Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  The experience of Sears exemplifies the point. He is not entirely successful in erotic love. The lovely Renee seems to care for him, but rejects him with a repeated catch phrase: “you don’t understand the first thing about women.” Eduardo, the elevator man in Renee’s building, then becomes his lover, but when their idyllic fishing trip is over, Eduardo goes back to his wife and that, presumably, is the end of that. The satisfactions of sex give life savor, but change nothing. Where Sears triumphs is in a wider devotion to his fellow human beings and the world they jointly inhabit. “Sears means to succeed in loving usefulness,” Cheever said of his principal character, “and actually he is quite useful. He purifies a large body of water. There really is little one can do that’s comparably useful today.” In his writing, though, he was striving toward a similar usefulness, with considerable success.

  On April 27, Cheever received the National Medal for Literature (and fifteen thousand dollars) in a ceremony at Carnegie Hall. William Styron was chosen to make the presentation, and the two writers foregathered backstage in advance of the ceremony. There Cheever caught a glimpse of the two pages of copy Styron had prepared. “Are you going to say all that?” he asked. “Ah, Bill, just tell them I’m short.” Then he held his hands over his ears in embarrassment while Styron, onstage, praised him as one of those “undislodgeably established in the wonderful firmament of American literature.” When he first began reading Cheever’s “marvelous early” fiction—“beguiling tales of apartment dwellers and suburbanites”—Styron did not realize that he was being “lured into another, more difficult territory: the landscape of the human condition.” Now he knew better.

  In prose “as sweet and limpid as Mozart,” he went on, Cheever

  has told us many things about America in this century: about the untidy lives lived in tidy households, about betrayal and deception and lust and the wounds of the heart, but also about faith and the blessings of simple companionship and the abiding reality of love. Only the greatest of writers have this gift: which is to write of these familiar and homely matters with such understated but powerful insight as to cause us to pause and realize, in wonder, that we have been told secrets about ourselves that we have never known.

  Hawthorne had this gift, Styron said, and Chekhov, and John Cheever, and therein lay his usefulness. The National Medal for Literature was being awarded to him, he said in conclusion, “because of our great love for all you have written, which will always be useful to us beyond all measure—and because you are a lord of the language.”

  There was an audible gasp when Cheever came out onstage to receive the medal. The sprightly Cheever many in the audience had once known was now a sick old man, bald, and carrying a cane to support his limp. Yet when he spoke his voice was strong. And in his response, he made the case for the ultimate, the cosmic, usefulness of his art. “A page of good prose is where one hears the rain,” he said. “A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle. A page of good prose has the power to give grief a universality that lends it a youthful beauty. A page of good prose has the power to make us laugh.” Then, finally: “A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” Literature had rescued the damned, inspired lovers, and routed despair. Now, perhaps, it could save the world from nuclear holocaust.

  Time and again in his last half dozen years, Cheever tried to express what he had been aiming for in his life’s work. “Literature,” he proclaimed, “is the only continuous and coherent account of our struggle to be illustrious, a monument of aspiration, a vast pilgrimage.” “Fiction,” he insisted, “is our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehensions and intuitions on the meaning of life and death. And that is what binds us together,… the bond of agreement that … keeps us from flying to pieces.” His favorite definition of fiction, he told John Hersey, came from Cocteau: “Literature is a force of memory that we have not yet understood.” The writer presents the reader “with a memory he has already possessed, but has not comprehended.” (Hersey was asked by his Yale colleague Peter Brooks, chairman of the French department, to find out where in Cocteau he’d found that quotation. “Come, John,” Cheever said when Hersey inquired, “you know I made that up.”) “Nothing in our civilization is more important than the welfare of literature,” he declared in 1979, for literature helped us make sense of an otherwise bewildering world, and without it “we would have no knowledge of the meaning of love.” Certainly writing helped him make sense of his own life. “Upon being bewildered by any turn of events …,” he said, “I’ve tried to put it into the language of a story—to see if I could comprehend it.” In the process, he might very well aid others in puzzling out their own confusing lives. And at last he came around to the assertion that literature might save the world.

