by John Cheever
As always, Cheever continued to think in narrative. “To spend an afternoon with Cheever,” Steve Phillips observed, “is to hear about forty stories begin to take shape.” But the three-day frenzies that produced many of his stories visited him no longer: he could not concentrate with that kind of intensity. Sometimes, too, he was afflicted with what he called spells of otherness. Fixing breakfast, sitting at his desk, or dawdling over dinner, his mind would trip a wire and transport him across time and space to a realm where he knew not who he was. After a few terrifying moments the short circuit would mend itself and he would be back in the house at Cedar Lane, shaken and fearful of madness. How could he write if his mind was not right? His diminished capacities combined with the distractions of fame to retard his writing. It grew harder and harder to get the words down on paper. But as never before—now that he was sober, now that he understood how important it was to his audience as well as to himself—he wanted to write. It was what gave his life meaning.
Along about 1977, it occurred to Cheever that he was as dependent on his readers as they were on him. “Writing is very much like a kiss,” he said. “It’s something you can’t do alone.” Armed with that realization, he was willing to do readings and attend book signings almost anywhere. Only once did he rebel, when a rather elegantly dressed woman brought him an old copy of The Wapshot Scandal that the dog had obviously gotten to. She presented the chewed and be-saliva’d copy for signature. He flatly refused to sign. “Buy one of the new books,” he suggested, “and I’ll inscribe it any way you want, but preferably to the dog, obviously the only Cheever lover in your household.” The woman stormed away. Otherwise, he felt a real sense of communion with “the fourteen or eighteen or twenty people who live in the woods and read my books,” as he said on The Dick Cavett Show. Actually there were perhaps two hundred thousand people in the United States and England who would read and understand and like his work, and that wasn’t counting the international audience he commanded in translation. He liked to think that they were “intelligent, well informed, serious, and mature,” but he did not know who they were in the sense that Virginia Woolf, for instance, knew exactly whom she was addressing in her best books. From RFD return addresses he discovered that some of his readers lived in remote areas and that among them was the president of the True Value hardware store in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and a woman from New York who thanked him for brightening the very day that her canary, “a glorious Yorkshire cock,” had died. Earlier he had thought they were all New Yorker readers, but that proved to be less true with Falconer and the collected Stories than the earlier books. His audience was expanding, and he wanted to reach still more. In an effort to do so, he turned to television.
To begin with, Cheever had his reservations about the medium. Late in 1979 the Public Broadcasting Service’s Great Performances series presented one-hour adaptations of three Cheever stories: “The Sorrows of Gin,” adapted by Wendy Wasserstein; “O Youth and Beauty!” adapted by A. R. Gurney; and “The Five Forty-Eight,” adapted by Terrence McNally. Cheever declined the chance to do the adaptations himself. “A short story completed is rather like a baseball game,” he said. “You can’t do anything else with it.” He was also convinced that no really fine novel or story could be translated to film. A fourth-rate story like Poldark made an excellent television series, while The Mayor of Casterbridge fizzled. You could not film The Great Gatsby, though people kept trying. “Literature goes to where the camera is not.” He admired J. D. Salinger for sticking to his guns on this issue. When The Catcher in the Rye came out, Salinger was approached to sell the motion-picture rights. He wouldn’t do that, Salinger replied. Catcher wasn’t a film, it was a novel. According to Cheever, Hollywood doubled the ante “and even sent a piano to soften Salinger up. He sent it back. The issue was not negotiable.”
The only way Cheever saw of writing for television was to write an original script. The problem here was that in commercial television as in the films, the writer was often regarded as a functionary whose work might be twisted entirely out of shape in the process of production. Such writers were at the mercy of the producer and the director, the network and the sponsor, and he was unwilling to give up his independence in that way. Jac Venza, executive producer of New York’s WNET, solved the problem. When Cheever told him he wasn’t interested in adapting his own stories but might like to do an original screenplay, if only he could be guaranteed the independence he wanted, Venza said to go ahead. He’d do his best to prevent any interference. This was in mid-1973, and for six months Cheever sweated over the first draft of The Shady Hill Kidnapping. In February 1979 there was a reading of the teleplay at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre. “It was an exciting experience,” Cheever remarked, but Venza and Ann Blumenthal, who was eventually to produce Kidnapping, knew that the script still needed work. For the time being all parties let it simmer while Cheever returned to fiction. By the start of 1980, he was working with painful slowness on Oh What a Paradise It Seems. It was intended, he told interviewers, to be a “big book.”
