Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  * An intriguing aspect of one's research is learning something of the fates of forgotten writers—a sobering lesson in the evanescence of literary fame. Take the strange case of Flannery Lewis. For a few more years, he and Cheever were boon (if occasional) companions, though Lewis's behavior became more and more erratic as his drinking worsened, until one day he left his wife and daughters and simply disappeared. Hoping to locate Lewis for an interview (while realizing that the odds of finding him alive were slim), I came across a listing in New Orleans and spoke with a woman who claimed to be a relation. Lewis had recently died, she told me, but yes, the listing had been for Flannery Lewis the writer. When I mentioned Cheever, she said that Lewis had often spoken of their friendship, though the two had never met again after the late 1940s.

  * Company that included their spouses and in-laws. Newhouse married (the same year as Cheever) one of the world's most distinguished violin teachers, Dorothy DeLay whose pupils included Itzhak Perlman.

  * As personified by Randall Jarrell, the poet, whose beard and accent struck Cheever as having an aversively regional savor: “He reminds me of the dirt roads leading in to the garrison town of Spartenburg [sic],” Cheever wrote, and proceeded with the description given above.

  * In a letter to Mary, Cheever described the man as follows: “[H]e has an up-turned nose with a small wart on it. He walks with his head way up, moving a little as though the arches of his feet had been broken.”

  * The published collection ends with four additional stories—”Problem No. 4,” “The Peril in the Streets,” “The Sorcerer's Balm,” and “The Man Who Was Very Homesick for New York”—but the basic idea remains the same: that is, two of the last four stories are concerned with aspects of army life following induction (and were published in The New Yorker after Cheever had initially suggested the book end with “Goodbye, Broadway—Hello, Hello”), whereas the other two are concerned with the effects of war on the civilian world.

  † For what it's worth: Ezekiel—the first Cheever in America—arrived aboard the Hector in 1637, and settled in New Haven for many years thereafter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  {1943-1945}

  IN APRIL, Cheever returned to Fort Dix, where it was only a matter of time before his regiment was shipped overseas. Occasionally he'd affect a bravura eagerness to kill Germans—as opposed to dawdling away his days at an army camp, at least—but in more lucid moments he hoped that some well-placed officer would hurry up and do something about the promising writer who'd remained an infantry private because of a low IQ. And so it came to pass. A month after his book was published, Cheever got word from Cerf that a former M-G-M executive named Leonard Spigelgass—now a major in the Army Signal Corps—wanted to see him as soon as possible. At the urging of mutual friends, Spigelgass had read The Way Some People Live and been vastly impressed by the author's “childlike sense of wonder.”* As Mary Cheever wrote her father, “Between long-distance calls to Frank Capra and Louis B. Mayer, Spigelgass told John that he considered it unpatriotic for him to be in the infantry and that he would ‘make with the General’ immediately to get him into movie work.” Both John and Mary were skeptical of what seemed a lot of Hollywood hyperbole, but a few days later the transfer went through and Cheever was whisked away from Fort Dix in a jeep while his comrades watched in awe.

  The 22nd Infantry Regiment—minus John Cheever—was finally sent to England in January 1944, and a few months later suffered heavy casualties at Utah Beach. Survivors were decimated in the long European campaign that followed, and sometimes Cheever would reflect, wistfully, on their fate: “I try to remember the names of my dead friends,” he wrote on Memorial Day, 1962. “Kennedy? Kenelly? Kovacs? I can't remember.” Finally, in 1978, an old Camp Gordon acquaintance, David Rothbart, sent Cheever a journal he'd kept to commemorate the heroism of their old regiment. Cheever stayed up all night reading and remembering his comrades—name by name—as he realized that “every last one of them” had been killed. “You and I are survivors, of course,” he wrote Rothbart the next morning, “and to be survivors seems to involve some responsibilities that I find onerous.”*

  WITH A BABY on the way the Cheevers needed a bigger apartment, preferably with a courtyard or patio of some sort, but of course money was a problem. Finally they settled for a cramped ground-floor flat on West Twenty-second Street in Chelsea—something of a slum at the time, with a large population of Irish prostitutes. The couple tried to make the best of it, putting a fence around their tiny yard and planting a garden: “We spend all of our Sundays rooting around in the soot and cat-shit that pass for soil in our yard,” Cheever wrote Herbst, “trying to grow lilies out of crushed bluestone, coal ash and garbage.” Once the garden was finished, they took to eating brunch alfresco and pretending to be middle-class while the life of the neighborhood bustled around them (“Don't you call ME a whore!”).

