Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Susan doesn't remember any second visit, and definitely no play or Justine Eliot. According to the journal, however, it does appear they returned at least once for her birthday—a visit that wasn't as bleak as the first, though hardly a red-letter day either (“It was not easy to talk with S[usan], but there was nothing sad”). As for that touching set piece he wrote for Maxwell, it was also characteristic of Cheever that he should castigate himself for having written it: “I yearned to discharge with competence and strength the responsibilities of a family man … [and] I glimpsed the lacks I show in turning my daughter's loneliness into a poor anecdote.”

  He would go on telling such anecdotes, though, which generally portrayed himself in a more or less sympathetic light. Twenty years later, while drinking with Raymond Carver and others at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he was effectively in exile from his family), Cheever mentioned that once, after yet another marital spat, he'd woken the next morning to find a message his daughter had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: “D-e-r-e daddy, don't leave us.” Someone remarked that he'd seen that in one of the stories,* and Cheever replied, “Probably so. Everything I write is autobiographical.”

  Asked whether she'd ever written “D-e-r-e daddy” in lipstick, Susan was bemused: “I know how to spell, and I think what we wanted was for him to leave us. One thing about my father was he was always there, you could not get rid of him. He worked at home, he ate at home, he drank at home. So ‘don't leave us’?” She laughed. “That was never the fear.”

  “I WOULD LIKE TO MOVE ALONG,” Cheever wrote, after a couple of years in Scarborough. “This may be some fundamental irresponsibility; some unwillingness to shoulder the legitimate burdens of a father and a householder. … It is partly the provincialism in the air that makes me want to kick over the applecart.” Having spent much of his youth among writers and artists at Yaddo or in the Village—or wherever it struck his fancy to go—Cheever was disheartened by the effort of finding sustenance among the burghers of Westchester, even the best of them. After a typical dinner with the Schoaleses, for example, he wanly observed of Dudley: “And the rich banker, the man who negotiates loans of millions that will bring iron ore out of the mountains and carry natural gas across a continent is utterly delighted to have found in his garden a squash that is shaped like a sexual organ. I am not hurt or perplexed; I am only bored.” For some time Cowley had been hectoring him to go abroad, suggesting his future as an artist was at stake, but Cheever simply couldn't afford it. As he wrote Eleanor Clark (who divided her time between Connecticut and Rome), “I keep writing a story that begins: ‘We lived in Westchester for six months.’ I think we'll be here for years.”

  As long as he was stuck here (he thought), he might as well make the most of it, but how? Sitting at a PTA meeting and listening to friends and neighbors ask silly questions, he couldn't help reflecting—again—how “stupid, depressed, and uncreative” they seemed. Also, in the harsh fluorescent glare, he noticed that one woman's face (a woman he'd always considered pretty) was actually “a wrinkled mask, her gold jewelry rattling and flashing like plumbers gear”—and so it went for them all, himself not excepted: “[H]ow pitifully exposed are all our struggles towards youth and beauty,” he mused. “And if we look like a hobgoblin company … it is because we struggle so to hang onto a youth that is longone [sic].” He'd written about the struggle per se—indeed, he thought “the theme of aging children” was one of the most pervasive in The Enormous Radio—but he wondered whether he really understood, on a level of deep empathy, what was at the bottom of it: “What I want is to live among this in love and charity; and for these feelings to have a clear value; not the vague sentiments of a Christmas card.”

  A breakthrough of sorts occurred at a civil-defense meeting. Gathered in a high school gymnasium with “the rayon blanket tycoon, the vice president of the Life insurance company, etc.,” Cheever and the others discussed what they would do, as a community, when the Bomb fell. Cheever sensed, however, that the dire business at hand was little more than a formality, and what was really on their minds was the touch-football game that would follow the meeting—and this, he concluded, was as it should be: a childish, larky escapism had its uses, at least when the alternative was contemplating Doomsday. And of course he fully shared his neighbors’ zest for the games of their youth (or rather, in Cheever's case, what he would have liked his youth to be), and it reminded him, too, of how Dudley was compelled to hurdle sofas when drunk. And finally all this tied nicely with an idea he'd been kicking around (after a creative doldrums that had now stretched on for many months): namely, the middle-aged suburban male as something out of Bulfinch—a Greek god, perhaps, or Narcissus crossing into hell and “lean[ing] from the boat for a last glimpse at his face.”

