by Blake Bailey
Writing was a suitable occupation for a pudgy, unathletic boy who preferred to stay home playing with his puppet theater. If other children visited, they often found themselves on the opposite side of the proscenium while John manipulated the puppets from above and provided their voices, or, if he had a more elaborate show in mind (for which he'd invite the whole neighborhood and charge a penny per), he'd put his visitors to work making sets or dyeing materials for the costumes. His friend Rollin “Tifty” Bailey got the impression that John was wholly absorbed in his own world, that he hardly noticed others, and was therefore startled when he read “Goodbye, My Brother” some twenty-five years later in The New Yorker. Cheever, it seemed, had paid better attention than Bailey thought—appropriating not only his nickname “Tifty” for the “rather undesirable” Lawrence Pommeroy, but also the relevant backstory. As Bailey explained, “When I was small, the sound of my little shoes on the runner carpet in the upper hall sounded to my father like Tifty-Tifty-Tifty …“ And finally, for what it's worth, Bailey had to admit he rather identified with his fictional namesake: “I did tend to see the bad side,” he said. “If you know what's bad, you can face it.”
Cheever's public manners were pleasant enough, for his mother's strict sense of propriety was “rigidly observed” by the family. At the end of any social event, he always made a point of bowing to the hostess and thanking her for a good time—though occasionally (if he had an audience) he might add a puckish “My mother told me to tell you so.” Such little rebellions were subtle, and no wonder. It was ill-advised to trifle with his “impetuous” mother, who abruptly defenestrated the puppet theater when it caught fire one day (“It was the intelligent thing to do,” Cheever mused in retrospect, “but I was shocked”). “You sweep like an old woman!” she berated him, yanking a broom out of his hands, whereupon he carved his name on the cover of her sewing machine—a rare and probably unrepeated act of (overt) retaliation, since afterward “she trashed [him] with a belt until [he] bled.” The woman's vigor was nowhere in evidence, however, when it came to showing affection. “My mother was not demonstrative in any way,” said Cheever, who came to emulate such restraint toward his own children, though he was, arguably, free enough with his feelings otherwise. He often signed letters with “Love” even to casual friends—usually “Best” or “Yours, John” to his children—and Updike's first wife, Mary Weatherall, remembered how Cheever went around gleefully hugging people in Russia.
His mother's lack of tenderness was partly a matter of New England decorum, of course, but was also influenced by Mary Baker Eddy's teaching that “God is both father and mother” and hence the proper source of such loving-kindness. Cheever had been christened in the Episcopal Church, though a few years later his mother “veered wildly into Christian Science” and thereafter adhered to its principles with the sort of fanatical devotion she brought to all larger pursuits. Every Wednesday she attended testimonial meetings, where (as family legend has it) she arrested a tumor by confessing to her fellows that she was “enchained by the flesh” and needed their prayers. Later, too, at the age of seventy, she broke her leg in the bathtub and set the bone herself—then, after five weeks in bed (“a severe trial for her,” wrote Frederick, “with her natural speed and energy”), she refused any sort of elastic bandage and would only grudgingly use a cane. Moreover, she expected the same stalwart self-reliance from her children, as John discovered when he developed pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of twelve: “I think of myself when I was spitting blood,” he remembered, “left alone in a dirty house. The sheets soaked with fever sweat, the rags I was given to spit in, stained with blood. … In the village [my mother] at the lectern, introducing an Armenian refugee.”
