by Blake Bailey
Tired and disoriented, they hired a carriage in Rome and spent the first day sightseeing. At the Tomb of Augustus, Cheever thought his heart would break (“Is this all, is this all there is?”), and matters soon took a turn for the worse. Eleanor Clark had found them a temporary two-room apartment at La Residenza, an expensive pensione near the Villa Borghese Gardens; they'd been there all of four days when Ben's beloved mouse, Barbara Frietchie, died. Aboard the boat, the eight-year-old and his pet had been inseparable, winning second place in a hat contest (the hat featured Barbara clinging to the brim with a piece of cheese). Now, however, in the close quarters of La Residenza, the mouse's odor was especially pungent, and one night, after the children had gone down to dinner, Cheever stole into their room and sprayed the cage with perfume. The next day, Barbara Frietchie was dead. “Mary bought violets in the Piazza di Spagna,” Cheever wrote Herbst. “Barbara was laid out in a candy box and I was commissioned to bury her in the Borghese gardens but the ground was hard and she got a sordid resting place.” Worried that he'd be caught digging in the public garden with a spoon, Cheever finally chucked the mouse into a trash can, and when he returned to the apartment, his children were weeping hysterically and begging to go home.
The bigger picture was also grim. They'd learned in Palermo—where a pack of newsboys had run screaming through the streets—that Israel had invaded the Gaza Strip in response to Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal, and another world war appeared imminent. This was the substance of Cheever's daily reading while he sat on a ratty sofa sipping bad gin and tap water; it also dominated the conversation at cocktail parties, where Cheever encountered a colony of Americans every bit as tedious and provincial as the ones he'd left behind in Scarborough: “They talk gaily about the certainty of war,” he wrote Maxwell, “and with their Roman clothes and jewelry and their knowledge of good small restaurants they seem to be fulfilling ambitions that must have been formed in the kitchens and backyards of small and lonely American Towns.” Given, too, that he was running through his money at a harrowing rate, that he could scarcely buy a newspaper without getting shortchanged, that he lacked the linguistic skills to remonstrate, and that “the dash of Roman men … reminded him of his own contested sexual identity,” Cheever already felt so homesick that he couldn't imagine why he'd ever left Westchester in the first place. After an especially dreadful cocktail party, he almost decided to cut his losses and go—this after a week or so in Rome—but resolved to stick it out like “Scout camp” and see if the “storms of strangeness” would pass.
By then he'd looked at some twenty-five “indescribably dismal apartments” and was about to sign a lease on a “cubby-hole in the outskirts,” but Eleanor Clark persuaded him to stay in the middle of town (bus service was terrible). With her help they found a rather stunning place: the piano nobile on the fourth floor of the Palazzo Doria, directly across from the Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini had hailed the multitudes. The place mostly consisted of a cavernous, gold-ceilinged salon, divided by screens into reading, living, and dining rooms, in the last of which Cheever sat typing his letters (and little else) at an ormolu table: “There is only one chair in the salon where I can sit and have my feet touch the floor and there are two chairs where my feet don't even hang over the edge.” Such grandeur didn't come cheap, but then Cheever had the added pleasure of regaling guests with tales of his romantic landlady, the Principessa Doria, an anti-Fascist who'd escaped the Nazis by hiding in a Trastevere cellar during the occupation. On the other hand, gas leaked in the grubby little kitchen, the drains were clogged, and there was only one water closet, with a toilet seat that pinched (“impulsive or hasty guests could be heard howling in pain behind the closed door”).
Within a few weeks, Cheever was “on thin ice financially” and had to borrow from The New Yorker. As for his children, they were still crying themselves to sleep every night, but at least they were back in school: Susan at Marymount International (“a convent where they work the nose off her”) and Ben at the Overseas School (“where he gets along mostly with Burmese”). The family's lack of Italian and basic cluelessness continued to make everyday life a strain. On Thanksgiving, Mary went shopping for the feast, but at five different shops (there were no supermarkets) the best she could manage was some bread, salami, and cheese. While Ben ate raw fish and rice at the home of his new Burmese friend, Ronald Aung Din, the rest of the Cheevers sat at a warped kitchen table and ate salami. Susan wept: “I don't like Rome,” she said. “It's just like any other big city. It's noisy and dirty and expensive and the crowds are always running and what does it matter if you see a ruin now and then?” Cheever recorded the remark in his journal and wrote, “I think she is so right.”
