by Blake Bailey
The beach was deserted, the sea was calm and I had no way of knowing if it contained, full fathom five, his remains. The amusement park was open and I heard some laughter from there. A group of people were watching the roller coaster where my father, waving a pint bottle, was pretending to threaten to leap. When he was finally grounded I got him by the arm and said Daddy you shouldn't do this to me, not in my formative years. I don't know where I got that chestnut. Probably from some syndicated column on adolescence. He was much too drunk for any genuine remorse. Nothing was said on the way home and he went to bed without his supper. So did I.*
The episode was part of a repertoire of comic anecdotes Cheever told about his father, in life as in fiction. There was also the time he found the man “drunken, debauched and naked but for a string of champagne corks,” as well as the time his father drank all the sherry and then tried to cover his tracks by pissing in the decanter. “I have finessed these scenes,” Cheever wrote a friend, “but when he failed me, and he did a thousand, thousand times, I found my cock and balls in a wringer. I was determined not to lose that sense of locus that I would have lost if I dismissed him as a tragic clown.” By way of mitigating his resentment (not to say his own dreadful fear of failure), Cheever struggled all his life to comprehend his father's predicament. “He did not even give me bus fare,” he mused; “but he didn't have it, and I think his spirit was pure.” Cheever was especially haunted by papers he'd found after his father's death—a heartbreaking testament of the man's losing struggle to preserve self-esteem. There were “at least fifty” rejected applications for menial jobs at shipyards and factories; promotional schemes for selling cheese and soap chips and automobiles; dotty letters to heads of state and other luminaries. One long correspondence was particularly telling: Frederick had been very proud of his four-digit license plate (“3088”), because a low figure marked him as one of the first automobile owners in Massachusetts and hence a man of substance; alas, his son Fred had forgotten to renew his license one year, and the coveted number was snapped up by an Italian politician. Frederick (who despised foreigners) wrote many indignant letters, and finally stopped driving altogether.
Naturally Mrs. Cheever was to blame. As John maintained, she never let the men of her family forget who the breadwinner was—and, to make the emasculation complete, she even insisted they do housework.* “I'm a businesswoman!” she'd gloatingly proclaim. Cheever remembered coming home from his newspaper route and finding the flowers dead, the furniture covered in dust, his father drunk. Desperate to cheer things up a bit (and since it was expected of him), John would rush about tidying the place before his mother returned from work. Then, after a dinner prepared in part by himself, he and his drooping father would wash and dry the dishes. (“I have got so [I can] polish the dishes better than [I] used to do,” Frederick wrote his son years later, “when you and I teamed up on that job—quote—’Polish them Dad!’”) Cheever never got over the bitterness of their mutual humiliation—“a bronchitic and routed old man picking a thread off the rug and a youth, famous for his salad dressing.” Later, as head of his own family, he created “an ideal Polynesian culture” (as his son Federico put it), for which the primary motto was “That's women's work!”—sternly repeated whenever Cheever caught a son of his hefting a broom or helping with dishes. Men scythed and split wood; housework was “bad for the hormones.”
