Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  • • •

  MARY DIDN'T LOSE TIME flexing her linguistic muscles with Cheever. “The folly of a fool,” she once murmured—in French—when her impoverished boyfriend waxed ecstatic over a New Yorker sale. Both seemed a little ambivalent in the beginning. What Cheever remembered about their first date was that his future wife had arrived three hours late; what she remembered was the taste of Scotch (she'd never tried it before) and boredom. Cheever was holding forth about life at Yaddo, which might have struck the idealistic young woman as a bit frivolous, at least as Cheever told it. “I didn't want to hear about the love affairs of Leonard Ehrlich and so on,” she later remarked.

  But Cheever had made up his mind: 1940 would be a pivotal year. “[T]he girl I'm going to marry is on 67th street,” he informed Denney, “my roots are in the forgotten valley of the North River, my agent is on Fifth Avenue, and money burns a hole in my pocket.” The place on Sixty-seventh was a mansion with stained-glass windows (“and a cellar full of rats,” as Cheever recalled), where Mary rented the master bedroom—or rather had rented the master bedroom, until she lost her latest job as secretary and reader for Thomas H. Uzzell, proprietor of a correspondence school for aspiring writers and author of Narrative Technique. (“Thank you for letting us see your work,” Mary had typed to potential students, before an efficiency expert had advised Uzzell to let her go. “You will find my book Narrative Technique useful …”) After parting with Uzzell, she was reduced to living on a monthly allowance from her grandmother, and the landlady (“a bit of a bandit”) moved her to a tiny room in the back of the mansion.

  By then Cheever had become something of a fixture around the place. “I was alone in the city,” said Mary, “and he kind of moved in. That's the only way I can describe it.” For Cheever it was a place that offered a warm body as well as an improvised meal of sorts (Mary, lacking a kitchen, cooked chops on a hot plate and fresh peas in a percolator). And when she was moved to the servants’ quarters, he saw a chance to be helpful—finding affordable rooms for both of them at Rhinelander Gardens on West Eleventh, a picturesque if not very elegant locale. The artist Robert Motherwell had an apartment beneath Mary's (a calling card with his Paris address was tacked to the door); Cheever's own studio was a few steps down the hall, near the noisy front of the building. (“Tomorrow will complete two weeks in which I have done no work,” he noted after moving in. “The comings and goings in an apartment house on Saturday and Sunday are distracting and I am broke.”) The main benefit was being near friends in the Village: the Werners also lived on Eleventh and promptly gave a party for the couple, and Cummings was around the corner on Patchin Place.

  Cheever worried whether he'd be able to support Mary in the style to which she'd become accustomed—which, of course, was a style he longed to possess. Mary's family occupied an Italianate villa on Prospect Street, near Yale, but what might have been even more alluring in Cheever's eyes was their fifty-acre summer estate in New Hampshire, Treetops. Thomas Watson had bought the place and designed the little guest cottages that dotted the hillside, but it was Mary's father who hired a notable New York architect to draw up plans for the Stone House, where the staff was installed and Dr. Winternitz held court. Each night at six o'clock, the guests would convene at the house for drinks, and during his early visits, at least, Cheever was a somewhat wary and critical observer. His prospective father-in-law, he noticed, was often a vulgar tyrant, especially after a few drinks (“he would tell a pointless obscene story in mixed company,” Cheever wrote, “spit into the fire, belch”); as for the mistress of the house—never mind her children—she was a silly, pampered snob out of touch with a world that was verging on disaster. But withal Cheever was covetous, and knew it. While at Treetops he wrote in his journal:

  The misanthrope thinks: You are all children of distinguished men and women. You went to the schools your fathers went to, you were introduced into their clubs, people will do much for you in memory of your father whereas I, I, I, was, in a commercial hotel after a sales banquet, conceived by accident and the quarreling over my existence began long before I had even seen the light of day. My father brought a murderer to the house. While you, the misanthrope thinks, were walking from the class to the playing field at Saint Pauls and Yale, I was living in the furnished rooms of the lower west side on stale bread and skimmed milk. … How fatuous and complacent you all are. Yes thank you, the misanthrope thinks when he is offered a second brandy, and he thinks when will you ever learn that this fine costs eight dollars a fifth. I used to live on less than that a week.