  “O Youth and Beauty!”—the first of Cheever's stories set in the Scarborough-like suburb of Shady Hill—was written a few days after that civil-defense meeting, and, despite a nominal pessimism, it reflects the joyful resurgence of Cheever's powers. This was due in part to a discovery that he didn't have to write an “excoriation of the suburbs” after all, adopting instead a tone of detached gaiety—a tone most characteristic of Cheever's mature greatness, a playfulness that would lead him at last to The Wapshot Chronicle. Having noticed his own boredom in reading the leaden openings of most New Yorker stories, Cheever determined to take an approach that would “refresh the attention of the reader”: “At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill,” the story begins, then dives into a whimsical catalogue of tediums, “when almost everybody who was going to play golf or tennis in the morning had gone home hours ago … when the bellicose drunk, the crapshooter, the pianist, and the woman faced with the expiration of her hopes had all expressed themselves …” On it goes, almost half a page, when abruptly the sentence ends and we're brought to the nub of the matter: “Trace Bearden would begin to chide Cash Bentley about his age and thinning hair. The chiding was preliminary to moving the living room furniture.” Once the furniture was arranged, Trace would fire a pistol out the window and Cash would begin hurdling furniture. “It was not exactly a race, since Cash ran it alone, but it was extraordinary to see this man of forty surmount so many obstacles so gracefully.”

  Cash, as Narcissus, is at length brought to hell when he breaks his leg and can no longer run the hurdle race; without that pistol shot to look forward to, that poetic demonstration of his abiding youth, the scales fall from his eyes and the parties of Shady Hill seem “interminable and stale.” And lest we fail to grasp the man's dejection, a suave and witty narrator (who henceforth will intrude himself more and more into Cheever's fiction) is apt to apostrophize on the matter: “Oh, those suburban Sunday nights, those Sunday night blues! Those departing weekend guests, those stale cocktails, those half-dead flowers, those trips to Harmon to catch the Century, those postmortems and pickup suppers!” Cheever knew those blues all right, but he also knew the peculiar magic of those leafy streets, and he imparts this too with sensual immediacy—the “sense of being alive” that he found in Fitzgerald's work, and which he invokes here with a sudden switch to the present tense (the same way one is cued to the building excitement of Gatsby's parties): “Then it is a summer night, a wonderful summer night. The passengers on the eight-fifteen see Shady Hill—if they notice it at all—in a bath of placid golden light. … On Alewives Lane sprinklers continue to play after dark. You can smell the water. The air seems as fragrant as it is dark—it is a delicious element to walk through—and most of the windows on Alewives Lane are open to it.” The night's fragrant nostalgia moves Cash to resume, foolishly, his hurdle races—to take a last look at himself in the water, as it were—until his wife (accidentally or not) shoots him dead in midair. No dénouement is necessary. “It seems allright to me,” Cheever noted on finishing the story. “God knows I need the money. What to do next.”

  Cheever's next story (also set in Shady Hill) was one of his best, “The F
ive-Forty-Eight,” though its raw materials were homely enough. His brother, Fred, had mentioned that he'd fired a secretary who seemed unstable, and afterward the woman had sent him a few threatening notes. (When Iris read the story, she was furious that John had plundered their lives for a donnée—it would be far from the last time—or rather two données: as John wrote in his journal, Fred would sometimes punish his wife “by refusing to speak to her for a week or two.”) But the story is no more about Fred than “O Youth and Beauty!” is about Dudley. Mostly it was determined by Cheever's own alienation—his occasional sense that there were “two worlds,” his own and everyone else's, that he was unloved and unloving, doomed to be “the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality.”

