by Blake Bailey
* Florence also painted a companion portrait of Cheever's brother, Fred, as the sturdy young burgher he was then in the process of becoming.
* A home movie survives from the thirties or forties in which Cheever's mother is seen walking briskly past the camera with a tight smile. When the photographer persists, she thrusts a hand toward the lens. One thinks of Honora Wapshot: “In all the family albums she appeared either with her back to the camera as she ran away or with her face concealed by her hands, her handbag, her hat or a newspaper.”
CHAPTER TWO
{1912-1926}
CHEEVER ONCE WROTE, “I have no biography. I came from nowhere and I don't know where I'm going.” He put a slightly finer point on this when he remarked to an interviewer that he had “no memory for pain,” which effectively eliminated a large part of whatever biography he had. Which is not to say he wouldn't talk about the past—on the contrary, he was forever telling stories about himself. “From somewhere—” said Updike, “perhaps a strain of sea-yarning in his Yankee blood—he had gotten the authentic archaic storytelling temper, and one could not be with John Cheever for more than five minutes without seeing stories take shape: past embarrassments worked up with wonderful rapidity into hilarious fables”—the main point of which was that life (his life) was a parlous but giddy affair. However, if one asked him to elaborate, a curious thing was apt to happen: suddenly Cheever would talk about something else—indeed, before one had even realized that the subject had been changed. “I always felt there was a blank behind John,” said the writer Hortense Calisher. “For an anecdotal man, he'd skip over his background.”
Cheever was at once the most reticent and candid of men. “Life is melancholy,” he said, “which isn't allowed in New England.” Mortality and bodily functions and so forth were not big topics of conversation in Cheever's childhood home, nor was anything else that adverted to human frailty or might lead to a quarrel: “Feel that refreshing breeze,” his mother would say when the mood turned tense, or perhaps she'd call attention to the evening star. “If you are raised in this atmosphere,” remarks the narrator of “Goodbye, My Brother,” “I think it is a trial of the spirit to reject its habits of guilt, self-denial, taciturnity, and penitence, and it seemed a trial of the spirit in which Lawrence [the narrator's brother] had succumbed.” A part of Cheever had succumbed as well, while another part roared its defiance to the world. On sexual matters especially, Cheever was almost insistently forward. He would answer fan mail with ribald anecdotes of the most intimate nature, and rarely hesitated to discuss a mistress or some other indiscretion with his children. At the Iowa Workshop, the sixty-one-year-old Cheever positively accosted colleagues to let them know that, the night before, he'd had a nosebleed and an orgasm at the same time! With a twenty-two-year-old girl! “[W]ith what delight, and agony, I read about [Boswell's] pursuit of Louisa,” he wrote in his journal. “And how troubled I am by the intensity of my feelings. It may be no more than the reactions of a man who was raised, let us say, where the subject of food was overlooked. … So it is with joy, with glee, perhaps with boorishness that we can at least admit our appetites and the deep pleasure of requiting them.”
But it was one thing to admit his appetites, another to discuss the “intensity of [his] feelings.” As his daughter observed, “He focused on the surface and texture of life, not on the emotions and motives underneath.” With family and friends in particular, Cheever was obliged to show a brave, jovial face—though strangers and chance acquaintances were, again, something else. “I am quite naked to loneliness,” he announced to a startled journalist, and that sort of thing was typical. “[W]ith dad our sense of his past pain comes mostly from inference,” said his son Federico, “and from observation of oddities in his behavior—fear and disgust turned up in the oddest places. … If the problems he died with were, in fact, the same ones he left Quincy with at 17, then they followed him through more twists and flips than anyone could have expected.”
FREDERICK LINCOLN CHEEVER, JR., was born on August 23, 1905—almost seven years before his only brother, John—and he often spoke of his happy childhood. Both parents adored him: his mother grew plump and stayed that way because Fred had weighed only three pounds at birth, and she'd had to eat and eat to feed him; his father called him Binks because he resembled a cherubic little boy in an advertisement with that name.* Father and son went sailing together in Quincy Bay for many years while John was either unborn or too small to join them. He would always be too small. Meanwhile Fred grew into a manly, likable fellow whose athletic prowess was his father's greatest pride. “Everybody loved [him],” Cheever wrote of Coverly's older brother, Moses, “including the village dogs, and he comported himself with the purest, the most impulsive humility. Everybody did not love Coverly.”
