by Blake Bailey
† Tanya Litvinov, Cheever's Russian translator and intimate correspondent, remembers a curious impression on meeting Cheever for the first time in 1964: “I thought at the moment he was a Charlus for some reason.” The oddity of the thought came back to her many years later, when Cheever's bisexuality was revealed after his death.
* When Faulkner won the Nobel in 1949, Cheever showed he could still channel Hemingway with the best of them, imagining what Papa might say if he were to write a letter for the occasion to the New York Times: “I think it's fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. … The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, but they don't give prizes for it. There is the kind of shooting that you get in the Abruzzi in the May snows and underwater shooting and the kind of lonely shooting that you have when you take your sights in a pocket-mirror and bring down a grizzley [sic] over your left shoulder but they don't give prizes for that kind of shooting. Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. Herman Melville did that kind of shooting but they never got any prizes.”
* Cheever wrote of this episode repeatedly in letters, journals, and finally in Falconer, where he called the fateful beach “Nagasakit.” In The Wapshot Chronicle, Leander ferries his customers aboard the Topaze to the amusement park at “Nangasakit” Beach, which appears to be the same fictional locale with an “n” added. Both are almost certainly based on Paragon Park at Nantasket Beach in Hull, about ten miles from Wollas-ton, which featured a large roller coaster such as the one Frederick rode so boozily Cheever was known to frequent the beach in his childhood.
*”Well, she did damage my father,” said Cheever with an edge of annoyance during an otherwise benign TV appearance in 1981, “and my father's well-being was very much my concern.”
* Peter Benelli, a later headmaster at Thayer, agreed with Cheever's assessment of the school circa 1930: “I was approached by angry graduates who were never taught to write,” he said. “Mostly they were just prepped for achievement tests.” Cheever's claim that he was bound for Harvard is more dubious. At the time, fewer than 10 percent of Thayer graduates went to Harvard. With Cheever's miserable academic record at a school of rather modest reputation, it's hard to believe anyone (much less Cheever) seriously considered him Harvard material.
* Miss Gemmel survived the attack and continued teaching at Thayer for many years. Hugh Hennedy (class of ‘47) was also given tea and cookies at Sunset Lake, and will attest that the woman was still teaching The Forsyte Saga in its entirety almost twenty years after Cheever's departure. “His portrait of her dazzles me every time I look at it,” said Hennedy.
† As we shall see, he returned to the South Shore only twice after his mother's death in 1956: for his brother Fred's funeral and for his own.
CHAPTER FOUR
{1930-1934}
JOHN AND HIS BROTHER had not been close when Fred left for Dartmouth in 1924, but when he returned two years later (because of the family's financial straits) the age difference no longer mattered as much. Also, Fred felt an obligation toward his gifted sibling, who was all but entirely alone in the world except for their embattled parents. Fred had settled briefly in Framingham, a few miles west of Boston, but as often as possible he'd drive to Quincy in his Model A roadster and, in effect, rescue his little brother. “[W]hen the situation was most painful and critical,” Cheever remembered, “my brother entered my life and played out for me the role of mother, father, brother and friend.”