  “When Blake stepped out of the elevator, he saw her,” the story begins, in medias res, proceeding in somber, muted prose that seems the work of an almost entirely different man from the author of “O Youth and Beauty!” Not a flicker of humor is found in “The Five-Forty-Eight,” since the reader is confined to the perspective of a humorless man incapable of love. “She had no legitimate business with him,” he briskly decides of the woman waiting outside the elevator, and that fixes Blake's character once and for all. And yet one feels a vague sympathy for him—as he pauses, say, on a rainy street (the woman lurking somewhere behind him) to peer into a store window: “The window was arranged like a room in which people live and entertain their friends. There were cups on the coffee table, magazines to read, and flowers in the vases, but the flowers were dead and the cups were empty and the guests had not come. In the plate glass, Blake saw a clear reflection of himself and the crowds that were passing, like shadows, at his back.” Here is perfect loneliness—a man divided from the domestic tableau in front of him (made desolate by his gaze) and the crowds passing behind him like so many ghosts. It is precisely the hell of a man “with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality,” a point sustained in almost everything Blake thinks and sees. Trapped on a train—the woman holding him at gunpoint—he wistfully notices the same advertisements at every station: “There was a picture of a couple drinking a toast … and a picture of a Hawaiian dancer. Their cheerful intent seemed to go no farther than the puddles of water on the platform and to expire there.” Meanwhile the woman reads to him from a letter written in the “crazy, wandering hand” that had first signaled her instability, before he seduced and fired her: “ ‘Dear Husband … they say that human love leads us to divine love, but is this true? … I dreamed on Tuesday of a volcano erupting with blood.’ “ Dear Husband is a marvelous touch, and indeed the character (“Miss Dent”) is a triumph of negative capability. Her bizarre behavior is somehow all of a piece, credible from beginning to end, and it even becomes possible to believe that—between her and Blake—she will be the one made whole again. “[A]n extraordinary story,” Maxwell wrote Cheever. “I was lost in admiration for the way you had done the girl, and for the way you brought it off, with the only possible, but completely unforeseeable, ending.”

  WRITING WELL made all the difference to Cheever's mood, and by the summer of 1953 he was far away from the dismal limbo of a year before. After a brief stay at Treetops, he took a room at the Hotel Earle on Washington Square and wrote three stories. Alone in the city—that precarious state—Cheever found it a splendid and even healthy place: “Walking on the streets I have never felt so well,” he wrote in his journal. “The loneliness that seems to have pursued me is over. … [T]he quality of hurt and fear, the feeling of deprivation, all these limitations seem conquered.” Such was his well-being that when he encountered his old, unloved acquaintance, Katherine Anne Porter, looking haggard and forlorn, he invited her to dinner at the Plaza. (“[She] kept chatting about American poetry and looking across the room to where a woman in a pale blue dress was eating watermelon,” he wrote Eleanor Clark.) A few days later, still magnanimous, he left the city and took his family to Cape Cod, and once he got back to Scarborough he began working “so happily” that he hardly gave a thought to moving to Europe.

  This lasted until New Year's Eve, when an annual bal masqué was held at the Swopes’ barn on Teatown Lake. It was the community's biggest social event, involving months of preparation. During the Cheevers’ first year in Scarborough, the theme had been “Come as a Clue to ‘52”: Mary had dressed as Pax (white gown and shawl, laurel branch with olives entwined), and Cheever had borrowed a Saracen helmet from Mrs. Vanderlip. This time the theme was “How You See Yourself in Heaven,”* and Mary was chairwoman of the decoration committee. Weeks before Thanksgiving, even, dinner parties were held on the pretext of discussing décor (Heaven and Hell) and arranging such effects as a “wire-recording of the ‘strange tongues, horrible outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, etc’” As for the actual party, it began well and ended in disaster—”a trauma,” as Cheever would always remember it.

