Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  It was last summer's feeling of being a stranger in a closely integrated community. … The dance at West Chop was a charming archaism; the old people sitting around the wall, musical chairs, the pretty girls. I walked on South Beach and tore my hair. Why? The sea was blue. … West Chop does not really interest me. It proves how insular and foolish a social group can become when they are able to isolate themselves, how this transparent illusion of superiority sustains them. It was close to high-comedy, the husbands and wives falling in love with one another; men and women of forty stealing kisses in the backs of cars.

  On his desk was the beginning of a gloomy story titled “The Backgammon Game.” Cheever could hardly bear to look at it. He wanted to write something “funny, beautiful, light,” but a constant “undertow of depression” dragged him away from any such effort—hollow at any rate—and back to the beach, alone, pacing, worrying about his debts, marriage, everything. “After lunch I walked along the beach; low tide, gold beards on the rock. … I kept thinking: but it is only a summer day, these are only debts … it is only a summer day.” At length, he returned (“sadly”) to where family and friends had finished a picnic, and saw his wife swimming with a neighbor named Florrie: “Mary's head was light. Florrie's head was black. … After a little while they walked out of the waves. They were both naked. The sight filled me with great joy.”

  This was a start, but only a start. Back in Manhattan by mid-October, the first order of business was imparting the usual bad news to Linscott: “This is a report on the long-delayed novel and it isn't good. Of the work I did since Christmas I sold only one story and I had to work on articles and stories all summer. It was an anxious summer and one result of this was that I wrote in a peculiar mixture of sentimentality and laconism that has meant throwing away three of the five stories I completed.” Pausing perhaps to consider this, Cheever concluded with an almost audible sigh: “It is still my principle aim in life to write novels …” That settled, he returned to “The Backgammon Game” and realized, reading it over, that, “like some kinds of wine, it had not traveled. It was bad.” The story was about a family named Pommeroy who play backgammon for “life and death” stakes: one brother wins the other brother's wife; Mrs. Pommeroy loses rights to her children, and so on.

  Cheever put the manuscript aside and looked over his journal notes from that summer—perhaps he'd find something cheering there—but no: all was sadness and bitter mockery. The way his neighbors in West Chop had carried on at the yacht-club dance—recounting old football triumphs and larky bonfires and such—was simply pathetic, or so he'd seen fit to perceive it (“The lights and passions of youth have gone down and having been replaced with no other lights and passions they are like people who have suffered a loss of faith”); indeed, such childishness was a universal failing in this country and class (“how the nation like a miserable adult, turns back to the supposed innocence of its early life”). The only whisper of happiness in the whole petulant account was the line about his wife and Florrie walking out of the sea. “I had spent the summer in excellent company and in a landscape that I love,” he later wrote, describing the genesis of one of his greatest stories, “but there was no hint of this in the journal I had kept.” Cheever reflected that the worst side of his nature—the dour, conscience-haunted Yankee who considered all forms of earthly pleasure “merely the crudest deceptions”—was getting the better of him and his work, and he felt a sudden impulse to exorcise this dreary spirit. Thus he contrived the image of “a despicable brother”—himself, in effect—and wrote the words “Goodbye, My Brother.”

  The story that followed was even longer than his intricate narrative about the Nudd family, but this time he finished in a joyous, week-long burst of inspiration (“I think it is myself, writing with the fewest obstructions”). Though Cheever almost never wrote in the first person—wary of lapsing into garrulous imprecision—he sensed a measure of “ambiguity in [his] indignation” and so required a slightly unreliable narrator, a soidisant “good brother,” to describe the “despicable brother,” Lawrence. At the outset this narrator announces, a little defensively, that he is a teacher: “I am past the age where I expect to be made headmaster … but I respect the work.” As for Lawrence, he is a bleak prig who has been something of a misfit in his own family ever since childhood, when he was dubbed “Tifty the Croaker” and “Little Jesus.” Still, the Pommeroys “are a family that has always been very close in spirit,” and when Lawrence pays a rare visit to their summer home at Laud's Head, everyone is eager to make amends. Lawrence, however, is unchanged, and loses no time alienating himself. “Is that the one she's sleeping with now?” he says of his sister Diana's latest affair, and also points out that the family house “will be in the sea in five years”: “The sea wall is badly cracked. … You had it repaired four years ago, and it cost eight thousand dollars. You can't do that every four years.” Such remarks are obnoxious, but not inaccurate: arguably the sister is “a foolish and a promiscuous woman,” and probably it is folly to keep wasting good money for a sea wall that will only continue to crack, and certainly (apropos of another mean remark) the mother does drink too much.

