by Blake Bailey
Occupying a stolid middle ground were the likes of Cowley and his friends at The New Republic: “Nice people to drink beer and shuck corn with,” as Cheever put it. At once grateful and slightly resentful of Cowley's patronage, Cheever would always regard the man with a kind of risible filial impiety. At the time he characterized him as “dull, slow, with an eye … for the second rate,” though he allowed that Cowley was likable enough and “useful” up to a point. There was, however, in his attitude toward Cowley (and most of the world) a considerable dissonance between heart and head. Frances Lindley remembered a dinner with the two men shortly after Cowley's mother died in 1935: “Malcolm produced a couple of childhood silver spoons, and John was tender toward him,” she said, invoking the episode as an instance of Cheever's conspicuous “sweetness” when young. But always, too, a certain distance. As Cheever noted that previous autumn in New York, his floating among such diverse worlds was, above all, a good education: “I know more about the history of literature and the conduct of men and women than I could have learned at Harvard.”
An actual Harvard diploma, though (or even one from Thayer), would have come in handy while trying to get a decent job at a magazine or newspaper. Under the circumstances, the best Cheever could do was occasional work writing plot synopses for M-G-M at the rate of five dollars a book. It was a hard-earned paycheck. The novels were divvied out by a Mrs. Lewton, a somewhat elusive figure who did not allow her employees to choose their own reading. “I've done one lousey detective story and am at work on a romance by a woman named or called Brada Field,” Cheever reported that first week; a week later he'd gotten started on a thriller by Sarah Gertrude Millin, about whom his only comment was “Phrrft.” On Wednesdays, when he wasn't waiting around for Mrs. Lewton, he waited around the offices of The New Republic with a crowd of other down-and-out literati, including the legendary bohemian Joe Gould (dressed in newspapers), since Cowley assigned book reviews on that day. Despite his good intentions, though, Cowley had far more reviewers than he could possibly use, and only gave books to Cheever (a reluctant critic, no matter how hungry) when there was a good thematic fit.*
The hot weather and Sarah Gertrude Millin were too much for Cheever, and after less than three weeks on Hudson Street he begged Mrs. Ames to take him back. She relented, letting him know that the mansion would close in mid-October and that he might be asked to make a “small contribution” if he elected to stay. Cheever was ecstatic, and after collecting his latest paycheck from Mrs. Lewton, he boarded a bus for Saratoga—arriving, rather fatefully, during the last weekend of the racing season. That Saturday, at a time when Mrs. Ames expected him to be sequestered with his work, Cheever and a painter named Martin Craig jumped a fence at the back of the estate and blew their money on the horses. Mrs. Ames let the incident pass. When, however, a few weeks later, Cheever and Craig failed to appear at dinner because of an unauthorized engagement in town, a blue note appeared in Cheever's lunch basket: “It now seems best to set your departure for Monday, October 8th,” Mrs. Ames sweetly informed him. “Perhaps after a month or so it will be possible to make some arrangements for you to come back either by contributing something for your board or perhaps doing some outdoor labor of which there is always plenty to do here at Yaddo.”
Cheever was dismayed—”the lowest of the low”—though he might have been a bit relieved, at least, that his exile wasn't permanent. Also, Mrs. Ames had been decent enough to give him sufficient notice (two weeks) to make other arrangements; since he was dead broke, of course, he had to ask Fred and Iris (now married) to come pick him up in the roadster and let him regroup at their apartment in Weymouth for a few weeks before returning to New York. As for Mrs. Ames's invitation to return for the winter as a part-time laborer, he declined: “There is no possibility [at Yaddo] for exploration, danger, discovery,” he wrote Denney “In buses, trains, boats, hotels, rooming houses you meet people open handed. But here there is supposed to be a cessation of all life, all human relations. Which is the cheapest way of all, I think, of spending time.” He knew it wouldn't be long, though, before the “open handed” life began to pall, and in the meantime he wisely took pains to mollify Mrs. Ames: “I have a lot of things to thank you for and I am sincerely grateful,” he wrote. “It was one of the best summers, in every way, I have ever known.”