A week or so later—after a day “like a witches [sic] tooth”—Cheever came home from his Italian lesson and found a letter from a stranger in Philadelphia informing him that Time magazine had “panned the collection.” The collection was titled Stories and included work by Cheever and three other notable New Yorker writers: Jean Stafford, Maxwell, and Daniel Fuchs. (The early Time review—”News from the Defeated”—wasn't really that bad: it called Stafford “the biggest name and most accomplished craftsman of the group” and didn't mention Cheever at all, though the four were collectively praised for their “competence.”) The idea for the book had originated a few years back, when Cheever had met Stafford at a party given by their mutual friend Margot Morrow. Someone had asked the two why they hadn't published more story collections. As Cheever wrote in his “Authors’ Note”:
The writers explained that—aside from the indifference of publishers—to collect short stories is something like marrying many times and collecting all your wives under one roof on a rainy day. Furthermore, collections of short stories are usually reviewed in tandem or four-in-hand and in an atmosphere of combativeness (X is more sensitive than Y) that overlooks the fact, known to most writers, that to make sense out of life is an exertion of uncommon cooperativeness.
Thinking no doubt of the invidious comparisons he'd suffered because of Nine Stories, Cheever had proposed that Stafford and he collaborate with Salinger on a collection of their most recent fiction; such a show of solidarity would perhaps appeal to the reviewers’ better natures. Salinger, however, politely declined (“What a very nice idea!”), and Cheever recruited Maxwell along with their old friend Fuchs, wryly suggesting they title the book (in homage to Hawthorne) Mosses from Four Old Manses. The more generic Stories included five by Stafford, four by Cheever (“The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” “The National Pastime,” “The Bus to St. James's,” and “The Country Husband”), and three apiece by Maxwell and Fuchs. Reviews were sparse but admiring. In the Times Book Review, Richard Sullivan described the stories as “expert, worthy and honorable pieces of prose,” while at least two other major reviewers singled out “The Day the Pig Fell into the Well,” both as the best (William Peden) and the gloomiest (Orville Prescott) story in the collection.
Back in Italy, meanwhile, things were looking up at last. One day Cheever got in touch with a fellow expatriate, the novelist Elizabeth Spencer. His wife was pregnant and becoming rather frantic, Cheever explained, what with one thing and another; he wondered if they might borrow Spencer's maid for an afternoon. Presently a short, energetic woman wearing a cat-fur stole appeared, and promptly began “raising great Biblical clouds of dust in the middle of the sala,” as Cheever wrote. “I Cheevers hanno bisogno di me,” the woman told Spencer (“The Cheevers have need of me”), to whom she sent her sister as a replacement. The new maid was named Iole Felici, and she would remain in Cheever's life until the end. For thirty-five cents an hour, she did the cooking, cleaning, minor repairs, and most of the child-rearing; she also dealt with various merchants who'd been robbing the monoglot Americans, and took it upon herself to hire a second maid, Vittoria, to help with heavy work. When Cheever tried to take out the garbage or carry his own groceries, Iole would scold him for making a brutta figura (“lousy impres
sion”)—a phrase that enchanted him.
Cheever's love of the language would prove an elusive, lifelong affair. In Rome he diligently attended La Società Nazionale Dante Alighieri, where a heavy woman “with a large amethyst brooch and a bum leg” scrawled verbs on the chalkboard and hissed (“psssst!”) for silence. To little avail. Aside from a few stilted phrases, Cheever was never able to master la bella lingua, whereas his wife got good enough to chat with the maids and keep secrets from him. Cheever's own attempts to communicate with his staff had a way of going awry. The teenage Vittoria would bring him breakfast in bed, but didn't understand that he preferred to eat his boiled egg from the shell, un-peeled. As his daughter remembered, “He studied the dictionary carefully, finding the word for egg, the word for kitchen, and the word for peel. In the morning, when Vittoria appeared, he cleared his throat and carefully asked her not to peel the eggs in the kitchen. Vittoria shrieked, blushed, and rushed from the room in tears. What my father had said was, ‘Do not undress in the kitchen, you egg.’ The fact that Vittoria had been changing her clothes in the kitchen didn't help.” But Cheever kept trying to learn, and eventually came to believe that Italian was his “linguistic hole card,” as he put it. People like Shirley Hazzard, who really did speak the language, would sigh whenever a tipsy Cheever gave a telltale leer and began speaking “his ghastly Italian.”