Unassisted by modern medicine, Cheever's lungs took a long time to heal, and he became even more of a loner and (reputed) mama's boy. Once his convalescence was over, he continued to plead ill health in order to excuse himself from gym class and other games, though such lies filled him with “self-loathing and remorse”—all the more so in light of his brother's vaunted athleticism and regular-guy charm: “[T]hat boy of summer,” Cheever recalled. “Quarterback … Captain of the undefeated hockey team. Happy with his friends, nimble with his girls, he loved his muzzy and dazzy” Fred's heroics even extended to sticking up for his delicate little brother, like the time he punched an Irishman at Braintree Dam for saying that John looked like a girl when he skated. But mostly Fred was too old and popular then to take much of an interest in John, who desperately wanted help with his “effeminate wing” so he could play baseball like the other boys: “I used to get out of bed in the middle of the night and practice pitching,” he wrote in his journal. “Neither my brother nor my father would help me; there seemed to be a conspiracy on their part to keep me out of their male demesne.” The trauma would become fodder for a bleakly amusing story in 1953, “The National Pastime,” which begins, “To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.” The narrator remembers having to beg a game of catch with his cold, unloving father (a malign ur-version of Leander Wapshot), who “stretched [him] out unconscious” with a throw to the back of the neck: “When I came to, my nose was bleeding and my mouth was full of blood. … My father was standing over me. ‘Don't tell your mother about this,’ he said.”
Later in life, Cheever's public remarks about his father were characterized by a sort of sensible regret that they weren't able to “requite” one another because of the “age difference,” and—after all—”in that particular period, intimacy between fathers and sons was fairly uncommon.” In his heart, though, he never forgave the man for rejecting him as a child. “I can't recall taking a walk at his side although I walked with the fathers of my friends,” he wrote, allowing, however, that his “memory may be blocked” in that respect (as indeed it may have been, since he'd once remembered those morning walks to the train station with the dog). “Baseball, football, fishing—we shared none of this.” The only father-son outings Cheever did recall were virile entertainments such as horse races and boxing matches, during which Frederick would shout, “Are you men sisters?” or “Hit him with a stool/”—this for John's benefit, perhaps, as Frederick was worried by then that he'd “sired a fruit.” His older brother, Hamlet, had practically told him so during one of his rare trips east (“as one of the founders of the Elks”) when Cheever was twelve. The old man looked over his runty nephew and said, “Well, I guess you could play tennis.” “That was all he said to me,” Cheever remembered. “My poor father, defending his own virility, said that his oldest son played hockey and football; but the lecherous, selfish old goat spoke with the authority of a tribal chieftain who, at a glance, had rejected me as a warrior or any other kind of man.” Hoping to prove otherwise, the boy went to a burlesque theater that afternoon, where the “jades with their flabby breasts” failed to arouse him. “My scrotum ached with dismay and I went home on a local in pain.”
With Hamlet's “tennis” crack somewhere in the back of his mind, the adult Cheever would often assert his manhood with a conspicuous interest in sports (except for tennis) and other kinds of strenuous physical activity. He flung himself into icy pools and skated with a masculine swagger; he professed to love the Red Sox (in fact he preferred the Yankees) and baseball in general, interrupting a 1969 Paris Review interview to watch the Mets win the last game of the World Series. And yet his “wing” remained weak and still he heard “the voices of [his] long-dead detractors, Uncle Hamlet and Mother and Dad. ‘He will never amount to anything. Dismal obscenities in furnished rooms, drunkenness, loneliness and despair is all he will ever know.’ … Isn't this something of what I suffered.”
“THE CLIMATE WAS ANXIOUS,” Cheever wrote of his early adolescence; Fred was away at Dartmouth winning glory on the varsity hockey team while, at home, his parents kept a weather eye on their weakling second-born. They suspected the worst (“You sweep like an old woman!”) and let him know, obliquely and othe
rwise, that sexual inversion was a terrible fate. Naturally, Cheever despised himself for having such impulses, splitting wood to cleanse his thoughts of an “obsessive” erotic need—not only a need for Janet Weil and Sally Bradford, but also “Arnold and Gordon and Faxon and Tubby.” And the more he was browbeaten, the more he was apt to pursue his “merry games of grabarse” as a means of “parting from Mother”—the sexual equivalent of carving his name on the lid of her sewing machine. Both had painful consequences. With or without a lash, the woman possessed “the authority of an executioner” as the embodiment of social custom—”a world of white gloves and dancing pumps” that Cheever associated with a fraught childhood memory:
It was autumn. We went over to the R.'s barn and had a penis-measuring contest, followed by an orgy, but when it was over I felt so guilty and ashamed of myself, so sorrowful and uneasy. … I went home and ate a sandwich and was put by my mother into a bath so hot that it made my skin pucker and made the touch of everything unpleasant. … I couldn't find my dancing pumps. I connected this with my lewd behavior in the morning. … I went into the closet, got to my knees, and said the Lord's Prayer three times, noticing … that my dancing pumps, in a serge bag, hung from a hook above me. At least this much of my prayer was answered, but I was filled with terrible longings. … I would have run away, except that my mother was a matron that afternoon [at dancing school], and anyhow where would I, in my blue serge, find a haven?