  In the early hours of July 31, 1943, Mary gave birth to an eight-pound daughter, Susan Liley Cheever. One of the father's “most intense” memories was holding Mary in his arms during the long labor, all the more grateful for being there when he learned that another woman, sharing the room, had to suffer the ordeal alone because her husband was in Africa. Mostly the couple were thrilled to be parents. A few days after returning to Chelsea, they were visited by Dodie Merwin—now married and living on Cape Cod—who was struck by how radiant with fatherhood Cheever seemed; though warm and gracious, he firmly prevented Merwin from entering the room where his wife was nursing.

  Each morning Cheever took the Eighth Avenue subway to the old Paramount Studio in Astoria, Queens, where he wrote scripts for Army-Navy Screen Magazine in keeping with the Signal Corps motto: “Make it clear, make it logical, make it human, and drive home the necessity of learning now, not when you get into battle.” The subjects ranged from crucial aspects of combat to something as mundane as brushing one's teeth or using a hammer correctly (one of Cheever's colleagues remembered a seven-reel disquisition on How to Carve a Side of Beef). Intrigued by the difference between written and spoken language, Cheever would fret for hours, at first, over the crucial mot juste—almost always a verb, divested at length of the various modifiers he'd weighed. Soon he was one of the fastest and most effective writers, known for the “lean purity” of his language. “There wasn't enough work for him,” Major Spigelgass recalled. “He was a writing machine.”

  Perhaps the best part of Signal Corps life was the company of illustrious peers such as Irwin Shaw, William Saroyan, cartoonist Charles Addams, and others—a fraternity of talent where rank hardly mattered. To underline the egalitarian ethos, writers and artists addressed one another by surname only, and when some B-movie-producer officer would insist they “flatten their backs against the wall when [he] pass[ed], goddammit,” Privates Shaw and Cheever would ignore the man and blithely retire to their offices. Finally, in an effort to impose some modicum of military discipline, drills were ordered in the streets of Astoria at the crack of dawn. Saroyan was said to have alighted on the parade ground, hungover, from a chauffeur-driven Rolls.

  Cheever nursed his own hangovers at Borden's ice-cream parlor, where he'd have coffee and bagels with his friends John Weaver, Don Ettlinger, and Leonard Field. The kindly Weaver was known as “Good John” to Cheever's “Bad John”—a distinction earned by the latter's drinking and malicious wit. Ettlinger was a handsome, buoyant man who'd been signed as a screenwriter by Twentieth Century-Fox while still in college; in 1943 he was twenty-nine and well established in a career that would span the next four decades, as would his friendship with Cheever. Leonard Field shared adjoining kneehole desks with Cheever, and would also remain in touch for many years, picking up tabs for their semiannual lunches at Sardi's and reciting his woes as a not-very-successful theater producer.

  By noon the headaches had dissipated somewhat and it was time to start drinking again. If the writers were flush, they'd race into Manhattan for an elegant lunch at “21” or another midtown restaurant, Au Canari
d'Or, calling ahead to order martinis and pots de crème, so they could (in theory) return to their desks by one o'clock. The lunches, said Ettlinger, were “wild and hilarious”: The overdressed matrons would stare aghast at the “so-called GI's” rocking with laughter and toasting their unbelievable good luck—at peace, for the moment, with their “occasional guilt that they were having too good a time and not getting shot at.”