Cheever’s personal relationships stabilized early in 1980. Fred was happy and doing well at Stanford. Ben, separated from his wife, came home to Cedar Lane in December 1979. Thereafter he and his father were closer than ever before. Susan’s first novel was in press, and her second in the typewriter. She and Ben alike were soon forging other alliances, Ben with Janet Maslin, film critic for the New York Times, Susan with Calvin Tomkins, art critic for The New Yorker. “You know, my kids find very interesting people to shack up with,” Cheever said irreverently, but he was pleased for them nonetheless.
In the spring of 1980, Max Zimmer moved back to Westchester from Long Island and resumed his thrice-weekly calls at the Cheever house. This time Max was on the payroll as general factotum: chauffeur and secretary, bike rider and backgammon opponent, friend and lover. When Mary left for Treetops in August, Max moved in and even did the cooking sometimes. He also continued to bring his fiction to Cheever for comments. “I learned an enormous amount from him about craft,” he says, “about scenes, paragraphs, story construction.” As time went on, the roles even reversed somewhat. When Cheever struck a rough patch on Paradise or Kidnapping, he and Max would bounce alternative passages back and forth.
With Max nearby, John could better abide the waning of his affair with Hope Lange. Hope loved seeing him, but had progressively less interest in the physical side of their association. She turned him down when he tried to persuade her to accompany him to Venezuela. And when they had lunch in New York, she would arrange to do some shopping or go to an exercise class immediately afterward. John took Ben along for one such lunch date in the summer of 1980. “It did not look as if things were going to work out for Daddy that day,” he recalls. Finally there was no sex at all. The last time he saw her, Cheever told Max Zimmer, they rendezvoused at Bloomingdale’s and then walked to her hotel. Cheever got undressed hopefully, while she busied herself making phone calls. Deciding that flowers were called for, he got dressed, went downstairs, bought flowers, came back up, put the flowers in a vase, and removed his clothes again. But Hope stayed on the phone, and finally—defeated—he got up, dressed, and left. Hope does not remember this scene. Certainly, she says, she would not have wanted John to feel dismissed. But that was the way he characterized it for Max, and pretty much the way he later presented it in a fictionalized version in Paradise.
In the fall, Cheever drove up to Saratoga Springs for his last, and worst, stay at Yaddo. Looking backward, it was easy enough to detect omens of the trouble ahead. In October “the small season” had begun at Yaddo, with the number of artists reduced to a fraction of the summer crowd. At dinner, Cheever was very much king of the hill and excessively short-tempered. He was also unconscionably rude to the writer and doctor Richard Selzer. Still no one was prepared for what happened.
Cheever was headquartered in Hillside Cottage, a studio nestled in a grove of locust trees. He went to some trouble to get a television set in
stalled there so that he could watch the World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Kansas City Royals, and invited Mary Ann Unger, Joan Silver, and Lee Hyla to watch the third game—a night game—with him. The game followed an exhausting day for Cheever. After his morning’s work, he bicycled twenty-two miles around Saratoga Lake, passing cottages—he was able to remember—called Gud Enuff and Dun Roamin. After dinner he attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and returned in time to watch the ball game with his guests. In the seventh inning, he stood watching the game and holding a plastic glass of ginger ale. As Joan Silver watched, he crushed the glass with his hand. At first she thought it was a joke, but the grimace on Cheever’s face arrested her laugh. With his mouth twisted, he slipped, fell on the couch, and continued to convulse. Hyla ran to West House to summon help, while the two women stayed with the unconscious Cheever.
The ambulance arrived in about ten minutes. Dr. Selzer, alerted to the emergency, rode along to the hospital with Cheever, where he saw to it that he was not subjected to any “invasive tests.” He was unconscious for several hours and troubled by loss of memory for many more. The hospital diagnosed his malady as a “mini-stroke.” Silver and Unger thought it might have been a heart attack. It was a grand mal seizure.