The two brothers—Fritz and Joey—were almost inseparable for the next five years or so. They took a sculpting class together and read the same books; they spent long days at the beach or simply driving and talking about things. At one point Fred was between jobs and moved back to the house on Winthrop Avenue, where he witnessed firsthand what a shambles his family had become. There was, of course, the constant bickering (or fraught silences) between his parents, but most appalling was the deterioration of his father, whose behavior was markedly odd with or without alcohol. One or both of the boys often stayed out late at night, and one of Frederick's rituals involved locking them out of the house; one night young Fred had to force a window to get back in, and his father fired a pistol at his head. “The explosion woke me,” John recalled, “and I ran downstairs and saw the two men in the dining-room and the hole in the wall. My brother was very pale. ‘You shouldn't have done that, Dad,’ he said.” For a while the brothers tried sliding into the house through a coal chute, until Fred found a job and took an apartment on Beacon Hill, a cosmopolitan world where John began to spend more and more time. “[M]y sense of freedom may have been erotic, my balls and my cock hung in my pants in a serene condition, no longer my Mother's errand boy …”
His genius validated by The New Republic, “Jon” endeavored to become the sort of idle, brooding bohemian his mother was apt to abhor. Growing his hair to his shoulders and affecting a large amethyst ring, he whiled away the hours in his room playing the accordion amid a pall of incense. (One assumes his mother was duly shocked; certainly Cheever was shocked, many years later, whenever the soigné New Yorker author considered his younger self: “I was some kid in those days,” he told the Times with “horrified amazement,” while privately he wondered how a boy with an amethyst ring had grown into “a decent, likable and healthy man as I think myself.” At other times, suffice to say, he saw the connection more clearly.) Nor was the performance entirely for his mother's benefit, as he'd begun to receive invitations to dine among older, rather distinguished company. Cheever—though he “knew the forks”—was still a small-town boy behind the Wildean façade, so nervous in any sort of sophisticated gathering that he could scarcely lift a spoon to his mouth. It was around this time that he discovered the usefulness of alcohol: “The next engagement that threatened to arouse my shyness I bought a bottle of gin and drank four fingers neat. The company was brilliant, chatty and urbane and so was I.”
He and Fred soon became regulars at raffish saloons like Cohen's and Sharkey's on Howard Street—”the arse-end of the city,” as Cheever put it. Strippers from the Old Howard burlesque theater hung out in such places, and soon Joey was adopted as a mascot of sorts. A venerable stripper named Boots Rush took a particular shine to the lad, letting him lift her off a stool whenever she got tipsy enough to regale the crowd with “Leave It to the Irish.” Mischievously, perhaps, Cheever invited his old neighbor Rollin Bailey to accompany him to a party in the arse-end part of town—an occasion Bailey recalled as being “like a dream,” so alien was it to his genteel Wollaston upbringing. Volatile men and women (“all foreign”) rattled around a dingy walkup apartment, drinking and laughing, and John seemed very much one of them. “Yesterday, sitting in the sun,” Cheever wrote in 1971, “I recalled my life among the burlesk stars. A frightful bore, highly colored with alcohol.”
He preferred being alone with his brother—it was “the most significant relationship in [his] life,” he later told a psychiatrist. “It was like a love affair.” Whether it was an actual love, affair is hard to say, though it appears not to have been entirely platonic. All his life Cheever spoke of an “ungainly closeness” to his brother, describing their attachment in his journal as “a sterile and perverse love,” while certain details he let drop in conversation would seem almost to clinch the matter. Many years later he told Allan Gurganus (on whom he had an open crush) that he and his brother had shared a bed when he was an adolescent and Fred a young man: “He implied it had been the erotic romance of his life,” said Gurganus. Above all, Fred seems to have served as a kind of ideal parent figure—a man he could easily confide in, as he'd never been able to confide in his father, and moreover a source of tenderness that had been all but entirely absent in his relations with either parent. When the brothers showered together, for example, John freely admitted he was worried about his sexual development, and Fred was able to reassure him. That the solace Fred offered was sometimes (in whatever form) physical is not in dou
bt: “I still long for the warmth and support I was given by his arms,” Cheever wrote.
Any separation from Fred was an almost intolerable wrench, and so, in the summer of 1930, John was crushed when his brother departed for Germany. Interested in the idea of “breeding” even then, Fred was fascinated by the budding experiment to establish a state along racial lines, and finally he could no longer restrain himself from crossing the Atlantic to learn more about National Socialism. John (who would always lack his brother's zest for big ideas) lay weeping on the sofa in Fred's empty apartment in Boston: “I wept for a love that could only bring me misery and narrowness and denial; and how passionately I wept.”