  Another Signal Corps veteran, playwright Arthur Laurents, characterized Cheever's frequent inebriation as “protective”—a way of dampening the discomfort he felt as a bisexual among “relentlessly macho” types such as Irwin Shaw, to say nothing of all the other gay and bisexual men in the Signal Corps.* “Lennie, your mascara's running,” Ettlinger was obliged to inform Major Spigelgass while the two filmed the invasion of an Aleutian island. Most knew about Spigelgass, who observed that it was “very clear to the ex-Hollywood and ex-New York people” who was and wasn't gay. Knowing it was one thing, admitting it another. Even the outré Spigelgass maintained a rather tongue-in-cheek public façade; Laurents saw a psychoanalyst for what was then viewed as a moral and mental sickness. Laurents could recall only one openly gay man in the Signal Corps—a “terrible drunk” in the animation department who concealed (or perhaps flaunted) his taste for rough trade by wearing a decorative patch over whichever eye happened to be black at the moment. As for Cheever: “He wanted to be accepted as a New England gentleman,” said Laurents, “and New England gentlemen aren't gay. Back then you had no idea of the opprobrium. Even in the Signal Corps, even in the film and theatre world, you were a second-class citizen if you were gay, and Cheever did not want to be that.”

  What Cheever wanted, above all, was to be a successful writer and family man—not necessarily in that order—and things were going well on both accounts, or so it seemed. His life in New York had “never been so well regulated, moderate, and quiet,” he wrote in the autumn of 1943. “Mary meets me at the door with a floury apron in the evenings. We eat dinner, play with Susan, read the paper, and go to bed.” But even then there were a few things wrong with that picture. A fellow writer and drinking buddy, Ted Mills, remembered how “terribly intolerant” Mary was when her husband came in late, and the couple gave Laurents the impression that, at bottom, “they disliked each other”: “Both were always making these snippy remarks—always with a giggle. John always giggled when he said something mean.”

  THE CHEEVERS’ SEEDY APARTMENT in a sinister part of Chelsea was far from ideal, but finances were as tight as ever, and there was a dire shortage of housing during the war—hence their decision, presently regretted, to move into a five-floor town house at 8 East Ninety-second Street with two other couples. The man who found the place was a Signal Corps acquaintance, John McManus, whose wife Peggy was the niece of Alfred Stieglitz and a schoolmate of Mary's at Sarah Lawrence. So that part made sense, but they still needed a third couple to split the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent and exorbitant fuel bills. When John Weaver and his wife, Harriett, declined, Cheever thought to approach Reuel Denney, then working as an editor at Time. The two had scarcely kept in touch since Denney's marriage five years ago, but Cheever was glad to vouch for his friend as a nice, bookish fellow who'd likely make a fine housemate. The unknown quantity was his wife, Ruth.

  Mary took pity on the woman—who struck her as awkward and oddly dressed—and so invited her (with her small son, Randall) to Treetops in the hope of making friends. The visit was not a success: Ruth spent an inordinate amount of time scrubbing the bathroom floor in her cabin, and couldn't be persuaded to follow the family custom of appearing for drinks and dinner at the Stone House without toddlers; also—though the two women were hardly en rapport by then—she liked to confide certain details about her marriage that made Mary uncomfortable. As for the town-house arrangement, it soon headed for the shoals. The women had agreed to divide cooking duties, and Ruth was hurt when the others seemed to dislike her codfish. More serious, or anyway curious, was the woman's tendency to wash her hair in the kitchen sink even though there were eight bathrooms in the place. As for the boy, Randall, he would sit on the steps and spit at Peggy McManus for some reason, until one day she slapped him and was promptly rebuked by his mother, who refused to let anyone “touch or chastise” her child.* Reuel Denney, for his part, naturally sympathized with his wife and took her side, and even began to feel a bit persecuted himself, what with the way John McManus persisted in addressing him as “Whit” (after his Time boss, Whittaker Chambers). And the breach grew wider one night when neighbors called the police because little Susan Cheever was banging her head against the wall; the police assumed (according to Ruth Denney) that this was the sound of an illicit, radical printing press located in the Denneys’ bedroom, and they attacked the couple in bed. When Reuel resisted, he was pistol-whipped and dragged away in handcuffs to the Harlem station.