By the time John was born, his parents’ marriage had become strained at best, and his conception was the result of some rare, tipsy lovemaking after a Boston sales banquet. “As my mother often pointed out,” Cheever said, “she drank two Manhattan cocktails that evening. Otherwise I would have remained unborn on a star.” His father—whose heart was already filled by Fred and the everyday joys of commerce—did what he could to dissuade his wife from having another child, even inviting an abortionist to dinner. It was a story that haunted Cheever the rest of his life, such that he couldn't help mentioning it time and again (often with a slight chuckle), and finally wrote it into Falconer. Not surprisingly, he saw fit to blame his mother for having the bad taste to tell him of the episode—this, as he wrote in his journal, by way of “seiz[ing] the affections of her son”: “‘[Your father] comes from very bad stock [she said]. It isn't his fault that he doesn't love you. He doesn't know anything about love. He didn't want you to be born.’ … And what sense can the boy make of these lies.” Most of the time, though, Cheever found it all too plausible: “I remember my father's detestation of me as I feel the roots of some destructive vine—the vine, of course, being my bewildering love.” His lifelong need to requite this love would lead him to “invent a father” in The Wapshot Chronicle, but still his eyes smarted with tears (“oh foolishness”) when he'd observe some chance tenderness between a father and son.
With whatever reluctance on his parents’ part, John William Cheever† was born on May 27, 1912, in a two-story clapboard house at 43 Elm Avenue, near the trolley tracks. Within a few years, the family entered the period of its greatest affluence, ascending Wollaston Hill to an eleven-room Victorian house on Winthrop Avenue. Leather prices spiked during the war, and by his own recollection Frederick Cheever sold five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of elegant, handmade shoes in a single six-month period of travel—”night after night in the stifling coffin of a Pullman berth,” as his son later imagined it, “because he had traveled all over a broad country selling shoes so they could join the golf club and buy gasoline for their cars.”* John remembered a milestone day when his father (“pleased and embarrassed”) picked him up at school in a brand-new Buick sedan of robin's-egg blue, complete with a flower vase and silk curtains. Such a powerful machine went well with the man's bespoke clothing, his Masonic finery, not to mention the other posh cars parked outside the Unitarian church where Frederick attended services as a matter of demonstrating prosperity rather than piety.
On the surface, at least, it was an idyllic time—and so Cheever was likely to describe it. “They were kindly and original people,” he said of his parents some fifty years later, and to the writer John Hersey he spoke of his childhood as “extremely sunny.” But privately he found a lot of “disorder and blindness” in his own memories: “If I were writing about someone else I could say honestly I think that he was well-fed, fair, blue-eyed, tanned from a summer at Dennisport or in some third-string white mountain hotel … believing that he loved and was loved by everyone in the world. To recall those years as an orderly development from youth to manhood does not come naturally to me at all.” The idealized New England of St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels (“a
n old place, an old river town”) might suggest a desire to return to this happier time, or else to create a happiness that never existed. Whatever the case, Cheever was a little bemused by his own aversion to revisiting his “sunny” childhood in terms of reality rather than myth, and only seldom would he pick through the actual details—as nearly as he could recollect them—and wonder at the seeming innocence of it all. Each day had been pretty much like the next: his father always rose at six and took a cold bath (“howling like a walrus”), then played a few holes of golf before a hearty breakfast of fish hash or chops. And so it went:
I and the dog walk with him to the station, where he hands me his walking stick and the dog's leash, and boards the train among his friends and neighbors. The business he transacts in his office is simple and profitable, and at noon he has a bowl of crackers and milk for lunch at his club. He returns on the train at five, and we all get into the Buick and drive to the beach. We have a bathhouse, a simple building on stilts, weathered by the sea winds. … We change and go for a long swim in that green, dark, and briny sea. Then we dress and, smelling of salt, go up the hill to have supper in the cavernous dining room. When supper is over, my mother goes to the telephone. “Good evening, Althea,” she says to the operator. “Would you please ring Mr. Wagner's ice-cream store?” Mr. Wagner recommends his lemon sherbet, and delivers a quart a few minutes later on a bicycle that rattles and rings in the summer dusk as if it were strung with bells. We have our ice cream on the back lawn, read, play whist, … kiss one another good night, and go to bed.
