by Blake Bailey
The thirty-year-old Hawthorne was charmed by the witty teenager (“What I always liked best about John,” she said, “was his persiflage”) and invited him to New York, where he slept on a sofa in Hazel and Morrie's fifth-floor apartment on Waverly Place. Beginning with that visit—the first of many—the couple spared no effort to launch Cheever in literary Manhattan. Through the Werners he would eventually meet Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, James Agee, Walker Evans, and many others. “Their kindness,” he said, “was exhaustive and indescribable.” Hawthorne also lured him back to Provincetown, where she introduced him around the famous playhouse; the emancipated atmosphere appealed to Cheever, and he decided to rent a studio there in the early spring of 1932. His roommate was another Hound & Horn contributor, Charles Flato, a young man with a hunchback (from a childhood bout with polio) who was working on a biography of Mathew Brady. The two lived in a creaky, unheated shack on a wharf, where the water splashed through the floorboards at high tide. Spring came late that year and they shivered over their typewriters, punching away with their gloves on, subsisting on whatever fish was left over from their neighbors’ daily catch.
By far the most important connection Cheever made through the Werners was Cummings—”Estlin”—whom John admired as much for his literary genius as for his stylish poverty despite an impeccably haut Cambridge background. When the two first met, Cummings was at a particularly low ebb in his affairs: “His hair was nearly gone,” Cheever recalled, “his last book of poetry had been rejected by every estimable publisher, his wife was six months pregnant by her dentist and his Aunt Jane had purloined his income and had sent him, by way of compensation, a carton of Melba toast. He bit into the toast and exclaimed—oh so wonderfully—’Now I know why they call it Melba.’” Cummings was, for Cheever, an elusive ideal of sorts: “The only Yankee on the American literary scene,” he remained happily married to his third wife, Marion Morehouse, while residing for decades in the same little apartment on Patchin Place (around the corner from the Women's House of Detention, where the poet would blithely hail the whores by name as he passed below their barred windows); effortlessly hilarious, Cummings could imitate everything from a ticket-punching machine to “a wood-burning locomotive going from Tifflis to Minsk,” and his everyday “windupthechimney” voice became a key ingredient of Cheever's own. “A writer is a Prince!” Cummings declared, and he touched his sword to Cheever's shoulder: “Get out of Boston, Joey! It's a city without springboards for people who can't dive.”
While testing the water in New York, Cheever also paid a visit to his patron at The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley, who was impressed by the young man's winning smile and “stubborn jaw.” Cowley was not the heroic figure that Cummings was, but he would prove more useful over the long haul. As Cheever wrote him in 1977, “You taught me to be polite to [New Yorker editor] Katharine White, by-pass the French symbolists, train a retriever with a fresh egg, buy my shoes at Fortnum & Mason, catch a trout and keep my literary sights high and earnest. My gratefulness is vast.” Cowley also invited the nineteen-year-old prodigy to what was perhaps his first New York literary party, where he was greeted by Cowley's first wife, Peggy, and shown to the bar. As Cheever remembered:
I was offered two kinds of drinks. One was greenish. The other was brown. They were both, I believe, made in a bathtub. I was told that one was a Manhattan and the other Pernod. My only intent was to appear terribly sophisticated and I ordered a Manhattan. Malcolm very kindly introduced me to his guests. I went on drinking Manhattans lest anyone think I came from a small town like Quincy, Massachusetts. Presently, after four or five Manhattans, I realized that I was going to vomit. I rushed to Mrs. Cowley, thanked her for the party, and reached the apartment-house hallway, where I vomited all over the wallpaper.
Cowley took pains to remind the young man that he had Voice of a Generation potential and was therefore obliged to produce a novel, whereupon Cheever presented him with a few sample chapters. Alas, they wouldn't do as a novel, Cowley was sorry to report: along with their blatant debt to Hemingway (most notably “Cross-Country Snow”), “each chapter was separate and came to a dead end.” The latter was a problem Cheever would struggle with for the next twenty-five years or so, and arguably never quite resolve.
