Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  It galled Cheever that such occasional sops hadn't translated into anything resembling big money, whereas a mediocre rival like New-house had scarcely written a word in five years because (as he was happy to explain) he'd taken his movie money and tripled it in the stock market; meanwhile his last (ever) novel, The Temptation of Roger Heriott, had been “aimed straight at the cockles of Sam Goldwyn's leathery old heart,” as Cheever saw it. Irwin Shaw had also continued to prosper. Having sold The Young Lions to the movies and gone to Switzerland, he occasionally blew through New York and entertained Cheever, distractedly, in his hotel (“I read the Sunday paper while Irwin talked large sums of money with Hollywood”). But then Cheever was not a worldly man. For years his old Signal Corps buddy John Weaver had exhorted him to hire a proper Hollywood agent—Weaver's own agent and friend, Henry Lewis—but Cheever “kept putting it off”: he didn't like haggling with show-business types, and he didn't want to be seduced, ever, into writing anything remotely like The Temptation of Roger Heriott. At long last, though, he did rather grudgingly assent to Hollywood representation, and roughly two weeks after “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” appeared in the April 14, 1956, issue of The New Yorker, he got a call: Dore Schary of M-G-M had bought the rights for twenty-five thousand dollars. Cheever drank off a glass of whiskey, told his dog Cassie the news, and piously read Winnie-the-Pooh to Ben. “The reason I told the dog about it,” he wrote Weaver afterward, “was because when Henry Lewis called there was no one here but Ben and me and the dog. Mary and Susie had gone to a movie called The Little Kidnappers. I don't believe that children Ben's age should be told about money and so that left me with the dog. … Then Mary came home, received the news sniffily, and went upstairs to sleep. This made me cross so I drank more whisky and sat broodily on the sofa thinking how with this money I could have prostitutes of all kinds, dancing to my whip.” His journal corroborates this account, more or less, including the part about prostitutes.*

  • • •

  ON A THURSDAY IN JUNE, Cheever finished a draft of The Wapshot Chronicle and dropped it off at a typing agency. The next day he drove his family to Friendship, Maine, where he'd rented the Spears’ house (The Spruces) on a point overlooking the Atlantic. “Bostonians, rocks, sunsets, fir trees, a lovely coast line and at dusk the whole point awash with tea,” Cheever wrote. “Lovely, lovely.” The “Bostonians” were three or four sprawling Yankee clans who populated the point in summer, wandering around The Spruces calling “Yoo hoo, yoo hoo,” while drinking martinis out of jelly glasses. Cheever was apt to receive them with perfect magnanimity. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he didn't have to worry about money, and, even better, his novel was finished, his wife was pregnant, and in the fall they were all going to Italy (and the Prix de Rome be damned). “Took Mary and the others out to Ram island in the outboard,” Cheever wrote of a serenely typical day. “Boiled lobsters over a driftwood fire on the rocks … Back here, feeling no pain, ate some excellent chowder, dozed on the sofa listening to Vivaldi. Rain on the roof at four in the morning.”

  As long as his novel was out of sight, he was somewhat able to relish the accomplishment. He wrote himself congratulatory letters (“The Greatest thing since War and Peace”), while anticipating book-club deals, movie sales, every conceivable award. Indeed, he could hardly believe his good fortune—and so he began to doubt it. He suspected the book was, at best, unfinished and full of holes, imagining a letter from Harper & Brothers reminiscent of the rebukes he'd gotten from Linscott over the years (“you may have the beginnings of something here but we feel it would be best if you put this behind you and made a fresh start”). Several times a day he went to the post office, waiting for his freshly typed manuscript, but when it finally arrived he could barely look at it. Fearing the worst, he sent copies to Maxwell and Bessie. “And I'm still up in the air over the book,” he brooded in his journal. “I think that Bill and Mike are reading [it] today. … A telegram cannot reach me here, but this does not keep me from writing them to myself.”

