by Blake Bailey
Fortunately, he was married to a resourceful woman, who saved the family from certain ruin by opening a gift shop in downtown Quincy.* In fact, it was becoming more and more common at the time for middle-class women to go into business for themselves—what with canned foods and labor-saving devices that lessened the drudgery of housekeeping—and certainly this came all the more easily to an old feminist like Mary Liley Cheever. Indeed, one might even venture to say that as a gift-shop proprietress she'd found her niche: genial and motherly, she was able to strike an instant rapport with most customers, who came to regard the Mary Cheever Gift Shoppe as the place to go for something a little better than the usual dime-store bric-a-brac. It was true that Mrs. Cheever could be a bit pushy at times. As she herself confided, a little ruefully, the harder she tried to “match the purchase to the person,” the more determined the person became to buy what she or he had picked out in the first place.
John was aghast that his mother had gone into trade: “[A]fter this I was to think of her, not in any domestic or maternal role, but as a woman approaching a customer in a store and asking, bellicosely, ‘Is there something I can do for you?’ “ Nor was it simply the doorstops and china dogs and doilies that she foisted on a public consisting mostly of her former peers, but the very furniture out from under her family's backs. “You can't sell this,” John would remonstrate, “it doesn't belong to you.” To which the woman would sensibly reply, “Well, do you have $100?” She even sold his own bed (and decades later, at a Sutton Place party, Cheever bumped into an old Quincy acquaintance who informed him that she herself had bought one of the family beds). It wasn't long before his mother's almost demonic élan began to bear fruit. In 1929, she opened a second store, the Little Shop Around the Corner, purveying dresses and accessories reflecting “the same exclusiveness and beauty which is already evident in her gift shoppe,” as the Quincy Patriot Ledger reported. Mrs. Cheever relished her success, such as it was, and became every inch the plucky, hard-boiled businesswoman: “She routed thieving gypsies,” her son recalled, “brained an armed robber with a candlestick and cracked jokes with the salesmen.”
The vulgarity of it all was an “abysmal humiliation” to Cheever, whose innate sense of alienation was burden enough. Nor did he ever quite recover from “the trauma, the earthquake,” of his family's awful decline. Anything smacking of gift-shop knickknackery would always repulse him to the point of illness—and there were other triggers, too, some of them rather odd. Rollin Bailey's father was the director of a local bank, and John was never invited to play on their tennis court, two blocks above the Cheevers’ house on Wollaston Hill. “Suddenly I remember with painful clarity a fight I had with Rollin Bailey, forty years ago, on the gravel walk of his mother's garden,” Cheever wrote in 1965. “In a way I had been victorious, but I had only a painful sense of having disgraced myself and my family.” Cheever would forever associate that disgrace (and also, perhaps, his irksome memories of Uncle Hamlet) with the posh thwock of tennis balls, and couldn't bear to be anywhere near the game; whenever his friends the Boyers would start a friendly tournament on Whiskey Island, Cheever would remove himself to the opposite shore. As for Rollin Bailey, he last saw his old friend on a troop train returning north during World War II; by then Cheever was on his way to becoming a well-known New Yorker writer, and he treated Bailey with a kind of cordial disdain that made the man feel “like less of a person.”
At the best of times, Cheever would joke about his family's downfall, announcing that he was one of the “poor” or “wrong” Cheevers. As with other compartments of his personal legend, he had a ready-made story about how the schism had come to pass. The “right” Cheevers had been distinguished doctors in the Revolutionary War, and John's father had impudently written to one of their worthier descendants—Dr. David Cheever of Cambridge—and offered his body for dissection at the medical school.* The proper Cheevers were appalled at the prospect of a relation (however distant) flouting the Christian burial service, and thereafter banished Frederick and his whole raffish branch to the South Shore. John Cheever, for his part, affected to accept his exile in a spirit of roguish insouciance: “They could have their humorless Boston respectability with its piss-pot social rules and regulations and its dumpy Richardsonian architecture,” as Susan Cheever put it. At the same time, he was quite pleased to be a Cheever (and a Devereaux to boot), because he believed somewhat in the idea of “breeding”—rather as his brother Fred expressed it in a late-life letter to his daughter Sarah: “My underlying conviction is that any Cheever has a great destiny, great ability, great force, grace and love of the world. This is inbred and not many people have it. It is a matter of breeding, and I have the great conceit to know that this will be a heritage to your child.” John Cheever rarely went that far, though he did think his “sound digestion” and “able dick” were the result of a lucky inheritance “that no amount of venereal or alcoholic abuse could impair.”
