Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  To Herbst he reported, deploringly, that the country club in question was “a depressing place to which Jews are not admitted,” and that a vulgar five-and-ten-cent-store heiress named Mrs. Newberry had proposed that tickets to the Fete be sold at the incredible rate of forty bucks a head, and that people be seated by age, no less: “[I]t made the benefit in The Possessed seem like a picnic,” he concluded. “Now the neighborhood is in an uproar. It's wonderful.” Even Cheever's evening strolls around the leafy streets were in the nature of fieldwork, as he peered through lighted windows and witnessed, say, “a man in his shirt sleeves rehearsing a business speech to his wife who was knitting.” Chatting with such men in person, Cheever discovered that many seemed to consider themselves “the peers of Milton”: when Cheever identified himself as a writer, his interlocutors would almost invariably reply that, if only they had the time, they'd have written any number of novels by now.

  Whatever their latent literary aspirations, Cheever's neighbors attached very little cachet to being an actual writer, and Cheever had to admit in his journal that he felt “out of water” and was “occasionally cut.” What these people knew for certain about writing—based on Cheever's example—was that it didn't pay worth a damn. The neighbors (“in the advertising business to a man”) lived in big houses and drove Cadillacs; Cheever drove a secondhand Dodge and lived in a “rented toolshed.” And he was lucky to have even that much, as his would-be benefactors were careful to remind him. Every so often a Vanderlip daughter would drop by the toolshed with a well-heeled friend on the lookout for a country pied-à-terre. “Perfect!” the friend would say, oblivious to the fretful little man in the corner, making drinks for his guests. As Susan Cheever wrote, “When the rich people had left … my parents would huddle in their wake like refugees. As my father always reminded us, we had nowhere else to go. This sort of observation was often accompanied by a laugh.”

  Rest assured he was not laughing on the inside. In his early days at Beechwood, while dressing for a social evening with prosperous neighbors, Cheever often found himself nervously rehearsing the “vital facts” of his father-in-law's career at Yale—realizing as he did so (“like a third person”) that he was “still compelled by his father's failure to regale himself with the facts of his father-in-law's success.” To some extent Cheever would always be the strange, friendless boy from a disgraced family, whose occasional scorn of the wealthy was in mitigation of an almost unbearable feeling of envy—but also, of course, he was an exceptional man and knew it, and wanted terribly for the world to know it too, and give him the admiration he deserved. “Every indifferent glance,” he wrote, after one year in Scarborough, “every back turned to me by chance, every hint of indifference, real or imagined, sinks into my breast like an arrow dipped in poison. I am consumed.” Gradually, though, he began to adapt somewhat. Rather than tell stories about his in-laws, Cheever acted all the more as if he himself were to the manner born, whatever his reduced circumstances as a (distinguished) writer. With, for example, a local friend such as Sally Swope—a Bostonian of unimpeachable pedigree—Cheever was almost “stuffy,” as she recalled, in observing the dictates of their common (so to speak) background: “My father taught me that a gentleman only wears dark clothes after six o'clock,” he'd drawl, then perhaps chuckle at the absurdity of it all. Generally he kept them guessing—was he really such a snob, or only pretending to be?—but in his heart he wanted very badly indeed to be considered “first-class,” and fortunately there was more to it than wealth or breeding per se: “You and I will get along without the awkward and the ugly,” he wrote in his journal. “They will ring your doorbell; they will bring you roses and pears; they will invite you into steerage. They disguise stupidity with seriousness; they sneer at the wit and grace they miss. … So the bores travel through infinity, a little below the waterline. Don't deceive yourself with illusions of equality. There is brilliance and there is stupidity.”

  DESPITE HIS ASSURANCES to Linscott about the accretion of “durable” novel chapters, Cheever had pretty much scrapped his previous drafts of The Holly Tree and started over from scratch in the summer of 1951—which is not to say he was telling a different story. Retitled The Impostor, the novel was still “the sad annal of a family that never amounted to anything,” and focused mostly on the travails of a Frederick-like character now called Leander. Though he gave out optimistic reports on his progress, the work went as fitfully as ever and he wondered, again, whether there was something “intrinsically wrong” with his material, which he suspected was not only depressing but dull. He was still convinced, though, that he had to write about his own past and get it over with, out of his system, since he felt a novel required some vital personal issue lest he find himself “writing off the surface.”