  “WELL ROARED LION,” Maxwell wrote in his first telegram—which arrived safely—and then he sent another: “I don't expect to enjoy anything as much for a long long time. The places and people are all real, the ‘hearty fleeting vision of life’ is consistent and recognizably yours, and the writing is brilliant everywhere. I think it is going to be enormously successful.” This, Cheever reflected, was the very thing he might have written himself, and made all the difference “between feeling alive and feeling like an old suit hanging in a closet.” Maxwell said nothing about “holes” in the structure or making a “fresh start,” and a week or so later he reported further that Shawn and Katharine White had also loved the novel, and wanted to publish two or three long sections in The New Yorker. Mrs. White even wrote separately: “One of the most cheerful things that has happened to me—and to the New Yorker—all this summer is the fact of our going to be able to publish the chapters from your book. … I know it will be a tremendous thing.”

  Heady stuff, and Cheever's elation lasted all of a day or two before he resumed brooding. He'd yet to hear from Bessie, after all, whose “prosaic” turn of mind had worried him ever since that meeting on Nantucket. It was one thing for Maxwell to like the book—he was a fellow artist: he understood Cheever's love of atmospherics, his need to listen (as it were) to the rain. Bessie, like Linscott, was liable to miss the point of all that. “I'm not prepared to remove any smells from this book,” Cheever had declared in his cover letter. “I'm a very olfactory person and I will not be disposed to remove any smells.” But Bessie hadn't minded the smells at all; he'd found the book delightful from start to finish, as had everyone else at Harper. Finally, almost a month after receiving the typescript, he even called Maine to say so: “Tell me!” he greeted Cheever. “How are Mary and the children? And how is Maine?” Cheever—overwrought, all but certain the long silence meant an imminent Linscottian raspberry—replied that Mary and the children were fine, Maine was fine, and how did Bessie like the book? Bessie said (in effect) that the book was wonderful, just wonderful, and he'd be happy to go into more “detailed criticism” in a letter; meanwhile they should have lunch and so on. “I seem to get nothing from Harpers but consternation,” Cheever wrote Maxwell. “They have promised to send me a ‘detailed criticism’ and as Mary points out I can't wait to lay my hands on this and lose my temper.”

  A few days later, Bessie and Cheever met for lunch at the Ritz. As they sat down, Cheever abruptly announced (eyes slightly averted) that he was happy to return the twenty-four hundred dollars if Bessie didn't like the book; also he repeated that business about the smells. “John”—Bessie interrupted—”I tried to tell you for half an hour on the phone the other day what a wonderful book it is, and I'll be glad to start all over again, and somebody [Evan Thomas] said ‘that it's the best thing that has happened to Harper's fiction in a long time’ …” At length Cheever appeared to be mollified, but afterward wrote in his journal that he was still “not satisfied”: “[Bessie] reminds me of other people who put one into the position of a patsy. They stuff you into taxi cabs, buy you plane tickets and buy you the drink you don't need and in the end they leave you standing alone at the bar, surrounded by your luggage and screwed.” He did, however, decide to accept the situation (“I've settled”), but continued to suspect some nastiness in the offing. A week or so later, Mrs. White wrote that she'd recently chatted with Bessie (a friend), who went on and on about The Wapshot Chronicle: “He is very happy about it.” “Harpers seemed to like it but it was very hard to tell,” Cheever replied. “Your good opinion has fortified me over the summer and made me a loving husband and a patient father. Without it I would have got drunk and broken all the dishes.”

  FOR WHATEVER REASON, Bessie had expected Cheever to be something of a lightweight when they first met in Westchester a few years back (quite possibly Cheever had picked up on this), but was pleasantly surprised when the subject of Saul Bellow came up. “Bellow”�
��said Cheever on that occasion—”is the first American novelist of parts who writes neither in sympathy with nor in opposition to the Puritan tradition. He writes as if it didn't exist.” This was high and insightful praise, coming from a writer whose own work was marred (so he thought) by an inordinate preoccupation with the Puritan tradition. Little wonder Bellow would always be Cheever's favorite contemporary, both as a writer and as a man—this even though they'd met on one of the worst days of Cheever's life. “These are the hardest days, hours anyhow,” he wrote on March 27, 1952, after his bad, bad lunch with Linscott. “Then to an unhappy drink at the Commodore and a party at Eleanor's where Saul Bellow was.”*