Meanwhile his mother gleefully bought a car and painted it herself (“imply[ing] that … neither my father nor I had the gumption”), then pressed her son into service as a chauffeur. Every morning he drove her to work, and returned in the evening at five; often Mrs. Cheever would be chatting with a friend or completing a sale, in which case John would cool his heels in a tiny office, amid stacks of broken china and the pervasive odor of “candle fat, sweat, … and hot radiator paint.” It was, perhaps, the least he could do, seeing as how the gift shop kept the family afloat (for a time), but mostly he associated its sweaty bouquet with “the gall and chagrin of failure.” That is, despite the best efforts of “a vigorous but disturbed woman”—as Cheever would have it—most of her business ventures came to a bad end. She soon sold the dress shop; the restaurant in Hanover “struggled on” for a few summers, though days passed without a single customer: “The waitresses—country girls dressed in quaint costumes designed by my Mother—hung around the three dinningrooms [sic] and the lobster and chicken that was all she served would spoil.” This was followed by something called the Oribe Tea Barn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, which lasted a few weeks before Mrs. Cheever telephoned her son one night to come get her. “When I asked what had happened she raised her face as though for a blessing and sighed: ‘I was much too popular.’ “
Cheever also associated the gift shop with a sense of personal impotence. (“Did you used to work in the gift shoppe?” Cheever's wife would tease him, stirring memories that caused “an actual sensation of discomfort in [his] scrotum.”) Later—when he sought the cause of his malaise in Freud—he discovered that his family was a virtual paradigm for “that chain of relationships” (weak father, dominant mother) “that usually produces a male homosexual.” But things were even worse in Cheever's case. His mother (he came to suspect) had a “terrifying ambivalence” about homosexuality, deploring it on the one hand but wanting to castrate him on the other, the better to guarantee “a gentle companion for the lonely years of old age.” Thus, when his wife would catch him, say, reading the theater page of the Times (“an incriminating piece of effeminacy”), Cheever would recall the Freudian shrink who'd told him, in so many words, that he'd married his mother—a ghastly thought. Could it be that the elder Mary Cheever had kept him tied to her “faraway apron strings” after all? “Come back, come back,” he imagined her crying, “my wretched, feeble and unwanted child.”
Whatever her designs, the fact remained that all three members of the household were crushingly miserable. The mother distracted herself with work, the father with drink and solitary quirks, while the son was left to shift for himself. His parents loathed each other and pretty much ignored him, except as a pawn or buffer; one year they both completely forgot his birthday. It was a lot to bear for anybody, especially a hypersensitive boy who found himself fleeing trolley cars because of a morbid awareness of other people. The main reason he became a storyteller, he said, was “to give some fitness and shape to the unhappiness that overtook [his] family and to contain [his] own acute-ness of feeling.” Later, with his own children, he often made a game of his favorite coping mechanism—picking out strangers in public and imagining their wallpaper, what they ate for breakfast, and so on. It worked and it didn't. Once, drunk, he confided to his son that he could hardly bear to take the train to New York anymore: “[E]very stranger's face,” he said, “is like the last hand in a game of poker in which my life is at stake.”
WHILE AT QUINCY HIGH, Cheever won a short-story contest sponsored by the Boston Herald, after which he was invited back to Thayer on a probationary basis. The idea was for him to receive special instruction from a revered English teacher, Harriet Gemmel, without the distractions of math or Latin. The academy was taken aback, however, by the more eccentric Cheever who returned in the fall of 1929—a “total kook” (so the consensus went) who flaunted his disdain for the place, interrupting teachers with pointless questions and taking pains to look as bored as possible. Also, whereas he'd neglected his personal appearance in the past, he now seemed to cultivate dishevelment as a kind of writerly ideal: “On more than one occasion,” said a friend, “we classmates would collect a few pennies and escort him to the barber shop.”
Miss Gemmel understood, and even looked kindly on her shaggy protégé when he'd stay behind in her classroom long after the bell rang, vividly absorbed in his writing. Eulogized in the yearbook as “our more-than-teacher, seeing guide, / Who understands our faults, but trusts our strength,” Miss Gemmel gave Cheever tea and cookies at her home on Sunset Lake and shared the fruits of her more-than-teacherly wisdom. In t
he story Cheever was soon to write, she appears as the “very nice” Margaret Courtwright, a “slightly bald” woman who adores Galsworthy and warns the young narrator away from the “sex reality” of writers such as Joyce. “When I told her people laughed at Galsworthy she said that people used to laugh at Wordsworth,” Cheever wrote. “That was what made her so nice.”
The sardonic prodigy—reading his way through Proust and Joyce and Hemingway, et al.—soon decided that the likes of Harriet Gemmel didn't have much to offer him. As for Thayer at large, Cheever later observed that it “existed not to educate us in any way but to make us admissible to Harvard University”—where he claimed a scholarship had awaited him, though he sensed an Ivy League career would prove “disastrous.”* Thus he became even more recalcitrant, ignoring his lessons (“I refused to commit to memory the names of Greek playwrights whose work I had not read”) and smoking behind the tennis court—the last an offense for which he was repeatedly warned and finally expelled. Or so he usually claimed.