  That said, most of Lawrence's opinions are only attributed to him by the narrator, who distorts his brother's pessimism in order to make it seem more fatuous and nasty than it is. When, for example, Lawrence watches the family play backgammon for money, the narrator imagines the man's absurd indictment of them all, as follows: “I may be wrong, of course [my italics], but I think that Lawrence felt that in watching our backgammon he was observing the progress of a mordant tragedy in which the money we won and lost served as a symbol for more vital forfeits.” This, of course, is an idea lifted from Cheever's own abortively portentous story, “The Backgammon Game;” the fact is, Lawrence's only explicit comment gives little hint of such dark musings: “I should think you'd go crazy … cooped up with one another like this, night after night.” Likewise when the narrator imagines Lawrence's cynical view of a yacht-club party with a “come as you wish you were” theme (which results in the men dressing mostly as football players and the women as brides), Cheever paraphrases his own caustic remarks in the journal: “And I knew that Lawrence was looking bleakly at the party … as if in wanting to be brides and football players we exposed the fact that, the light of youth having been put out in us, we had been unable to find other lights to go by and, destitute of faith and principle, had become foolish and sad.” Again, whatever the relative truth of this observation, the narrator is actually projecting on Lawrence his own suspicion that he and the others have “become foolish and sad.” To be sure, Lawrence is a “gloomy son of a bitch” (as the narrator calls him), but ultimately he's little more than an abstraction—an embodied point of view that is “elegiac and bigoted and narrow” and that the narrator, confronting the disappointment of his own life, wants desperately to reject. The famous last paragraph, then, is a moving affirmation that yet seems to protest a little too much:

  Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

  Malcolm Cowley pointed out to Cheever that the story's irony is so extensive that it is “troublingly uncertain” what the author means to say. Cheever replied: “The brother story, in its bare outline, was the story of one man. There was no brother; there was no Lawrence.” In other words, it was to be the story of one man struggling with his demons—a struggle that would never quite be resolved in Cheever's life or wor
k, such that his use of irony would, if anything, become even more elaborate, the better to have it both ways, light and dark (or neither). As for the ultimate “meaning” of “Goodbye, My Brother,” Cheever was determinedly subtle: “I had hoped that the women—dark head and gold—coming out of the sea, would clear away any ambiguity,” he explained to Cowley with characteristic diffidence. “I seem to have failed.”

  “GOODBYE, MY BROTHER” was promptly accepted by The New Yorker, though almost a year would pass before it appeared in the magazine, and Cheever was rather surprised it was accepted at all. He wanted to go on writing stories of greater length and complexity, to take a break from the soul-killing grind of writing “saleable” stories or, for that matter, his recalcitrant novel (“a form with which I seem unable to cope”). Explaining his decision to apply for a Guggenheim, he remarked, “I would like to write some stories that would not be inhibited in their length by the pages of a magazine nor in their content by the fact that the magazine might, after all, fall into the hands of a child.” Though “Goodbye, My Brother” and “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well” existed only in typescript at the time, he chose to submit them (with “Torch Song”) as samples of his best work, while writing “None”—again and again—in reply to such prompts as “College,” “Degrees,” “Accomplishments,” and “Positions Held.” “I'm not sanguine about getting a fellowship,” he told Cowley, who'd written an urgent recommendation in his behalf (“He really should have a chance to develop his talent, which is now at a turning point”), along with Wolcott Gibbs (“one of the four or five ablest and most original [New Yorker] contributors”), S. J. Perelman (“I cannot think of anyone who has as exact and meticulous a knowledge of middle-class behavior and psychology”), and others. When Cheever was informed a few months later of his three-thousand-dollar fellowship, nobody was more surprised than he.

  It came at a good time, since relations with Lobrano had soured over the past couple of years—beginning with that string of rejections after the failure of Town House, whereupon Cheever noted that his “long love affair with The New Yorker seems like an unhappy marriage, repaired now and then with a carnal exchange, a check.” Matters took a turn for the worse when Lobrano responded unenthusiastically to “The Bus to St. James's,” the only decent piece of writing Cheever had managed that summer on Martha's Vineyard. Lobrano had advised him to cut the story, and when that didn't work he asked to see the deleted scenes again so that he, Lobrano, could perhaps cobble together something salable. Cheever realized the suggestion was made in “pure kindness and helpfulness,” but couldn't help feeling insulted: “I do resent the fact that my stories, imperfect as they are, must undergo so much manipulation,” he wrote in his journal, “from people who are paid much more than I for tampering with my fiction.” Lobrano had stumbled, then, while walking the tremulous wire between being a friend and being editor and banker, and may himself have been feeling a little put out two months later, when he took Cheever to lunch after accepting “Goodbye, My Brother” and proceeded to speak at length about the sale (for thirty-five thousand dollars) of a recent Newhouse story to the movies.* “I listened patiently to these triumphs,” Cheever glumly reflected, “thinking that it is difficult to be petulant when you don't have a buck to get your hair cut …” But perhaps Cheever did allow himself a hint of petulance, because Lobrano promptly turned him back over to William Maxwell. What would prove a happier association—at least for the next ten years or so—began with Maxwell's editing “Goodbye, My Brother,” which forever remained his favorite Cheever story (“John seemed to have a joyful knowledge that no one else had”).