  But Cheever liked the brandy, and found himself softening toward the people who offered it—extraordinary people, whatever their shortcomings, and obviously fond of him. Whenever he visited the villa in New Haven, Dr. Winternitz would take him away to the den or laboratory and speak brilliantly on some medical topic for exactly fifty-five minutes. After listening to one such lecture on “the chemistry of courage,” Cheever observed in a letter to Herbst: “He would like to reduce personality to terms of salt and potassium, being a man who has always been overwhelmed by the mysterious forces of his own temperament.” Cheever had his own temperamental forces to contend with, some of them not dissimilar to his future father-in-law's. Meanwhile he came to view the man's wife as a soulmate of sorts. In her company—drinking martinis and gossiping over games of backgammon—Cheever became all the more attractive, whatever his social insecurity; in fact, it might even be fair to say that his boulevardier persona was partly evolved as a result of Polly's influence. Nor did the couple object to the charming young man's relative poverty; he was writing stories for The New Yorker, and a distinguished person at a dinner party had assured them that was a big deal.

  Perhaps to force the issue, Polly came to New York one day and confronted her stepdaughter over lunch: “Your sweater is on backwards,” she said, “and I hear you are living in sin.” With respect to her sweater, the young woman replied that she liked it that way, and at least technically she was innocent of the other charge. Dr. Winternitz didn't bother to consult his daughter at all. “What are your intentions?” he sternly inquired of Cheever, who was happy to put the man at ease. The only problem was that Mary herself wasn't at all sure she was ready for marriage, and once (in response to some cutting remark) she told Cheever she wanted to “end the business” then and there. But he ignored this—he already had the family's blessing, after all—the way he ignored most of her contrary opinions. “Oh, the Sarah Lawrence girl!” he'd say, or words to that effect.

  WRITING FOR The New Yorker was one thing, but Cheever knew that his reputation as a serious (and commercial) writer would remain suspect until he'd published a novel, an even more urgent matter now that he was getting married. Casting about for a subject, he vacillated between something “topical” and something more personal—close enough to his own experience, that is, to hold his interest for a few hundred pages. Again and again, rather in spite of himself, he reverted to his humble origins in that forgotten valley of the North River. “My heart is in a stuffy living room in a middle class suburb after a heavy dinner,” he wrote, “listening to the philharmonic, dealing a hand of bridge or making talk. My heart is there and Polly's drawing room and the blinding tennis courts in the July sun and the fox hunt in Rockleigh and the track at Saratoga and the slopes of Cannon Mountain and all the rest of it seem thin.” And lest he forget his colorful, troubling family history, his old Yankee father was at pains to remind him of its narrative possibilities. The man offered his son all kinds of “material” in the form of yarns about maritime New England, the post-Civil War era, the glory days of the shoe business, on and on. Likewise, when Cheever considered registering as a New York resident on his Social Security application, his father was duly shocked: “John boy—Quincy your hometown—Massachusetts your state—hope you make it here—not so many Yids or Bulgarians …” Probably he hadn't learned yet that his son's fiancée was descended from Austrian Jews.

  During a visit that
summer to Quincy, while Cheever was listening to one of his father's spiels (“Dad's just been in telling me about Newburyport in the 70's”), a woman from the Patriot Ledger arrived to interview him for “a feature story about hometown boy doesn't make so good,” as Cheever wrote Mary, adding that he “got [the reporter] off the subject” of himself as soon as possible. Such “exceptional modesty”—so noted in the article (“Quincy Youth Is Achieving New York Literary Career”)—would remain a byword of Cheever's public image in perpetuum. “I really haven't written anything worth reading yet,” he told Mabelle Fullerton of the Patriot Ledger, conceding that he was “at work on a contemporary novel with a New England background.” Afterward he seemed chagrined that he'd revealed even that much. Despite his being declared “one of the white hopes of American literature,” Cheever ended his visit to the South Shore in a state of “great moodiness and discontent”: “I drove back to [Fred's house in] Norwell and drank a lot of Tom Collins in the kitchen, snapping crossly at everyone,” he wrote. “The evening was spent in brooding and brooding over the novel.”

