by Blake Bailey
And yet Mrs. Ames's Victorianism was a bit on the quasi side. She herself was something of a feminist and radical, and hardly averse to a little fun: in August she made time for the horse races like everyone else and sipped her share of champagne. Nor was she a prude in her own affairs, nor was she likely to object if (as Cheever noted) “a distinguished man or woman took a lover”—key word “distinguished,” as talent was everything, or anyway a great part in gaining Mrs. Ames's favor. Charm was important too, so that the woman's paradoxes were nicely reconciled by the following (oft-repeated) observation: “If Elizabeth Ames was fond of you, she'd do anything for you. If she wasn't, forget it.” And if you protested, well, she was pretty much deaf as a post for most of her adult life, and would simply elect not to listen. To the very end, though, the likes of Cheever were encouraged to shout amiably into her ear.
Mrs. Ames hewed to the Trask vision of a “house party” in those early years, and a stay at Yaddo was (as Cowley recalled) like a summer visit “to a Newport ‘cottage’ owned by robber barons.” If guests chose to sleep in, then breakfast trays laden with Trask silver were placed outside their doors with a gentle knock; as for the elaborate dinners, one reported in proper attire or not at all. After the stock market crashed, standards were necessarily lowered. Most artists could scarcely afford a new pair of shoes, and were grateful to have a roof over their heads, much less a platter of confiseries when they gathered downstairs at four o'clock. Yaddo's budget was strapped too, and some of the more enduring guests were asked to work for their room and board. John Cheever, in fact, became the first in a permanent tradition of “SAPs”—”Special Assistants to the President,” as they were later called, a position that in Cheever's case involved chopping wood, shoveling snow, and doing whatever other donkey work needed to be done. Fortunately, the rigors of Hanover had prepared Cheever well for such labor, which he never minded in any case, since it was manly and distracted him from dark thoughts.
The privations of the outside world, as well as a not-so-subtle “climate of repression” (as Cheever put it) under the Ames regime, led to what has been called “the Yaddo effect”: an obsession with food and sex and high jinks in general. Cheever was something of a pioneer in this respect, too. Each morning he slid down the banister and whacked the bronze Aphrodite on her rump; he left hats on statuary and splashed naked in the atrium pool; and once he installed the left-wing author Mary Heaton Vorse in a souvenir sleigh (given to Katrina by the Queen of the Netherlands) and shoved her down the grand staircase: “Hooves of fire!” the woman cried. As for sex, he often reflected on the “practical and colorless fucking” that he and a certain writer's wife used to practice, when young, on every flat surface in the mansion (not to mention “every garden, field and streambed”). From such exertions a naked Cheever tiptoed back to his room one night, bumping into a startled group of guests in the hallway: “[M]oving with great Hermian grace,” Gurganus recounted, “he bounded directly past them, smiling and—just as he drifted past, offered the explanation of his casualness: ‘I'm a ghost.’” To the very end, indeed, with both sexes, Cheever retained a certain Hermian vigor: “I have been sucked by Ned [Rorem] and others in almost every room,” he reminisced during a visit in 1977, “and tried unsuccessfully to mount a young man on the bridge between the lakes.”
As for the rest of “the Yaddo effect,” food was never as high a priority for Cheever as drink, no matter how repressive the climate. At first he abided by house rules and drank in his room, leaving an impressive pile of empties outside his door for the maid, or else he'd repair with other thirsty colonists to the New Worden Hotel in town. All too often, though, he had to suffer the company of bores at dinner—sanctimonious radicals, effeminate poets, and the like—a trial he was loath to endure soberly. The problem was solved when he broke into the Trask wine cellar and found a vast supply of brandies that had turned clear over time, which he then drank out of his water glass even when seated right beside Mrs. Ames.