Thayer's headmaster at the time was Stacy Baxter Southworth, a beloved figure known throughout greater Braintree as “Uncle Stacy.” “From someone who remembers Stacey [sic] Southworth vividly” Cheever inscribed a copy of Falconer for the Thayer library, and once, on television, he praised the man as “extremely understanding and vastly intelligent.” Southworth was, in fact, keenly aware of John's troubled home life and more than willing to be patient (he'd excused him from math and Latin, after all), if only the boy would meet him halfway and buckle down to his studies a bit more. But John refused, and that was that. “The young man was not expelled from the Academy,” wrote a furious Southworth three weeks after Cheever's “Expelled” appeared in The New Republic. “He left entirely on his own volition in the late spring season, presumably because of the added attraction of the May orchard blossoms, which he characterized in his unique way.” Another unique characterization in Cheever's story (among many) was that of the headmaster's “gravy-colored curtains,” which occasioned a lot of knowing snickers behind Uncle Stacy's back.
Shortly after leaving Thayer in March, Cheever took a job in the stockroom of the Shepherd Company in Boston, a large department store, where he presumably pored over The New Republic during lunch breaks. Judging from “Expelled,” he'd become quite familiar with a few of the left-wing magazine's pet issues. For example, the governor of Massachusetts—a Republican Cadillac-dealer named Alvan T Fuller—was a particular target for having refused to commute the sentences of Sacco and Vanzetti, and so in his story Cheever mentioned “the Governor” who comes to the narrator's prep school and delivers a Memorial Day harangue against the “Red menace.” Meanwhile a gallant history teacher named Laura Driscoll is fired for daring to suggest that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Miss Driscoll also serves to embody the higher possibilities of modern pedagogy, as opposed to the “ruthlessly regimented” system that still prevailed, whereby “children were being crammed with meaningless miscellaneous information”—or so The New Republic reported in a “symposium” on progressive education that ran throughout its June 1930 issues. “When Laura Driscoll dragged history into the classroom,” Cheever wrote, “squirming and smelling of something bitter, they fired Laura and strangled the history;” such a maverick as Driscoll had no place in a school where “people didn't care about Chartres as long as you knew the date.”
Cheever commended his story to the attention of a young associate editor, Malcolm Cowley, whose first book of poetry, Blue Juniata, had struck the young Cheever (so he remarked in his cover letter) as the work of a sympathetic soul. Cowley read the precocious slush-pile manuscript and agreed: “I felt that I was hearing for the first time the voice of a new generation,” he recalled sixty years later. So emphatic was his advocacy of Cheever that his fellow editors decided to suspend a long-standing rule against publishing fiction.
“Expelled from Prep School” by “Jon” Cheever (as he'd spell his name for the next five years) was the lead story in the October 1 issue, prefaced by a little note from the editors explaining that its author had recently been expelled “from an academy in Massachusetts … where education is served out dry in cakes, like pemmican.” It's an astonishing debut. At age eighteen, Cheever had evolved a voice that alternated seamlessly between droll, oddly precise details (“a soft nose that rested quietly on his face”) and flights of somber lyricism: “The year before I had not known all about the trees and the heavy peach blossoms and the tea-colored brooks that shook down over the brown rocks. … I wanted to feel and taste the air and be among the shadows. That is perhaps why I left school.” Here and there, Cheever's adulation of Hemingway lets him down a little, as when he resorts to a kind of lumbering irony: “Our country is the best country in the world. … Dissatisfaction is a fable. … It is bad because people believe it all. … Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.” For the most part, though, the story is a curiously self-sufficient performance—“alarmingly mature,” as Updike put it, “with a touch of the uncanny, as the rare examples of literary precocity—Rimbaud, Chatterton, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Green—tend to be.”
Years later, when asked what it felt like to sell a story to The New Republic at such a tender age, Cheever cocked his head and replied, “It felt precisely … eighty-seven dollars, that's what it felt like.” That may have been what it felt like to his parents, too, who suddenly developed an avid interest in their son's literary career: “Have you been writing today?” they kept asking him, bruiting it about Wollaston that their celebrated boy was working on a novel. In the meantime another notorious local dropout, Curtis Glover, sought out Cheever for his views on educational reform. Two years before, Glover had made the front page of the Boston Herald by abruptly leaving Dartmouth to live in the woods like Thoreau. Cheever enjoyed Glover's visit in the same spirit of jaunty mockery that informed his narrative voice: “[Glover] was tall, blonde, with a pink and white complexion, wide hips and a loose mouth,” he reported to Cowley “[H]e laughed through his nose, ate his toast with a knife and fork and read the ‘new republic’ faithfully.” For the time being, at least, Cheever finally seemed to be having some fun.