WHEN FREDERICK CHEEVER sold out of the shoe business, he invested the proceeds in Kreuger and Toll International Match. On March 12, 1932, Ivar Kreuger shot himself in a Paris hotel room rather than face creditors, and Cheever's father lost his “anchor to windward,” as he called it. For a long time, the Cheevers had borrowed against the big house on Winthrop Avenue, and when they couldn't pay their mortgage or fuel bills, the bank foreclosed. As John would later tell it, he'd overheard an argument one night between his father and “Mr. Pinkham” (owner of the local Granite Trust), whom his father indignantly informed that he, Frederick Cheever, was a “human employer of forty-two people whose birthdays and names he remembered, and coldhearted Mr. Pinkham simply dealt with money.” The next day, said Cheever, his family was routed out of their house, which was summarily razed to the ground. The house was indeed razed, but it took a few months at least, and of course Frederick had not been a human employer for many years (if ever) when this finally came to pass.
John's parents went their separate ways: Mrs. Cheever took an apartment on Spear Street, near the gift shop, and the wretched Frederick washed up at the desolate old farmhouse in Hanover, where he slept in front of a fireplace to keep from freezing to death. Hardly able to care for himself, Frederick might have perished if not for a shell-shocked veteran named McDonough who used part of his pension to buy groceries and cigars for the poignant old man, and also helped shovel snow and chop wood. A lot of wood: in winter the temperature dropped to thirty below, and (since there was no running water) Frederick had to “bathe” by stripping naked and rolling around in snowdrifts; so galvanized, he spent the rest of his waking hours stoking the five fireplaces to such an uproarious glow that drivers slowed along the highway a quarter-mile away, wondering if the place was on fire. “Never a one of them stopped to see the prisoner,” Frederick lamented.
Before cruel Pinkham had sent the bulldozers to Winthrop Avenue, Mrs. Cheever arranged for some leftover furniture to be hauled to her sons’ new apartment at 6 Pinckney Street, on Beacon Hill near the Common. She pretended to be nothing but pleased that John was striking out on his own (under Fred's protective eye), but as the brothers backed out of the driveway for the last time, their headlights struck the old woman's face—”gleaming with tears,” as John recalled, though neither brother remarked on it at the time. The better part of their sympathy remained with their father. Every weekend they drove to the farm in Hanover, despite its forbidding lack of creature comforts. “I still remember,” wrote Cheever, “I will remember forever, shivering and reading by the fire long after everyone else had gone to bed, getting up and walking down the cold hallways, the odd flights of steps, out to the woodshed and peeing off the stoop.” By day, the brothers picked up where the helpful McDonough had left off—chopping wood and planting gardens in warm weather—and for a while it pleased John to be such a good son to his forsaken father. But the man wasn't especially grateful. When he wasn't gloating over plans to raise goats and make a fortune on cheese, he'd maunder in a tipsy, self-pitying way: “I can't smell a rose!” he announced one day. “I have grown old. If I can't smell a rose I can't smell the east wind, I can't smell rain, I can't smell smoke and if the house catches fire I will burn to death …” On it went. Other times he'd retire to his room and read to the cat (which he'd found on the road with a broken hip and nursed back to health).
Nor were things much better in Boston. The brothers’ apartment wasn't as cold as the farmhouse, perhaps, but it didn't have five fireplaces either; at one point they took a hacksaw to the main heating pipe and diverted steam with a rolled-up magazine. Such hardships might have been romantic if the rest of life were going well; by then, however, John had tak
en a dreary newspaper job and dropped his persona as a South Shore Rimbaud.* The company he kept as a cub reporter was decidedly less glamorous than the Werners’ circle in New York or the languid bohemians of Beacon Hill. “I can remember night after night,” he wrote a couple of years later, in very different circumstances, “drinking parties on Milton Street, leaving my place half-cocked, going out for supper with a bunch of people I didn't want to see then and never wanted to see again, coming out of night-clubs in Copley Square, impatient with the girl I was with, glad to get away from the dance music and not wanting to go back to the place where I lived.” The main reason he didn't want to go back (“lurching into lam-posts [sic]”) was “mortal boredom”: “To finish the day's work and pass a football in the failing light was not enough for me.”
