Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  But a piecemeal approach was the only way to proceed, given his finances. Indeed, the journal suggests that the first usable part of The Wapshot Chronicle was the “Clear Haven” episode—begun in early 1954—which appears in the last third of the published novel. “Clear Haven” originated as a lampoon of the Vanderlips’ ghastly mansion—to say nothing of Mrs. Vanderlip herself (who, like Cousin Justina Wapshot Molesworth Scaddon, was a great believer in celibacy)—but a long time would pass before Cheever could figure out how to relate it to the rest of his material. In the meantime he put it aside to write what he hoped would prove a salable, self-contained story about the Wapshots, “Independence Day at St. Botolph's [sic],” which appeared that summer in The New Yorker and was partly cannibalized into the first and fifth chapters of his novel. In the magazine story, Leander is named Alpheus,* a ferryboat captain who loves “boarding-house widows, seaside girls, and other doxies,” and freely consoles himself with same after learning that his high-minded wife doesn't like to be “embraced.” On Independence Day, Mrs. Wapshot discovers her jewelry box has been rifled and assumes, tearfully, that Alpheus has robbed her in order to run away with a randy widow. In fact, Alpheus has hocked the baubles to buy fifty dollars’ worth of fireworks: “He was in high spirits, for he knew there would never again be such a display at the farm.”

  For the actual Leander of the novel, though, Cheever wanted something more than simply a colorful scoundrel, and hence considered “breath[ing] some fire” into the character by including his “autobiography”—that is, a document based on Frederick Cheever's notes about his youth during the gaslight era of old New England. The problem was how to turn his father's “antic” and “vulgar” writing into a properly elegant prose style. “Having revised these lines as Gide might have written them,” Cheever later wrote, “I realized that my father was a better writer than I, and using his style I went on then to invent a character and a life that would have gratified him.” At the time, Cheever wrote two chapters of Leander's journal (sometimes quoting his father verbatim) and rather doubtfully gave them to Maxwell, hoping for a little feedback at best. Maxwell was not only wildly enthusiastic (“I was mad about that journal”), but willing to publish the whole thing almost word for word in The New Yorker as “Journal of an Old Gent.” For Cheever it was the crucial turning point: “So many of my plans for books have backfired, withered and vanished,” he wrote Maxwell after getting the news. Now, however, he had both confidence and money enough to continue—though little existed of the novel except a few bright scraps: the first part of Leander's journal; the Independence Day parade in St. Botolphs; and bits of “Clear Haven” (which might or might not fit into the ultimate design). As Cheever noted in early February 1955, “[W]hen I drink a martini after dark the book seems to unfold before my eyes like a roll of pianola music … but in the clear light of morning I have my troubles.”

  A MONTH AFTER THIS WATERSHED, Linscott decided to pull the plug. “It is nine years now since we advanced you $4800 to write a novel and two years since the last report of ‘No progress,’ “ he wrote on March 2, 1955, with unwonted severity. “Meanwhile our finance department has been pressing me to make some sort of arrangement for repayment.” The man added, pro forma, that of course he'd prefer a complete, publishable manuscript, but in lieu of this he suggested that Cheever “undertake to pay us back in installments.” After further negotiation (epistolary), Linscott agreed to release Cheever if he could repay half the advance, and Cheever began casting about for a savior (“I wonder if any publisher will pay as much for a forty-three year old writer”). In the meantime, expecting a modest windfall from the television sale of “The Country Husband,” he took his family to Nantucket for the summer.

  He'd rented a big, rickety old Boston cottage* atop a bluff on the narrow northeastern tip of the island, in Wauwinet, with spectacular views of the ocean on one side and the bay on the other. “I am able to spend a good deal of money on liquor,” he wrote the Spears, “because we have found a sea pond that is teeming with steamers, cherry stones, oysters, and blue crabs and we can count on a good deal in the way of free groceries.” One day the family was frolicking naked in the little pond, digging for clams, while the dog Cassie furtively removed their discarded clothing: “When we climbed back to the sand dune that afternoon there was nothing but one shoe,” Ben remembered. “My father had to slink back to the house naked, and then return with clothes for the rest of us.” The place was isolated but hardly deserted; nearby was a family-owned hotel with little cottages, and the Cheevers had plenty of social life. They hired a well-born young woman named Cordelia (“Dilly”) to help look after the children and teach them how to sail, as well as to team up with Cheever in the local yacht-club races—a “disaster,” as Mary recalled: “They found themselves going backward. John came from an old maritime family, so he liked to believe he knew something about sailing.”