But it came at a certain price. Among respectable people, Cheever was more a pariah than ever: simply to write for such a “radical” magazine as The New Republic was bad enough, but to play “fast and loose with the truth”—as Stacy Southworth noted in a letter to a sympathetic Thayerite—was unforgivable, even in a purported work of fiction. “Laura Driscoll,” for instance (the firebrand Sacco-and-Vanzetti supporter), was an obvious surrogate for Mary Lavinia Briscoe, late of the history department. In Cheever's version of her departure, the headmaster had reported to students in chapel that she had “found it necessary to return to the West”: “Then Laura got up, called him a damned liar, swore down the length of the platform and walked out of the building.” This, Southworth fumed, was “a tissue of falsehoods”: “I was glad to cooperate with her in securing a fine position in St. Louis,” where she had moved “to enlarge the scope of her experience.” Nor was the woman known to have any particular convictions about Sacco and Vanzetti one way or another, though in any case “she surely appreciated the freedom of expression which she enjoyed [at Thayer].”
By far the worst of it was Cheever's heartless treatment of his mentor, Harriet Gemmel, the woman he'd slurred as a balding Galsworthy connoisseur. “[T]ragic indeed,” said Southworth, who knew only too well how wounded the woman had been. Thayer staff and students, the citizens of Braintree and beyond—almost everyone was aware of the pains Miss Gemmel had taken with the obnoxious youth, and was equally up in arms.* So they remained. “Personally, had I the choice, I should not invite John to visit or to speak at the Academy,” protested his old teacher Grace Osgood when Thayer invited its most famous alumnus to give the commencement address in 1980 (the year his grandniece Sally Carr graduated). Cheever, said Osgood, had made too many “inaccurate” and “cruelly unkind” statements “about gen
tle, gracious, bright people who were truly trying to help him.”
As it happened, Cheever had no interest in accepting the invitation. In fact he'd been asked before, in 1968, when Headmaster Peter Benelli had paid a personal visit to Ossining in hope of persuading him. As ever, Cheever presented his guest with a whacking martini and then grew solemn. His memories of Quincy, he said, were “very painful,” and he would never return to the area for any reason.† As for Benelli's eminent predecessor—well, the very name put Cheever in a pious mood. “Without Stacy Baxter Southworth,” he liked to say, “I would have ended up pumping gas in some place like Walpole.” Such piety depended somewhat on his audience, however. To a fellow disgruntled alumnus, Cheever mentioned an old photograph he'd seen of Uncle Stacy: “[He was] wandering under some Elm trees in a light rain performing some traditional and foolish ceremony,” Cheever wrote. “God have mercy on his soul.”
* Her first shop was opened at 9 Granite Street in 1926 and later moved a block or so away, to 1247 Hancock Street, where it remained for many years.
* John Cheever's wife thinks Frederick may well have written such a letter—not as an impudent gesture but rather because (like both his children) he became a great writer of eccentric letters in later life. Also, he was drunk a lot: “Perhaps he was depressed that day,” she opined, “and thought, this is one thing I can do—give my body to science.”
* Thayer tuition was $i80 a year. Frederick made the first payment of sixty dollars on November 6, 1926, after which all payments were made by his wife.
* One of Cheever's friends was Francis Steegmuller, arguably Flaubert's greatest translator into English. Asked in 1956 why he was working on a new Bovary translation, Steegmuller explained that the current Modern Library edition (translated by Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx Aveling) was a “really poor job with awful mistakes”: “My friend, John Cheever, loves it, though,” said Steegmuller. “He's read it so many times in that way that he doesn't want it changed or improved on. It's his idea of ‘Bovary’ though he knows it's absurd. Well, that's my goal, to convert John Cheever.”