NEW YORK MEANT MRS. LEWTON, though Cheever continued to spend much of his free time, fruitlessly, looking for steadier work. He wasn't getting a lot of writing done. What remained of his time and energy had to be conserved for summarizing potboilers; then, too, there was the simple unpleasantness of writing on Hudson Street, where he shared a sagging mattress (“stinking of lice-preventive”) with a heavy typewriter. Most of the time he just didn't feel up to it. “I am certain of my own voice and I have a mindful of stories,” he wrote, “and coming back here I smoke butt after butt and read the newspaper and lie on my back looking at the ceiling.”
An ever more frequent companion was Walker Evans, though Cheever disapproved of the photographer in many respects. Almost ten years older, Evans had allowed his personality to congeal into a weary façade of pseudo-gentility—as Cheever put it, “a hopeless impersonation of the upper-middle class,” including a mumbly accent of sorts. In other words, the friends had a little too much in common, though Cheever coveted at least one notable dissimilarity: Evans was wholly devoted to his art, such that the rest of him was almost an excrescence. And Cheever had to concede that, in Evans's case, the sacrifice of charisma had been worth making: “[Evans's photographs] are, for all of their contempt, snobbery, preciocity [sic], an impressive record,” he wrote. “There are beautiful shots of razed houses, vacant lots, a tin ceiling smashed and twisted, peeling bill-boards. His pictures of Saratoga are much better than the ones [Lincoln] Kirstein printed.”
Meanwhile the two discovered other things in common. “I feel confident that we are going to be involved in a war,“ Evans would say, “and that I will be killed.“ Thus resigned to his fate—as Cheever also professed to be—Evans didn't see that it made any difference whom one slept with, and no doubt detected some such attitude in his young friend. “When I was twenty-one,” Cheever recalled, “Walker Evans invited me to spend the night at his apartment. I said yes. I dropped my clothes (Brooks). He hung his (also Brooks) neatly in a closet. When I asked him how to do it he seemed rather put off. He had an enormous cock that showed only the most fleeting signs of life. I was ravening. I came all over the sheets, the Le Corbusier chair, the Matisse Lithograph and hit him under the chin. I gave up at around three, dressed and spent the rest of the night on a park bench near the river.”
For Cheever it would always be one thing to have sex with a man, another to spend the night with him. The latter was a taboo he would rarely if ever violate until a ripe old age—although, under whatever circumstances, he'd once caught a glimpse of Walker Evans sitting naked at the breakfast table and seemed haunted by the memory: “[W]hy should [Evans]”—he mused forty-three years later—”drinking his coffee seem to have between his legs not a source of burgeoning but the circumspect and humble equipment for knitting a pair of socks?” Henceforth Cheever suspected that certain kinds of sex had the unsavory effect of “tax[ing] one's posture.”
But even in those days there were people who thought Cheever's posture (so to speak) was also a bit off. “We all knew John was sort of gay,” said Betty Hewling, a copy editor at The New Republic in the thirties. And though Malcolm Cowley would later deny having seen “any sign” of his protégé's bisexuality, Cheever's journal decidedly suggests otherwise: “[Cowley] was father, brother, friend and might have jingled my participles,” he wrote in 1962. “There was this in the air, I think, but neither of us wanted it enough to forgo the rest of the world. He's always been jumpy on the subject but never opaque.” Cheever remembered being “reproached” by Cowley for even considering a homosexual lifestyle: “Such a course [said Cowley] could only end with drunkenness and ghastly suicide”—as it had, ind
eed, for Cowley's friend Hart Crane. A very young Cheever had met Crane, and (thanks to Cowley) had a lively idea of what had led to Crane's suicide, since Cowley's first wife, Peggy, had been romantically involved with the poet, and on the same ship, when he threw himself overboard.* Crane thus became a totemic figure to Cheever: an artist who'd succumbed to the “Orphic cycle” of self-destruction, which in Crane's case was a direct result of his role as a “tragic homosexual.” That Cheever would endure (it seems) his first twenty years of married life without succumbing to temptation was at least somewhat due to Crane's example. “If I followed my instincts,” Cheever wrote, “I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”
Reuel Denney had never “known or suspected” his friend's “dual sexuality” except in retrospect, once it became widely known after Cheever's death. Denney was then struck by something odd, after all, in Cheever's “attitude toward women,” which had seemed “to combine a strong sense of need for women's attention on his part with a hostile resentment against the fact that the need existed.” Cheever confirmed this resentment in so many words, referring to his “duty [my italics] to respond to females,” as though it was something of a burden. On the one hand, he wanted a socially acceptable “sanctuary for [his] cock,” but above all he wanted a family: “I wanted to marry almost every girl I slept with, I wanted to marry and have sons and a home and I flatly deny that this was a guise of sexual cowardice, that I didn't have the courage to pit my homosexual instincts against the censure of the world. I didn't find the world that contemptible.”
