by John Cheever
Within Yaddo itself, the reigning monarch was experiencing difficulties of her own. In her late eighties, Elizabeth Ames was almost blind, quite forgetful, and often cranky. When the Palamountains called, soon after their arrival in Saratoga in 1965, to ask if they might visit Yaddo, Ames slammed down the phone on them. So during Cheever’s visit he snuck them into the mansion by the back door (he knew where the key was hidden), and the three of them spoke in whispers as they tiptoed around Yaddo’s dark halls. The spirit of Elizabeth Ames seemed to pervade the place, though she was asleep in Pine Garde cottage a football field away. They encountered instead Philip Roth, as he came spooking downstairs to see who was there. As that episode suggests, Ames was threatening to become rather a tyrant at Yaddo, and of course she had always played favorites. “If she was fond of you,” longtime cook Nellie Shannon remarked, “she’d do anything for you. If she wasn’t, forget it.” But to many Yaddo colonists—and to such board members as Cheever and Cowley—she represented everything that was valuable about Yaddo. In a sense, she was Yaddo, and they were reluctant to make her step down until the rigors of old age made it impossible to act otherwise. Finally it had to be done. After an extensive search, Curtis Harnack was named to replace her as director. Cheever was chosen to write a tribute to her accomplishment.
Elizabeth has seen all kinds—lushes down on their luck, men and women at the top of their powers, nervous breakdowns, thieves, geniuses, cranky noblemen, and poets who ate their peas off a knife. She has remained imperturbable, humorous and fair. This is much more than the conscientious stewardship of a will, much more than a friendly feeling for the arts. This is a life and a triumph.
Cheever’s own capacity to derive humor from adversity was illustrated in late 1967 when he suffered a long episode of prostatitis. In a letter to Dr. Mutter, he explained that his prostate acted up in response to erotic stimuli. That whole part of him, he confesses, “was apt to be foolish.”
At Thanksgiving the family followed a regular ritual. First John and Fred lined the sloping lawn with tennis-court tapes, and then the crowd—as many as two dozen—arrived for the touch football game. Cheever himself was not much of a player. Next there were drinks for all and then the turkey that Mary had prepared and John carved, after reciting a grace he constructed out of the Cranmer Bible and Jowett’s Plato.
The Cranmer is loud, resonant and liturgical and cuts into the small talk and the noise of silver. “Almighty God, maker of all things, judge of all men!” Then comes the Plato, even louder. “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus may we live happily with one another and with God.”
The close is incantatory, close to plainsong. “By Whom and with Whom in the Unity of the Holy Ghost all honor and glory be to Thee oh Father Almighty, world without end. Amen.”
After dinner everyone took a walk, and after dark they played charades. The pattern was important to Cheever. Like Leander Wapshot, he intended that “the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life” should be “a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and continuousness of things.”
And yet, he sometimes broke the bounds. One holiday dinner he and Natalie Robins slipped away from the dinner table to go shopping at Barker’s, the discount store in the Arcadian shopping center nearby. Cheever loved shopping there: the shoddy merchandise, the piped-in variation on “In a Little Spanish Town,” the assistant manager “with ash-blonde hair, a grey lace dress and … a strong, unfresh smell like old candy” who counted on her fingers. Natalie, who had no hobbies other than shopping for bargains, was delighted to go along. She went off to look for junk clothes, socks, and shoes, while he visited hardware and chatted with Richard Van Tassel, the manager of the store. Both found a small treasure to purchase, and they drove back to Cedar Lane, where everyone was still at table.
In December 1967, Ben was arrested in Cincinnati. Together with a group of other college students, he had blockaded an induction center as a protest against the Vietnam War. All were thrown in the workhouse for disturbing the peace, with bail set at nine hundred dollars. Cheever wired the money as soon as he got word, but meanwhile Ben spent two nights in jail. When he came home for Christmas, he looked at his father “a little distantly” and told him, “You know, you don’t know anything until you’ve been roughed up by the Man!” It was an experience Cheever was willing to forgo, but otherwise he was entirely supportive of his son, who was eventually tried and got off with a suspended sentence and a $150 fine. A few years later, Cheever was invited to appear in Cincinnati. “I won’t make a speech there,” he declared. “I won’t make a potholder in the city that arrested my son.” Early in April, he and Mary and Susie participated in an interracial march to mourn the death of Martin Luther King: whites and blacks elbow to elbow, united—however fleetingly—in the common bond of sorrow.