In conversation and correspondence, Cheever treated the incident lightly. The game itself had been very dull, he told Silver, and was not to be blamed for his seizure. Even after a second episode six weeks later, he continued to make light of his affliction. During the “aura” that preceded his collapse, the image that sprang into his mind was of a bishop on the beach in Nantucket, bestowing his blessing in a forgotten language. Then he began to “chew on grandmother’s Oriental rug and woke up in the emergency room.” He was willing to accept his seizures as somehow ordained by God, and not by a vindictive God, for they helped bring about a knitting together of the threads of his marriage. In his distress the still-beautiful Mary cared for him with love and tenderness, and he responded to her nurturing with gratitude. Stein & Day had just published her The Need for Chocolate & Other Poems. And she was also branching out artistically, developing her drawing skills under the tutelage of Millie Adler. She needed an etching press and a studio with good light, John decided. He commissioned architect Don Reiman to plan such an addition and bought her an Edward Hopper print for Christmas.
When writer and psychologist Eugene Kennedy came to see Cheever on December 21, he unburdened himself about his seizures. He was grateful that they had brought his wife back to him, but terribly afraid that they had cost him his imaginative powers. He had signed a contract with Knopf and was not at all sure that he could fulfill it. His memory seemed to be going. He could not organize his thoughts. Even reading required more concentration than he could manage. Kennedy tried to reassure him as the two men spent the shortest day of the year together. Cheever had been cautioned against driving, but on their way to lunch he took the wheel and sped with abandon across the icy hills of Westchester. He seemed to Kennedy a combination of Peck’s Bad Boy and dignified Brahmin, at one moment a genteel landowner and at the next a schoolboy on truancy. When they reached the restaurant, the bravado was gone and Cheever spoke again of the terror of surrendering consciousness, of losing his creative gifts. From the windows they could see the hills across the Hudson, and Kennedy reminded him of what Tony Nailles said in Bullet Park, “Give me back the mountains.”
“Yes,” Cheever said, his eyes glistening as he gazed out the window, “that’s what I want. I want somebody to give me back my mountains.”
Cheever was childlike in his uncommon need for affection, Kennedy thought. Now that he was successful, he said, only two kinds of people wanted to see him: those with scandalous stories to tell about other people, and those who asked for favors. Occupied by their private agendas, they hardly noticed that the famous man they spoke to was reaching out for friendship. Kennedy listened, understood, and cared.
As if to dispel doubts about his creative ability, Cheever worked hard the first six months of 1981 on The Shady Hill Kidnapping and O What a Paradise It Seems. Jac Venza called in director Paul Bogart, well known for his success with All in the Family, to work with Cheever on revising the script for Kidnapping. As an admirer of Cheever’s fiction, Bogart was pleased to get the assignment, and still more pleased when the author proved to be not at all defensive about making changes. “They’ll do the script the way it is, just because it’s yours,” Bogart said at the outset, “and they damned well should.” But, he added, “I think your audience needs more than you’ve given them.” The plot revolves around the disappearance of a small boy, and his family’s frantic attempts to find him and bring him home. Cheever was clearly more interested in the way this crisis drew the family together than in the fate of the boy, however, and that threatened to confuse the television audience. In first draft, for example, the family assumes at once that the boy has been kidnapped, but for no good reason. Bogart encouraged Cheever to work on scenes of comic contrast: the boy happily riding his little red wagon, the family discovering his absence, the boy eating popcorn and watching television with the lonely housewife who invites him in, the family trying to get the police to take an interest. Initially Cheever did not bother to return the missing boy to his family. “You’ve got to bring the kid back,” Bogart told him. “The audience is going to say, where’s the kid? Where’s Binxie?” Cheever nodded, seeing a lot of rewriting ahead, and did nothing. In the end Bogart reunited Binxie (a name Cheever used for a young male child three times in his fiction) and his mother. “Yes, do it,” Cheever told the director. “Go ahead and do it.” Nor did he object to minor changes in dialogue. “The bigger the artist, the less they fuss about it,” Bogart observed.