  Bellow had yet to become an obsession, though Cheever had been impressed by Dangling Man (“Here is the blend of French and Russian that I like”) and doubtless said so in lavish terms. Then, in 1953, Cheever read The Adventures of Augie March and (as he later put it while presenting an award to Bellow) “had the experience, that I think of as great art, of having a profound chamber of memory revealed to me that I had always possessed but had never comprehended.” If anything, the book was even more overwhelming than these orotund words suggest. At the time, Cheever was writing his first Shady Hill stories, and had a sense of coming into his own powers at last; Augie March—as both a vision of life and a piece of writing—was an incitement to do better. “There is to learn that in writing of carnal love he shakes the gloom, the morbidity, the mud, and proseyness (an unclothed woman, etc.) that gets under my feet,” Cheever wrote. “His optimism I share, having reached it by my own, crooked, lengthy, leaf-buried path. We cannot spend our lives in apprehension.” But of course the book was not altogether pleasurable. Faced with “the challenge of a brilliant contemporary,” Cheever tried hard to compare himself favorably. For one thing, he tended to find vernacular prose “distasteful” as a rule, but then his own relative precision was in the service of expressing “the genteel symbols of the middle class”—constricted, in short; small. Meanwhile he kept reading Augie March (“I read it backwards. I read it upside down in a bucket of water”), and finally wrote a letter to its author: if Bellow was as good as all that, then it was Cheever's “manifest destiny” to return to the South Shore “and pump gasoline at one of those service stations on the way to the Cape.” In loftier moments, though, he considered Bellow's work an exalting reminder that literature was “a key part of the human enterprise”—and besides, “writing is not a competitive sport,” as Cheever's public persona liked to say.

  He might have been less generous if he hadn't been so smitten with the man. In the summer of 1956, Cheever was elected to the Yaddo board of directors, and when he returned to Saratoga for the meeting in September, his main concern was seeing Bellow: “At dinner I am conscious of being in the same room with Saul.” The two went for a walk afterward, and Cheever remembered other “passionate friendships” which had begun at Yaddo—with Reuel Denney and Flannery Lewis—wondering why he should feel an almost “mystical” bond with a Chicago Jew. “I cast around for some precedent of two writers with similar aims who are strongly drawn to one another,” Cheever mused. “I do not have it in me to wish him bad luck: I do not have it in me to be his acolyte.” Nor did it seem to matter whether he had anything weighty to say with Bellow. The two had rapport—”we joke, fool, as I like to”—and Cheever couldn't help reflecting a little sadly on “poor BM” [Maxwell], “who never extends this pleasant feeling of friendship, who never quite seems to get out of doors except to bend over his roses.”

  The admiration was wholly mutual. “I loved him,” said Bellow. “A wonderful man.” Both were charming, difficult personalities, and both were at their best with each other on the rare occasions when they met. If anything Bellow was the more prickly of the two, alert to slights of any sort—especially from goyim—but with Cheever he felt “no sense of rivalry,” and certainly never a hint of Yankee condescension. As he remarked in his eulogy, “It fell to John to resolve these differences [of background]. He did it without the slightest difficulty, simply by putting human essences in first place.” Reduced to their essences, the two were fundamentally alike. “We share not only our love of women but a fondness for the rain,” said Cheever. Or, as his wife would have it, “They were both women haters.”

  * A number of Cheever's Barnard students went on to become professional writers—among them Sherwin, Emilie Buchwald, Irma Kurtz, and Piri Halasz.

  * There is no evidence in Cheever's notes (after 1950 or so) that he ever intended to call this character anything but Leander. Probably the name was changed in the magazine to avoid confusion with the Leander of “The National Pastime,” published in The New Yorker about nine months before.

  * The house had belonged to Sally Swope's aunt, who'd recently died of cancer. “Sally was reluctant to use it so soon after her aunt's death,” her son David explained, “so she let the Cheevers have it.”