DOUBLING
1967–1969
John Cheever embodied the paradox of the bourgeois artist. Most of the time he pursued a respectable suburban existence as a family man, but he sometimes played the drunken rakehell and sexual adventurer. Most of his friends in Ossining saw only the Cheever who lived a conventional life. The bohemian exploits generally occurred on the road. This two-sided pattern of behavior was accompanied by a division within his spirit between the celebratory and the deprecatory. Darkness and light competed for preeminence in a continual chiaroscuro. Hypersensitive to beauty and ugliness alike, he “adored everything and deplored everything.”
He was, he liked to point out, a Gemini. The legend of Castor and Pollux, those mythical twins in the sky, holds that they alternated between different realms. Castor occupied Olympus one day while Pollux remained in Hades, and on the next day they changed places. A similar duality obtained in Cheever’s personality and in his writing. In Bullet Park, the novel he was working on until midsummer 1968, he gave Tony Nailles the same birthday as his own, May 27. Tony’s high school French teacher tells him he is a Gemini, and adds with seeming casualness, “Gemini determines many of your characteristics and one might say your fate.…” This does not mean that Cheever believed in astrology: he did not. It does suggest an awareness of the deep division within himself that is patent in almost everything he wrote.
“I want an environment, a house, dogs, children and love,” he observes in one introspective passage. Yet in another he accuses himself of having constructed a museum of a home, where the exhibits depicted only a drab and confining life. “The fully disciplined man,” he wrote a young admirer, “is a stick of wood.” He was damned if he would be a stick of wood.
Cheever began his extended affair with Hope Lange in the late 1960s. Of necessity they saw each other infrequently. She lived in Los Angeles most of the year, and was often busy in films or plays or starring in the television series The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968–70) and The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1971–74). From the beginning Cheever was proud of the affair, for wasn’t Hope one of the most beautiful women in the world? Chatting with Jinny Kahn at Susie’s wedding, he confidentially let her know about it. The Friday Club members heard about Hope regularly, sometimes in wildly exaggerated form. Alan Pakula, Hope’s husband, was after him with a pistol, Cheever said. Hope had to hide him in the closet once when Frank Sinatra came to call, he maintained. These tales, Hope confirms, were outright inventions.
Cheever began to invoke Hope’s name in a mantra that enabled him to get out of bed in the morning during spells of depression. “I’m loved and wanted and there’s something to get out of bed for,” he assured himself. “Hope is beautiful and she loves me and she’s coming to see me.” In his imagination he fancied that they lived together happily in a house by the sea. At times he fantasized about leaving home and family for her.
They saw each other, almost always, for liquid lunches at La Côte Basque or Maxwell’s Plum or a French bistro. Sometimes, but by no means always, they made love afterward. Either way they had wonderful fun together, Hope remembers. Like a
teenager on a first date, he took her skating at Rockefeller Center. She encouraged his sense of the ridiculous, and was happy when she could make him laugh. “When he threw back his head and really laughed,” she said, “I knew I was giving him something.”
She loved the way he spoke, too, though sometimes when he mumbled she used to think she was partially deaf. And she liked the way he was supportive of her and totally unjudgmental. There was never any jealousy about the men she was seeing. “Whatever I wanted to do was okay,” she said. Theirs was not a “great physical love affair,” however. She was not strongly attracted to him physically, and rather surprised by how highly sexed he was. There was never enough lovemaking for him; he always wanted more. He was, she thought, “the horniest man” she’d ever known, and at times adolescent in his demands. Once, early in their afair, John wanted to make love and she did not. Quite drunk, he completely lost his sense of dignity and lay down on the floor in the hallway outside her hotel room.