But even boredom might have been bearable if not for a mortifying love triangle involving the brothers and a pretty Canadian named Iris Gladwin, whom John had met a few years back at Quincy High. John and Iris were the same age, and when by chance they were reunited in that sculpting class at the Museum of Fine Arts, the two began courting—which meant, of course, that Iris saw a good deal of Fred as well, since one brother was rarely without the other and they shared almost everything. Sizing things up, Iris came to the sensible conclusion that a man with a steady job was a better prospect than a would-be writer who hitchhiked to Fall River at the drop of a hat.
“Other than Malcolm's word and a few published stories, I have little to recommend me,” Cheever wrote in April 1933 to Elizabeth Ames, director of the Yaddo artists’ colony. “I am planning to be a writer and have been working for the last year on apprenticeship prose. At present I am trying to write a handful of good short stories.” Such a modest, even perfunctory, request for admission suggests that Cheever was still a bit reluctant to leave his brother; in any event, Mrs. Ames replied with like brevity that perhaps he should try again next year. Cheever didn't seem put out. He thanked Cowley for recommending him, and added, “I don't expect to do anything worth publishing for five years or so. There is a lot of time.”
Then another year passed—a bad year, one suspects. The brothers moved to 46 Cedar Lane Way, even closer to the arty heart of things, where it might have become clearer than ever that that particular garden was closed, at least where John was concerned. Meanwhile two years had passed since his last published story, and almost four since that marvelous debut in The New Republic. “The idea of leaving the city for a short while … has never been so distant or so desirable,” Cheever wrote again to Mrs. Ames in March 1934, promising to work hard on a novel (about the incongruities of Boston life) if she saw fit to extend an invitation. Vague desperation was a better tack than modest ambivalence, and this time the hostess of Yaddo consented.
John seems not to have mentioned his decision to Fred one way or the other, and perhaps he wondered to the end whether he'd actually be able to leave. One day in June, though, he simply packed his bags and shook his brother's hand: “Fred, I'm leaving.” “Oh, are you?” Despite the decorous reticence, it was a parting (“impetuous, visionary, and dangerous”) that would haunt Cheever the rest of his life. “Oh brother, brother, why has thou forsaken me,” he repined thirty-four years later. A putatively happy man at the time—prosperous and acclaimed—he'd never stopped longing for the one person who loved him as he wished to be loved. “[C]rowding fifty-six I want my big brother to come back and be my love,” he wrote, “and when he comes, pious, artistic and floundering in sentimental self-deceptions, I can barely stay in the room with him.”
* One of Townsend's later boarders was the young John Waters, years before he made his name as director of Pink Flamingos and Lust in the Dust: “It was like living with a lunatic Swiss Family Robinson,” Waters recalled. “Part of the apartment was made out of a submarine, and trees grew right up through the living room.”
* For the rest of his life, Fred made a point of buying German cameras, binoculars, etc., and claimed to be the first person in Massachusetts (circa 1950) to own a Volkswagen. And while he and Hitler fell out over World War II and the Holocaust, Fred continued to find a certain validity in the man's racial theories. “We had a funny conversation once in the early sixties while driving between Connecticut and Boston,” said his daughter Sarah, who distinctly remembered her father's observation that “blacks [were] inferior because of malnutrition;” he then dilated on the relatively superior nutrition and educational opportunities of white Germans.
*”Untouched by the magic of fable, whole areas of experience have disappeared,” Alwyn Lee wrote in his 1964 Time cover story on Cheever. “This includes an early walking tour of Europe with his brother Fred.”
* Cheever is listed in the 1933 Boston City Directory as a “reporter,” and he vaguely spoke of the workaday routine he had to maintain at the time (“get[ting] out of work at five o'clock” etc.). No details of his employment are otherwise known, and perhaps it's safe to say that this was the sort of pain for which Cheever had “no memory.”