  This barrage of near pontifications suggests how strongly Cheever felt the need to justify his art. It is probably significant that he uttered almost all of these statements in interviews that took place after achieving wealth and fame. He may have felt a pang of guilt that his writing gave him so much pleasure and brought him so much success. It was not enough to do what he was born to do. As a Yankee he felt it imperative to be useful, to serve the common good.

  Critics have often tried to classify Cheever by comparing him with other writers, and it was a measure of his accomplishment that most such comparisons rapidly break down. For example, he was sometimes likened, early in his career, to such social realists as Marquand and O’Hara. But his suburbia is an archetypal version of the real. Open the front door and the god Pan slips past. Open the back and the Angel of Death sneaks in. And so, though he is often criticized for the narrowness of his fictional world—“Where is politics? Where is history? The ghetto and the camps?”—the mythical and the miraculous give his fiction the universal resonance of fables.

  In assessing his work, critics have variously called him “a satirist, a Transcendalist, an existentialist, a social critic, a religious writer, a trenchant moralist, an enlightened Puritan, an Episcopalian anarch, a suburban surrealist, Ovid in Ossining, the American Chekhov, the American Trollope for an age of angst, and a toothless Thurber.” He has been compared with Thoreau and Emerson for his sensitivity to nature and distaste for the unlived life, and with Hawthorne and Melville for “the shadowy and troubled undergrowth” of his stories and for a powerful sense of morality that has little to do with conventional standards.

  The fact is that each of the critical characterizations and each of the comparisons has at least some validity. In his work the transcendental consorts with the real and Chekhov lies down with Kafka. What distinguishes Cheever from the minor writers is that throughout the assimilative process he kept his own distinct and idiosyncratic voice. You can pick up a Cheever story or novel anywhere and know within a paragraph or two who is speaking. The proof of the style is that it can be parodied but not re-created. “Anyone can write a Barthelme story,” Tom Boyle says. “No one can write a Cheever story.”

  In acknowledging his literary debts, Cheever bowed in all directions. There were so many influences, he said, that it was difficult to single out only a few. The thread ran from the Egyptian Book of the Dead through the Greeks to Flaubert and the Russians. “Then the generation before mine—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—was also terribly important,” he said. Of the three, his closest affinity is with Fitzgerald.

  In both writers there is a strain of romance that seems oddly out of place in the midst of busy quotidian life, and much the same tenderness and lyricism of style. Some writers feel thinly and others pretend to feel, as Bernard Malamud remarked, but “Cheever’s fiction is always informed by feeling.” So, too, is Fitzgerald’s. Cheever “wrote prose fiction in a manner more common with poets and their poetry,” Updike observed, “as a kind of dictation that flowed, when it did, effortless and compa
ct.” He might have said exactly the same thing of Fitzgerald, for both were granted the rhetorical capacity to evoke epiphanies. As early as the mid-1960s, both Elizabeth Hardwick and Stanley Kauffmann drew attention to the Cheever-Fitzgerald connection. It’s almost like tracing a family tree, Kauffmann wrote, “for it is difficult to imagine the later writer exactly as he is without the existence of the earlier one.” Something of that family bond must have been in John le Carré’s mind fifteen years later when he told Cheever, over the telephone, that he thought him “the best American writer since Scott Fitzgerald.” The strongest evidence of the link between them, however, emerges in the short biography of Fitzgerald that Cheever wrote for Atlantic Brief Lives (1971). It is significant, to begin with, that Cheever chose to write about Fitzgerald and no one else. And there is no disputing the fact that in composing his brief life of Fitzgerald, Cheever was writing about himself.