No matter how insistent he was, they were both very much aware that he was married. During their afternoons together, it was important for him to leave at four o’clock to catch the four-twenty train. “I certainly loved John, and would do anything for him,” she said, but she realized that he “had to be a hellion to live with”: home a lot, sometimes drunk, terribly moody. She’d known enough writers to understand how difficult they could be. She and Mary met perhaps three times, first when she and Alan Pakula went up to Ossining for lunch, later when Cheever read at the YM-YWHA in New York in 1977, and again at a screening of The Shady Hill Kidnapping in 1981, and she could sympathize with the wife’s role in those awkward meetings. Certainly she was not out to steal Mary’s husband. Though she loved seeing John, she was not prepared to make a full emotional commitment to him. What would happen if she let herself become emotionally dependent on him? She was the one who was single (after 1971), and he’d still be catching the four-twenty to Ossining.
Hope appeared often in the journals he maintained after the fashion of his grandfather and father. As he grew older, he came to depend on his journals “to preserve the keenness of small daily sensations.” They also served as his confessional. As Richard Stern suggests, writing in his journal was “a consolation, a secret repair shop, a magic ring to rub out his enemies and doubts.” If he could write it down, it lost its sting.
So down it went, even to the extent of self-loathing. When he said that he loved his son’s track shoes—so he challenged himself—wasn’t he really an emotional impostor? Weren’t his dream girls a manifestation of “the barrenness of self-love”? And how could he justify the lack of discipline he brought to his work and the cruelties he visited on his family? When Mary—a superlative cook—fixed a roast for dinner, he carved as usual and served her with the choice piece of meat. “I don’t want it,” she said, but he insisted that she take it. This pattern was a common one at the dinner table, as he constantly reserved the smallest or least attractive cut of meat for himself. Eeyore, Susan used to call him. He knew what he was doing, and in his journals excoriated himself for doing it. These minuscule sacrifices represented an attempt to salve his conscience for larger betrayals. It was as if he were saying, “See how good I am to you, in this trivial way.”
Astringent as he could be with himself, Cheever sometimes allowed self-pity to intrude into his journals. Early in 1968, he went through a period of considerable discomfort with his teeth. Some had to be extracted. The remainder were capped. “I don’t care about my beauty,” he said, “but my dentist does.” The dentist was in New York, and one day he stopped in to see Frances Lindley at Harper & Row before an appointment. They had a drink at “21,” and then he asked her to come along while he had a tooth pulled. Fully cognizant that she was playing a maternal role, she went along, sat with him on the dentist’s couch for a while afterward, put him in a cab, and left. Soon thereafter he awoke in pain in the middle of the night. Worse than the toothache was his despairing feeling that the doors of his own house were being shut against him. On another trip to New York, he went to the public baths after lunch and encountered a male whore. “How did you ever get into this fix?” he wondered. And why couldn’t men have ideal friendships without any taint of perversion? Meanwhile his addiction to alcohol grew worse. This became poignantly clear when his brother, Fred—well dressed, alert, and cold sober at sixty-two—came to visit on the eve of his departure for Europe. The brothers talked late into the night, Fred sticking to ginger ale while John downed a bottle of bourbon. Which brother was in trouble now?
In the summer of 1968, Cheever took a vacation in Ireland with Mary and son Fred. He was ready for a holiday, having finished Bullet Park after a long siege and completed a number of literary obligations as well. As chairman of the grants committee of the National Institute, he recommended an award for Dick Stern and wrote “a beautiful sentence or two” by way of citation. As an NBA judge he was a strong supporter of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a book he thought “astonishing” from a man in whose work he found “no bluff at all.” He was also lobbying with the institute and the foundations on behalf of Fred Exley, whose poignant A Fan’s Notes came out in mid-1968.