Not surprisingly, the two were a little slow in warming to each other. Elizabeth Ames was forty-nine in 1934—when Cheever (twenty-two) first came to Yaddo—and took a dim view of puerile high spirits, at least in people she didn't like. “I am told that he is twenty-two years old,” she wrote in 1930 of the novelist Leonard Ehrlich (who would become the love of her life), “and somehow a twenty-two year old novelist does not greatly stir my enthusiasm;” most young novelists of her acquaintance, she primly continued, had proved “more infantile than anything else.” Far from being an exception, Cheever was a rule unto himself, and Mrs. Ames was obliged to lecture the youth about “unwise attachments” and so on. When his second of two visits in 1934 ended on a slightly sour note, Cheever wrote a friend about a dream he'd had in which he'd thrown a platter of jellied salmon at Mrs. Ames's face: “ ‘I'm glad you did, John,’ she said firmly and calmly, ‘I'm very glad you did it. I'm glad to know how you feel towards me.’ ‘I'm also very glad I did it,’ I said, going up and shaking her hand. ‘I'm sincerely sorry but I'm glad I did it. Now we both know how things stand. There won't be anymore subterfuge or deceit between us.’ “ Nevertheless, she kept inviting him back, and one day she began to cry as he said goodbye to her. “I realized for the first time,” said Cheever, “that our relationship was not simple.”
Not only would he become a favorite of Mrs. Ames—even a surrogate son—but the servants loved him too, and took to calling him Lord Fauntleroy This was important to Cheever for a number of reasons. “Only dogs, servants, and children know who the real aristocrats are,” he liked to say. Though artists were forbidden to mix with staff (as Marc Blitzstein had been sternly reminded), Cheever would appear in the kitchen almost every morning to gossip with the cook, Nellie Shannon, while she fixed his breakfast. He was also fond of the superintendent, George Vincent, whom he'd insist on helping with chores around the estate (whether it was expected of him or not) as well as any problems the man might have with a guest or underling. “Do you want me to talk to him?” Cheever would offer. “I'll talk to him.” Both Shannon and Vincent and certain other employees remained at Yaddo for fifty years or more, and became Cheever's lifelong friends. “[W]ho can come back to the scene of his early manhood,” he wrote in 1961, “and find not a chair, not a thread, not even the faded asters in the silver bowl have changed. … Someone has remembered all my favorite dishes; spare ribs, ham and turkey, peach soufflé.” One of his happiest memories was returning after a long absence and overhearing a parlor maid say, “Master John is back! Master John is back!” As Gurganus remarked, “He was living out some sort of magisterial fantasy of being master of the house, which he deserved to be in terms of his gift and his decency and his sweetness.”
“It's the only place I've ever felt at home,” Cheever said of Yaddo, and all his life he endeavored to pay the debt. For decades he served on the board of directors, and donated money when he could spare it. Without Yaddo he would not have survived the Depression, at least as a writer, and throughout his life it remained an oasis where he could work in peace until four in the afternoon, then have drinks and a swim and a good dinner with (usually) congenial company. No wonder he wept as he kissed an elderly Nellie Shannon goodbye after one of his last visits in the late seventies, when he thought he might never return.
THOUGH HIS FIRST VISIT to Yaddo wasn't especially productive—he wrote nothing publishable—Cheever did meet a soulmate of sorts, or so he thought at the time. Fresh out of Dartmouth, Reuel Denney was a poet whose first collection, The Connecticut River, would win the Yale Younger Poets Award five years later. But what eventually earned Denney at least “a footnote to scholarship history”—as his Times obituary noted—was his contribution to the sociological classic The Lonely Crowd (1950), which he co-wrote with David Riesman and Nathan Glazer. Denney was perhaps Cheever's first real friend since Fax Ogden, and it was more than a little significant that he bore “a startling resemblance” to Fred. Having left the one and found the other, Cheever came to ass
ociate both with a sense of youthful communion. “A fleeting longing for some kind of once-enjoyed tenderness,” he wrote twenty years later—”Fred or Reuel.”
