Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  One of his more stimulating companions was the writer Irwin Shaw, whose larger-than-life personality excited both love and envy in Cheever. The two had in common the Signal Corps and The New Yorker, though already Shaw was becoming the kind of “money player” who wouldn't have to suffer Harold Ross's legendary stinginess much longer. Even then Cheever secretly considered himself the better artist, and it galled him that Shaw got most of the glamour. Their rivalry was manifest in touch-football games they played in Central Park on Sundays. Though heckled as a runt, Cheever was all business when Shaw was on the opposing team, and once managed to slip past him for a touchdown—a slender triumph, since otherwise Cheever was constantly reminded that he could scarcely afford the sweetness of Shaw's company: “[T]he cost of this comfortable life is fantastic,” he wrote Herbst, after a skiing weekend with the Shaws in Vermont (“drinking martinis and playing parchesi”). The same applied to his friendship with the Ettlingers, who were then in the process of buying the artist Waldo Pierce's house in Rockland County, where they would consort more and more with show-business neighbors such as Burgess Meredith and Paulette Goddard, Helen Hayes and Charles Mac-Arthur. On returning (by bus) from a New Year's visit, Cheever noted his envy and wondered if he and his family would ever have a house of their own—while at the same time surprising himself with such petty materialism:

  Last night, folding the bath towel so the monogram would be in the right place (and after reading a piece on Rimbaud by Zabel), I wondered what I was doing here. This concern for outward order—the flowers, the shining cigarette box … I was born into no true class, and it was my decision, early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

  * Cheever incorporated the episode in a draft of The Holly Tree, though arguably his version lacks the comic brio of his father's. Aaron (the name of the Frederick/Leander character at that point) ends up feeling grossly humiliated by the whole ordeal: “They told me to take off my clothes. … Then they said I was too old.”

  * Or did he? In 1977 he told John Hersey that he did, though at other times (as Susan Cheever noted in Home Before Dark) he claimed to have “refused”—all this a reflection, no doubt, of his profoundly mixed feelings toward the man. Whatever the case, he made amends in The Wapshot Chronicle, at the end of which a weeping Coverly recites the speech at Leander's graveside. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” is inscribed on Frederick's headstone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  {1946-1949}

  THE YEAR 1946 had begun on a promising note: Cheever signed a contract with Random House for a novel (still some version of The Holly Tree) and received a rather generous advance of forty-eight hundred dollars. Both Broadway and Hollywood were showing interest in the “Town House” stories. And meanwhile, advance or no, Cheever was broke again: “I got out of the army in November and the work I've done since then you could put in a pea-shell,” he wrote Herbst in January. “I want to start on a book but I still have to write three stories and God knows when I'll get those done.” According to his journal, he wrote himself out of debt by late spring, when at last he returned to the novel he'd abandoned shortly before his enlistment in 1942. “And now we face the Holly Tree again,” he noted with bleak apprehension. Reading over the thing with the vast objectivity of four years, Cheever tried hard to like what he saw (“It seems good; it seems good”), but mostly he noticed that it was, as ever, the work of a short-story writer: each chapter ended with a dying fall, a bit of provocative irony that went nowhere. “You must use suspense,” Cheever hectored himself.

  His editor at Random House was the well-respected Robert Linscott, whose letters to Cheever over the next seven or eight years were rarely other than tactful and encouraging, while Cheever, for his part, always did his best to seem hopeful. “This letter is to thank you for the great pleasure I had in reading your admirable story in last week's New Yorker, and to tell you how eagerly I'm awaiting the manuscript of your novel,” Linscott wrote in July 1946, almost seven months after Cheever had signed a contract for a novel he'd started writing (as both men knew) several years before. “How goes it, and do you still expect to complete it this year?” The novel was coming along “nicely,” Cheever replied, and yes, he thought he might have a draft by late November; he repeated the deadline in a letter to the Ettlingers, almost as if to persuade himself of its plausibility, though he also confided a certain dread: “I like the story but I keep asking myself: Is there a character in this book you would enjoy meeting? … It troubles me. I love a great many people and the color of the sky, but this doesn't describe my work.” A year later, at Treetops, he was still wondering whether to inflict these characters on the world, in whatever form, while letting Linscott know there was “a fairly good chance” he'd return to the city with a draft in September. In August, however, he learned that “eggs in the city [were] a dollar a dozen,” and so he put the novel aside, again, to grind out stories.

