beatles,” he told Cheever. He had in mind their Croton neighbors George and Helene Biddle. Further confusion developed the day Barolini finished a story called “The Beautiful Hussle,” about “the beautiful Hussle River.”

  The Cheevers kept a busy social calendar. “I wish to Christ I led a more private life,” he sometimes said, but on the other hand he loved the parties and the gossip and the laughter, much of it generated by his wit. Most of his friends in Ossining were those he had made during the decade in Scarborough. The Kahns had moved away, but the Benjamins and Swopes and Reimans remained, along with such others as Alwyn and Essie Lee, John and Mary Dirks, Tom and Mimi Glazer, Barrett an
d Jane Clark, and Roger and Maureen Willson. Cheever felt closest of all, though, to Phil Boyer and Arthur Spear.

  A Harvard man with a hearty manner and a love of the outdoors, Phil Boyer was married to the daughter of a Morgan partner and had grown up with the kind of wealth and position Cheever could only dream of. In addition to raising dogs, both Phil and Mimi Boyer were interested in exotic birds. At their home in Croton they kept a toucan in a cage. When the toucan squawked for attention, Phil would take a tennis ball from the basket by his chair and fling it at the cage. In time their interest took a more serious direction. Wherever the Boyers went—to Whiskey Island on the St. Lawrence in the summer, or to Guatemala or Texas or Arizona in the winter—Mimi made paintings and woodblock prints of the birds they saw, and Phil became expert at photographing them. The museum in Clayton, New York, four miles from their island retreat in the St. Lawrence, reserves a room for a joint display of “Boyers’ Birds”: Mimi’s paintings and Phil’s photographs. In 1964 Cheever wrote an admiring commentary on Mimi’s work for her exhibit in New York City.

  The Boyers were very much John’s friends. Mary did not share in the friendship. In the summers when she was at Treetops, he often journeyed to Whiskey Island. On a clear day at Whiskey—one of the Thousand Islands—you could see New York on one side and Canada on the other, with steamers, freighters, pleasure boats, excursion launches, and fishermen’s skiffs going by. On stormy days you could see nothing at all; a freighter crashed into the rocks during one of Cheever’s visits.

  Mimi’s family—Carters from Virginia—owned both Whiskey and a neighboring island, and John reveled in the patrician surroundings. Sleeping in the big house on Whiskey, he communed at night with the ghosts. These happy spirits crowded the upstairs landing, he told Mimi, and in describing them he brought to life with uncanny accuracy the absent and deceased members of her family. He loved the water, especially when aboard the Wild Goose, a boat of almost Edwardian splendor. “I don’t think the Kaiser will declare war, do you?” he once asked Mimi from his magisterial position in the stern. Other activities had less appeal. When a baseball game started up on the next-door island, he not only wouldn’t play but hiked out of earshot to the very tip of Whiskey. Tennis was just as bad: he hated the sounds of games he couldn’t play.

  As best he could, Cheever reciprocated the Boyers’ hospitality to him. Along with St. Clair McKelway, he sponsored Phil for the Century Club. He read and critiqued Phil’s writing, and encouraged their son David to go to his agent with what turned out to be a book of stories, The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker (1968). He and Mimi made long-range plans to go to college, both for the first time, when they reached seventy.

  Arthur Spear, like the Boyers, was unusually attracted to birds. At one time he installed an aviary at his home in Briarcliff Manor. When this became a nuisance, he and John spent a hectic afternoon trying to catch all the birds and transport them to a tropical-bird store in the Bronx. As if forewarned of their relocation, the birds flew all over the house to avoid being caught. The last one they retrieved from under the upstairs radiator. In the early 1960s the Cheevers themselves kept ringneck doves, and some of their offspring found their way to the Spears’ house as well. The most remarkable feature of that home, though, was surely the “cow room”: a downstairs sitting room, just off the kitchen, with every inch of wall space occupied by pictures of cows and every ornament and knickknack accenting the bovine theme. Spear was like Cheever a Yankee, in his case a down-Maine Yankee, and they wasted so few words in conversation that Arthur’s wife, Stella, sometimes thought they must be angry with each other. Cheever would call for a lunch date. “Hello,” Arthur answered the phone. “Tomorrow,” said Cheever. “Noon,” said Arthur. “Sellazzo’s,” said John, and both hung up. Some of the pithiness of Leander’s journal in The Wapshot Chronicle derived from the Journals of Hezekiah Prince, Jr., 1822–1828, Arthur’s ancestor.

  Both Spear and Cheever loved the outdoor life. Together they used to go fishing at Mahopac, stopping on the way at a Greek monastery to buy good black bread and macaroons from the monks. Regularly they made the six-mile-round-trip hike along the aqueduct to the Croton dam, with a pint of liquor in pocket. A first drink was permitted at a cut through the rocks they dubbed the Ambuscade Room, and a second at the dam itself as they contemplated the falls while imbibing bourbon or Gilbey’s gin, otherwise known to them as mother’s milk. Cheever dogs usually accompanied them on the hike. “Now don’t go playing with the Crotonville dogs,” John warned them in mock seriousness. “They’re not the right sort.”