Happy developments were in prospect for his own work, too, as Cheever left for Ireland. At the Ford Foundation’s invitation he applied for a grant to write a play. From Stockholm came a letter from the Nobel Prize people addressed—he said—to “Sir John Cheese, Offining” and revealing the news—he said—that they “wanted to take a look at me and see if I can walk backwards.” And in the Emerald Isle he waited anxiously for a cable from the Book-of-the-Month Club about Bullet Park.
In Ireland the mountains were blue and green, and there was wonderful swimming and fishing. The place struck him as “haunted,” in the best sense. Armed with the Shell guide and a letter from old Ireland hand Bill Maxwell, the Cheevers went to Kenmare, County Kerry, where Michael J. O’Connor, a fine figure of a man of seventy who owned a fishing boat called the Sea-Elf, took them fishing for mackerel in the estuary and talked a fine “crack” about his World War II experiences with the Eighth Army in North Africa. They then went to Inishmore and stayed in a farmhouse with such primitive amenities that John and Fred had “to face the wall when Mary pumped ship.” Less politely, a horse gazed in at one window, a cow at another.
On the return flight, Cheever stuffed some smoked salmon in the pocket of his sport coat, a subterfuge that led to a terrible midnight scene in customs at Boston’s Logan Airport. And for days afterward, he felt violently disoriented, much more so than after trips to Italy. But he loved the Irish people and the Irish gift for language. He and Mary told John and Mary Dirks, then considering a trip to Ireland, that they really had to go and visit Kenmare and look up the brilliant blue-eyed garrulous Michael J. O’Connor and take their tea at Mrs. Hussey’s in Sneem.
Though the Ford Foundation and the Nobel Prize Committee and the Book-of-the-Month Club had no good news to report, his agent Candida Donadio had already improved his financial position. She negotiated a new and lucrative contract with Knopf beginning with Bullet Park, and so ended eleven years, two novels, and three books of stories with Harper & Row. Cheever felt defensive about a decision so obviously based on financial grounds. It did not suit his image of himself as an author who was “not a money player” like, say, his friend Irwin Shaw. As best he could, he made light of it. So he wrote Frances Lindley that he was changing not just publishers but everything—his lawyer, doctor, dentist, and liquor dealer. And to editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf he made a mock apology for fussing about money. He hated to admit it, he explained, but he was subject to dreams of envy about such best-selling colleagues as Updike and Roth.
At the same time, he could be like a little boy in the presence of large sums of money. He brought a hefty check from Knopf along to dinner with Connie Bessie one night, and afterward they decided to see if the St. Regis (where they’d dined) would cash the check. When the staff said they wouldn’t—or rat
her couldn’t—he was delighted. He was also extraordinarily generous when flush. “When John felt rich,” Mary said, “he’d go out and buy color television sets or Volkswagens. Three Volkswagens.” He did in fact buy Rob and Susie a Mustang, and with the advance from Knopf in the bank, he took the entire family to Curaçao for ten days over the New Year’s holiday of 1968–69. Ben had to be persuaded to come along. At twenty-one, he disapproved of people who were tan in January. The following summer, there was a still more expensive family trip to Majorca, Madrid, and Rome, “all first class.” His income for 1969 came to more than sixty-three thousand dollars, and he spent a large fraction of it on those vacations. When he had money he spent it. When funds ran low he was reluctant to part with a dime.
No novel of Cheever’s more vividly illustrates his duality of vision than Bullet Park. As critic Samuel Coale has noted, a “distinctly Manichean conflict” runs through his fiction. As with a reflex light his writing evokes opposites, flashing back and forth between the polarities of “flesh and spirit, dark and light, the terrestrial and the weightless, land and sea.” He is at once the lyric transcendentalist and the bitter Calvinist. As John Updike expressed it, Cheever “thought fast, saw everything in bright true colors, and was the arena of a constant tussle between the bubbling joie de vivre of the healthy sensitive man and the deep melancholy peculiar to American Protestant males.” And John Gardner, writing of Bullet Park in particular, observed that the author “sees the world in its totality—not only the fashionable existential darkness but the light older than consciousness, which gives nothingness definition.”