For a while, he found a haven of sorts in his friendship with Fax Ogden, which he later described as “the most gratifying and unself-conscious relationship I had known.” Even their sex play struck the adult Cheever as larky and harmless (though in general he was “frightened and ashamed” of such memories), and he didn't hesitate to suggest as much to his wife and children. According to his journal, it was Fax who first learned the joys of masturbation from a man sitting beside him at a vaudeville show: “F[ax] went home and gave it a try and told me about it at school. Lying in bed that night I jacked off while listening to a philosophical radio commentator. The orgasm was racking; my remorse was crushing. I felt I had betrayed the fatherly voice on the radio.” Happily, the remorse passed, and soon the two were masturbating each other as often as possible—in movie theaters, in the golf-club shower, and especially at Boy Scout camp on Gallows Pond, in South Plymouth. The camp was “one of John's happiest memories,” according to his wife: He and Fax earned their junior lifesaving certificates, and one year John won the treasure hunt and was awarded a watermelon. Rainy days were best of all, as the two boys could stay in bed and practice, indefatigably, their favorite pastime (“When one bed got gummed up we used to move to another”).
They also attended the same progressive elementary school, Thayerlands, for which Anna Boynton Thompson had bequeathed her home near the Thayer Academy (high school) campus. Cheever entered as a seventh-grader in 1924, the school's inaugural year, and was well suited to its determinedly creative atmosphere. He served as poetry editor of the yearbook, The Evergreen, to which he contributed some of his own verse, including at least one rather impressive stanza from “The Brook”:
Arched with birches in Gothic style,
Traced in crystalline rain,
Like a tall and slender window
In Notre Dame on the Seine.
“John never has a grudge against anyone,” reads his character summary, “and is always a good sport”—a consensus view, it would seem. His teacher Grace Osgood remembered him as pleasant and “eager to learn” (“a very different young person,” she noted, from the one who later made a notorious exit from Thayer), and other classmates described him as “a tease” and “full of fun.” “Make it Posture Week, not Weak Posture!” Cheever quipped in The Evergreen (though he does not appear on the “Posture Honor Roll”), where he was repeatedly mocked for being a poor speller (“WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF … JOHN CHEEVER learned how to spell?”). Clearly he and Fax were both regarded as class wags, and everyone found it “great fun” to watch them perform in an eighth-grade production of A Christmas Carol, with Fax appearing as Scrooge and John as his jolly nephew Fred in a swallow-tailed coat.
“I think of substratas of aloneness,” Cheever wrote in 1972, remembering a sad day when “Fax walked off the playing field with his arm around someone else.” After his sophomore year at Thayer, Fax transferred to Culver Military Academy in Indiana; he and Cheever would meet only once again, almost forty years later, after which the dejected Fax would occasionally call while in his cups: “Weren't we happy, Johnny? Weren't we really happy?”* Back at Thayerlands in 1926, the boys were given prints of snow-laden evergreens in lieu of diplomas (“thought to be inhibiting”); Cheever's bore the inscription “John, be true to yourself.”
* John would have no such charming nickname. He was either called Joey, a name he loathed, or the more generic Brother—because he was, after all (in his parents’ eyes foremost), Fred's brother.