  The novel—about a family called Morgan—was not going well. He'd hoped to have at least a chapter and outline to submit in September, but so far he had little to show for a long summer's worth of fretting. Part of the problem was the constant distraction of money work: “Writing for the New Yorker leaves me feeling tired,” he wrote in May, after his fifth story of the year had appeared in the magazine, “tired and lazy. Tired of the language, that is.” Also, the disappointment of his previous novel lingered. Years later Cheever would recall (for the benefit of a young man writing a dissertation) that his novel for Simon and Schuster had been a highly experimental affair—”a deliberately digressive, episodic, avant-garde work with a shifting point of view.” He claimed that the publisher had been quite enthusiastic about it, suggesting, however, that a seasoned editor such as Cowley help “whip it into shape;” Cheever had been so affronted by the idea (he said) that he'd dropped the manuscript into a garbage can that very afternoon. Both the publisher's enthusiasm and Cheever's brash integrity are doubtless exaggerated (if not entirely apocryphal), though it does seem likely the work was experimental to some extent, in keeping with Cheever's view at the time that a novel (“a bad word”) had to reflect the fragmented experience of his generation.

  The problem was how to apply such innovation to what was, essentially, an exercise in nostalgia. “In trying to recapture what I want to recapture I keep returning to an afternoon at the farm in Hanover,” Cheever wrote in his journal that summer. “I have been burning tent catipillars [sic] out of the apple trees. … I can hear mother working in the kitchen. Fred is painting his boat. After that I went down to the wood-shed and talked with Fred. The door stood open and I could smell the wet grass outside and hear the brook. Dad came down and told us about the boats he used to build.” The novel that would follow from this Proustian evocation was a family chronicle titled The Holly Tree, after a tree in Hanover that Cheever believed was “the largest holly in the Northeast and very probably planted by some English settler.” Cheever had once imagined his mother writing him a letter in wartime, insisting he come home and protect the holly tree—a symbol of tradition amid the modern darkness. That, anyway, was the idea. “The book is a pain in the neck,” he wrote Mary in August. “I start it and stop it about six times a day, revile and abuse myself, leer at the novels in the book-case and write long descriptions of my problem. … [A]ny conventional story or narrative seems to eliminate the qualities of modern life that interest me. … The desk is covered with notes reading: ‘a realistic piece populated with grotesques, a grotesque populated with familiar characters,’ etc.” Whatever approach he took, he'd only become more certain over time that his material would (must) consist of some account of his youth, whether idealized as a lost Eden or a mirror of man's divided nature or what you will. “One thing is clear,” he wrote four years later, still brooding over The Holly Tree. “I've got to write the Morgans out of my system.” At that point he only had twelve more years to go.

  RATHER THAN LET HER LIVE in relative sin at Rhinelander Gardens, Mary's parents had spirited her away to Treetops for the summer; Cheever had moved to Muriel Rukeyser's vacant apartment at 76 Bank Street. Mostly he hacked out stories and brooded over his novel, but when the world was too much with him, he'd take off to Yaddo and stay drunk awhile. That summer he befriended a young writer named Flannery Lewis, who, beginning in 1937, had published three books in three years; unknown to himself, one imagines, he would never publish another, and would vanish almost entirely as a writer and a man. For the time being, he staggered around Yaddo cracking up furniture and insulting Katherine Anne Porter, of all people. “Porter is wonderful,” Cheever had written at first, having observed the woman sweetly patronize some boob named Ekstrand. “What do you write? Ekstrand asks, leering. Oh, not very much, Porter says, very little really, almost nothing. I mean do you write books or what, Ekstrand asks leering.” A few days later, however, Cheever decided Porter “[wasn't] so wonderful”: “La Porter and Joffe and Flannery and I went down to the Worden last night and the great conversational style was an awful disappointment,” he wrote Mary. “[She] began with Auden, George Davis, etc. She was side-tracked for a few minutes into talking about her experiences with aviators in the last world war, but then she went back again to Auden, Davis, MacAlmon, Escott …”

  Cheever would pay a valedictory visit that summer, but it wasn't the same without Lewis (banned for pissing in the atrium pool). Mrs. Ames urged him to stay on through the fall, and even offered to hire Mary as her secretary—a “very kind” but “impossible” offer, Cheever decided. For the foreseeable future, the Yaddo phase of his life was over. “If there is anything in my memory that could be called pre-war it is Yaddo,” he wrote Herbst in 1944. “Oh those fountains, oh those box lunches, oh that stained glass window at the head of the stairs.”

