by John Cheever
REBIRTH
1975–1977
Cheever emerged from Smithers weighing twenty pounds less and feeling twenty years younger than he had four weeks earlier. It was as if he had been reborn, to begin a new life at sixty-three.
When John came home sober, Mary Cheever recalls, he was as happy as a prisoner released from bondage. “It was like having my old father back,” Susan writes, except that now he was kinder and more alert and more helpful around the house than before. His pattern of social behavior had to change, for liquor forever threatened to pull him into the abyss. On his second day out of Smithers, he warned himself against “the euphoria of alcohol when I seem to walk among the stars.” Yet drinking was very much part of the social world he and Mary continued to inhabit. The hardest part of the day came at twilight, especially the early-stealing dark of fall and winter afternoons that summoned up cocktail hours of the past. Once he had loved large parties; now he detested them. He and Mary sometimes arrived in separate cars, so that he could leave as the level of hilarity rose. At Jane and Barrett Clark’s Christmas Eve party, he stayed only five minutes. When the Cheevers themselves entertained, he poured generous drinks for guests, but thought it would be “terribly nice” if they left early.
When Cheever quit drinking he quit taking pills: no Valium to get through the day, no Seconal to bring on sleep. Instead he drank large quantities of iced tea and chain-smoked cigarettes. (In the spring of 1979, he finally shook off his addiction to tobacco.) He chose not to sedate himself, and stuck to that choice with a remarkable fierceness of will. The choice, he knew, was really no choice at all, for by giving up alcohol he opted to live rather than die. But he reminded himself anyway that drink could do nothing to ease his daily passage, that it ruined his writing, that it robbed him of his dignity.
It was the drinking, he came to understand, that brought on his phobias about bridges and trains and crowds, if only to justify further drinking as a way of combating these anxieties. No encounter could be prepared for by liquor; the minutes beforehand simply had to be checked off. Nor did alcohol stimulate invention or liberate imagination; it only dulled the senses. Everywhere he detected the ill effects of drink on other writers’ prose. “You can practically smell the bourbon” in Faulkner’s worst work, he thought, and he sniffed it as well in the novels of contemporary writers he otherwise admired. And he repudiated the popular notion that great art derived from a torment that eventually led the artist to destroy himself. Certainly artists suffered, and perhaps more than most people. But that did not mean that they had to destroy themselves. Nor did they have to give up all their dignity, like the proverbial drunken poet at the campus reading. Hayden Carruth, himself a poet who long ago stopped drinking, asked Cheever why he quit so late in life. “At your age I think I’d have gone out loaded,” Carruth said. “Puking all over someone else’s furniture?” Cheever answered, in wonderful condensation.
Cheever set joyfully to work upon release from Smithers. In Boston he had been unable to write much of anything. Updike recalls visiting his apartment on Bay State Road early in the fall and spying a page in the typewriter. It was the beginning of Falconer, describing the entrance to the prison. But “from month to month the page in the typewriter never advanced.” His muse, as Cheever said, had been in Portugal while he was in Boston. In May 1975 they were reunited on Cedar Lane, and he threw himself into the composition of Falconer. He was overjoyed to be working again, and enchanted with what he was producing. He had been throwing “high dice” since May, he wrote Denny Coates in October 1975.
Rising early and working until one or two in the afternoon, he streaked along on the book, seven pages a day, and finished it in less than a year. He knew from the beginning what he wanted to create: a novel about confinement “as dark and radiant” as possible. Yet there were blissful discoveries along the way. He awoke one morning and it suddenly struck him that Farragut had to escape. “He’s going to get out,” he went shouting through the house. “Hey! Hey! He’s going to get out.” Never had his writing given him so much happiness.