The part that shamed Cheever—the part he sometimes took pains to conceal—was a dreadful suspicion that his family had become poor and outcast not as a result of some stylish revolt against “piss-pot” respectability, but because they were, at bottom, strange and vulgar people. In his journal he worried that he would “have to pay” when his origins caught up with him: “I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more significant. I have turned my eccentric old mother into a woman of wealth and position, and made my father a captain at sea. I have improvised a background for myself—genteel, traditional—and it is generally accepted. But what are the bare facts, if I were to write them?” For his own edification he often wrote the facts. There were, for example, the soiled underpants hanging from a nail on the bathroom door (“When I complained about this I was slapped down”). There was the player piano his father had won in a raffle, which was later supplanted (anecdotally) “with a glistening parlor grand, some Schumann on the rack;” in fact, the instrument was upright, mice-infested, and the tunes it played when one pumped the pedals were not Schumann sonatas but dance-hall hits like “Lena from Palesteena.” There was the cat to whom his father read Shakespeare. And finally there was the coral-embroidered, homemade dress his mother wore to Symphony Hall, to which she never bothered to bring tickets: “Young man,” she'd say, “I am Mrs. F. Lincoln Cheever and my seats are number 14 and 15.” Actually, Cheever was somewhat inclined to mention that spectacular dress and certain other details—her tri-corn hat, say (“what shit,” he glossed privately)—because they “[made] the cast seem charming and eccentric when it was neither.”
“Eccentric,” in this context, is meant to suggest a desirable originality—that is, as opposed to undesirable, as opposed to aberrant: “Sexual losers, sartorial losers, bums at the bank,” Cheever wrote of his family. “Unclean outcasts whose destiny, written in the stars, was to empty garbage pails and pump the shit out of septic tanks but who, through some cultural miscalculation, imagined themselves being carried off the Lacrosse field on the shoulders of their teammates and then dancing with the prettiest girl in the world.” Such an outcast was something Cheever never intended to be, and so he spent much of his adult life “impersonat[ing] squares” and living among them, despite his own “passionate detestation of the establishment.” And much the same may be said of his brother Fred, who rebelled against his own Babbittry by becoming an “exhaustively” offensive drunk, and later a sixty-something hippie riding a Harley around the South Shore.
