Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  At home in Ossining, Cheever led an active physical life. He enjoyed hiking and biking, skiing and skating. In his boyhood he learned to skate on the Braintree dam with his parents, and as an adult skating always gave him pleasure. Some winters he skated nearly every day at Sara Spencer’s pond, where the golden carp could be seen gliding beneath the surface, or at Max and Marion Ascoli’s pond in Croton. He coveted such forms of “rudimentary locomotion” because the ground under his feet gave him a foundation to live and write upon. “The physical world is extremely important to me,” he said. “It’s the world by which I live.”

  For the sheer joy of exercise, nothing compared with swimming. Cheever swam in the pools of friends and the pools of acquaintances. He swam in the daytime and he swam at night. He swam at pool parties and at dinner parties. He swam in rivers and lakes and ponds and oceans in the northeastern United States, in Italy, in Eastern Europe, wherever in the world he happened to find himself. As a director of Yaddo he led a persistent campaign to get a pool installed—a campaign that succeeded despite the misgivings of Elizabeth Ames. He wrote his most famous story about swimming: “The Swimmer.”

  As a landowner he enthusiastically did the outdoor work around his place. He cut wood, both with an ax and a chain saw, and scythed the underbrush in the woods. Yet the ground was never entirely cleared until after his death. It was as if he wanted to keep the job “in a state of process,” his son Fred said.

  There were always dogs to walk at Cedar Lane. One summer the Cheevers hired a neighborhood youngster to take Cassie for walks, but the Labrador was set in her ways and refused to budge for anyone but John or Mary. Cheever’s own mother seemed to survive in Cassie. As she grew older, Cassie used to fix her master with a reproachful stare, and he could hear his mother’s voice saying, “John, can’t you try to be a little neater?” He himself felt so close to Cassie, and then to Flora MacDonald and to Edgar (female), that he suspected he had been a dog in an earlier life.

  Fond as he was of dogs, Cheever could not tolerate cats. In particular he loathed Delmore, a cat presented to the family by Josie Herbst and once the property of Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Pollet. Delmore arrived early in 1963 and immediately established his perversity by relieving himself in a box of Kleenex. When he got the cat shit off his face, Cheever drop-kicked him out the kitchen door, and soon the cat began to sulk. After Delmore, Cheever took to declaring that he was “internationally famous for his cruelty to cats.” After Delmore, one of his fictional characters puts a kitten in the blender and another—the obese guard Tiny in Falconer—massacres dozens of prison cats.

  Cheever moved to Ossining with as full a schedule of social, recreational, and domestic activities as the busiest of suburbanites. The difference was that he did not commute to a job in the city but repaired for five or six hours each day to a room not his own where he wrote letters, wrote in his journal, and wrote the fiction that made him famous. Within two months after the move to Cedar Lane, in April 1961, his fourth book of short stories appeared under the title Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel.

  Despite including the magnificent “Death of Justina,” Some People contained fewer excellent stories than any collection since The Way Some People Live. Two of the stories—“Brimmer” and “The Golden Age”—are little more than anecdotes constructed to build up to a punch line. A pervasive discontent and disenchantment runs through the book. “What is becoming evident in your work is a sort of apocalyptic poetry,” Cowley wrote, “as if you were carrying well observed suburban life into some new dimension where everything is a little cockeyed and on the point of being exploded into a mushroom cloud.” David Boroff, in the New York Times Book Review, called Cheever “a Gothic writer whose mind is poised at the edge of terror.” Frank Warnke in The New Republic described his vision as one of nightmare, not of promise.

  The final story in the book, “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear,” purports to eliminate a number of subjects that were in fact to recur later in Cheever’s career. Cheever announces that he will do away with such golden girls as the one he might have glimpsed—glorious in her shyness and her violet eyes—catching an out-of-bounds kick at the Princeton-Dartmouth rugby game, with all parts for Marlon Brando, with “all scornful descriptions” of ruined American landscapes, with all “explicit descriptions of sexual commerce,” with all addicts and lushes, with “those homosexuals who have taken such a dominating position in recent fiction,” in short with all topics that suggest a writer has “lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women.” Omitted from this “Miscellany” was one other category described in the New Yorker story Cheever published in November 1960: autobiographical characters “under the age of reason” à la J. D. Salinger: “I mean I’m this crazy, shook-up, sexy kid of thirteen with these phony parents, I mean my parents are so phony it makes me puke.…”

  The thing to do upon publication of one book, Cheever knew, was to put it out of mind and get on with the next. Like a runner, he was much more interested in where he was going than in where he had been. So in the wake of Some People he produced some excellent stories and continued work on The Wapshot Scandal. Six excerpts from the novel appeared in The New Yorker between May 1959 and the book’s publication in 1964. That way, readers who counted on seeing Cheever’s fiction in the magazine could find it there, even when he was concentrating on a novel.

  A rare editorial dispute with The New Yorker surfaced in November 1961 in connection with “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow.” In this cold-war story, the jingoistic Charlie Pastern gives a key to his elaborate bomb shelter to a neighbor, the plumply seductive Mrs. Flannagan. When Charlie’s wife discovers this perfidy, a terrible row occurs. In a final coda the narrator reveals that both the Pasterns’ and Flannagans’ marriages have collapsed, that Charlie is in jail for grand larceny, and—as a finishing touch—that in the first snow of the winter the now impoverished Mrs. Flannagan comes back to the Pasterns’ fine suburban lawn and is standing there, gazing at the bomb shelter in the snow, when the new owner of the house sends out her maid to tell her to go away. Bill Maxwell, who thought this summarizing ending ineffective, had the story set up in galleys without the coda, so that Cheever could see how it read. At this stage Cheever stopped by the office, saw the proofs, concluded incorrectly that the magazine meant to publish the story that way regardless of how he felt, and roared with indignation. Maxwell gave up trying to persuade him, and the coda was restored. The conflict foreshadowed the severing of relations between author and magazine that was to come two years later.

  Meanwhile, Cheever was beginning to get his first serious critical attention. Frederick Bracher, a professor at Pomona College in California, published two essays which remain among the best yet written about Cheever’s work, in part because they benefited from the correspondence between the two men. In his letters Cheever made it clear that he welcomed and was surprised to receive the attention of an intelligent and reputable critic. Most of the breed, he thought, were guilty of a great deal of trimming and hedging. It was a rare critic who, like Bracher, genuinely concerned himself with the welfare of the literary commonwealth. He liked Bracher’s article, “John Cheever and Comedy,” so much that it became a kind of family joke. “Daddy’s reading Professor Bracher’s paper again,” Susie would say.

  Cheever did most of his writing at home during the early 1960s, but he was at Yaddo in September 1962 when word came of Cummings’s death. Everyone sat around in the Great Hall after dinner while John and Curt Harnack reminisced about the poet. “I’m not especially pious,” Cheever wrote Cummings’s widow, Marion, the next day, “but I think he was an angel.” As much as anything he admired his fellow New Englander’s indisputable style, a style reflected in the manner of his passing. At sixty-seven and despite his arthritis, Cummings was cutting kindling behind his house in New Hampshire. Marion called out to him, “Cummi
ngs, isn’t it frightfully hot to be chopping wood?” “I’ll stop now, dear,” he answered, “but first I’m going to sharpen the ax before I put it up.” Those were the last words he spoke.

  The following year Cheever had his first literary encounter with John O’Hara, another New Yorker regular and a writer he was often compared to. The occasion was an Esquire-sponsored conference in Princeton, and at a tea party there he met O’Hara, who was wearing yellow plush shoes that seemed to be killing him. “Well,” the hostess told O’Hara upon discovering that he was a writer, “you’ve got the map of Ireland on your face.”

  Cheever himself was increasingly troubled about his drinking, a vice often associated with the Irish and with writers. In his journals he wrote of excruciating hangovers and dissected his own rationalizations. If he had errands to run the next day, that was a reason to get drunk the night before. If he went to pick up the maid, he could swing by the liquor store for gin. If there were no errands, he struggled to stay at his desk until noon—or at least until eleven—before taking a first drink. To disarm strangers, he took to announcing himself as “a very heavy drinker.” Whether or not to invite the Cheevers became a real issue among their friends, since his customary good nature sometimes turned to meanspiritedness under the influence of alcohol. The problem was his to deal with every day, for it was up to him to establish his own job discipline. Unlike many modern American writers, most of whom have held regular positions as teachers or journalists, Cheever lacked the benefit of an external schedule to keep him at his desk. He had to make his own appointments and set his own deadlines, and this required tremendous willpower. There were a good many hours in the day, and it was easy to occupy them with drinking, with sex, with anything except work.

  His brother, Fred, furnished an example close at hand of the devastation of drink. Liquor was undermining Fred’s career and leading to domestic problems, while he steadfastly maintained that it wasn’t his fault, that the world was against him.

  The Cheever brothers saw much less of each other after Fred moved from Briarcliff Manor to Weston, Connecticut. Yet when it became clear that Fred was in the grip of alcoholism, John felt an obligation to care for him. He and Mary invited Fred down to Thanksgiving. His face swollen with drink, Fred insisted, defiantly, that at least his children loved him. John was immediately angry at the implication—intended or not—that his own children did not love him. But mixed with the anger was a complementary compassion for the brother who was “drinking himself to death in an empty house in Weston.” A few months later he woke in the middle of the night, sensed that something was terribly wrong, and drove to Weston, where he found Fred in the throes of acute alcoholism. He rushed him to the hospital at Yale, where Dr. William Winternitz, Mary’s younger brother, took charge of the case.

  Clouds were hovering over the house on Cedar Lane as well. In the fall of 1962, Mary Cheever took a part-time job teaching English at Briarcliff College nearby. She was hired, Dean Kenneth Shelton assured her, for her own wit and intelligence and integrity, not because she was John Cheever’s wife. Though the job paid only a few thousand dollars a year, about enough to cover Iole’s occasional domestic services, it gave Mary a sense of herself as a person of value. Teaching “saved my life,” she said in retrospect. She was an exceptionally gifted teacher. Raphael Rudnik remembers accompanying her to class one day and being struck at her easy rapport with students who obviously worshiped her. She rapidly earned the admiration and respect of her colleagues as well: they recognized in her a professional, and a good one. Invigorated by the college surroundings, she made new friends, took yoga lessons, and started to write poetry in earnest.

  John viewed his wife’s career with scorn and resentment. Sensitive about his lack of education, he thought most academics were “bitter and ugly” people. At one party, he threw a glass of whiskey at Mary’s department chairman, who was advocating a libertarianism Cheever found odious. He also thought it ridiculous that the family should in any way be inconvenienced while Mary instructed Briarcliff’s Megans and Betsys—most of them, in his opinion, debutantes of limited intellectual capacity—in the mysteries of freshman composition and creative writing. It was one thing to teach good students and be properly compensated for it, but why, he asked her in front of others, why should she waste her time teaching at an eighth-rate college? “Now, John,” she replied, “it’s a fifth-rate college and you know it.”

  Both of them used humor to smooth over arguments, but tensions were building in the marriage. Perhaps as a consequence of his drinking, John was troubled with spells of impotence. They sought counseling for the problem, but nothing seemed to help. In due course each of them became convinced that the other was not interested. In a poem, Mary recounted how in a dream people

  young and old can lie naked

  side by side in a single bed

  each one believing he or she alone

  wants to make love.

  Both of her parents, according to Susan, sought lovers outside the home. In any event, John became convinced that Mary was unfaithful to him. “If she does not take a lover,” he thought to himself, “she will be a fool. If she does and I find out, I will wring his neck.”