CHEEVER DIVIDED the American colony into “Academy and unAcademy,” and found a fair number of “duds” in both groups. While unAcademy people were often provincial and generally foolish, Academy people were dull in their own right and doubtless intimidated Cheever with their intellectual airs. In early December he attended a reception for Robert Penn Warren—Eleanor Clark's husband of four years—and reported afterward that he hadn't “been so uncomfortable since they discontinued the old 59th Street cross-town trolley cars.” For the rest of his life, Cheever would see the Warrens once or twice a year, at Institute functions or the couple's Christmas parties in Connecticut, but he and “Red” never became close—except perhaps for a single afternoon when he visited the Warrens’ apartment in the Academy complex atop the Janiculum, one of the highest hills in Rome. The two went for a walk along the Via Aurelia and discussed their various projects and ideas. “We saw some pretty country, bought bread and cheese and ate it in the sunlight, throwing our scraps to a pair of tame magpies,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “Then, walking back a terraced hill covered with sheep, he recited and Dante'd [i.e., recited Dante]. We must have walked sixteen miles. All very pleasant.” Warren noticed, however, that Cheever tended to grow “impatient” whenever the erudite Kentuckian resorted to “generalizations”—that is, the sort of formalist lingo he was apt to exchange with Cleanth Brooks. Cheever himself “always talked specifics”—nice little details from the books he loved—and privately mocked Warren as an “academic charlatan” who confused philosophy with literature.
Ralph Ellison was also at the Academy (he'd gotten his 1955 Prix de Rome renewed for another year), and he and Cheever were friendly in a somewhat constrained way. “His face can shine with light,” said the latter, “but it doesn't seem to shine for me.” Though he would never admit it publicly, Cheever had found Invisible Man “longwinded”—an allegorical novel of ideas, after all—and when Ellison would start “talking about negros” and using terms like “mass motivation,” Cheever would make a sympathetic face and cast about for ways of changing the subject. At the Academy, at least, he preferred the surrealist painter Peter Blume, whom he'd known in New York twenty years before; neither Blume nor his wife, Ebie, was inclined to discuss New Criticism or sociopolitical topics, at least with Cheever, who found them “about as clear, sweet and blue-sky as any people I have ever known.”
And finally among the literary set (briefly) was Irwin Shaw, living like a movie star at the Hotel Excelsior and riding around Rome in a chauffeur-driven cream-colored sedan (or “canary-yellow convertible,” as Cheever preferred to describe it). Now that Cheever had finished his novel and gotten a taste from the Hollywood trough, he could afford to laugh at Shaw's zanier excesses, to say nothing of his linguistic facility or lack thereof. “Irwin stopped at the [Excelsior] desk and asked for his mail in Italian,” Cheever wrote a friend.
He spoke such gibberish that [his companion] offered to interpret for him but he said that wouldn't be necessary. The governess of his son, he explained, was Italian and that was why he spoke so fluently. Irwin got his mail—a large bundle of it—and they went out to the chauffeur driven car that Irwin always has in Rome. “I'll ask the chauffeur to hold my mail,” he explained and then made another assault on the bella lingua. “Si, si,” the chauffeur said when Irwin had finished, “si signore.” Then, as Irwin climbed contentedly into the back seat of the car the chauffeur trotted down the street and stuffed Irwin's letters into a mail-box.
Cheever's socializing was a more or less vapid way to kill time (which weighed heavily in the absence of any work), though he longed all the while “for a kind of unicorn”—something more romantic, that is, than a stale friendship or even a pregnant wife. Quite simply he wanted to be in love again, and in that respect he liked the strangeness of Rome. Walking the streets in New York, he was never quite free of “sexual and financial anxiety”: he couldn't help sizing people up and deciding that one or another was richer or more virile or temperate than he. But in Rome he never saw “a recognizable homosexual or alcoholic”: old men bussed one another on the cheeks, and the “coxcombery” of youth seemed to have little to do with class or sexual disposition. The mystery appealed to Cheever—the whole hopeful ethos of “arsehole jokes and golden piety that … adds up to an honest measure of our nature.”