  That night, as always, there were early cocktails and a sit-down dinner, a stop at the Beechwood gala to pay homage to Mrs. Vanderlip, until finally they arrived at the Swopes’ barn, where Cheever swung the women around in widening circles, the way he'd learned at the Masonic Temple in Wollaston. Shortly after midnight (“moved by profound love and some alcohol”), he asked his wife to dance but was “rudely” repulsed—and the next thing he knew (or thought he knew), she'd disappeared into the parking lot with another man, Rod Swope, Sally's handsome brother-in-law. (“I never did,” said Mary, “but I'd like to.”) Cheever sadly recounted coming home around three, alone, and washing away his makeup and all traces of false beard. In the wan light of dawn Mary herself came home, and, despite Cheever's determination to be “just” and “cheerful,” she regarded him with “looks of aversion and grief “ for weeks and even months to come. “If I ever see R.S. again”—Cheever scrawled in his journal—”I will bash him in the nose.” Such sentiments were promptly transmuted into a story, “Just Tell Me Who It Was,” about a man who suspects his wife of cuckolding him at a fancy-dress party; it was the fourth story in Cheever's bonus cycle at The New Yorker, and hence resulted in an extra 15 percent payment on that story as well as the previous three. This, however, was small comfort.

  It wasn't just other men who worried Cheever, but anything Mary did that seemed to indicate a waning interest in wifely duties. Her participation in the League of Women Voters, for example, excited an almost hysterical chagrin, which as usual Cheever cloaked with a lot of good-natured ridicule in his letters: she was a “comical character,” he wrote, who got up early every morning and nailed signs to trees alerting “the ladies” to their latest meeting, while he, Cheever, hid “in a neighbor's attic.” In fact, he feared nothing less than total abandonment, suspecting that her interest in the League of Women Voters and Rod Swope was all too justified. Impotence had become an issue in their marriage, and this was a very vicious cycle for Cheever. Any failure to perform resulted in proliferating anxieties, which drove him deeper into drink and further impotence; rather than blame drink and certain other factors, though, Cheever would find ways of blaming his wife—she was cold, self-involved, and so on—which in turn heightened her own exasperation and caused her to reject him in actual fact.

  Beneath it all, of course, was an escalating terror of homosexuality, and living among the dauntingly normal citizens of Scarborough didn't help. Alleged “sex perversion” was a bigger stigma than ever—the fifties were a time of rampant homophobia, of government witch hunts and random police raids—and there was a lot of heavy, nervous joking at suburban cocktail parties. “Jumping at every mention of homos,” Cheever wrote in his journal, which in the early months of 1954 was filled with self-loathing on the subject. “He speaks scornfully of effeminate men lest he be misunderstood and as he scorns his own effeminacy,” Cheever wrote of an acquaintance. “And in making this harsh judgment I might say that I sometimes seem to live behind a veil of ignorance myself.” That was perh
aps an understatement, though in Cheever's case it wasn't so much ignorance as visceral revulsion. Every encounter with suspected homosexuals (“with their funny clothes and their peculiar smells and airs and scraps of French”) struck him as “an obscenity and a threat,” such that his own impulses were unbearable and had to be numbed with alcohol or blamed on his wife. But then homosexuality was only part of the problem, as even Cheever could see. Reading the psychoanalyst Karen Horney one night, he realized that he was “implicated in the neurotic picture,” given his insatiable need for love and approval (often caused by “parental indifference,” said Horney), and never mind his pathological jealousy: he strained himself to write kindly, witty, intimate letters to almost total strangers; his public persona was unassailably charming (belied withal by the depressive paranoia of his journal); he followed comely people around on the street; he felt an “erotic, childish” hankering almost all the time, and regarded himself (rightly) as “a punching bag for the beauty and virility of the world.” But why speak only of the neurotic's “frustrations,” he wondered, when “a good deal of poetry and charm can be involved”?