  The Impostor slogged along until, at the beginning of 1952, Cheever's debts outweighed the balance of his Guggenheim money; rather than go back to writing stories, he decided to “complete a rough draft as rapidly as possible and send it off to Bob.” What he actually managed, by March, were a few relatively polished chapters—about a hundred pages in all—which he hoped were good enough to persuade Linscott to give him some money to finish or, failing that, at least a vote of confidence. When, however, he wrote Cowley that he thought this latest effort had “gone very well,” his old mentor replied with decorous skepticism: “I'd begun to think that the only way you'd work up to a novel was simply by expanding a long story, or by fitting two or three long stories together, but now you sound as if you were writing a novel just—like—that.” This would prove a prescient assessment of Cheever's novelistic approach, and meanwhile some such misgiving had occurred to him in regard to The Impostor, even as he tried to cheer himself up in his journal: “I think they will like it … [a]lthough it may seem to them jerrybuilt, unhealthy and comical. We will see.”

  At Random House the manuscript was received with “an all around air of profound embarrassment,” such that Cheever suspected his editor had given the pages to an assistant “to read among her cats.” As the days passed, one after another, Cheever waited for the telephone to ring while writing little more than the odd despondent note in his journal: “[I]f the work I've sent him is bad I have made some grave mistakes. My eyes are wrong, my heart is wrong, and I have been mistaken in listening for all these years to the rain.” Writing to Herbst—two weeks had passed by then—he indulged in the usual jaunty stoicism, predicting that when the telephone did ring (“but it will probably never ring”) he'd be told something along the lines of “We like some of it” or “We like the way you've handled the material, but we don't like the material.”

  This, as it turned out, was overly optimistic. Perhaps to force a verdict of whatever sort, Cheever arranged to have lunch with Linscott on a day (March 27) when he was in town anyway to see his dentist. The editor greeted him more sheepishly than ever, spoke of other matters as long as he could manage it, then finally announced that he didn't like Cheever's manuscript. At all. (“He had nothing generous to say about anything,” Cheever noted afterward. “He looks at me as if I were a cistern or manhole into which 4,800 dollars had been dropped.”) He thought the characters were unbelievable, that the overall negativism was not “timely”—and so on. When Cheever wondered aloud how he'd ever manage to pay back his advance, Linscott replied that Random House had insured his life via the contract, which Cheever took as a sober suggestion that he commit suicide. Thirteen years later (Linscott had been safely dead a year), Cheever related the following sad, comic, and largely apocryphal account of their meeting:

  When I reached the office [for lunch] they said [Linscott] was out. I waited nearly an hour. He presently drifted down the stairs, gave me his left hand and took me to a basement restaurant. He did not mention the book. He said he thought it worthless, that I should give up writing and try to make a living in some other way. As we parted he asked softly: “You wouldn't do anything foolish like kill yourself, would you?” “No,” I said. These were the last
words we exchanged.

  Cheever was not quite suicidal, though he was getting there (again). During a follow-up visit with his dentist, he lay in the chair brooding: “I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. Oh, I think, if I could only taste a little success.” Meanwhile he needed to write more stories, and fast, but his confidence was shot. With much effort, he finally finished a long story that summer (“The Children”), but couldn't think what to write next. For a while he “loafed around the house” and complained that he needed more privacy, so he drove to Erwinna and visited Herbst for a weekend; then he loafed some more, absorbed the scenery on Long Island, and finally spent the rest of the summer at Treetops, where he “subsisted] on his mother-in-law's creamed chicken and [made] some delicate notes on the weather.” “The Children” was published in the September 6 issue of The New Yorker; a year would pass before another of Cheever's stories appeared.