  He was fretful about finances: the television deal was still in suspense, and always nagging at the back of his mind was that unpaid Random House advance. “These old bones are for sale,” he wrote Simon Michael Bessie, a senior editor at Harper & Brothers whom he'd met at a Westchester lunch. He mentioned the price—twenty-four hundred dollars—and warned Bessie that the novel “may or may not ever be written,” but in any event he was tired of running into Bennett Cerf at parties and invariably being greeted (after a few fumbling moments of nonrecognition) with “Oh yes, of course—uhhh—Cheever! … How's that novel coming?” If Bessie saw fit to repay the advance, said Cheever, he must never ask how the novel is coming. As it happened the man was also on Nantucket that summer, and a few days later Cheever was gazing pensively out his window at the harbor, when suddenly he descried a dazzling yacht on the horizon. Presently the boat was anchored and a dinghy rowed ashore containing a dapper fellow dressed in flannels and a navy blazer: Bessie. “I'm looking for John Cheever!” he announced, and thus a bit of literary history was made. So Cheever told it. Actually, Bessie had simply phoned the author and asked where he should send the check. In due course, though, he did sail a modest catboat into the harbor and pay Cheever a visit. “He has a slender face, glasses, a nimble mind, I think, liberal and perhaps prosaic,” Cheever noted after their meeting. “I'm not sure that he will like what I do, and it doesn't much matter. I've got to get to work.”

  The months that followed were among the happiest of Cheever's adult life. Four days a week he worked on The Wapshot Chronicle, and his leisure was savored all the more as a result of his steady progress. The grail was almost within his grasp—a novel!—and he felt a thrilling sense of “having overwhelmed [his] detractors … of having a headlong and exciting role to play.” Suddenly the suburbs seemed a golden place—a paradise of creativity and fellowship. On weekends he drank martinis and raked leaves and played piano or recorder in a Baroque ensemble—this amid the usual games of scrub hockey and touch (“A lovely afternoon; the women cheering; Tommy Brooks running with the football under his sweater”). He and Mary got invitations for parties almost every Saturday night, and the next morning at eight o'clock (no matter how bad his hangover) Cheever duly appeared at the communion rail.

  Such was his renewed sense of belonging that he joined the Scarborough Fire Company and persuaded a few neighbors to follow his lead—a tight group, said Cheever, who “ate roast beef and drank India Pale Ale,” whereas Briarcliff firemen settled for baloney and Rhein-gold. What particularly appealed to Cheever, or at least piqued his interest, was the chance to mix with the indigenous population, the Italian and Irish who'd lived in Westchester long before the commuting crowd had moved in after the war. It always pleased Cheever to be accepted by working people: Peter Wesul at Treetops, Nellie Shannon at Yaddo, and Angelo Palumbo, the Beechwood superintendent and fire-company veteran, who organized cookouts and taught Cheever and his friends how to use the equipment. Cheever found it “smalltown stag and pleasant”: he got a kick out of whooping around in the Diamond T fire engine, playing th
e spotlight on his comrades when they ducked behind the truck to take long beery pisses. As a writer he was made secretary, and soon began typing his letters on Scarborough Fire Company stationery: “As you can see from the letterhead,” he wrote Herbst, “I have gone way up in the world. … I have my own exclusive club—a brotherhood of 29 manly, hard-drinking, courageous fellows. … As my father used to say: What a bully life!” Or so he liked to think. Worried that his new friends would doubt his commitment, he made a point of attending the many social functions—”and attending” (he wrote in his journal) “I must eat clams and drink beer and clams and beer make me sick. Life. Life.” After a few months he bestowed the office of secretary on his fellow writer Jack Kahn and promptly resigned.