  Based on his journal notes, plus a number of surviving typescript pages and his correspondence with Linscott, The Holly Tree seems to have been composed almost entirely of scenes and people that would later find their way into The Wapshot Chronicle. This was the material Cheever was determined to “write out of [his] system,” and his perseverance in the face of repeated failure—fifteen years (or more) of tinkering and starting over—is simply astounding. The version that evolved in the forties, after the war, concerned an Ur-Wapshot family alternately named Morgan, Flint, or Field: an elderly couple, Aaron and Sarah, and their sons, Tom and Eben. The gift shop was always part of the story, as was the blithely promiscuous Rosalie and Aaron/ Leander's abandoned child who haunts him as a haggard spinster—and so forth. “All moderately dull material,” Cheever admitted in his journal. What was missing, perhaps, was the transformative magic wrought by a special point of view: the tender and forgiving humor of The Wapshot Chronicle, a love of humanity and the “color of the sky,” as it were. It's telling that nothing equivalent to Cousin Honora existed in the novel's early stages—no composite, that is, of Cheever's quirky aunts and cousins and (foremost) mother—perhaps because such a character was inconceivable until enough time had passed for Cheever to view these people with a certain degree of detached loving-kindness. In the absence of such nostalgia, Cheever resorted to melodrama as a means of lifting the miserable facts of his early life above the mundane. Of the character most like himself, for example, Cheever wrote in his journal: “Tom would have tried to kill himself when he was sixteen. Perhaps out of jealousy for his brother. This and any other irregularity in his conduct he would be very anxious to conceal. The effort to present the front of a college man.” All this was certainly true of Cheever himself—minus (in all likelihood) the suicide attempt—but almost beside the point in regard to Coverly Wapshot, the benign neurotic that this character would eventually become.

  By the end of 1947, Cheever still hadn't produced a manuscript, though he claimed a longish one existed, and finally Linscott suggested he write an outline, at least, to give the salesmen something to work with. Cheever reluctantly obliged, though he doubted he could convey what was best about the novel—the actual writing—and so took pains to play this up in the outline, which itself is quite cleverly written:

  The writing, or the surface of the book, which has concerned me a good deal, seems to me clear and reliable. I speak of the writing since it seems very important to me … that it should appear decorous and beautiful and I sometimes think of the story as having the polish, the sentimental charms of a greeting card with an obscene message. …

  The story centers on a family; the Fields. Aaron, Sarah and their two sons, Tom and Eben. There is much of a country that I love in this book—much scenery, much rain, many semi-colons—for these are bewildered children in a beautiful garden.

  The story begins in 1936 and has in it's opening the
appearance of something to be read in bed on a rainy night in an old house.* …

  Sarah Field … is stout, she has yielded her beauty without a struggle, she has attended a White House reception, dreamt of carnal relations with Padarewski and two bibles have come apart in her hands. …

  Having sold the atmospherics of the book (and emphasized his own cleverness wherever possible), Cheever tried to relate the plot with similar élan. The first part of the book consisted of various threads that would later be woven into The Wapshot Chronicle. The second part was absurdly melodramatic and perhaps never written at all, except in tentative bits and pieces. Aaron was to escape the blackmail of his spinster daughter by hiding in Detroit, while Sarah “commits a dreadful murder”—the particulars of which Cheever wisely omitted in his outline, as well as whatever pyrotechnics he would perforce bring to bear in resolving such complications. The novel was to end (à la Wapshot) with Aaron's funeral.

  “That's a wonderful presentation of your book,” Linscott generously replied. “You have certainly whetted my appetite for the book, and I shan't be happy until I read it.” He would not be happy, then, for a long time. Three months later, with no end in sight, Cheever felt like “the only man in the East Fifties who hasn't finished his novel;” meanwhile the usual financial setbacks made it imperative that he get back to story writing and stay there for a while. “I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken.”

  It was unfortunate he felt that way. Apart from the foundering progress of his novel, the late forties (and 1947 in particular) were miraculous years for Cheever. He was well on his way to becoming one of the best fiction writers at The New Yorker, and hence (when considered in the company of contributors such as Nabokov, O'Hara, Salinger, and Shaw) one of the best writers in America. Cheever later remarked that the magazine had accepted almost everything he wrote in those days “as long as there wasn't any explicit sexual intercourse,” and in fact rejections did become relatively rare as Cheever's work continued to change and improve in startling ways. Though he belittled his stories, and longed to be a novelist, Cheever was almost morbidly aware of his New Yorker readership and eager to please. “It was one of the most felicitous relationships between readers and writers I think that ever existed,” he said of this golden age. Cheever loved the immediate gratification of writing for the magazine—not only the quick (if meager) paycheck, but the marvelous idea that he could communicate in print “with estimable men and women” as soon as (sometimes) a week or two after he'd written a story! And how delightful (for such a lonely man) when these same readers would write personal letters validating, in effect, his most vital feelings about life. Indeed, when he met these readers in the flesh, he was elated by their praise and stricken by any sign of indifference. When, for example, a woman at a cocktail party applauded the New Yorker work of one Robert McLaughlin—but had never heard of Cheever—the latter brooded despondently in his journal: “The stories she liked by McLaughlin were obvious and done without any talent, and I was disappointed to find that she did not remember, and had never noticed the cutting edge I work so hard to give my prose. … Who knows the difference.”

  Cheever was determined to make them see the difference. Having finished the last of his “Town House” stories in March 1946—and perhaps sensing he was in danger of becoming the sort of slick writer whose proper peers were the likes of Robert McLaughlin rather than O'Hara, Shaw, et al.—Cheever challenged himself to write something with “more size and passion”: no more “rueful vignettes,” in other words, “but real stories with characters, invention, scenery and moral conviction.” What followed was “The Sutton Place Story,” which appeared in The New Yorker that June*—a somber look at the tawdry private lives of the Manhattan middle class, as witnessed by a little girl named Deborah Tennyson, who “knew about cocktails and hangovers.” Through a series of delinquencies committed by the negligent adults in her life, Deborah ends up (disastrously) in the care of a genteel semi-prostitute named Renée. The narrator casually evokes the woman's sordid nature, as if it were the sort of thing any quasi-respectable New Yorker could relate to: “She had begun to notice that she always felt tired unless she was drinking. … When she was not drinking she was depressed, and when she was depressed she quarreled with headwaiters and hairdressers, accused people in restaurants of staring at her. … She knew this instability in her temperament well, and was clever at concealing it—among other things—from casual friends like the Tennysons.”

  The story of a child who runs away from adult corruption—and is almost lost forever—certainly possessed the moral conviction to which Cheever aspired, and the contradictory impulses of his characters had rarely been so well portrayed. In the meantime, as a self-styled “spy” among the middle class, Cheever liked to imagine the secrets of his innocuous fellow tenants in that building near Sutton Place, and he continued to brood on this theme—namely, “that genuinely decorous men and women admitted into their affairs erotic bitterness and even greed,” as he put it (a little self-mockingly) in his preface to the Stories. As an early treatment, “The Sutton Place Story” would serve as a springboard to greater things, possibly leading the author to ponder a more interesting way of becoming, so to speak, a narrative fly on as many walls as possible. The solution would involve a dose of magic. “[I'm] facing the need for change in my work,” he wrote in 1947. “The physical world is very important to me but dry descriptions of the details of its beauty are not enough.”

  Cheever would later invoke Kafka as his main influence for “The Enormous Radio,” but when Dodie Merwin first read the story, she immediately recognized Cheever's own peculiar anecdotal style: “He had the most hilarious sense of going on tangents. He would build this absolutely perfect portrait of the times and the places and the people—and all of a sudden it would shoot offsomewhere.” Consider the opening lines of “The Enormous Radio”: “Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in West-chester.” Rather than dramatize the Westcotts’ ideal ordinariness with a lot of tedious narrative detail, Cheever simply states the matter with a droll statistical flourish (“10.3 times a year”). The only way the couple deviates from the norm, he informs us, is in their extravagant love of music, hence the need of a brand-new radio. Thus, as Irene Westcott settles down to listen to this ungainly machine, Cheever goes off on one of his tangents: “A crackling sound like the noise of a burning powder fuse began to accompany the singing of the strings. … [S]he began to discern through the Mozart the ringing of telephone bells, the dialing of phones, and the lamentation of a vacuum cleaner.” This is Kafka's approach, too: Before the reader can object to the idea of a man transformed into a dung beetle, the thing has been done with absolute naturalism, from Gregor Samsa's “armor-hard back” to the “rigid bow-like sections” of his abdomen. And so with Cheever's radio: a hot “crackling” is precisely the sound a radio makes (circa 1947) when changing signals, but the description also resonates with infernal overtones, as Irene discovers that this particular radio allows her to eavesdrop on neighbors. “Irene shifted the control and invaded the privacy of several breakfast tables. She overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair.”

  The story is typically interpreted in terms of Edenic myth—the satanic radio bestows on the Westcotts the knowledge of evil—and one supposes this was fine with Cheever, whose main objective was to “put things down as they appear and to leave the spore of myth and allusion to the reader.” He knew his fanciful exaggerations had mythic dimensions, and so be it; however—quite like Kafka—he deplored his work's being reduced to “banal allegory.” In the c
ase of “The Enormous Radio,” the obvious Edenic gloss doesn't quite fit—unlike Adam and Eve, the ultra-normal Westcotts have always been corrupt, and the radio simply reminds them of this: “You made Grace Howland's life miserable”—-Jim Westcott berates his wife toward the end of the story—”and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? … You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau.” And finally, once the radio is “fixed,” it still insists on confronting the traumatized pair with the hopeless suffering of a fallen world: “The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal. ‘An early-morning railroad disaster in Tokyo,’ the loudspeaker said, ‘killed twenty-nine people. A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns. The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine.’ “

  “The Enormous Radio” was included in that year's Best American Short Stories, and was also selected for a Best of the Best volume published a few years later. More gratifying, perhaps, was Mary Cheever's reaction: “It made a big difference in how I felt about the man I was married to and how he was spending his time.” From then on—while the evidence mounted—she would have to consider their marital and financial woes in the context of caring for a potentially great writer. Even Harold Ross was moved to praise the story (a rare enough occurrence, lest a writer think about asking for more money): “I've just read ‘The Enormous Radio’ … and I send my respects and admiration,” he wrote Cheever a few weeks before the story was published. “It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish. Very wonderful indeed.” And a few months later the man sent another personal message (“unquestionably excellent”) when the magazine published “Torch Song,” Cheever's equally surreal tale about a woman who battens on sickly, violent men, cheerfully enduring their abuse because of a “lewd” infatuation with death.