  Both writers had unsuccessful fathers and strong mothers: that much is true of almost all major American male writers. But Cheever shapes his version of Fitzgerald’s parents to suit his own. “His mother was the ruthless and eccentric daughter of a prosperous Irish grocer. His gentle father belonged to the fringe aristocracy of the commercial traveler.…” No one else has ever characterized Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald as “ruthless”: eccentric, to be sure, but hardly ruthless. Against her, Fitzgerald’s father, like Cheever’s own, is outmatched, too gentle yet somehow still a prince of the road. As for Fitzgerald’s career, Cheever comments on certain “appalling lapses in discipline” but in the same breath characterizes him as “a serious writer working to support a beautiful and capricious wife” and as one who never quite lost “his singular grace.” Above all in Fitzgerald, Cheever pointed out, “there is a thrilling sense of knowing exactly where one is—the city, the resort, the hotel, the decade and the time of the day.” His stories were not mere vignettes or overheard conversations “but real stories with characters, invention, scenery and moral conviction.” This was true despite his notoriety as a drinker given to “pranks, pratfalls and ghastly jokes.” Fitzgerald’s last fiction uncannily predicted Cheever’s own. Though he wrote often of the poignancy of loss and sorrow, Fitzgerald “remained astonishingly hopeful,” so that there is no more trace of darkness in The Last Tycoon than in Oh What a Paradise It Seems.

  The similarity of the two writers, both in their lives and in their work, extends well beyond what Cheever wrote about Fitzgerald in his brief biography. Both of them, for instance, grew up with an acute social sensitivity that derived from living in the best section of town while debarred from acceptance among the community’s elite by the failure of their fathers. Both were poor students, though Fitzgerald at least finished prep school and by virtue of makeup examinations was eventually admitted to Princeton. Both found their vocation early and stuck to it. They were writers first, last, and always, with no other apparent gifts. Neither was in the least intellectual. Both were small men of great charm, when sober. Both were alcoholics who managed late in life to stop drinking. Both had difficult marriages that they remained true to, in their fashion. Both fell in love with motion-picture actresses. Both were exceedingly fond of their children. Both achieved a final dignity.

  Professionally the parallels are also striking. Cheever and Fitzgerald produced almost exactly the same body of work: four and one half novels and one hundred and eighty stories. Each was denigrated in his own time for the company his fiction kept—Fitzgerald for his ties to the well-paying middlebrow Saturday Evening Post, Cheever for his long affiliation with The New Yorker. Both were criticized for not writing enough about the sociopolitical crises of their times. Both were superlative story writers who found the longer form of the novel difficult to master. Yet both succeeded in doing so at least twice—Fitzgerald with Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Cheever with The Wapshot Chronicle and Falconer. It remains to be seen whether Cheever’s posthumous reputation will follow the ascending course of Fitzgerald’s.

  No forerunner was responsible for the work that Cheever left. He would have written more but for drink, and a lot less if he had not put in his hours at the desk, on good days and bad. Even in his last weeks, as his lethal disease extended its dominion, he tried to write and tried to take exercise. The will to live was there very powerfully at the end. He and Mary watched a television show about the Irish patriots Parnell and Kitty O’Shea. “That made me want to live so,” he told her afterward, “to walk across that field the way they did.” If will alone had been sufficient to save him, he might have outlived his cancer. He was “a man of iron will,” Mary thought. When he decided to quit drinking, he quit, and that was that. He quit smoking the same way. But he could not stop dying.

  Mary cared for him in his extremity as never before. Max came to Cedar Lane only occasionally in Cheever’s final illness. Now it was Mary who nursed him and fed him and cared for him at home. The two of them even played a kind of courtship game. Even toward the end, Ben recalls, John was always trying to get into Mary’s bed. One morning John, feeling better, fixed her breakfast and took it up to her along with a flower in a long vase. That evening, father winked at son when Mary started making strawberry jam from a recipe in a cookbook he’d bought her. “A good sign,” he told Ben. He retired with high hopes for the morrow, when once more he brought her breakfast in bed. The technique did not work. “You know what she said,” he told Ben, “‘That cookbook you bought me, it’s a pack of lies.’” The strawberry jam had not set. But there was good humor about all this, a kind of shared male camaraderie about the unfathomable ways of womankind.