Still, there was the rest of the day and some of the night to get through without drinking. He kept himself busy with a variety of activities, some old and some new. As always he swam in Sara Spencer’s pool, or Maurie Helprin’s, or Sally Swope’s, during the summer months. He skated not only in the winter—the ice in the winter of 1975–76 was the best in a decade—but year-round at a nearby indoor rink with Donald Lang and two black girlfriends of Lang’s. Occasionally he hiked to the Croton dam with the dogs. He also discovered new forms of exercise such as biking and cross-country skiing. John Dirks was with him the day they went into Barker’s and Cheever hauled the assembled bike on display up to the counter and insisted on taking it home with him. Thereafter he worked out two routes—one long and one short—for the daily bike ride. The long route, eight miles, took him by Marion Ascoli’s estate on Teatown Lake in Croton, where he would stop to buy some of the brown eggs laid by the free-ranging chickens and to chat with John Bukovsky, who was in charge of the chickens and the farmland and the orchards. The first time he pedaled up, the German shepherd Fritz charged out of the lilac bushes and nipped at his rear. Thereafter Bukovsky knew Cheever was on his way when he heard his voice calling “Fritzie, Fritzie” soothingly.
Cheever began to grow vegetables of his own—beets, leeks, chard, spinach, tomatoes, beans—around the house on Cedar Lane. Roger Willson, who had grown up on a farm in Iowa, helped introduce him to the mysteries of gardening. “He loved to dig in the dirt,” Willson remembers. Willson also took him fishing out in Long Island Sound. Their first time aboard the Klondike VI, the FM radio played Chopin, and between them Cheever and Willson hauled in a hundred pounds of mackerel in two hours. It was not always like that. The next time, they left New Rochelle at midnight on a beautiful night, but when they reached open water the seas were rough. Nobody caught any fish, and almost everyone on board got sick. On other evenings the Willsons took Cheever to the monthly fights at the Westchester County Center in White Plains. He loved it all: the fat sportswriters with their cigars, the floozie who paraded around the ring with the placard announcing the upcoming round, the toughs in the audience, the local hero with the cauliflower ear.
Occasionally Cheever drove down to Yankee Stadium for a baseball game. More often he watched on television, taking part as a spectator in the national pastime his father had failed to instruct him in. He heard the right-field fans turn ugly when Yankee outfielder Roy White dropped a fly ball. He watched in fascination as Jim Lonborg pitched a one-hitter. He agonized when pitcher Luis Tiant defected from the Red Sox to the Yankees, for like “all literary men” he was a Boston Red Sox fan. “To be a Yankee fan in literary society,” he declared, “is to endanger your life.” It was the game itself that drew him along, a game that seemed almost perfect in its unfolding. At World Series time he could not be pried loose from the television. And other television shows became virtually obligatory viewing also: the Sunday-night Masterpiece Theatre (Poldark was his favorite), and the glamorous soap opera Dallas.
Two or three nights a week Cheever attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He was a member of the Briarcliff chapter, but there was a meeting every night of the week in one or another of the communities nearby. He needed to go to these meetings, for he never got over the desire to drink. Simply saying the mantra “My name is John and I am an alcoholic” made him feel better. So did listening to the stories of others, as they traced their descent into degradation through drink. Cheever rarely spoke himself, instead smoking, drinking coffee, and sometimes striking up a conversation with someone who might prove to be a friend or confidant. In his new life he required new friends, and found some of them through AA.
Those who knew him before and after he quit drinking detected a substantial change in his attitude. As his writing in the late 1960s turned dark, he became even darker in person. There was an element of viciousness in what he said of others, including family and friends. This
changed when he stopped drinking. Still intolerant of slowness and stupidity in others, he nonetheless acquired a new generosity of spirit. He learned from AA, with its membership drawn from all levels of income and education, how vastly different people could help one another. Characteristically, he would not wash dishes after AA meetings, but he would turn out at four in the morning to talk with someone afraid of backsliding. He also went out of his way to help young friends in trouble with alcohol, playing the role of a surrogate parent who had been through it all and who cared about them. “I have too much faith in you and your promise to let you do this to yourself,” he told David Lange, Hope’s brother. “You’re an alcoholic like me,” he told young Dudley Schoales. “I’m going to take you to Phelps and that’s going to be it.”
By such means, Cheever coaxed several of his acquaintances into Smithers. The therapy did not always work. Truman Capote, for example, appealed to Cheever for help in a series of drunken telephone calls. “Truman, the world will lose a great writer if you lose yourself,” John said in some exaggeration. “Let me book you into Smithers.” In due course this was arranged. Capote completed the program at Smithers. Soon thereafter he appeared on the Johnny Carson show, drunk, to sing the praises of his treatment.