This is not to say that Cheever was passive or uninterested in his play. According to Kidnapping producer Ann Blumenthal, he participated in three areas where writers are rarely involved: in casting, where he asked for and got the same casting director who had worked on the adaptations of his stories; in locations, where he chose the most rural of the three possible sites Blumenthal located for a Department of Motor Vehicles office; and in voice-over, where he himself recorded the coda at the end of the film. Bogart had to do some coaching on the voice-over. “You need a pause there,” he’d suggest, “and a little more volume here.” Cheever balked briefly. “I’m not an actor, you know,” he said. As an emergency measure Bogart had George Grizzard, the leading actor in the play, make a dummy recording of the voice-over. The final decision, though, was to go with Cheever’s own, idiosyncratic voice.
During his work on Kidnapping, Cheever became fascinated with the technical side of television. At parties he began buttonholing CBS News producer Bud Benjamin with questions about the most detailed mechanics of the craft. And had he lived, Ann Blumenthal felt sure, he would have written more for television. “He was very good at it, and learning very fast.” Both she and Bogart remain enthusiastic about Kidnapping. “It’s a very odd, very angular, very literary film,” Bogart says. “I love it.” Cheever was proud of it too.
With Kidnapping in production, Cheever wrote one last very short story for The New Yorker. Called “The Island,” it told of a small imaginary island in the Caribbean—well off the routes of the cruise ships—where were assembled “the greatest trombonist, the movie queen, the ballplayers, trapeze artists, and sexual virtuosos of yesterday leading happy and simple lives.” They were engaged in catching shellfish, weaving baskets, and reading good books. “We were only on the island for a few hours,” the narrator concludes, “but I keep thinking about this little-known place where everybody was having such an easy time of it, reading the classics and eating shellfish.” Perhaps that was where Cheever was headed, too.
His energy was on the wane, and Paradise turned out to be a much shorter book than he had anticipated: only one hundred pages. In May he interrupted his writing briefly to accept an honorary degree from Skidmore. As an old man, he wrote Joe and Anne Palamountain afterward, he e
njoyed “accomplished men and women.” More and more, his remarks took on a valedictory tone. “I am an old man nearing the end of his journey,” he had been telling his children for twenty-five years. Now that comment lost some of its humor as a succession of physical ailments—possibly related by metastasis to his seizures—conspired to weaken him.
On April 20, Cheever went to Phelps Memorial Hospital for a prostate operation. At that time, Dr. Marvin Schulman detected blood in the right renal pelvis, but thought that the bleeding had probably been caused by the passing of a kidney stone. Back home from the operation, he managed to finish Kidnapping. He was determined to get that job done, he told John Updike with casual indelicacy, “even if his prick fell off.” In fact he passed blood with his urine long after the effects of a kidney stone should have ceased. Still, Cheever was casually upbeat when he wrote Schulman on July 3 about collecting urine samples. Two specimens of his “vin ordinaire” were in the refrigerator, he said. And his “plumbing” seemed to be in good working order. A week later he was back in Phelps, first for exploratory surgery and then to have his cancerous right kidney removed. A carcinoma the size of a walnut came out with the kidney. His doctors hoped they had caught the cancer in time. They had not.
There is no human difference so great, someone has observed, as that between the sick and the well. After his July operation, it was clear to everyone who saw him that Cheever was unwell. Soon after his return from the hospital, the Updikes swung through Westchester on a research trip for Bech Is Wed and stopped for lunch at Cedar Lane. Ravaged by pain, Cheever had no appetite but sat through the meal with his guests, courtly and witty as ever, and afterward took them on an excursion to the Croton dam. In August, Professor Robert G. Collins of Ottawa and his wife, May, came to make a tape recording. Collins, who had seen a vibrantly healthy Cheever in Canada in 1978, was startled at the transformation that age and disease had wrought. Thinner now and shaky of limb, Cheever was nonetheless genial and cheerful throughout the visit. He spoke with satisfaction of having just sent off the galleys for Paradise, as if completing that chore had somehow qualified him for last things. There was a “sunset quality” about him, Collins thought. At the same time he looked like a little boy alongside the patently fit Max Zimmer, there to care for him during Mary’s vacation at Treetops.