Cheever was a great believer in Satchel Paige's advice not to look back lest you see something gaining on you. “I'm tickled to know that the letters still serve,” he wrote Josephine Herbst when she mentioned rereading their old correspondence, “although I always throw the damned things away myself. Yesterday's roses, yesterday's kisses, yesterday's snows.” Nor did he keep carbons of his stories, or (so he claimed) copies of his own books. Cheever worried that, if he got in the habit of dwelling on t
he past, he might also be inclined to dwell on the fact that his father was a failed salesman and his mother ran a “cluttered gift shop” and that hence, with an origin like that, he should have ended up “a slightly drunken gas-pumper” rather than a distinguished author with “the airs of a disenfranchised but charming duke of the holy Roman empire.” As for souvenirs, there were “the antiques and heirlooms out of Cheever's Yankee past,” as one journalist observed—meaning the ivory fan, the Canton china, the lowboy from Newburyport, and of course Aunt Liley's portrait of the artist as a young man. “Gene [Thaw, an art-dealer friend] frames the portrait,” Cheever noted in 1977, “[and] my whole past takes on authority and substance.” It wasn't his whole past, of course, and sometimes—when he was speaking of his dear old days at Thayerlands, or the time his cousin Randall spent at Eastman Conservatory—his wife would laugh at him: “ ‘When I was at Thayerlands,’” she'd mimic, “and what is this Eastman Conservatory … “
THAYER ACADEMY WAS an old-fashioned New England day school that had no truck with the progressive, “child-centered” principles of its junior school. Founded by Sylvanus Thayer—the so-called Father of West Point, a man who opposed “dissipation of every kind”—the school sought to instill a sense of “duty, industry, and honor” in its students while stuffing their heads with the kind of knowledge required for college entrance exams. The atmosphere was, in almost every sense, austere: the school couldn't afford to heat its buildings in the winter, so students wore earmuffs and mittens while poring over Latin verbs; as for Cheever, he was constantly reminded of the “intellectual Atlantis” of his stern cousin, Anna Boynton Thompson, whose collection of plaster friezes from Periclean Athens (“a large cast of absolutely naked men”) covered the walls of the main building.
Cheever did not shine in such a climate, though at the time he was not shining generally. Sloppy and depressed, he refused to improve his abysmal math skills (“What future is there for a man who can't deal with figures?” his anxious mother had remarked while John was still in grade school), nor did he make more than a token effort in classes that might otherwise have interested him. His freshman English teacher, Louise Saul, remembered him as a young man who did perfunctory work and “didn't take well to discipline;” in her class and in history, he managed a low C, while receiving D's or E's (failing) in pretty much everything else. Meanwhile he was an almost total outcast, and never forgot his “nearly animal resentment”: “Second-hand clothes that didn't fit, lost friends, athletic incompetence, poor marks, no pocket money, bad food in a dark lunch-room where nobody much wanted to sit with me. … the member of a deposed family.”
During his second year he transferred to Quincy High, where he could fail at no expense to his family* whom he'd begun to help support with a job delivering the Quincy News in a Model T. Cheever enjoyed the independence of driving alone to little towns along the South Shore—Houghs Neck, Braintree, Milton—especially during the World Series, when he'd make an extra trip at dusk to deliver a late edition including box scores and full accounts (“It made me feel good to be the one delivering the good news”). When he got home, though, his mother would sometimes make him wash up and put on his brother's “safety-pinned tuxedo” so he could keep up appearances at some “backstreet cotillion.” His grades continued to sink: for the fall 1928 semester he received a 77 in English and French, a 66 in Latin; the next semester his grades in those classes were, respectively, 55, 45, and zero.
One reason (of many) for Cheever's apathy was that he was too consumed with his own reading to bother with mundane schoolwork. Even as a child he'd spent summer vacations hiding in a canoe to read Machiavelli, and now that he was a lonely, inquisitive teenager he read “everything.” Then and later, his favorite novel was Madame Bovary, not only because of its “absolutely precise” writing, but also a c'est moi identification with its heroine: the novel, said Cheever, was “the first account we have of controlled schizophrenia,” a phenomenon he was somewhat familiar with. He reread the book over and over as an adult and could recite long passages word for word—in English, though he generally advised friends to read it first, if possible, in Flaubert's glorious French.* When reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time he always stuck to his native tongue, but to read the entire masterpiece in whatever language, at age fourteen, is astonishing enough. “It must sound awfully precocious,” Cheever conceded in a 1969 interview, but it appears to have been no idle boast. He also reminisced in his journal about “how disturbed” he'd been, as a boy, to learn of Baron de Charlus's secret homosexuality: “This was in the house in Quincy where the clash between what I read and my surroundings made an intolerable discord,” he wrote, while reflecting that he himself had “none of the ebullience it must take to lead a double life” (though at the time he was leading such a life, to some extent, ebulliently or not).†
In an altogether different category was Hemingway, whose importance to Cheever is hard to measure. Much of Cheever's apprentice fiction reads almost like deliberate homage (or parody), but there was more to it than that: “I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his,” Cheever wrote after Hemingway's suicide in 1961, “and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers, and the smells of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage, a quality that I had heard … extolled by Scoutmasters and others who made it seem a fraud. He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain.” A little later, Cheever met the great man's widow and was thrilled to learn that Hemingway had once rousted her out of bed to read “Goodbye, My Brother.” As time went on, though, Cheever became more ambivalent about his lifelong hero: reading the posthumous A Moveable Feast (with its unseemly reference to “Scott [Fitzgerald]'s cock” and so on) made Cheever feel as if he'd met “some marble-shooting chum of adolescence who has not changed.” Finally, at the height of his own fame, Cheever seemed to worry that readers would overestimate Hemingway's (passing) influence on his work, the earliest samples of which he'd labored to keep out of the public eye. “What have you learned from Ernest Hemingway?” asked a well-meaning admirer at the Ossining Library. “Not to blow my head off with a shotgun,” Cheever replied.