  THOUGH CHEEVER CLAIMED he encountered no “deep spiritual impediment” to finishing his novel, the fact remained that he was trying to write an unflattering account of a family very like his own—featuring a domineering, gift-shop-owning mother—while his actual mother was still alive, if not altogether well. At age eighty she was very fat and ill with diabetes, and her face had a mournful way of collapsing when she removed her upper plate at night. She managed to keep busy, though. In recent years she'd closed the gift shop and begun selling hand-painted lampshades out of her house; sometimes when Cheever arrived for a visit he'd find the living room crowded with ladies and have to retreat to the kitchen or backyard, remembering the old days when he used to cool his heels in the back of her shop while she chatted with customers after hours (“I still feel the struggle—faintly—in my balls”). Though he tried hard to be nice to the old woman, her “depraved tastes” mortified him as much as ever—more—now that he had a family and lived in the posh banlieue of Scarborough (where, he noted, her “tastes and manners would not succeed”). When she insisted on talking business, Cheever would listen with a faint, flinching grin and imagine that she was deliberately tormenting him, and in front of his family no less. Her reactionary provincialism (as he saw it) pervaded all of New England. When he took Susan on a tour of Concord and other historical sites, a lady custodian at Emerson's house pointed to a portrait of the great transcendentalist and said, “He was a man of principle. Today [Senator] McCarthy is our only man of principle.” Writing to Eleanor Clark, Cheever claimed to have given this woman a piece of his mind while “Susie blushed and sweated.” A few days later, however, writing to Maxwell, he transferred the woman's McCarthyism to his mother: “ ‘Isn't MaCarthy [sic] wonderful?’ old Mrs. Wapshot asked me before her welcoming kiss had dried. … It galls her that I am now her sole support and she announced—reflectively—that if I were only dead she would be handsomely provided for by the state. It would be like poor Coverly to notice that every stick of furniture in her house has claw feet.”*

  For what it's worth, Susan Cheever did not find her grandmother (“Bammy”) the least domineering, nor did she consider the gift shop the “depraved” brainchild of a castrating vulgarian; rather she thought it the natural enterprise of a “craft-y” woman with a taste for pretty things. Indeed, she remembers Bammy as nothing but thoughtful and kind: the woman was always sending lovely little presents she herself had made—an embroidered dress, bits of jewelry—and liked to teach her granddaughter how to do practical feminine things like bake cookies and make a martini (“Just pass the [vermouth] bottle over the gin”). Fred Cheever's oldest daughter, Jane, also has nothing but fond memories of Bammy: “She would take me out to lunch and have my hair done, and then she'd buy me outlandish clothes that my mother would never want me to wear. She hadn't had daughters so I was the first girl she had a chance to play with.” Lest the picture seem too idyllic, though, it's worth noting that Jane's younger sister Sarah thought her grandmother “a bit of a bitch,” and never forgot the time Bammy asked her to help wrap a package by placing her finger on the bow: “She tied it so tight my finger almost came off.” By then relations had soured between Bammy and Iris—Fred's wife—who chafed at her mother-in-law's bossiness and resented her husband's having to “prop up” the old woman (pace John's claim that he was her “sole support”). Because of the friction, Bammy's visits to the chalet in Norwell had dwindled to the odd Sunday dinner, though apparently Fred tried to compensate by going alone to visit his mother—or so she'd find ways of suggesting to John. “Would you like a drink?” she'd greet him when he came to Quincy, and if he answered “Yes, please,” she'd go to the pantry and return with a sad little smile: “Your brother has drunk all the whiskey.”

  This was perhaps her decorous New England way (“Feel that refreshing breeze”) of letting John know his older brother had a drinking problem, as he did. The brothers had rarely seen each other for the past ten years or so, but after one recent visit John had noted that Fred seemed “like a man in a labyrinth, who thinks that he is unobserved. Fumbling, lost, self-deluded.” By then Fred had begun to alarm his family and alienate his neighbors, but at the same time he was still advertising manager at Pepperell and about to be promoted to the head of the Sheet and Blanket Division—a promotion that would bring him to New York and closer to his brilliant little brother. Fred later wrote his daughter Sarah that the move to “an exciting place like New York” was “part of trying to deny [his] middle-class status,” and in fact Fred shared and even surpassed his brother's ambivalent snobbery. On the one hand, Fred was tired of small-town bourgeoisie and wanted to be introduced to bright, sophisticated people—writers and artists—and perhaps he expected Joey's help with that. On the other hand, he wasn't a writer or an artist, or even particularly sophisticated; he was a businessman who considered himself an intellectual, too, and wanted credit for both—his success and his intellect—to say nothing of his winning personality (“Where there's a Cheever, there's color,“ he liked to say). In 1952, Fred bought an ivy-bearded Tudor in Briarcliff Manor, about a half-mile from Beechtwig.