  Though he longed to join his fiancée at Treetops, Cheever stayed put on Bank Street despite having to sleep in the bathtub to avoid bedbugs. He was eager to prove himself as a provider, and (except for his stalled novel) was doing a rather good job of it: That summer (1940) he published three stories in The New Yorker and three in the slicks—two in Harper's Bazaar and “a stinker” in Collier's—and in the meantime pursued, fruitlessly as ever, some sort of regular employment. When he got word that a junior editor at The New Republic had been “taken off to the booby-hatch,” he raced over to fill the breach—too late: “Some other ghoul” had already gotten the job. In the end he accepted an advance from The New Yorker that required him to churn out stories faster than ever, while in his journal he girded himself for the task:

  It is still, even in writing for the New Yorker, a question of feeling strongly, of being alive. It can be the first thing you see in the morning; a wet roof reflecting the bleak light, the suspicion that your wife's legs under the table may be touching the legs of someone else, the happiness of burning up the road between New Haven and Sturbridge on your way home. In signing a contract with the New Yorker there are certain apprehensions as if writing were a mystery, something as chancey as a long shot on a wet track with mud all over the silks and the bums crowded in under the grandstand out of the rain. I have twelve stories to write and they'll be good.

  One is reminded a little of Chekhov snatching up an ashtray to explain his writing method—that is, forming a story around the kernel of an object, an image, an emotion, and letting one's intuitive gift take over from there. Indeed, Cheever may well have had Chekhov in mind as he faced the challenge of writing stories at such a demanding pace and yet imparting, each time, some fresh glimpse of the world. Certainly Chekhov was becoming a greater influence on his work. The laconic mannerisms of Hemingway were giving way to a more discursive, playful style, the banality of incident suggesting—but lightly—an underlying sadness. “Read [Chekhov's] the Black Monk for perhaps the 100th time,” Cheever noted in 1954, “all different times of life. I found it as c
lear and forceful as if I had looked up into the blue sky and seen a hawk strike a pigeon. … How precisely he brings a group into focus.” Such an affinity was fostered all the more by Cheever's association with The New Yorker, whose slice-of-life fiction was nothing if not Chekhovian. As the young Irwin Shaw pointed out, a typical New Yorker story occurred in a single time and place, and all the dialogue was “beside the point.” A virtual model of the form is Cheever's “The Happiest Days”*: Suggested by Katherine Mansfield's “Bliss” (and hence by Chekhov), the story consists of a long, frothy dialogue in which a man discovers—implicitly—that his wife is having an affair with a man named Borden: “ ‘I'm going to be a war profiteer,’ Borden said. He was lying with his face on the grass and his voice was indistinct. Each word added to the weight of the hatred Tom felt for him.”

  Sometimes Cheever was too Chekhovian even for The New Yorker, which rejected “I'm Going to Asia” as lacking “direction or focus.”† The story, in certain respects, is almost a rehash of “The Happiest Days”: both feature a family group (give or take the odd neighbor/ lover) sitting around having a random chat about the weather and whatnot, with here and there a bit of innuendo about the war or some private sorrow. In “The Happiest Days” the exposition is supplied by an omniscient narrator: “ ‘Oh, look at that cloud!’ Mrs. Morgan exclaimed. Her husband had hanged himself from an apple tree on a suburban golf course in 1932, and since his suicide she had supported herself, first by teaching contract bridge and then by running a dress shop.” In “I'm Going to Asia,” however, the narrator is almost wholly effaced, and readers are left to negotiate the oblique dialogue on their own. The title refers to a game in which each member of the Towle family says, “I'm going to Asia and I'm going to take” some object (an anesthetic, a trunk, a dress), which—if it satisfies some mysterious requirement known only to one player (but not the reader)—will enable the person to “go to Asia.” (An anesthetic enables one to go to Asia; a dress does not.) Meanwhile a cynical son, Freddy, grouses about the war: “You just sit around here as if nothing had happened. Well, something has happened. Our world has ended.” So it goes, until finally the two threads are brought together at the end, when old Mrs. Towle complains about losing the “Asia” game because of the dress she wanted to take: “ ‘I'd like to go to Asia. … There isn't any war in Asia, is there? Or is there?’ “