  By then, however, Cheever's thoughts were on higher things—not just his novel but his immortal soul, and indeed the one seemed to remind him of the other. “While I was writing the book I would walk around the streets,” he later recalled, “staring into the faces of embarrassed strangers and asking myself what glad tidings could one bring them? … I settled for a book that closed with praise of a gentle woman and The Lord God of Hosts.” Cheever had been a churchgoer for many years, often explaining that he'd regained his faith as a result of falling in love for the first time, or, as he sometimes put it, “because of an experience of sexual ecstasy so great that I felt impelled to respond through liturgical gesture.” But his most recent happiness—after the awful lows of the past decade—had reinvigorated his sense of a benevolent Creator (“[T]here is some love in our conception. … [W]e were not made by a ruttish pair in a commercial hotel”), and his need to express thanks was so powerful that he decided to be confirmed. As he explained to a friend, “[H]aving lived much of my life like an odd mixture of man and cockroach* I found, not so long ago, that the cockroach had left me and I am still now and then bewildered by the strenuousness of my pleasure. … I keep telling the rector that I did not reenter the church because I travail and am heavy-laden, but because I was happy …”

  The All Saints rector was Reverend William Arnold, who presided at Cheever's confirmation on October 16, 1955. With this man at least somewhat in mind, Cheever once told his son Ben that it didn't matter if the minister was a jackass—though there were times, plainly, when it did. “I will not go to church,” Cheever recorded one Good Friday, “because B[ill] will insist upon giving a sermon and I will not have the latitude or the intelligence to overlook its repetitiousness, grammatical errors and stupidity.” Arnold was an affable, tippling bachelor who liked to insinuate himself as much as possible into the life of the community, participating in local theater productions and cadging meals among his flock. What he knew about Cheever was that the latter wrote “articles” for The New Yorker and served enormous martinis, such that the garrulous ex-army chaplain was sometimes slow to leave in the evenings. “I'd ask you to stay for dinner, Bill, but I don't even know what we're going to have,” Cheever once remarked, urging the man out of his chair just as Cassie wandered into the room with a leg of lamb clamped in her jaws (the meat was extracted and popped in the oven). Nevertheless Cheever stuck with All Saints, because it met his basic requirements: it used the Cranmer prayer book and was less than ten minutes away, and (as Susan Cheever pointed out) its altar was “sufficiently simple so that it [didn't] remind him of a gift shop.” Also, the eight o'clock service was sermon-free, so he could have at least twenty-three minutes of relative peace each week (“a level of introspection that's granted to me at no other time”). Not one to proselytize, he rarely mentioned his faith except at odd moments when visited by the same happiness that had moved him to become a communicant in the first place: “There has to be someone you thank for the party.”

  HIS MOTHER clearly wasn't long for the world, and to the end Cheever chided himself to be kinder to the old woman: “He would have liked, somehow, to do it again,” he wrote a few months before her death,* “to have them both behave differently, to spare her, in her old age, the sharp teeth of loneliness, helplessness and neglect.” She was nothing if not proud, however: having been (relatively) deserted by her children and scorned by an ungrateful, dissolute husband, she clung to her independence with something akin to bitterness. “I am eating a capon in front of my fireplace and I am not lonely,” she proclaimed when Cheever phoned during her penultimate Thanksgiving on earth. He felt guilty about neglecting her, but not so guilty that he could bring himself to visit more than once or twice a year. At such times he'd keep a polite simper afloat while his mother chatted (perversely, he thought) about a lovely new mural at the corset shop, or a pleasant young man who was, after all, “a regular boy.”

  Probably the woman had no idea of the bruises she was stomping on—certainly her son wasn't one to enlighten her—and simply figured the best she could do was not be a bother. Toward the end, she sold her little house (giving her sons five thousand dollars apiece) and moved back to the dingy apartment up the street where she'd lived before her husband's death. “Empty rooms, torn windowshades, a glimpse of old age,” Cheever mused while measuring her kitchen floor for linoleum. “[S]he is admirable; she did not ask for sympathy on her moving; and she is a very old woman.” A month later she had a stroke. Cheever returned to find her “bedridden and helpless,” her speech slurred; at first she made the usual show of heroic resilience (“systematically learning to write with her left hand”), but at some point dissolved into tears and said she wanted to die. Though Cheever was stricken by her misery, it simply wasn't in him (or vice versa) to respond with tenderness. “Left in the middle of the afternoon,” he wrote afterward. “Deeply sorry to have arrived at no sense of requition. Here is an excellent woman, but her excellence cannot be applied. There is for both of us a sense of failure that I cannot assess.”