  The only member of this strange ménage who benefited was Cheever, keeping his Signal Corps buddies in tears of helpless laughter each morning as he related the latest mishap. Indeed, it was too good not to share with the world, and so he began spending nights writing “funny, funny pieces for The New Yorker”—six in all—titled “Town House.” Apart from whatever satisfaction he took in making hay of his disastrous living arrangement, Cheever denigrated the serial as the sort of middlebrow fluff then in vogue (e.g., Life with Father): the literary equivalent of a sitcom. In fact, Cheever's own stories amounted to a stylish, nuanced comedy of manners—another increment in his chameleonic progress as a writer. “Look, I hope you don't mind,” he said to Ruth Denney before the first installment appeared. “I put you in a story and it's not terribly flattering.” This was a breathtaking understatement. “She ate as though she were participating in a contest, trying through practice to pare seconds and minutes from her eating time,” he wrote of “Esther Murray,” the character modeled on Ruth Denney (as she herself concedes). “She smacked her lips, overloaded her fork so that it sometimes spilled its load before reaching her mouth, and scratched her arm on the edge of the table.” Nor was Cheever's own wife spared. Though her “Town House” counterpart is mostly sympathetic, even in those days her husband was apt to score points through his fiction—in this case indicting what he regarded as her maudlin capacity for pity: “It was the naive, erratic, and indefatigable pity of an amateur social worker, and it had crossed their marriage with many stray animals and strange people.”

  Though his domestic travails were sublimated somewhat into art, Cheever longed to escape and see the war before it was too late. Once again he was jockeying for a transfer to Yank, for which he hoped to cover the aftermath of the D-Day landings, ideally in the company of his old regiment. At the last moment, though, his superior in the Signal Corps, Manny Cohen, refused to let him go: “He used to be president of paramount,” Cheever wrote, “and he decided that Yank was RKO or 20th Century Fox and that he was not going to let them have one of his writers.” Cohen promised to make amends “any minute” by sending him abroad with the Signal Corps, and so Cheever was “given injections for everything but bubonic plague” and told, over and over, to wait a bit longer. Nearly a year passed, until finally, in April 1945, he was put on a train to Los Angeles, where he got a belated plague shot and woozily awaited transport in the Biltmore Hotel, next door to a roomful of younger servicemen (“hanging out of their windows, yelling, throwing bottles, glasses … singing obscene songs, and challenging one another to fights”). Such was the secrecy of his assignment—somewhere in the Pacific—that Cheever could only write about “dreams and reading” in his letters home, and mostly he stuck to the latter: “I had bought a copy of ‘The Best Known Novels of George Eliot,’ and I read Adam Bede into the Los Angeles station,” he reported to Mary. “Adam Bede and his unlucky friends didn't strike me as being any more unhappy than the Cheever family.” A few days later he was still in Los Angeles and halfway through The Mill on the Floss.

  Finally he arrived in Manila—a smoking ruin where “absolu
tely nothing over waist-high” remained. An old man sat amid the rubble trying to interest Americans in purchasing a ten-year-old magazine; also for sale were monkeys and birds and “a dried fish strong enough to smell up a city block.” Japanese money blew around the streets. The beaches and jungles of Guam—Cheever's next stop—were something of an improvement: the public-address system played Strauss waltzes, and one could get a good milkshake, though liquor was unavailable west of Honolulu. Sober, then, and keenly susceptible, Cheever took his typewriter to the beach and wrote another “Town House” story; he also swam and “crack[ed] coconuts” with a sailor who'd taken a fancy to him. Many years later, Cheever would claim that he'd “changed to another beach” as soon as this friendship had “seemed about to become sentimental;” but his journal implied that he'd stayed put, since that sailor in Guam would become one of the lifelong elect who (however briefly encountered) would “wander at will into [his] dreams, undress and wait to be gentled,” as Cheever noted in 1961.

  By mid-June he was back in New York, where he was welcomed with a party at Ettlinger's apartment that didn't break up until three. He and Ettlinger were together again on VJ Day (riding around in a cab shouting “La guerre est finie!”), and a few months later Cheever was mustered out of the army after three and a half years. Except for occasional teaching jobs, it was the last regular employment he'd ever know.

  * The origin of that marvelous phrase vis-à-vis Cheever. It was later adopted by friends and family to mock (often rather pointedly) Cheever's reputation among certain of his more admiring critics.

  * As a classification specialist, Rothbart was kept off the line, and so lived to send Cheever that poignant journal. When Cheever himself died a few years later, an obituary appeared in the regimental newsletter that would have made him very happy: “John contributed to the IVY LEAF and DOUBLE DEUCER, and although he was even then something of a celebrity, he was a very regular guy who used to drink beer in the PX with the rest of the guys.”