An early vehicle for social acceptability was Dodie Merwin, a pretty and spirited nineteen-year-old whom Hazel Werner had met in Provincetown and recommended to Cheever. By the time he called her, she'd moved to a little apartment on Barrow that shared a courtyard with the famous Chumley's Bar, not far from the squalor of Hudson Street (or, later, the squalor of Bethune). She and Cheever got on easily together. They took long walks around the Village, stopping at Sutter's Bakery, near Merwin's apartment, or any number of bars along the way. Both were adventurous, especially after a few drinks. On snowy nights, when the streets were empty, they'd ski beneath the old elevated train on Sixth Avenue, sometimes as far as Bryant Park.
Like most, Merwin was charmed by Cheever—and yet, for all his breezy wit, she detected something a little studied, detached, in his manner. “He always had this kind of chuckle,” she remembered. “He'd say something with a sort of self-deprecating look and burst into a chuckle. The remarks were always acute—they amused himself. And if successful, he'd repeat them with that grin. He'd toss his head a little and look wise.” Always, too, there was a tacit insistence on surface matters. If one was sad, and wished to confide, Cheever would make a sympathetic face and say the right things, more or less. He was kindly. But, as Merwin noticed, “He didn't communicate by eye. He looked at you straightforwardly enough, but his eyes were opaque. You got the impression he was thinking about his writing.” Or (often the same thing) he was thinking of something he didn't want to discuss—his brother, Fred, say, or Walker Evans: “He didn't seem comfortable” with either subject, Merwin recalled. Nor would he ever be. “He would never talk to me about his brother,” said his son Federico. “He would never talk to me about his years in New York, with the exception of a few carefully crafted and well-worn stories, and all that stuff was with him and would show up in the journals. I don't think I realized how much the past, and alternative presents (and that goes into bisexuality), were always with him.”
Cheever's amiable self-absorption was especially evident in his sexual approach—which, as Merwin put it (with a sort of wondering understatement), was “perfunctory and quick”: “It didn't seem to be initiated by the other person,” she said. “It was self-initiating and -sustaining.” A few years later, when Cheever lived near Dupont Circle in Washington, Merwin would pass through a creaking gate when she visited his brownstone; the creak would alert Cheever to her arrival. “No sooner did you get into his apartment than he's got you on the couch,” she said. “And that's it. Now you can go out for the evening. And he was happy. I can remember looking at him kind of quizzically and thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’” Many others, men and women alike, would wonder the same thing.
What also remained consistent over the years was Cheever's drinking. Even as a young man he had an enormous thirst, always on display in social situations, when sobriety seemed out of the question. Watching him polish off a dozen Manhattans at a single sitting—all the while chuckling and telling stories at an almost frenzied clip—Merwin got the impression that reality was a little too much for Cheever to bear. “He simply never faced himself, or when he did he didn't like what he saw,” she said. “And nothing relieved him.” William Maxwell made a similar observation after his friend's death: “He wanted to understand the world but he didn't want to understand himself.”
* So to speak. Three years later, Peabody formally adopted Miss Waite, as was customary for May-December romances in those days.
* Cheever refers here to that “first winter” after his New Republic story in October 1930, when he definitely rejected the regimentation of mainstream society—including college—and began wearing an amethyst ring, etc.
† Cheever's outlook was also compounded, perhaps, of the droll Republicanism of his new hero, Cummings, who'd visited Soviet Russia in the late twenties and found it a dreary place, and now insisted that President Hoover be recalled to office.