Cheever described the Quincy of his childhood as a “pleasant, relaxed” middle-class suburb where all the women had gardens and everybody went to the more or less democratic “Neighborhood Club” for black-tie dances. There was a social hierarchy, of course, but it was relatively flexible: “[W]e were always allowed to play touch football with the Winslows and the Bradfords,” Cheever remembered in the New York Times, adding that his family's maid had been no less than the daughter of “an Adams coachman and she once ate all the brandied sugar lumps around the plum pudding and was found on the wooden floor of the kitchen (this was before linoleum) dead drunk, giggling helplessly and contributing a bearing or milestone for our recollections.” An examination of this chestnut vis-à-vis the journal gives a little insight into Cheever's methods as a raconteur. It was true his family occasionally hired the coachman's daughter for “large family dinners,” though usually their maids were “girls sent out on probation from some reform school,” and it was almost certainly such a girl who pilfered those sugar lumps, as Cheever recalled a “violent scene” when a girl was sent back to the reformatory for that very offense: “She gathered me in her arms, crying despondently. My mother pried me out of her embrace. I expect I was about five.” Whenever such a “breakdown in service or finance” occurred, it fell mostly to Cheever's grandmother Sarah to take up the household chores until another waif could be supplied. And while the old woman was nothing but bitter toward the men of the family for using her as a menial (“we had failed her, not only as providers but as men”), she was most displeased by the conduct of her youngest daughter, whom she called a “cretin,” thereby winning her grandson's lasting regard. When she lay dying of a stroke, the seven-year-old John sat at her bedside reading aloud from David Copperfield.
Thanksgiving was a great event in the Cheever home—the sort of thing for which the coachman's daughter was presumably pressed into service. What Cheever particularly remembered was his mother's habit of collecting “strays” for the table. For weeks ahead of time—on beaches and buses, in train stations or “the lobby at Symphony Hall during the intermission”—his mother would approach whosoever seemed lonely, poor, infirm, preferably all three, and invite them to the stately house on Winthrop Avenue for the annual feast. The mellow Cheever who waxed reminiscent for the Times viewed his mother's motives as a poignant blend of noblesse oblige (“pride and arrogance”) and “her respect and knowledge of the cruelty of loneliness.” When the holiday arrived, the children of Wollaston played touch football or hockey on the millpond, then repaired to their homes at noon. This was a day when gluttony was forgiven even by the Cheevers, since an overloaded table was one way of expressing “sentiments that were … too profound and tender ever to be mentioned.” Finally, once the guests had departed, Frederick Cheever stood by the door and declared, “The roar of the lion has ceased! The last loiterer has left the banquet hall!”
By far the most memorable Thanksgiving was not a happy one, though it offers a useful glimpse at the ethos in which Cheever was raised. One of the strays invited for that year's feast was Miss Anna Boynton Thompson, a cousin of Cheever's father and one of the most celebrated spinsters in nearby Braintree. A classical scholar who received her doctorate from Tufts, Thompson taught at Thayer Academy for almost fifty years and had startled her neighbors during the Great War by standing on her balcony each night and appealing loudly to the heavens for peace. “She thought of all sensuality as a mode of ignorance,” Cheever observed. In 1922, Miss Thompson was fretful over the Armenian famine, and so became incensed at the sight of the Cheevers’ laden table: “How can you do this when half the populations of this world are starving?” she exclaimed. “Anna departed,” wrote Cheever (on whom she made such an impression that he'd pause guiltily over his meat during the lean years of World War II). “Six weeks later she was found in her cold, classical library in Braintree, Massachusetts, dead of starvation.”*
One might bear in mind a curious affinity between the dour Miss Thompson and her cousin John—who combined, as Updike put it, “the bubbling joie de vivre of the healthy sensitive man and the deep melancholy peculiar to American Protestant males.” Born under the sign of Gemini, the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, Cheever considered his own nature to be “truly halved,” and his aunt Anne Armstrong was hardly alone in supporting this view: “What you have to remember,” his wife, Mary, insistently repeated, “is that John was a split personality.” Though the words “boyish” and “pixie” are constantly used to evoke the giddy, hilarious Cheever, he could also be curt, cruelly sarcastic, relentlessly harsh in judging friends and family and especially himself. Henry Adams thought a divided nature was the inevitable result of growing up in New England and Quincy in particular (“the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan land”): “The chief charm of New England,” he wrote in his Education, “was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it—so that the pleasure of hating—one's self if no better victim offered—was not its rarest amusement. … Winter and summer, then, were two hostile lives, and bred two separate natures.”