Travel provided another way for Cheever to work off his restored supply of energy. He resumed frequent visits to Yaddo, working on Falconer there—for instance—both in the summer of 1975 and in the winter of 1976. He took trips whenever he had completed “a lump” of the novel: to Boston early in December 1975, to Stanford with son Fred late in January 1976. During the subsequent half-decade, he journeyed to Romania, Bulgaria (twice), Russia, the Netherlands, Venezuela. He became much sought after on the visiting writer circuit, reading his stories at Harvard and Bennington and Cornell, Syracuse and Oswego and Bradford, Ottawa and Montreal and Toronto, Stanford and Southern Methodist and Utah. As his fame grew, so did the local demands on his time from libraries, colleges, and civic and cultural associations. In addition, there was a substantial volume of correspondence that he answered himself, and promptly. So he passed many hours of his days.
Coming back to Yaddo, Cheever told Nora Sayre in a voice bursting with pleasure, was like “coming home again.” It was still the one “positively ideal” place to work through the long mornings. In the afternoons he bicycled to Schuylersville and back, or cross-country skied the six-mile run through the golf course. At dinner he was in his element, engaging, convivial, full of anecdotes and good humor. Afterward he lost at Ping-Pong, shone at charades, or went into town to nurse his ginger ale and watch the young writers drink. Allan Gurganus was in residence in September of 1975, and so was the poet Philip Schultz. Cheever admired Schultz’s poetry and soon was throwing the football back and forth with him in his fathers-playing-catch-with-sons ritual. It meant a great deal to Schultz to be befriended by so well established a writer as Cheever. At the time he was virtually broke, and was planning to move from Cambridge to New York with no job in prospect. Cheever assured him that better days lay ahead, and rejoiced with him when that turned out to be true. He enjoyed taking an interest in the careers of writers whose work he liked, whether he knew them or not. One of the pleasures of growing old, as he remarked, was that sometimes you could call attention to young people’s work.
After Thanksgiving, Cheever went to Boston to read for the Harvard Advocate. To begin with he was apprehensive about revisiting what he thought of as “a sinister, provincial and decadent” part of the world, but he had something to prove. “I must repair my farewell scenes there,” he wrote. In Cambridge he had dinner with Rob Cowley before the reading, and afterward there was a reunion with Jim Valhouli and Phil Schultz. The cabdriver, recognizing Cheever, refused to collect his fare. “Hot shit,” the cabbie said. “Apples, Bullet Park, the Wapshots.” Oddly, another cabdriver in New York later surfaced as one of Cheever’s greatest fans. Sometimes it seemed as if he were “driving straight through a Cheever story” in his taxi, New York cabbie Patrick Coyne thought. The next day, Schultz got word of a four-thousand-dollar grant from the Council for the Arts, and to celebrate Cheever took him to lunch at Locke-Ober’s. He liked watching Schultz—and others—drink, so long as there was no hint of alcoholism in the air.
The glow of redemption was still on him when Cheever accompanied his son Fred on a week’s visit to Stanford in January. Fred looked over the university he hoped to attend—and ended up attending—while his father performed his “cultural soft-shoe” (a classroom visit and evening reading) for the English department. The two of them arrived in identical preppy dress—tweed sport coats, button-down shirts with crew-neck sweaters, gray slacks, brown penny loafers. In these clothes, with his face “reddened and polished, as if by a brisk wind,” Cheever looked at least ten years younger than his sixty-three years. While Fred decamped at once to stay with friends from Andover, John was put up in the institutionally drab guest room of Florence Moore (Flo Mo) House. Instructor Dana Gioia, the poet-in-the-making who was asked to look after Cheever during his visit, was struck by the older man’s unusual air of physical calm. His conversation was remarkable for its sensitivity and sudden surprising turns of phrase, but there was nothing of the performance about it. He listened intently to the Flo Mo undergraduates who were his companions at meals, and they were eager to sit at his table. “He gave off,” Gioia wrote, “that almost visible aura of joy and serenity that people have just after they have experienced a genuine religious conversion or suddenly recovered from a long life-threatening illness.” It was the joy of resurrection from alcohol, resurrection from the dead.