* As in the case of Philip Stevenson's The Gospel According to St. Luke's—a “quite uninteresting” prep-school novel that Cheever reviewed a few months after “Expelled” appeared—or Silas Crockett, by Mary Ellen Chase, a novel about New England's decline that struck a particular chord with Cheever, who boiled it down as follows: “Silas Crockett, the first in line, is a sea captain of the prosperous China trade. … Reuben of the third generation is forced to pilot a ferry boat and sell the splendid furniture and portraits of his fathers in order to make a living; and Silas of the fourth goes to work in a herring factory. … [T]he glorious seaboard of the China trade means to most of us … empty harbors and fugitive mill towns and the smell of the tourist camps and a cretin at the gas station. And all this, to Yankees of the new generation, is a story less for reverence and delicacy [that is, as Mrs. Chase chooses to tell it] … than for immense indignation and wonder.”
* Cheever's version of Crane's death was singularly unflattering to Peggy Baird Cowley. As Cheever told it, Crane was hysterically despondent after being beaten by a sailor to whom he'd made advances. “I have to talk!” he cried to the former Mrs. Cowley, on finding her at last in the ship's beauty parlor. “I'm having my hair done,” she replied, and so Crane hurled himself into the sea. Presumably this was some simulacrum of the version to which Malcolm Cowley was privy, though Cheever might have added the beauty parlor and much of Peggy's callousness. Certainly Malcolm himself didn't lack compassion toward his first wife: “Poor Peggy,” he wrote Cheever. “She died about 1970 in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker farm in Rivoli. … The services, at which I was the only old friend present, were conducted by a hippy priest with long dirty hair.”
CHAPTER SIX
{1935-1938}
WALKER EVANS LEFT NEW YORK in January 1935 to take a long photographic tour of the South, and Cheever moved into his basement studio at 23 Bethune, two blocks east of the Hudson. If anything the studio was even more ghastly than Cheever's previous dwelling, and odd reminders of the place would forever send him into tailspins. While reading the Times in 1980, Cheever saw a photograph of a tubular chair very like the Le Corbusier in Evans's studio, where his younger self had “sat when [he] was truly lonely, hungry, impoverished and cold;” almost half a century later (and even more depressed), he wondered if that era had “introduced a strata [sic] into [his] makeup that is only now becoming apparent.”
He was still trying to m
ake ends meet with occasional scraps from M-G-M, but the work was erratic and weeks passed without a paycheck. “I don't know how I'll get along unless I sell a story,” he wrote Denney, a few days after moving to Evans's studio. It was, perhaps, the worst time in history to be starting out as a writer. In 1934, only fifteen authors in the United States sold fifty thousand or more books, and the magazine market was even more straitened; advertising was at an all-time low, and many of the mass-market, high-paying “slick” magazines had either shrunk or folded. One night Cheever was bemoaning his fate at Cowley's house in Connecticut—where on weekends he'd often cadge a meal* —when Cowley suggested he try a different approach. “Your stories are too long for other magazines to accept from new writers,” he said. “Tomorrow, try writing a story of not more than a thousand words, say three and a half of your pages. Write another of the same length on Sunday, another on Monday, and still another on Tuesday. Bring them all to the office on Wednesday afternoon, and I'll see if I can't get you some money for them.”
For some time Cheever had suspected his work was too selfconsciously arty, not to say derivative, and he was determined to curb its “refinement, discretion, excessive detail, lack of action.” The constraints imposed by Cowley proved to be the ticket, as though Cheever were a discursive poet whose talent suddenly blossomed in the sonnet form. Three of the four shorts he'd written in as many days would find their way into print. Cowley was able to buy one—”The Teaser” (about an aging stripper)—as a “color piece,” since The New Republic still didn't publish much fiction. Another story, “Bayonne,” eventually appeared in Parade (not the Sunday supplement, but a would-be periodical that died after a single issue in 1936). The others were sent to Katharine White at The New Yorker, who met their twenty-two-year-old author a few days later at a New Republic party. As she wrote him afterward, “I thought we were taking one [story] and it turns out that I was right. I enclose our check for ‘Buffalo.’ The other one we didn't like so well.”