  For vicarious amusement, he conjured up dream girls like the one in his 1961 story “The Chimera.” This imaginary creature (named Olga) appears miraculously to a henpecked husband one evening after dinner. A waltz begins to play, and there she is, dark-haired, olive-skinned, just in from California on the train and sorely in need of his “love, strength, and counsel.” Soon Olga proves unfaithful herself and disappears, but the husband is not desolated. Since he had invented Olga, what was there to keep him from inventing others—“dark-eyed blondes, vivacious redheads with marbly skin, melancholy brunettes, dancers, women who sang, lonely housewives?” In another story, “An Educated American Woman” (1963), Cheever took a more direct swipe at his wife’s busy calendar. In the story, Jill Chidchester Madison, a graduate of one of the best women’s colleges, devotes herself so wholeheartedly to community and educational causes that she neglects her husband and child. In the end, the child falls ill with pneumonia and dies. Mary knew what the story was about. “I did go to one or two meetings of the League of Women Voters,” she remarked, “but I do think he should not have killed the little boy.”

  In the Cheevers’ own very literary family, children and adults alike sometimes read aloud after dinner. As a regular weekly ritual, the clan foregathered in the living room at five o’clock on Sunday afternoons to recite poems they had memorized during the previous week. Ben, at seven, was reciting Robert Frost. Despite such pleasant family entertainments, an undercurrent of sarcasm ran beneath the dinner-table conversation. And for a time at least, John was dissatisfied with the progress of his two older children.

  Susie, in adolescent rebellion, was unhappy at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry. Her father used to give her books to read, books not in the regular school curriculum—Stendhal, Flaubert, Dumas, Dickens, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bellow’s Augie March—and then keep her up late at night talking about them. The next day in English class, almost inevitably, she would argue with her English teacher. Occasionally Cheever tried to play the stern disciplinarian. When Susie brought home news that she was on probation, he was upset. When she announced that she didn’t care, he was furious. Considering her father’s hopes for her as a potential debutante, it did not help that she rarely had dates. When a boy did come to the door, her father welcomed him effusively and told him to keep her out as late as they wanted. She felt as if he were selling off the homely daughter.

  In reaction, Susie sought ways to declare her independence. She persuaded her disappointed parents to remove her from the Masters School and send her to the somewhat less social Woodstock Country School in Vermont, where she improved both grades and attitude enough to be admitted to Pembroke. In college she took up the classical guitar and started wearing serapes. Summers she worked as a maid at the inn in Wauwinet, as a clerk at Mac
y’s, and as a teacher of the illiterate poor in Alabama. Charles Shapiro from Briarcliff College, leader of the group that went to Alabama, remembers Susie as extremely intelligent and biting in her wit.

  Like his parents before him, Cheever was sensitive to the least hint of unmanliness in his sons. At Scarborough, Ben had one friend with effeminate manners. “My father hated him,” he recalls. “He’d much have preferred my hanging around with the kids who broke into candy machines.” In Ossining, John was annoyed by Ben’s high early-adolescent voice. “Speak like a man,” he used to command him. Once when Ben was sweeping the floor he angrily snatched the broom away. Sweeping was woman’s work. Man’s work was outdoors, clearing land and splitting wood. At twelve or thirteen, Ben came in from a spell of such yard work at fifty cents an hour and climbed into the detergent bubble bath his mother had run for him. John happened by and saw the boy up to his neck in bubbles. “Who do you think you are?” he roared. “A movie star?” When Ben went off to prep school at Loomis, his father forbade him to take his teddy bear along.

  Despite incidents like these, Ben always regarded his father as a good parent. “He could be so loving, so concerned, so solicitous, so entertaining.” He used to take Ben fishing, and later the two of them went kayaking on the Croton River. When Ben tackled Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, his father began calling him Myshkin, affectionately. And he read Ben all of Joyce’s Dubliners aloud. Ben recalls especially “The Dead,” with the snow, “general all over Ireland,” falling lyrically at the end and leaving both father and son limp with tears.