For most of the week, Cheever had little to do. He lingered over meals in the Flo Mo cafeteria, spent long hours smoking in the huge Naugahyde chairs of the lounge, and went on meandering walks and drives with Gioia. The undergraduates, Gioia discovered, knew nothing of his writing, so he rounded up some remaindered copies of The World of Apples and distributed them to freshmen. Cheever’s reputation was at its nadir. The younger generation was reading his contemporaries, sometimes as class assignments, while his work was virtually forgotten.
The literary lion at Stanford that week, however, was not John Cheever but Saul Bellow. Bellow’s wife, a mathematician, was being recruited for a position in the math department, and the administration and English department were courting her husband as well. Bellow’s star was in the ascendant. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, his last novel, had won the National Book Award. Before the year was out, Humboldt’s Gift, his widely praised new novel, was to win the Pulitzer Prize, and he himself would receive the Nobel Prize. His visit to campus was as overscheduled as Cheever’s was the opposite, but John betrayed no trace of resentment at the greater attention paid his co-artist and friend. There was warmth between them, and mutual admiration. Both understood, in Cheever’s oft-repeated phrase, that “literature is not a competitive sport.”
So Bellow read one night and Cheever the next, in as impressive a bit of campus programming as one could wish. Both were small, graceful men, but Cheever projected a relaxed amiability that contrasted with Bellow’s dignified reserve. He was also capable of making fun of himself. Before leaving Stanford, Cheever was persuaded to tape an interview for the literary magazine. He always sounded funny on such tapes, he said. Even on telephone recording machines, his voice came out an octave lower, with a pronounced English accent. One day he’d phoned Sara Spencer and left a message on her machine: “I’m coming swimming in about twenty minutes.” When he arrived, Sara played the recording back to him. “Who’s that old fruit with the English accent?” Cheever asked, and dived into the pool.
However curious the accent—and when combined with his characteristic mumble it could render his speech extremely difficult to follow—Cheever’s greatest charm lay in his command of language. He was hardly prepossessing physically. Trimly built with nut-brown hair, he looked at sixty-four, John Hersey reported, rather like a thirty-four-year-old who had been to “a hilarious but awfully late party the ni
ght before.” At Iowa he was mistaken for a janitor in the basement of the English and Philosophy Building, at Knopf for a deliveryman, at the Ossining public library for an employee of Mr. Cheever come to Xerox portions of the Falconer typescript. Yet in good spirits and good company, there was a joyous quality about him that communicated itself in brilliant speech and infectious laughter. At such times, Mary said, people were crazy about him.
One of the problems confronting him after he solved the worst problem of all was who to be crazy about. As a side effect of his liberation from drink, he reacquired a powerful sex drive and continued to seek outlets for it outside his marriage. After the trip to Stanford, for instance, he put Fred on a plane to Andover and went down to Los Angeles to see Hope Lange. It was a very successful reunion. Hope looked marvelous. As soon as they sat down to dinner in a restaurant, Cheever reported, both of them took off their shoes. John had just read Humboldt’s Gift, in which Charles Citrine and the gorgeous Renata make surreptitious love to each other under cover of a tablecloth. “My,” the hostess said, “you two surely enjoy your food.” Much of Hope’s appeal for him derived from her position as Hollywood and Broadway and television star, as the woman Norton Simon sent his jet to fetch across the continent to his birthday party. Proud of her and proud of their affair, he took her to meet John and Harriett Weaver in Hollywood, Bob Gottlieb in New York. He also tried to persuade her to travel with him to Romania and to Venezuela, but she turned him down. He was married, they could both be recognized, and she did not intend to slink around corners incognito. And over an extended period marked by long separations, the passion in the affair dwindled away.
Hope was not the answer, then, and it became increasingly clear that no woman could be. Soon after the drinking stopped, Cheever became more actively homosexual. What he yearned for was a loving manly relationship that did not demand too much of either party. In this way he could avoid accommodating, say, a particular woman’s taste for “scalding bathwater and pink wallpaper.” At the same time he was repelled by displays of the gay subculture. There they were mincing along in the Arcadian shopping center: the old one with his dyed hair, the youth in all his beauty. He was not like that at all, and could never be, Cheever thought. He had an occupation, he supported his family, he loved his wife and children, and nothing that he might do in the company of another man—he insisted—could diminish that.