CHAPTER FIVE
{1934-1935}
YADDO, FOR CHEEVER, was a majestic summons back to his true calling. There was his artistic calling, of course, but more: a Gatsbyesque aspiration to the good life—in this case embodied by a fifty-five-room Tudor mansion situated among 440 acres of pleasant woodland and gardens and statuary and lakes, all within walking distance of the famous Saratoga Race Course and other mansions along Union Avenue (the most beautiful street in America, or so Henry James considered it). It was true that the mansion bequeathed by Spencer Trask for artistic purposes was a bit of an eyesore, but from Cheever's perspective it was a big improvement over a freezing ramshackle farmhouse in the sticks or a seedy bachelor flat on Beacon Hill.
The origin of Yaddo is a well-known and remarkably bleak story. Trask (the Wall Street financier who backed Thomas Edison) bought the property in 1881 as a place of summer respite for his poetic wife, Katrina, after the death of their first son. According to lore, it was the Trasks’ second child, Christina, who came up with that beguiling name, Yaddo—the four-year-old's version of “shadow,” as in the flickering shadows of wind-tossed trees, which the girl took to be the spirit of her dead brother: “Call it Yaddo, Mama, for it makes poetry!” Little Christina was soon among the shadows, too, as was her little brother, Spencer Jr., since both were ill-advisedly allowed to kiss their mother when she was thought to be dying of diphtheria. Katrina survived; the children died within two days of each other. A year later a fourth child died, whereupon Katrina devoted herself to more ethereal pursuits. One day, walking with her husband, the woman had a vision: “Here will be a perpetual series of house parties—of literary men, literary women and other artists. … Look, Spencer, they are walking in the woods, wandering in the garden, sitting under the pine trees—men and women—creating, creating, creating!” The man saw her point and set up a nonprofit corporation to maintain the estate as a retreat for people “usefully engaged in artistic and creative work”—but before the dream was realized, a freight train ran a red signal near Croton and smashed into Spencer Trask's private car. He was the only person killed. For a few more years, Katrina mourned her decimated family, comforted by the couple's mutual friend, George Foster Peabody, whom she finally married (“the romantic culmination of a rare triangular friendship”) less than a year before her death on January 7, 1922. Her ghostly presence still abides in the mansion, or such is the impression created by a portrait of the woman in a billowy white shift (“poor Katrina's shower curtain,” as Cheever called it).
A year after Katrina's death, Peabody was still in the process of carrying out her wishes with the help of an eighteen-year-old assistant,* Marjorie Waite, when the two were visited by Waite's widowed sister from Minnesota, Elizabeth Ames. Peabody was struck by Mrs. Ames's enthusiasm for his project and asked her to draw up a plan, which she accomplished with such insight and energy that Peabody named her executive director on the spot (or, in Cheever's more picturesque version: “When a beam of li
ght caught Mrs. Ames's lovely face, Mr. Peabody decided that it was she who had been chosen”). In most respects he chose wisely. By 1926, Mrs. Ames had refurbished the mansion, erected outbuildings, hired a large and efficient staff, and was ready to welcome her first group of artists as the hostess of Yaddo.
“Hostess” was one way to put it. “For the first twenty-five years,” said Malcolm Cowley, “Elizabeth Ames was Yaddo.” No detail, however niggling, was likely to escape Mrs. Ames's notice. With her guests as a whole she communicated via bits of advice tacked on the mail table; more intimate messages were written on blue paper and left, like ill-boding tarot cards, in guests’ lunch baskets. (“When you have a suggestion to make please do not ask to see any of the servants,” she admonished composer Marc Blitzstein. “They have strict orders not to receive requests from guests. They may go only through me.”) Guests ignored such prompts at their peril, to say nothing of the more general commandments for which these notes served as gentle reminders. A temperate (though not entirely teetotaling) Quaker, Mrs. Ames forbade the consumption of alcohol in common rooms, though guests could furtively tipple behind closed doors. As for even more private matters—these, too, were closely monitored. When one woman chose to disregard a blue note deploring (tactfully) her entertainment of several different men after hours, she returned to her room to find that her double bed had been replaced with a single.