John was perhaps well cared for in his brother's absence, as they'd become part of a rather louche circle of intellectuals who tended to espouse socialism of one kind or another and gravitated around the frank bohemia of Beacon Hill. As Cheever reported to Cowley (in e. e. cummings-esque lower-case), “prescot [sic] townsend will very nearly give me his house in provincetown for a month.” Prescott Townsend was then a thirty-six-year-old dandy who frequented “tearooms” such as the Green Shutters on Cedar Lane Way (a narrow street where Fritz and Joey would presently take an apartment), which featured enormous martinis quaffed discreetly from porcelain cups amid a din of radical palaver. Townsend's greatest fame would come later, as founder of the Boston Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay-rights advocacy group. Known as “Foxy Grandpa,” he had exotic digs in Provincetown that were a kind of caravansary for like-minded youths who were either attractive or interesting (and Cheever, at the time, was both).*
Another Boston mentor was the poet John Wheelwright, a Brahmin socialist who lived on Beacon Street with his sister in (as Lincoln Kirstein put it) “a suite of red-and-black Pompeiian chambers.” Cowley and Wheelwright had been fellow Harvard aesthetes, and Cowley might have been startled by the extent to which his new discovery “Jon” was getting around—as the latter informed him, he and “Jack” were friends: “[H]e is very nice, very guarded,” Cheever wrote of the poet. “[D]espite his attempts to be a period piece or a distinguished snob he is probably one of the most sincere, affectionate, charming people in Boston.” Wheelwright's sexual inclinations were as mutedly unorthodox as the rest of the man. He wrote bitterly of “those who split the monism of love into the dismal triad of heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality,” and once made a shy attempt to kiss the poet Howard Nemerov. What passed between him and Cheever will remain a mystery, though Wheelwright's endearing quaintness was (according to Cheever's journal) part of the confection that became Honora Wapshot.
With a certain wistful hilarity, Cheever often spoke of a memorable encounter with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, the poet's notorious grandson and proprietor of the family mansion on Brattle Street in Cambridge. Known for cultivating protégés, the fifty-year-old Dana gave Cheever a modest allowance and once invited him to Craigie Castle (as the mansion was known) for a lavish dinner. Later they went to the theater, after which Dana suggested they return to Brattle Street for a taste of his grandfather's brandy. “While I was waiting for him to produce the brandy,” Cheever recalled,
he got out of his clothes. I remember turning around and being surprised by the sight of a plump, white, naked man. I think I was more amused than anything else although I can see now the bitterness of having one's erotic drives seem clownish. I thanked him for the evening and politely said goodnight to the naked spectre. He railed at me. “You claim to be an independent spirit,” he said, “and yet you don't dare have a little harmless fun. You're just tied to your mother's apron strings.” I left the room with him in pursuit. The front door was locked but I found the key in a marble daisy on the left.
Naked or not, Dana was a rather comic figure (he reminded Cummings of the comedian Jack Benny), though Cheever's memory of the man assumed a poignant dimension as time passed. “I could not imagine a man so old, racked with sexual ardor,” he wrote Gurganus in 1974. “You may very well feel the same about me.”
FRED WAS EXCITED by what he'd seen in Germany, and the following summer he proposed a return trip with his brother. John didn't see why not; his novel was stalled and he hadn't been able to follow up his New Republic coup with another sale. Meanwhile Fred had gotten a promising job in the advertising department of Pepperell, a textile manufacturer, and was happy (as ever) to pay for the whole thing. On a rainy day in July, then, they sailed for Bremen, where they caught a slow train to Munich and watched the swastika-laden scenery.