  Cheever, with some misgivings, also admired Maxwell's highly autobiographical fiction—especially his 1945 novel, The Folded Leaf, which Cheever vividly remembered reading for the first time in a Hollywood hotel room (presumably while taking a break from George Eliot's oeuvre). His admiration for that particular novel is worth considering. “The whole of my youth is in it,” Maxwell once observed. Like at least two of his other novels, it touches on the sudden death of his mother when he was ten years old, as well as the suicide attempt that eventually followed. It's also regarded as one of the first serious novels in American literature about an overtly (more or less) homo-erotic male friendship. “Bill never made a secret of the fact that he'd had a brief homosexual life before [his marriage],” said Shirley Hazzard. “He felt he was so sensitive he could never have friends or a normal life.” A few years after his suicide attempt, Maxwell began an intensive seven-year course of therapy with the controversial Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud who did much to popularize psychoanalysis in the United States with such books as Listening with the Third Ear and Masochism in Modern Man. Reik also treated Cheever's old Signal Corps colleague Arthur Laurents, who was struck by Reik's tendency to mention, somewhat luridly, the progress of another patient—Maxwell—perhaps because Laurents and Maxwell were seeking help for much the same problem. Laurents would presently decide Reik was a “charlatan,” though Maxwell was nothing but grateful to the man (“He gave me a life”), and seems to have discussed the matter up to a point with Cheever, who remarked on his friend's “courage and perseverance”: “I think of Bill who did penance for seven years with a screwy hungarian [Austrian] in order to conquer his partiality to death. And conquer it, he did.” Shortly after finishing The Folded Leaf, Maxwell interviewed a beautiful young woman, Emily Noyes, for the job of poetry editor at The New Yorker; she wasn't hired, but the two were soon married and by all accounts were ecstatically happy with each other the rest of their lives.

  Apart from his work as a writer and editor, Maxwell was legendary for his kindness, his vast empathy, a warmth he conveyed despite an ironclad sense of decorum. To some he gave the appearance of a man who was very carefully holding himself together. Laurents met him for lunch, at Reik's insistence, and naturally expected a discussion of their common problem (since, after all, Reik had mentioned a number of intimate details about Maxwell's sex life)—but the subject never came up: “We talked about writing,” Laurents recalled. “He was very reticent.” Not that he was apt to deny anything—he was too honorable for that. Once, in a gathering, he was approached by a man who rudely referred to a certain disreputable character from their mutual past. Gently but firmly, Maxwell replied—ending the exchange—that such matters were “very remote from [his] life now.” For his part, Cheever thought his friend “terribly fastidious,” and liked to tell of the time Maxwell had suddenly phoned to say he was coming to tea: “Mary went wild and cleaned, waxed, arranged flowers, etc. When he arrived everything seemed in order. Mary poured the tea. The scene was a triumph of decorum until Harmon, an enormous cat, entered the room, carrying a dead goldfish. It seemed to be our relationship in a nutshell.”

  Whether Maxwell was aware of Cheever's predilections is hard to say, though Cheever certainly knew about Maxwell and sometimes longed to air the matter between them, while worrying, too, over the “devastating turn” their friendship might take as a result. Reunited as writer and editor after Lobrano's defection, the two met for lunch at the Century Club; afterward Cheever wrote: “Here is an old friend, a boy to play with, an answer to the lonelyness that I still seem to carry from childhood and upon which I do not choose to act. And here is a man who is lonelier than I will ever be. He talked about childhood dancing school, his step-mother, this and that—rather in the end like a woman—and I talked about my parents, my brother, and held through it all the affectations of gentility. I avoided the looming truths.”

  Cheever would always esteem Maxwell's literary advice, and was properly grateful for the man's support in almost every department of life; this created a vague intimacy between them that, for various reasons, didn't quite translate into intimate words or acts—though with Maxwell, again, Cheever longed to find “some way of expressing our indignation at the fix we have got ourselves into, some reassuring nostalgia for what appears to be a lost and natural way of life.” In the end, though, he was in
variably disappointed with the actual fact of Maxwell and his “terribly fastidious” manner: as he often noted, he loved the man and always looked forward to seeing him, but he tended to feel “bored stiff” in his company.

  TOWARD THE END of 1950, Cheever's apartment building changed ownership and would soon be turned into a cooperative. Present tenants were given eight months to move, which was imminent in the Cheevers’ case anyway: their growing children were sharing a tiny bedroom and needed more space. Like so many of the postwar middle class, Cheever considered moving to the suburbs—better schools, cheaper housing, fresh air—though he had some typical misgivings: “My God, the suburbs!” he later wrote. “They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.” Be that as it may, his friend and fellow New Yorker writer E. J. (“Jack”) Kahn, Jr., would soon be vacating his rented house in Westchester County, and invited Cheever to take his place. For a while the search continued for a larger but affordable apartment in the city, until Cheever neglected to pay his electric bill and the lights went out; he spent the night sitting in the dark, solemnly pondering his poverty. The next day he paid the bill and took a train to Westchester, where he arranged to rent the house (“with a sickly shade tree”) in Scarborough-on-Hudson.