†He was named William after his (despised) uncle Hamlet, and kept the name under wraps as much as possible.
* In the midst of his post-Falconer celebrity, Cheever would claim his father had actually been a partner in the manufacturing firm of “Whittredge and Cheever,” which had a factory in Lynn where Frederick took his son John once a year to blow the whistle. However, Ben Cheever pointed out that his father, in the 1964 Time cover story, had described Frederick as a mere salesman (“a commercial traveler with a flower in his buttonhole”): “I assume the factory had not yet been invented,” said Ben, with due skepticism. As with many matters relating to Cheever's past, the truth remains nebulous. Among Frederick's notes is a vague reference to one “MH Whittredge” (“Saratoga every season—clothes”), presumably the same “Myron H. Whittredge” who appears in an old family album. Perhaps this was the man who brought Frederick into the business as a salesman, but whether the two were actually partners remains unknown—there's no record of “Whittredge and Cheever” in the various city directories, and Frederick gives his occupation in every federal census as “Salesman.” But wait: he appears in the 1932 Quincy directory as a “shoe mfr,” and writes in his notes: “I have produced in essential material for 50 years. Given employment to many. Invested in equipment, material.” Here one throws up the hands—except to add that Fred Jr.'s children never heard about any “shoe factory.”
* Lillian Wentworth, the Thayer historian, wrote me helpfully as follows: “Anna Boynton Thompson died January 28, 1923, at age 76. … The police found Anna dead, sitting at breakfast in the kitchen. Medical examiners determined death was caused by cerebral hemorrhage and hardening of the arteries.”
* Which may have had the desired effect, as Cheever's musical tastes were narrow but passionate. As his wife remarked, “He was a nut about certain music. He played nothing but the Beethoven quartets for years. Also he loved Tosca—listened to it over and over.” Cheever also enjoyed playing some of the easier Chopin preludes on the piano, and could sing the entire score to Guys and Dolls. When asked about his favorite music on New York's classical station, WQXR, he remembered hearing Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony when he was fourteen and thinking, “That's the way I feel about life”—a piquant remark, since the symphony reflects Tchaikovsky's struggle with what he called Fate, often interpreted as his secret homosexuality. The Fifth begins ominously but ends in a mood of triumphant joy.
† “Come, John, you know I made that up,” Cheever remarked to John Hersey, when the latter asked to be reminded of the source of that fascinating quote.
* In 1979, Cheever told an interviewer that his “closest [childhood] friend, a man named Faxon Ogden,” was probably dead: “Someone called from Thayer last winter and I asked them to check back on Fax, and it was ‘address unknown.’ “ On October 28, 1980, David Oliver of Thayer wrote a letter to the Culver alumni office asking for Ogden's address on behalf of “a classmate who remembers him warmly”—almost certainly Cheever, who perhaps saw fit to check on his friend one last time. The letter was returned with a
Wilmington (Delaware) address typed at the bottom—though, as it happened, Fax had died almost ten years before.
CHAPTER THREE
{1926-1930}
THE DEPRESSION CAME EARLY to New England, and by the mid-twenties the shoe industry was all but dead. This, of course, was not openly discussed in the Cheever household, though John could tell his father was becoming dispirited. He overheard the man say to a neighbor, while raking the driveway, that he was prepared to die. As Cheever would later tell it, Frederick had sold out of the shoe business (whether that meant the manufacturing firm of “Whittredge and Cheever” or some lesser concern is, again, a mystery) and gone into an investment partnership with another fellow, alternately named “Mr. Forsyth” and “Harry Dobson” in Cheever's journal. One day, while playing his four holes of morning golf, Frederick espied what appeared to be a coat hanging from a tree near the fairway; naturally, this proved to be none other than Forsyth or Dobson, hanged. After that, Frederick gave up golf and began crying at the breakfast table: “He'd say good morning to me and then look out the window and say something about the weather and then his face would break … and he'd start making noises like a winded runner.”