The profound ambivalence with which Cheever beheld the world was even more pronounced in regard to his birthplace. On the one hand, it was “a red-blooded and a splendid inheritance” to grow up in such a “powerfully sensual” environment, where one was barraged by the smells of wood smoke and flowers and the sea. “I've often wondered what makes us old Quincyites so randy,” Cheever wrote a stranger who was trying to sell him insurance. “Must be the sandy clams we dug at Wollaston Beach in those wonderful days of our youth.” Cheever made much of the fact that he'd lived less than a mile from Merrymount, where Morton had erected his Maypole and “jollity and gloom [had contended] for an empire,” as Hawthorne would have it. “[T]he difference between the legend and the present has always been amusing,” Cheever wrote in 1934, shortly after leaving Quincy for good. “It is now the most despicable, contrite tract of Dutch Colonial Houses I have ever seen. I've always wanted to go down there with a jug of firewater and a couple of sluts and raise a maypole.”
TO CHEEVER'S MIND, Anna Boynton Thompson “in her cold, classical library” served as an emblem for the “Athenian twilight years” of fin-de-siècle Boston, when even provincial families of the South Shore placed a high premium on culture. This was particularly true in Cheever's house, where reading aloud (“All of Dickens, from beginning
to end, read and reread”) was the chief entertainment and a successful novelist (Mrs. Deland) often paid visits. Indeed, the entire extended family cultivated a certain artistic and intellectual flair. There was the painter Aunt Liley, of course, whose pianist son Randall studied at the Eastman Conservatory, while even the snobbish Aunt Anne founded a Shakespeare Society, and Frederick Cheever “could be called on to recite ‘Casey at Bat.’” (Frederick, again, was a great fan of Shakespeare in his own right, though perhaps defensive about his lack of formal education. In any event, he disliked arty pretentiousness, and tended to play the rube when things got thick. “If you want to hear the pianer-player you'd better come in,” he said when the great Rudolph Ganz came for tea. “Mr. Ganz is about to tickle the ivories.”) As for Cheever's mother, she took a particular hand in her sensitive younger son's education. Even when pregnant—”casting around for some way of improving the destiny of an unwanted child”—she made a point of attending every concert of the Boston Symphony,* and later took John to the theater, though an especially good play would make him almost ill with excitement. After a performance of The Merchant of Venice, the eleven-year-old dismayed his parents by rushing downstairs the next morning to get started on the rest of Shakespeare; and one time, too, his mother brought him to see Hedda Gabler, thinking it a musical, and was unable to budge her son once she'd been hideously disabused.
Cheever's precocity as a storyteller became something of a local legend. His fourth-grade teacher at Wollaston Grammar, Miss Florence Varley, never forgot the first time John “rose glibly to the occasion”: “ To my utter surprise,” she recalled half a century later, “he told a fairy tale that lasted about ten minutes. His classmates listened as avidly as they did whenever I found time to read to them from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.“ She refrained from praising the boy, because she assumed he was simply repeating something “he had read, or heard sometime;” but soon John convinced her he could make up such stories on the spot. For his part, Cheever never had any clear idea what he was going to say when asked (more and more often) to tell his classmates a story—but once he opened his mouth, a beguiling fabric of “exaggeration” and “preposterous falsehoods” never failed to synthesize. Miss Varley thought it a gift from “departed spirits,” whereas the writer Wilfrid Sheed observed that, in Cheever's case, memory and imagination were “not two faculties but one mega-faculty,” such that his everyday experiences were “improved” as soon as they happened and “halfway to being publishable” within a week—or, as Cheever himself liked to say (claiming to quote Cocteau), “Literature is a force of memory that we have not yet understood.”† It was around this time, at any rate, that Cheever decided to make a career of his uncanny knack and told his parents as much: “It's all right with us if you want to be a writer,” they replied, after some deliberation, “so long as you are not seeking fame or wealth.”