Of course, the pious side of Cheever's nature was devoted to his family, and he was duly grieved by the ordeals of a pregnant woman in a foreign land. Mary noticed that Roman men rarely gave up their seats to her on buses, and her obstetrician was downright “brusque and patronizing.” At one point he diagnosed her with toxemia and told her to eat nothing but spinach (without oil or salt): “She did this for two weeks,” Cheever wrote, “and then protested and the Doctor said: ‘But I have gout and that's all I eat.’ Mary said that he wasn't going to have a baby and he drew himself up and said, ‘It's not my role in life.’ “ The onset of labor (on March 9) came as a blessed relief. The Blumes drove Mary to Salvador Mundi Hospital on the Janiculum, where she lay in a birthing room, along with nine or ten screeching Italians, and read her husband's copy of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Cheever, meanwhile, was fretfully pacing the streets of a city whose aspect “seemed pitiless and cruel”: “I went to the zoo for a Campari and found myself surrounded by hyenas, buzzards, wolves and grisley [sic] bears. Then I climbed up the roof of St. Peters but all the prophets had their backs to me.” Arriving at the hospital, he found his wife “in great pain”—and alone, because her bookish decorum had resulted in neglect. A nun was summoned in the nick of time, and twenty minutes later Cheever was told he had “un figlio robusto.” “I don't ever remember loving a child so much,” he wrote in his journal the next day, after visiting the hospital with Susan and Ben. “I have a drink and feel very odd—the cold, I guess—and looking down from my balcony into the street I covet the freedom of young bucks in open cars going down to Ostia to raise hell, and observe how a man can be given nearly everything the world has to offer and go on yearning.”
Cheever would not stop yearning, to be sure, but neither would he ever love another human being as much as his younger son, Federico.* Though easily disappointed in people (particularly his family), Cheever noted toward the end of his life that Federico had always been “a source of boundless pleasure” and even his own “salvation”—quite true, if not unfailingly mutual. And Cheever wasn't the only one whose love of the boy was lifelong and unconditional. “Il Ducef! Il Ducef!” Iole cried ecstatically when they brought him home. Unmarried and childless, she spirited the baby away and would only yield him at nursing time. Dubbing him picci—�
��little one”—she did not abide contradiction on matters pertaining to his care: she ignored Princess Doria's complaints about the diapers hanging from one end of the balcony to the other, and when Cheever returned from the doctor with a bottle of brown medicine (a purgative of some sort), she snatched it out of his hand and poured it down the sink amid a long incomprehensible harangue of rapid-fire Italian.
* He wanted to name the boy Frederick, of course—after his father and once-beloved brother—but ran into trouble with the birth certificate: there is no “k” in the Italian alphabet (“I gave up after an hour or two”). As a grown man Federico is generally called Fred, though I use the Italian by way of distinguishing him from other Freds in Cheever's life.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
{1957}
WHEN OBLIGED TO DISCUSS his almost total inability to work during those first months in Italy, Cheever would sometimes explain that he couldn't find the right sort of paper, or that he didn't have enough privacy in the Doria salon, or even that the ceiling was too high. Mainly, though, he was obsessively “woolgathering” about The Wapshot Chronicle. He couldn't help wondering what sort of reception the book would get, and this led to rereading it over and over (“I hope to become so bored and tired with it that I will forget it”) in order to reassure himself. Usually he rather liked the book, and this in turn led to further woolgathering about fame and fortune—or at least a sale to the Book-of-the-Month Club, so he could really afford life as a leisured expatriate. As it happened, the club was all for it, except for one problem: the word “fuck.” As Ralph Thompson (the editorial director) explained to his old friend Mike Bessie, the club had never distributed to its members a book with that word in it; therefore he wondered if the author might be persuaded to come up with some reasonable equivalent. Bessie got hold of Cheever in Rome and mentioned the money at stake, then told him about the hitch. There was a pause. Finally Cheever replied: “Mike, the answer is no. That's the right word. That's the only word.” Bessie pointed out that the word had been changed when the passage had run in The New Yorker,* but Cheever remained obdurate—there were things he'd do for the magazine that he wouldn't do for anyone else, and that was that. Thus history was made: The Wapshot Chronicle became the first-ever selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club that contained the word “fuck.”