Apart from the beer, John wasn't particularly impressed by Germany, and he was appalled by Nazi militarism. “Everything I saw meant war,” he later wrote Cowley, “although no one, especially Bruce Bliven [chief editor of The New Republic], seemed interested in my accounts of the National Socialist Party.” Fred was exalted, however, and would always speak of the trip as one of the great adventures of his life. He adored the Führer's insistence on discipline and was touched by the renascent pride of the German people, whose mettle was evident in the superior merchandise they produced.* He breezily made friends with total strangers, eager to canvass their views on the combustive Zeitgeist of 1931, and thereby gained a number of lifelong pen pals. John apparently kept his own counsel (Fred remained under the impression that his brother had relished the trip almost as much as he), but a fissure had begun to form in the relationship. Indeed, John's memory of that summer was so troubling he managed to repress most of it (“I have no memory for pain”)*—claiming many years later, for example, that he'd never once gone to France because his infantry comrades had been slaughtered on the beaches of Normandy; in 1931, however, he and Fred did stop in Paris, whence Cheever reported the following “Talk of the Town” item for The New Yorker: “On the Quai de Louvre, we are told, is now a sign on a lamp post: ‘Pietons avant de traverser, allumez le signal.’ One pushes the button, a bell rings, a red light gleams; then, while the traffic halts, one crosses statelily”
When he returned to the States, Cheever sought the literary advice of a new acquaintance, the gay communist biographer Newton Arvin, who pronounced the young man's work “contemptible” because it failed to address the problems of the working class. Cheever promptly hitchhiked to Fall River and took a room in a slum occupied mostly by unemployed mill workers. The product of this experiment was “Fall River,” an impressionistic sketch of local bleakness that reads like something a young Hemingway might have written if he'd fallen under the influence of Newton Arvin. Cheever thus evokes an abandoned mill: “On the floors and on the beams and on the brilliant flanks of steel the mist of the web was covered with dust like old snow.” The images of dust and dead leaves and stark hilly distances recur often in Cheever's early stories, suggesting a somewhat too avid study of the famous first paragraph in A Farewell to Arms. Fortunately, elegant Hemingway pastiches on proletarian themes were at the height of their vogue, as most of the arty little magazines had been replaced by organs of radical propaganda. An example of the latter was The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art, whose manifesto announced “the disintegration and bankruptcy of the capitalist system”—as did “Fall River,” more or less, which appeared in that journal's Autumn 1931 issue.
Cheever found he didn't like writing about hunger and cold, much less living in a Fall River slum, so he returned to Quincy and reverted to a more apolitical mode. “It had rained hard early in August so the leaves were off the trees,” the story “Late Gathering” begins. “In the sunlight the hills were like scorched pastry and when there was no sun the meadows were gray and the trees were black and the clean sky parted in firm lines down onto the smooth horizon.” Let it serve as a testament to Cheever's precocity that, at this point, it was almost impossible to distinguish his prose from the master's. But while Cheever had mastered the style all right, his content needed work. Both “Late Gathering” and his next story, “Bock Beer and Bermuda Onions,” are mostly concerned with a middle-aged war widow named Amy who runs a boardinghouse in the coun
try and presides over events that resist analysis. What's notable about the second story is the enigmatic motif of its title, which is sounded throughout but never explained: “[Amy] thinks about her forty-fifth April and the great symbol and seal of spring as Bock beer and Bermuda onions.” Such ambiguity had a nice modernist savor, whatever else it lacked, and both stories were placed in reputable journals. “Late Gathering” appeared in the second issue of Pagany, founded by a high-school dropout from Lynn named Richard Johns, with whom Fritz and Joey shared a bottle of bathtub gin (“One could tell it was bath-tub gin,” Cheever later recalled, “because the bottle contained a large, perfectly preserved spider”). The other story was published in Lincoln Kirstein's Hound & Horn, alongside the work of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and—perhaps most auspiciously for Cheever's purpose—Hazel Hawthorne.
As Fred Cheever would later describe her, Hawthorne was “one of the original beats”—a woman who'd married young, had many children, then left her minister husband to explore the world and work on her writing. Around the time she met John, she'd married Morris Werner—the biographer of P. T. Barnum and Brigham Young—and henceforth divided her time between Greenwich Village and Province-town, while dividing herself among a great many men (including both Cheever brothers). A descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne, she was “the Compleat Wasp”—as writer Roger Skillings put it—”who had entirely slipped the noose of respectability … a grand figure, much admired, said to have competed for lovers with her beautiful daughters.” She was introduced to Cheever over lunch with Kirstein and another editor, both so tall that John and Hazel (as she recalled) had to “hop along” to keep up with them. The diminutive Cheever was otherwise undaunted, however, feistily arguing some point about Henry James with the aristocratic Kirstein. Later he confided to Hawthorne, a little sheepishly, that he'd been drinking all morning to get his courage up for the lunch.