Based on his later writings, it seems fair to say that Denney was largely unaware of the impact he'd had on Cheever, though Denney's memories of that summer were also “dominated” by their friendship: “I was one of the first to recognize [Cheever's] great talent,” he wrote shortly before his death in 1995, “and I remember well the shock of admiration and envy with which I first heard his unpremeditated outpouring of conversational wit, criticism, and well-turned narrative.” Cheever felt an almost pathetic gratitude for having found an intelligent, talented, and withal regular-guyish contemporary who responded to his personality and work: “Sympathy and patience, let alone understanding for my or our interests is rare,” he wrote Denney. “[A]nd once found it can be stimulating and helpful as hell. Which it has been.” For the previous five years—and most of the years before—Cheever had been close to only one human being; such profound alienation in his “formative years” (the telling phrase that had sprung to his lips as he helped his drunken father off the roller coaster) would arguably leave him with a blurred sense of identity the rest of his life. He tried to articulate the trauma to Denney in various ways. When, for instance, the latter mentioned his time at Fred's alma mater, Cheever replied that he'd gone to a Dartmouth football game the year before and ended up “feeling lousy”:
[S]eeing the importance you give those four years and their associations I naturally feel that I have missed something. … I cannot, as you can, at a point of loss or discovery, identify myself with a generation, a college, a class or industry. At the most it amounts to a handful of men and women of various ages and nationalities that I know because I like. … The thing I miss most is an ability to identify myself with a group. When you are lost you are completely lost. This resulted during the first winter in a confused, defensive idea of myself* But that's all over now. I know who I am.
Cheever had formed his latest sense of who he was in direct opposition to who he'd been—that is, rather than a radical bohemian who cultivated burlesque stars and Beacon Street aesthetes, he was now a cynical traditionalist who regarded his leftist contemporaries with a majestic (if peevish) detachment. “Being likened to a decadent intellectual makes me sore,” he wrote Denney. “I accept no interpretation of history, read no direction in the past, have no brief for progress. I fail to see why the thirteenth century should be any blacker than the nineteenth.” He was, in short, somewhat in the throes of a “sane conservative” phase influenced, in part, by Henry Adams.† Fred was also a lifelong Adams fan, and had recently loaned his brother a volume of the great historian's letters. Adams was congenial in a number of ways, not least because Cheever was “born in the shadow of the house where [Adams] wrote some of the Education” (and of course his family had hired their coachman's daughter); also, the desperate reversals of Cheever's adolescence had left him susceptible to Adams's bleakly deterministic view of history: “There is something immense and significant,” Cheever wrote of the dying Adams circa 1918, “in that doddering figure standing on the beach at Newport as if he could see them bombing Rheims and dismantling Chartres.” If anything, Cheever found himself more pessimistic than all that. What with the Depression and the rise of oppressive regimes throughout Europe and Asia, history seemed in a downward spiral that might even have startled Adams. For his part, Cheever deplored such contemporary works as Malraux's La Condition humaine because it “read form into a scene of such violence,” whereas he himself was inclined to “admit the futility of art in the present or near future.” This included fiction, and perhaps reflected a passing frustration with his own work as much as a larger Weltschmerz. Whatever the case, Cheever was considering some rather bizarre literary projects, such as writing short biographies of Adams, Poe, and Hart Crane—”a simple disarming analysis of the three men and their ends drawn from a viewpoint as personal as if they were my ancestors.”
Such was the young man who found himself at Yaddo in the summer of 1934. And let it serve as evidence of Cheever's amiability, then and later, that he was able to mix with what should have been (except for Denney) a pretty inimical cast of characters. James Farrell was there, writing the last volume of his Studs Lonigan trilogy; a hard-boiled Irishman from Chicago, Farrell was a little bemused by Cheever's elaborate Yankee manners, but liked him well enough to toss a baseball back and forth. Muriel Rukeyser, the radical lesbian poet, became a good friend for the next decade or so. Even Leonard Ehrlich would warm to Cheever over time, and vice versa, though Ehrlich embodied the sort of naïve idealism that drove Cheever up the wall: “He's a liberal, a gentleman and a romantic,” he wrote of Ehrlich, “and he makes me feel like a bloody son of a bitch with his concern over the defense of political prisoners and his desire to preserve a free and inquiring spirit in a highly questionable world.”
Cheever's only serious work that survives from that summer is “Letter from the Mountains,” a response to the misguided utopianism of his peers at Yaddo and beyond: “I think of Europe as a rat-toothed bitch,” he declared with Poundian scorn. “Even up here I often have a sense of something cracked.” This odd document (a continuation of his dialogue with Denney, who'd left Saratoga at the end of June and gone back to Buffalo) suggests that Cheever had taken to heart Cow-ley's advice about writing on behalf of his generation, which might have suited Cheever's wistful desire to “identify with a group,” the more explicitly the better: “Born in the vicinity of nineteen-twelve”—his own birth year—”we come as strangers to this wreck.” Cheever suggested that his generation, victimized by its elders, was drifting helplessly from one great war to the next. At last he fixed the time and place of this fatalistic manifesto (“July, 1934/the Adirondacks”) and mailed it off to Cowley, who doubtfully tried to interest his colleagues at The New Republic: the manuscript was “diffuse,” he admitted, but perhaps they should publish it “as a picture of the state of mind of the youngsters.” The piece was rejected as “defeatist.”