  At the beginning of 1956, her diabetes took a turn for the worse, and her sons arranged for a nurse to look after her. Before long, however, Cheever got a telephone call—the nurse had been fired—and he hurried back to Quincy on the train. “Who told you?” his mother demanded when he appeared at her bedside. With typical self-reliance, she was working her way through a case of Scotch, having been warned by the doctor that alcohol would kill her.* “You must not be upset when I die,” she said. “I am quite happy to go. I've done everything I was meant to do and quite a lot that I wasn't meant to do.” She died a few days later, having finally won her son's unequivocal esteem. “[Although she was afraid of many things in her life—” he wrote, “crowds, confinement, deep water—she seemed to face death completely unafraid.” So it was, on a snowy day in February, that Cheever paid his last visit to the scenes of his childhood, noting his “strong emotion” as he stood at his parents’ graves in Norwell—one of the little towns in that “forgotten valley of the North River” where part of his heart remained. Mostly, though, the environs of Quincy reminded him of a time when he'd felt like “an ugly and useless obscenity,” and he was glad to be shut of it forever.

  His mother's death freed him in another crucial respect. “The Chronicle was not published (and this was a consideration) until after my mother's death,” he told at least one interviewer, though of course he'd been trying to write (and publish) such a book for almost twenty years before her death. Perhaps it's fair to say, though, that his worst inhibitions were lifted, that he felt a bit easier about conferring his mother's quirks on Mrs. Wapshot and Cousin Honora—the latter's tendency to toss her unopened mail into the fire, say, or read Middle-march over and over—not to mention his mother's death, which he would re-create with some exactitude when writing of Honora's death in The Wapshot Scandal. But, mother or no, he was determined to finish his first novel as soon as humanly possible—”to prove [Linscott] wrong” and liberate himself, at least somewhat, from the constraining label of “New Yorker writer.”

  Certainly the time was ripe: Cheever was finally receiving a degree of acclaim from his peers, something he'd fully expected after “The Country Husband.” “I have written to myself imaginary letters of
praise from Auden, Bellow, Trilling, Mizener,” he reported in his journal the day after the story appeared—and the next day: “Still this low comedy of waiting to be complimented … Half asleep I saw letters so numerous that they had to be tied into bundles; but nothing this morning at the PO (which I visited twice) but a belltin [bulletin] from the League of Women Voters.” Presently, however, some mail began to arrive. A. J. Liebling wrote that he considered Cheever the “American Chekhov” (an almost proverbial title in later years); Katharine White called him “one of our most original writers and one of the most gifted.” And finally, when Malcolm Cowley became president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1956, Cheever began rubbing his hands together in earnest. “I guess you and I can look forward to a cozy old age—” he wrote Herbst, “snoozing in club chairs and eating the free food at testimonial dinners. I don't think he'll forget his old friends.”

  What Cheever was specifically hoping for—even counting on—was the Prix de Rome: a fellowship subsidizing a year's residence at the American Academy in Rome.* Cowley of all people knew how badly Cheever had wanted to go abroad these last five years or so; indeed, it was Cowley who kept insisting such a move was essential, lest Cheever lapse into hopeless provincialism. But apparently Cowley's endorsement wasn't enough, for that year's fellowship went to the poet John Ciardi.† Cheever, however, was not entirely overlooked: along with James Baldwin and five others, he was awarded a one-thousand-dollar grant in recognition of his “wry sympathy of heart, [which] has commemorated the poetry of that most unpoetical life, the middle class life of the American metropolis and its suburbs.” Cowley may have sensed chagrin on Cheever's part over what amounted to a relative booby prize; in any case, he accused his old protégé of ingratitude when Cheever declined (in all modesty) to donate an original manuscript to an exhibition at the award ceremony. “I am crushed and miserable,” Cheever promptly wrote the Institute librarian, Hannah Josephson, assuring her that a manuscript was in transit. “I know myself to be drunken and lazy, foolish and lewd, nervous and long-winded, runty and improvident, but God preserve me from ever being balky with such an old friend as you.” (“Spent most of the morning writing letters to repair my fences at the institute,” he wrote in his journal. “Malcolm pompous, I think.”)