He also read Faulkner,* with whom he had a more subtle affinity but an affinity nonetheless. As Malcolm Cowley pointed out, both men were autodidactic high-school dropouts with “enormous confidence in their own genius,” and Cheever also cultivated his “little postage stamp of native soil” à la Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha (postage stamps plural in Cheever's case, as he mythologized—inimitably if less ambitiously—such diverse locales as provincial New England, the West-chester suburbs, and the lost midcentury Manhattan that “was still filled with a river light”). Both writers, too, were attracted to the sprawling, picaresque novels of the eighteenth century—though, as with Hemingway, Cheever would sometimes hesitate to admit the breadth of his debt to Fielding (whose work he'd consumed “intravenously”). “Oh no, no,” he hemmed when a visiting graduate student asked about Fielding's influence on the Wapshot novels. Cheever's wife had overheard the exchange, however, and sniped “That's not true! You've been reading Tom Jones again!”—then vanished back into the house.
The fact was, Cheever had read so much as a young man, and come so far as a writer, that he could honorably deny any particular influence—there were simply too many. “I seem to be running down,” he wrote a few months before his death, “but as a very young man, choosing a career, to be a serious writer seemed to be to emulate heroes. Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Ernest Hemingway all seemed to me heroes.”
HE WAS BADLY IN NEED of heroes. In the space of a few years, his father had gone from a jaunty golf-playing burgher to a sodden failure with a hacking cough who always seemed to be sitting on the porch with nothing to do. Everybody in the neighborhood knew about “poor Mr. Cheever”: he'd taken to drink and odd behavior; he wore the shabby cast-off clothing of his dead friends.
His son John “deeply resented his defeatism,” but resented his mother's strength even more. Her latest venture was a restaurant she'd opened in a family farmhouse in nearby Hanover, where Frederick was relegated to an outbuilding and fed only after the last customer had left. John came to understand such contempt as unique to wives in New England and peculiarly evident in his mother's case. “Why don't you want to eat with me?” his father would say, following his wife around the house. The woman could hardly bear the sight of her idle, drunken husband, and would either eat standing at a sideboard with her back to the room (“For Christ's sake,” Frederick would protest, “what have I done to deserve this?”), or remain at table to indulge in a bit of chilly repartee. “Don't these chops taste good?” she once asked, and when her husband replied that he hadn't “been able to taste anything for ten days,” the woman sweetly observed, “Well, it doesn't seem to have spoiled your appetite.”
At last they stopped talking entirely, communicating (if at all) in the form of written indictments. One day Frederick presented his wife with an exhaustive list of malfeasances; she tossed it, unread, in the fire, whereupon he announced he was going to the beach to drown himself. She told her son as much—with an exasperated sigh—when he came home for dinner that evening, and John took the car and raced after his father: