Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  I am writing principally to say that I will not have a draft for you by the end of this month [January 1950]. No one regrets this more bitterly than I; but I cannot die whenever I announce another delay. … If you should feel, as Mary does, that I closet myself all day merely to take cat-naps I would be delighted to talk with you, to tell you how the book has changed over the years and to convince you that this is not a still-born project, an illusion, that my way is not hopelessly obstructed by some deep spiritual impediment and that I am not willfully tinkering with some old pages. I never read what I think of as the right, the durable chapters without some satisfaction and their number has increased steadily since fall.

  Linscott replied with his usual equanimity (“I have told you many times we would rather wait for a really good novel than take an almost good novel prematurely”), but Cheever wasn't much consoled. As one decade dwindled into the next, he felt more than ever like a failure: “Sitting on the sofa, surrounded with friendly people, I kept saying: I am not doing well, I am not doing well enough. I must take a line on the novel, strong enough to get me out of bed in the morning.”

  * Cheever adored this phrase, this image, and thought of using it in almost every novel he wrote. He liked to say that “fiction is our most intimate means of communication,” and the idea of telling his readers a story while they are safe and cozy in bed seemed to please him. Finally he was able to use the sentence in slightly different form at the beginning (and end) of his last novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems: “This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.”

  * The earliest story that Cheever—or rather editor Robert Gottlieb—saw fit to include in the definitive collection, The Stories of John Cheever (1978).

  *”Ross is dead,” Cheever noted in his journal on December 6, 1951, then proceeded to other matters: “Dinner party despatched [sic] on Sat. Hotchkisses, Boyers, Maxwells. An annoying waste of time.”

  * He managed to sell two of these rejected stories to Harper's, “The Reasonable Music” and “Vega.” The second—an odd tangent for Cheever in certain ways, though by no means inferior—was a long story inspired by Peter Wesul's farouche daughter, who rarely showed herself or spoke. It appeared in the December 1949 Harper's with illustrations by a young Andy Warhol.

  * Herbst would benefit in a similar way from Cheever's friendship. Because of her lifelong interest in left-wing causes—and because her former husband, John Hermann, was an actual party member—the State Department accused her of communism and refused to issue her a passport. On November 9, 1954, Cheever submitted the following affidavit in Herbst's defense: “Nothing that she ever did or said would have led me, or now leads me, to believe that she was a member of the Communist Party.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  {1949-1951}

  MARY CHEEVER SUSPECTED there was something fundamentally wrong with her marriage almost from the start, though she'd had no serious boyfriends before Cheever and certainly knew almost nothing about homosexuality. Nevertheless, as she put it many years later, “I sensed that he wasn't entirely masculine.” She got a slightly more definite inkling in 1948, when she and her husband saw the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire (“As decadent, I think, as anything I've ever seen on the stage,” Cheever wrote). The leitmotif associated with Blanche's dead, homosexual husband* stuck in Mary's head, and led to a subtle, perhaps only semiconscious epiphany: “I saw a connection there.” Did she discuss it with Cheever? “Oh Lord, no. Oh Lord, no. He was terrified of it himself.”

  “I can remember walking around the streets of New York on a summer night some years ago,” Cheever wrote in 1952. “I cannot say that it was like the pain of living death; it never had that clear a meaning. … The feeling always was that if I could express myself erotically I could come alive.” After several years of marriage, and burdened with almost every sort of anxiety, Cheever found it more and more of a strain not to yield to temptation. In his journal he called himself “the walking bruise,” a sensation he would attribute to Coverly Wapshot—”one of those men who labor under a preternaturally large sense of guilt that, like some enormous bruise … could be carried painlessly until it was touched; but once it was touched it would threaten to unnerve him with its pain.” Cheever was almost daily unnerved, almost daily reminded of his damnable secret (as he saw it), and such was the loneliness of his suffering that he considered returning to the church in hope of comfort.

  His greatest fear was that his wife would discover his illicit desires. Because of this—and because his career at the time seemed to have “all the characteristics of a failure”—he was especially sensitive to any sign of discontent on her part. One night, when she asked to be alone for a while, Cheever's pride was so wounded that he considered asking for a separation or divorce, though he knew such an impulse was “perverse”: “There is some part of her that is not gregarious or affectionate, that has never been yielded to me or to anyone else without pain. She was alone much when she was a young girl and the habits of solitude sometimes return to her. Now and then, by a complete absence of privacy, she feels suffocated. She is entitled to this—I recognized it when I met her and married her.” This was Cheever's reasoned, objective view, and it could hardly have been more empathetic; his actual behavior was another matter, and so Mary tried to hold her tongue. Still, there were many distant looks and “tremulous sighs,” duly noted by Cheever, who imagined his wife in the midst of some “tragic adultery” or anyway wishing to seem that way.

  Perhaps to show how well he understood, he wrote “The Season of Divorce,” about a woman named Ethel—gifted in her own right—whose life is “confined” to housewifery by her husband's modest salary. For a while she hangs her college diploma over the kitchen sink as a pathetic joke (“I don't know where the diploma is now,” the husband-narrator remarks), and is tempted by the passionate appreciation of a man named Trencher, who sends roses on her birthday while her husband forgets the occasion entirely. One of the woman's outbursts stands as a rather remarkable apologia given the times—all the more so in comparison with Cheever's later, decidedly less compassionate portraits of talented, unfulfilled women: “In Grenoble,” Ethel says, “I wrote a long paper on Charles Stuart in French. A professor at the University of Chicago wrote me a letter. I couldn't read a French newspaper without a dictionary today, I don't have the time to follow any newspaper, and I am ashamed of my incompetence, ashamed of the way I look. Oh, I guess I love you, I do love the children, but I love myself, I love my life, it has some value and some promise for me and Trencher's roses make me feel that I'm losing this, that I'm losing my self-respect. …”

  Such a dark view of the distaff middle class was galling to Harold Ross, who preferred to give his readers (chiefly female) a little uplift in their fiction. Later Cheever would claim that Ross—while picking his nose and scratching himself and jumping about in his chair—had once admonished him, “Goddammit, Cheever, why do you write these fucking gloomy goddamn stories? … But I have to buy them. I don't know why.” He might have bought them, but he sometimes hesitated to print them, letting almost two years pass before he published a grindingly lugubrious story titled “The Pot of Gold,” about a nice young couple named Whittemore who endure a life of constant disappointment while clinging to the lower rungs of white-collar Manhattan. A dream of success sustains them, coloring their dreary lives with a wan golden light that Cheever paints into the story with deft, incidental strokes, as when Laura Whittemore chats with another deprived wife amid “the sorry and touching countryside of Central Park”: “Vaguely, boastfully, the two women discussed the irons their men had in the fire. They sat together with their children through the sooty twilights, when the city to the south burns like a Bessemer furnace, and the air smells of coal, and the wet boulders shine like slag, and the Park itself seems like a strip of woods at the edge of a coal town.” All the Whittemores’ schemes come to nothing in the end, and the light seems to fade as they find themselv
es poor as ever and middle-aged to boot. Left at that, the story would rank with Chekhov at his most laughably desolate; but perhaps as a sop to Ross (as well as an oblique tribute to his wife's forbearance), Cheever tacked on a sappy ending in which Ralph Whittemore realizes that the gold he sought was always there for the taking: “Desire for [his wife] delighted and confused him. Here it was, here it all was, and the shine of the gold seemed to him then to be all around her arms.”

  “The Pot of Gold” and “The Season of Divorce” were included, respectively, in the 1951 O. Henry Award Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories, though Cheever gloomily concluded that “Pot of Gold,” at least, was “not a first-rate story”: “It is deeply felt but it is morbid,” he wrote in his journal. “It is a morbid story with a sentimental resolution. It was a step in the right direction, perhaps, but don't do this again.”

  • • •

  AS THE NEW YORKER prepared to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary with a famous gala at the Ritz, Cheever took stock of his affairs. Both his lack of money and certain limitations in his work were linked, undoubtedly, to his dependence on the magazine, and he wondered how he might improve as a writer and yet continue to support his family. His friend Irwin Shaw was now cheerfully scribbling left-handed screenplays for Sam Goldwyn—while retaining (for the time being) his reputation as a serious writer—and for Cheever it was exquisite agony to hear Shaw complain, blithely over lunch, about how much money he'd have to make this year in order to pay taxes on his earnings from last year, and so on.* Cheever, meanwhile, was momentarily pleased that he'd sold a recent story and could almost afford to take his family to Martha's Vineyard for the summer; also, his friend Lennie Field had agreed to loan him a car. But of course such contentment was fleeting: “I am tired of borrowing and hedging and living like a bum,” he complained in his journal, adding that he again felt like killing himself (“I have so little to pass on to my children”). One would scarcely have guessed that he had only to accept money from his wife, who—on the death of her Watson grandmother in the late forties—had begun to receive a modest inheritance every quarter. Only in moments of the most hopeless penury, though, would Cheever stoop to borrowing from her (“It wasn't genteel,“ she explained), and for many years, at least, he'd insist on covering household expenses out of his own pocket. Indeed, as a decent if tenuous member of the middle class, he was even loath to accept the hospitality of a grateful Mrs. Ames, who urged him to return to Yaddo after a long absence. “I cannot, in good conscience, accept an invitation,” he wrote her, “knowing that a younger and a needier man would benefit … more than I.” Instead he advised her to invite his old friends Pete and Elizabeth Collins (the latter an abstract artist), whom he knew to be poor but industrious.

  “Tonight Ross is giving a party for seven hundred people to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine and I am going to wear a tuxedo which I bought in a second-hand clothing store on East End Avenue,” Cheever wrote Herbst on March 18, 1950. “I got some studs at Woolworths and a ready-tied black tie in a store in Times Square. We are going with Hazel Werner who is going to wear a night-gown and with Morrie who is also wearing a second-hand dinner jacket and I guess the city will probably never see such a concentration of hair-dye, hand-me-downs, and five and ten cent store jewelry.” The lavish bash was a landmark event for New York's literati, who packed the Ritz grand ballroom and spilled into the Oval Room amid a constant din of music and laughter and tinkling glasses. Cheever got very drunk and “skipped around the dance floor” until half past three, when he piled into a taxi with Shaw and others to pay a visit to Shaw's bedridden wife—or so Cheever dimly remembered the next day, amid a “profound physical and spiritual depression”: “A lot of people complimented me on my stories,” he noted a little doubtfully, “and I hope that I can at least take from this some confident feeling that people are interested in seriousness and that I have been able to preserve in spite of the pages of The New Yorker, many of my own characteristics.”

  The magazine imposed constraints on fiction writers—of length, subject matter, and language—that, Cheever thought, had reduced his work to a “contemptible smallness;” the best solution was to finish his novel, but of course that wasn't panning out and the failure was affecting his everyday mood as well as that of his “gloomy goddamn stories,” as Ross would have it. And yet Cheever knew his work was improving and would continue to improve if only he could “achieve some equilibrium between writing and living”—less drinking, more discipline, and the rest would follow: “I must bring to my work, and it must give to me, the legitimate sense of well-being that I enjoy when the weather is good and I have had plenty of sleep.” The place where he felt best was Treetops—what with “the smell of wood smoke and the noise of the wind,” which almost erased his “dread of falling, of loneliness and disgrace”—though he'd rarely been able to work there, or quite do justice to its peculiar atmosphere in his fiction. Finally, though, after four evocative postwar summers, he was able to write a long, ambitious story, “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” about a Winternitz-like family called the Nudds who gather each year at their house in the mountains and tell stories, or rather parts of the same story.

  Cheever completed a draft in late 1949 and continued to revise for a few months; because of the length, however (as well as complexity and mature themes, perhaps), the story would not appear in The New Yorker until 1954. Returning galleys at last, Cheever felt obliged to explain a few points to Maxwell, who was apt to enforce a certain Rossian literality: “It is supposed to operate something like a rondo and I don't think the chronology can be too exact. … The story is intentionally sketchy—Hartley is supposed to be a good man without my saying so. … [T]he story asks a lot from the reader and repays him with the noise of the wind up the chimney.” As in Cheever's early, elliptical finger exercises—his rather simplistic Chekhov pastiches—much of the story's meaning is suggested by understatement; but in terms of sheer technical mastery, and depth of feeling, the story's relation to those apprentice efforts is that of, say, The Cherry Orchard to the jocular newspaper sketches of Chekhov's youth. “Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” the Nudds are forever asking each other, and so the family members take up their familiar parts of “this chronicle of small disasters”—about a summer day long ago when the pig drowned and Mr. Nudd had to swim ashore with Aunt Martha because their boat sank and young Esther got thin and had her first affair with a poor neighbor and so forth. As the past is examined, piece by piece, the sadness of the present transpires “softly, softly,” rather like the insidious voice of Cheever's enormous radio. There is an accumulation of parenthetical asides—bits of exposition that become darker and darker: “Mr. Nudd's part in the narration was restrained (Aunt Martha was dead);” “But their memories of the war were less lasting than most memories, and, except for Hartley's death (Hartley had drowned in the Pacific), it was easily forgotten.” So the story proceeds, quite like a rondo, circling back to the past, the pig, while the present unfurls “like magicians’ colored scarves”—novelist Anne Tyler's apt phrase for the marvelous legerdemain of Cheever's best work. Finally, the entire span of the Nudds’ lives is evoked and somehow sadly transcended all at once: “There had been the boom, the crash, the depression, the recession, the malaise of imminent war, the war itself, the boom, the inflation, the recession, the slump, and now there was the malaise again, but none of this had changed a stone or a leaf in the view [Mrs. Nudd] saw from her porch.” Thinking it over, she realizes in a single sinking moment that “none of them had done well”—and rouses herself by asking the others if they remember the day the pig fell into the well. “It had begun to blow outside,” the story ends, “and the house creaked gently, like a hull when the wind takes up the sail. The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure, although in the morning they would all be gone.”

  Rightly pleased with this magnificent story,* Cheever showed it in typescript to his long-suffe
ring Random House editor, Linscott, who pronounced it “the best you have ever written” (while wondering, perhaps, how Cheever could compress the material for four or five novels into twenty-odd pages and yet not be able to complete a novel per se). With that time-consuming triumph behind him, Cheever hoped to find a little peace and quiet that summer (1950) so he could more briskly “pry a saleable story out of [his] head.” He drove to Treetops in Lennie Field's expensive-looking Packard, which belied his overdrawn bank account and helped him cash (and bounce) a twenty-five-dollar check at the local grocery store. As for Treetops, he had even less luck working there than usual—the families were as combative as ever—though he thought he might make some fictional use of the cook that summer, “a crazy Pole”: “At night when the dishes are done she butters a loaf of bread and goes out to feed the chipmunks, porcupines, birds, and fishes. ‘Eat, eat, eat,’ she shouts at them.” Cheever stayed a month, wrote nothing of merit, and proceeded en famille to a nice rented house at Seven Gates Farm on Martha's Vineyard—more than he could afford, of course, but working conditions now struck him as “perfect”: “This house is remote and quiet and fish is plentiful and cheap,” he wrote Lobrano. “Some kind neighbors take Mary and the children to the beach in the mornings and don't return them until one or two. Then at six I take them to the beach again where we usually cook supper.”

  With all the time and quiet and scenery he could possibly desire, Cheever remained morose and unproductive. “It's been sort of a fuckedup summer,” he wrote Herbst. The cliffs of Gay Head were stunning, the beaches ditto, but he couldn't help thinking the whole thing was about to “sink into the ocean.” Moreover, he looked askance at “the hosts of people with white shoes” who gathered on the island every year for softball and cocktail parties and dances; Cheever found them nice enough but scorned their frivolity and felt envious, as always, toward their rather too vivid gentility. “At the West Tisbury fair I felt lost,” he wrote in his journal.