  John was horrified. He'd spent almost twenty years reinventing himself, adopting his mother-in-law, Polly, “as a phantom parent,” ingratiating himself with the nobs of Scarborough—and here, lumbering out of the past, was his drunken Rotarian brother. “Hey, Joey!” Fred would hail him across a room of his peers, the local smart set, and what could John do but wave back and try not to wince? Nor did he overestimate his friends’ dismay: this was certainly not what they'd expected from a brother of John Cheever. Mimi Boyer found Fred “gross, roughhewn,” and actively avoided him, while for his part John urged the whole crowd to keep their distance, for Fred's sake as well as their own. Nor did it help that Iris and Mary Cheever despised each other. Iris sensed that Mary and her Scarborough friends didn't cotton to her and Fred, and she bitterly resented it—why didn't John and Mary help them more, and where did they get off anyway? Did they live in an elegant Tudor house? Did they have a daughter at Milton Academy, about to be presented to Boston Society at the Debutante Cotillion?* Besides, Iris was born in Canada to British parents, and knew plenty about the right way to serve tea and so forth; if anything Mary should defer to her.

  Iris complained to her husband, but what could he do? He'd also picked up on the condescension and perhaps understood it all too well—at any rate he became more and more glum and drunken. Even John was startled by how badly things were turning out. “I think of F[red] who seems to me deeply unhappy,” he wrote in his journal.

  I can't imagine how they think of me or how they anticipated thinking of me. It may have been little Joey; it may be unacceptable to them that I am not little Joey and this may again be vanity on my part. But why should I go to see him; with one exception, when we were alone, our meetings have been disastrous. He retires from a creative, a progressive human relationship into a drunken corner every time.

  Fred may have been und
erstandably chagrined that, far from being accepted on his merits as a successful, intelligent (and colorful) businessman, he was practically treated as a pariah. Thus he was less inclined to be gracious in praising his brother's different kind of success, and never mind that Fred fancied himself a writer, too. “We seem unable to grant one another excellence without losing ground,” John wrote, though in fact Fred was delighted as ever by his brother's talent, always exhorting his children to read Uncle John's stories and later his books. And sometimes, when drunk, he'd drop his guard and let his old extravagant affection (and desperation) show: “Don't go, Joey, don't go,” he pleaded one night as John was leaving along the bordered flowerbeds that traversed Fred's lawn. John thought his brother seemed almost frightened and wondered “what there was to frighten a man, surrounded by his family.”

  In time John would know the loneliness of being a bad drunk, estranged from friends and family alike; for now (given Iris's tendency to “complain passionately” about her husband) he might have surmised that what Fred wanted was a drinking companion, a little commiseration, since clearly his own family didn't fill the bill. For the past five years or so, his older children had been watering his gin, hoping to forestall the moment when Fred's joviality turned into something else—something ghastly that Fred himself was less and less apt to remember, such that he seemed almost puzzled when his children tried to remonstrate with him. As his daughter Jane recalled, “His attitude was ‘Well, I don't think there's anything wrong. I'm providing for all of you.’ “ While in Briarcliff, she and her brother, David, finally went to a dry-out facility and spoke with a doctor, who assured them that little could be done until their father wanted to help himself. Fred gave no indication, however, of being anywhere near that point, and meanwhile his obnoxious behavior got worse. According to his brother's journal, he called Mrs. Vanderlip an “old bag” and almost made it a point, at parties, to “single out some woman of a conservative appearance” and ask her if she wanted to fuck him. “You're a lovely old bitch,” he remarked to his daughter's future mother-in-law (to whom it was explained that there was nothing necessarily pejorative about the word “bitch” when spoken by Fred; it was interchangeable with “woman”). Sober, Fred was a kind, lovable, funny man (if a bit prickly and arrogant when put on the defensive), and the sober Fred decided that things weren't working out in Westchester. He was not sober, however, when he visited his brother to announce that he and his family were moving to Connecticut after less than two years in Briarcliff. “Going out F[red] gooses M[ary],” John recorded. “ ‘I hope we'll see more of you,’ I whimper, ‘now that you're going away.’ “ Though he felt nothing but relief as he watched Fred shamble off, he couldn't help feeling sorry for the man, and wistful too, as if he'd encountered a former lover “grown old and shabby”: “But the fact is that we were once like lovers, that this has left an opening, a weakness in my mind, a lack, a longing, the chagrin of unrequition, a sexual tristesse.”