  Occasionally Arthur accompanied John on longer trips. In September 1963, the two drove up to Saratoga, visited Yaddo, stayed at the Gideon Putnam, and spent a hilarious evening with Frank Sullivan, the town’s resident humorist. “Wherever we went,” Arthur recalled, “John made it amusing.” They played backgammon together, for the small stakes both preferred. They commiserated with each other over injuries, illnesses, and deaths. They kept in touch even when apart. Arthur reported from Friendship on the performance of his beans and tomatoes and laying hens; John wrote chattily from each of his increasingly frequent stopping places overseas. In short, they were the closest of friends. Among the affinities that bound them—though theirs was not really a literary friendship—was an interest in the language and in the making of books. Spear was for many years an executive of the World Book Company, a right-hand man to its president William Cross Ferguson. Soon after Harcourt Brace purchased World in the early 1960s, however, he was summarily dismissed. Cheever, feeling deeply for his friend, dramatized his dismissal in a 1964 story called “The Ocean.” Brutally fired, the man in the story holds his emotions under control until he can get to the men’s room, lock himself in a cubicle, and weep in private.

  The Yankee friends made an annual ritual of swimming on Patriot’s Day. No private pools were open on April 19, and often the waters of the pond or river were bone-chilling at that date, but in they plunged each year in commemoration of their common heritage and the shot heard round the world. Cheever was not a man to test the temperature with his toes.

  He did much of his warm-weather swimming at Sara Spencer’s. An attractive divorcée, Sara lived across Cedar Lane in a beautiful hillside house with an artesian-fed pool for swimming and a pond for skating. When she learned that Cheever, whose stories she greatly admired, was to be her neighbor, she sent him a postcard of welcome. He phoned and asked her to cocktails, she had a dinner party for the Cheevers, and soon a close companionship developed. No place was handier for swimming and skating, and no one more warmly disposed toward him than Sara Spencer. In the early years of their relationship, John was often “very urgent” with her sexually, she said, but insisted that theirs was “not a full-scale love affair.” There had been an affair early on, John told his son Fred, and then it deepened into something else. With Sara as with Arthur, he practiced a private ritual. At eleven o’clock on Saturday mornings, he would appear at her home with fresh-baked croissants for breakfast and conversation. When he was out of town he sometimes sent a note, as a reminder of their rendezvous, missed. He cared about Sara, and she adored him.

  On the surface, Sara Spencer and John Cheever did not seem to have much in common. To begin with, she was Jewish and a few years older than he. In addition, Cheever thought of her as much stronger and more capable than he. She inherited some apartment buildings in New York City, and successfully ran the business from her house in Ossining. She tried to teach John something about finance, but he was an indifferent pupil, affecting to scorn the very subject of money. Sara was also emotionally independent. She had survived a broken marriage and learned to live alone, a condition he could not have tolerated himself.

  What she provided for him, most of all, was an entirely sympathetic ear. He told her about his difficulties as they came up, and she gave him her understanding and unqualified support. Whatever the merits of the case, she could be counted on to assure him that he was right. Over time he
r role became rather like that of a fond mother who will not find fault with her own child. John presented himself to her an unhappy and unfulfilled man, terribly in love with a wife who did not give him the love he deserved. Sara thought him badly treated, and told him so.

  New literary friends swam into Cheever’s ken during his periodic trips to Yaddo. In the summer of 1963, for example, he met and befriended two young poets, Raphael Rudnik and Natalie Robins. Rudnik was sitting by the Yaddo pool one afternoon, eyes closed against the glare of the sun, when he heard someone reading—as he thought—from a book. It was Cheever, and as he looked up, Raphael saw that he was talking in wonderful prose, not reading from a book at all. “I’d better avoid this guy,” Rudnik thought. “If he doesn’t like my stuff, he could make mincemeat of it.” A few nights later, Raphael did a reading at Yaddo. Cheever liked his poetry, and they began to take walks together and—another ritual—to throw a ball around. Raphael had “a great wing,” Cheever thought, and he admired him too for his reputation as a horse player who used to sneak into the track next door and return with more cash than he’d started out with. Soon thereafter Raphael started visiting the Cheevers on holidays, particularly Thanksgiving. “It was a celebration to see John,” Raphael said. He had a mysterious capacity, he thought, for getting people to produce the best in themselves.

  In August 1963 there were very few women at Yaddo, and for the first time in her life Natalie Robins felt really popular. Perhaps she reached out to Cheever then because her own father was dying. Perhaps he sensed in her an unusual talent for friendship with men exclusive of sexual complications. In any event he liked her, she liked him, and almost instantly Natalie became like a member of the family, trekking up to Cedar Lane on holidays along with Raphael and—after her marriage in 1965—along with her husband, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, book critic for the New York Times. At the beginning Natalie felt flattered and awed that an established writer like Cheever should take an interest in her. Later she assumed a stronger position in their friendship, comforting him in his distress.