  Humor welded the marriage together. In a 1981 interview of both Cheevers, John was asked to describe his life with Mary.

  “She has displayed an extraordinary amount of patience,” he began.

  After a pause he continued. “Women are an inspiration. It’s because of them we put on clean shirts and wash our socks. Because of women we want to excel. Because of a woman, Christopher Columbus discovered America.”

  “Queen Isabella,” Mary murmured.

  “I was thinking,” John said, “of Mrs. Columbus.”

  Cheever had less than two months to live after the award of the National Medal for Literature on April 27. During those last weeks, a number of friends and admirers made the pilgrimage to Ossining. Raphael Rudnik came on a brilliant day early in May, to be greeted by a Cheever he hardly knew. He was wearing old clothes, and for the first time Rudnik noticed an intricate map of lines on his face. He said something about Cheever’s being “disheveled,” and knew immediately that was wrong. “Yes, I’m intrinsically disheveled,” Cheever answered. At Cedar Lane he took out the scythe, though he didn’t have much strength, and maneuvered it down the slope by letting inertia work for him. Miraculously, the scythe left a jack-in-the-pulpit uncut. It was his favorite flower, Cheever said.

  Later they drove up to see the Croton dam in full flow. Anyone who was excited by the dam overflowing was all right, John said. Raphael saw a lot of smoke or white hair in the coursing water, a Dionysian image. But for Cheever the fire seemed to be going out. Here was someone who had won a series of battles, a singer of the tribe, Rudnik thought. It seemed wrong that he should be physically beaten, defeated.

  Cheever also took Allan Gurganus to see the dam on his last visit in May. Allan went “Ah” at the sight of the falls, and John said you could always tell what kind of orgasms people had by the way they Ahed. “I guess I won’t see you again …,” Gurganus said at the station upon parting, and then hurried on after watching Cheever’s face collapse, “until I come back from Yaddo.” He was at Yaddo on the morning he heard of John’s death, and found a letter from him on the mail table. “There is something that I must tell you,” it said. Perhaps it was the same thing he told Steve Phillips on their final trip to the dam. He revealed how sick he was and extracted a vow. “No matter what,” Cheever said, “promise me you’ll have a family.” Whatever his homosexual feelings, they were only tolerable within the conte
xt of a conventional family life. After Phillips left, Cheever took Ben aside to confess that he’d made love to a number of men in his life. Ben allowed that he’d suspected as much.

  Max Zimmer came when called. Once John awoke in the middle of the night and said, “Charlie’s at the station. I have to go down and get him.” Mary quieted him down. “Charlie”—a nickname for Max—couldn’t possibly be there, she told him. No trains ran at that hour. The next morning she telephoned to suggest that Max come for a visit. He also chauffeured Cheever on his now infrequent trips to the hospital in Mount Kisco. Cheever still had some good days, as good as they had been before his kidney operation ten months earlier, and then there were terrible days. Max found there were two things he could say to cheer him up. First was to tell him he’d be back on his bicycle soon. Second was to paraphrase favorite scenes from his fiction, as when in Bullet Park Nellie Nailles finds the Swami to cure her son, Tony, and the Swami and the boy chant “Love” and “Hope” together.

  During the third week in May, Max drove Cheever to Mount Kisco for a blood transfusion. At the clinic he held John’s ice-cold hand, and felt it warm as the blood began to travel through him. Cheever was so inactive now that his Rolex kept stopping. On June 2, Mary picked Max up at the station and drove him to Cedar Lane. “Go up and see him,” she said, and Max went through all the bedrooms looking for him except Mary’s and there he was, restored to her bed after many years of separate bedrooms. He was always cold now, and the electric blanket warmed his bones. Mary brought lunch up to the room—the first time Max had seen John unable to make it downstairs for a meal. After lunch he slept, after that Max took him outside for the sun, and after five minutes in the sunshine he asked to go inside again.