ONE OF MRS. AMES'S blue-papered notes appeared in Cheever's lunch basket toward the end of July, and he returned to Boston for a week or so before moving to New York. To avoid unnecessary strangeness, he took a six-by-eight apartment in the same rooming house, at 633 Hudson, where he'd stayed during a previous visit in 1931: “[A]cross the street from me,” he reported to Denney, “sits the same old man in the same yellowed underwear.” The place was mostly occupied by unemployed longshoremen, and Cheever's own room was so exquisitely squalid that Walker Evans would later photograph it—a quintessential Depression tableau—for the Museum of Modern Art. Cheever didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. For the time being, he was living on a weekly allowance of ten dollars from Fred; this covered his three-dollar room as well as a certain amount of stale bread, raisins (“I almost destroyed my teeth, but I needed the iron”), and a daily bottle of milk divided into five portions. As Cowley remembered, “His only capital was a typewriter for which he couldn't often buy a new ribbon”—nor could he summon much energy to write. Some days he'd simply sit in Washington Square with a friend and discuss the phases of starvation (“It was the torpor we objected to”), and once he actually collapsed on Hudson Street. On the brighter side, he liked to recall the kindly longshoremen who were always trying to help the boyish, dapper little Yankee in their midst: they urged him to get work with the government, perhaps attend an extension class or take the post-office exam. In the meantime Cheever lay on his bed dreaming—determinedly—of a wife and family, wealth and fame, while “motors and klaxons and breaks and river-whistles” clamored outside his window. Sometimes, too, a bit of gravel would clatter against the glass, and there in the street would be Fred.
“Hudson Street is a far cry from anything in Boston,” he wrote Mrs. Ames, “and so far the difference stands in favor of Hudson Street.” Except for his constant hunger, Cheever was glad to be back among people who mattered. He was seeing a
lot of Hazel and Morris Werner again, which meant he was seeing Agee and Sherwood Anderson and Dos Passos, as well as a good deal of his beloved Cummings. The latter shared his dislike of Edmund Wilson—another regular at the Werners’—whom Cummings ridiculed as a secret homosexual who needed to ride a motorcycle so he could have something vibrating between his legs. The poet, said Cheever, had “one of the finest tongues of the century,” but was also “immensely considerate and just” and never mocked people who were hurting or helpless. In general, the atmosphere chez Werner was a nice mixture of New England manners and Greenwich Village irreverence. As Cheever described a typical party, “[I]t was a fine night with Morrie yelling that their food was talking while their conversation was getting cold and Hazel insisting that she hadn't raped x and that x hadn't raped her but that the bed had come up and hit them both. They are nice people, all of them with the characteristics of Cummings. Sharp tongues and patient sympathies.”
Nor did Cheever neglect his friends from Yaddo, despite the “strenuous” contrast between their humorless radicalism and Cummings's tipsy shtick (his “facetious telephone calls to the municipal offal department”). Cheever listened with an earnest deadpan while Rukeyser and her fellow poet Sol Funaroff lectured him about the necessity of using literature to elevate the proletariat, and sometimes he'd tag along to some sordid venue so he could watch them put their ideas to work. “On Saturday night Muriel gave a reading of her poetry to a group of boogies in Harlem,” he wrote Denney, observing that most of the audience was both “drunk and high”: “[M]y impression was that this was not the crowd to approach or the way or place to approach them.” Again, the miracle is that Cheever remained friends with such people—though not without a certain amount of chafing on both sides. Later he'd claim that, while still in his early twenties, he was labeled “the last voice of the decadent bourgeoisie” in The New Masses; if so, it was perhaps a bit of reprisal on the part of an exasperated Funaroff, the magazine's poetry editor.