  * Cheever often referred to his depression as le cafard, “the cockroach” or (colloquially) “the blues.”

  * In his journal, Cheever often referred to himself in the third person, using alter egos such as “Coverly,” “Bierstubbe,” or “Estabrook.”

  * This smacks of mythology, and one can only point out that it was a story Cheever stuck to, with little variation, the rest of his life. From his medical record at Smithers (dated April 10, 1975): “Father was a heavy drinker, mother was not, but at 82 developed diabetes [and] bought a case of scotch and drank herself to death.”

  * The American Academy of Arts and Letters, that is, whose fifty distinguished members were elected from the 250-member National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1976, the two merged into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is now a single, 250-member organization known as the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  † Getting beaten out of the Prix de Rome—by John Ciardi—would rankle forever. In 1979, Cheever was head of the jury awarding the prize, and thus phoned that year's winner, Joseph Caldwell, with the good news. “You yourself won, didn't you?” said Caldwell, filling an awkward pause. Cheever allowed that he hadn't. “Well,” said Caldwell, “keep plugging!” Cheever didn't laugh.

  * In fact, Cheever spent at least part of the money on an old friend. If he'd been awarded the Prix de Rome as expected, then Josie Herbst—now virtually destitute—would have gotten one of the thousand-dollar grants, since she'd been chosen as an alternate. Whether Cheever knew as much is unknown, but once he received the Hollywood money he promptly sent her a check “which should be spent on gin, shoes, and rose-bushes or anything else.” Herbst would have to wait ten more bitter years before she finally got a grant from the Institute (largely at Cheever's behest).

  * Mary Cheever confirmed that this encounter at Clark's party was indeed the first time the two met.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  {1956-1957}

  AFTER HE FINISHED a light revision of The Wapshot Chronicle, Cheever wasn't able to get any work done for a long time. He was tired of writing about (and living in) Shady Hill. For years now he'd been casting ahead to Rome—listening to La Traviata and Tosca again and again, as well as the odd conversational-Italian record—and now at last he was ready to sail. Such was his excitement that he'd hardly considered some obvious difficulties: none of them spoke Italian (records withal); they hadn't arranged a permanent place to stay or schools for the children; Mary was pregnant, and didn't see the point of having a baby in Rome, to put it mildly. Also, Cheever had elected to receive his M-G-M money in three annual installments for tax reasons, and now discovered he had surprisingly little in the bank once he'd paid for boat passage (first-class), trunks, clothing, and the like. And finally there was a more esoteric concern: “So [I am] afraid that I may fall in love in with a dirty duchess or a lonely grocery boy,” he wrote a few days before sailing, “but this is after all not so remarkable; and with a gentle heart and a capricious cod what can you do but trust in the Lord and take your chances.”

  They dep
arted on October 17, 1956, aboard the Conte Biancamano (“a cross between the Fall River Line and the old Ritz”). Cheever rose early and had a last drink with Angelo Palumbo, then a few more with the Boyers, who eventually drove them into New York. After a bon voyage party in their cabin, the ship pulled out of the harbor amid a shower of confetti and circus music. The gaiety lingered perhaps an hour or two: “Then fog, a heavy roll and everyone sick but me.” The wind would blow for six long days. Cheever awoke “to the noise of smashing flower vases and medicine bottles,” and when he emerged in the morning, most of the passengers were absent. Dressed in black-tie, he passed the time in an elegant bar or playing musical chairs with a few stragglers in the ballroom, all the while worrying whether the boat would sink. Finally the weather cleared somewhere around the northern Azores (Cheever went for a swim), and after stops in Lisbon, Casablanca, Gibraltar, Barcelona, Cannes, Palermo, and Genoa, they disembarked at Naples and boarded a train for Rome. “I am tired of the ship,” Cheever wrote in his journal, noting a “peculiarly bad smell” that had pervaded the crossing: “The essence of it seems to have been one rough mid-afternoon when I was hanging onto an ornate piece of furniture with one hand and a glass of whisky with the other, the orchestra playing concert music to a room-full of empty chairs … and the unfresh smell.”