Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Cheever had continued to take a dim view of Bessie and Harper, whose attitude he likened to a large “Boston trust company with a very small investor.” Then, in late February 1957, he received an advance copy of The Wapshot Chronicle and had to admit it was very handsome indeed; that same day he also received a complimentary letter from Bellow, all of which left him in grave danger of “commit[ting] the sin of pride”: “But dizzy with excitement I went out to buy cigarettes,” he wrote in his journal, “and the pretty girl at the cafe, quite a flirt, gave me a look of pure uninterestedness and so I am crushed and feel like myself again.” And still he had a month to go until publication, and still he couldn't get back to work. Instead, he mentally wrote reviews (“I've written them all, even the Albany Times-Union”) and allowed himself to wonder, late at night, what it would be like to open a copy of Il Messaggero and learn that he'd won the Pulitzer.

  One of the first important notices, in the March 24 New York Times Book Review, seemed to portend no such result. “The ‘New Yorker’ school of fiction has come in for so many critical strictures lately that one almost wishes John Cheever, a talented member of this group, would confound the critics and break loose,” wrote Maxwell Geismar, who went on to conclude that Cheever had not, in fact, broken loose, nor was his novel “quite a novel,” or at any rate a very “serious” one. Rather it was mere “entertainment”—a “picaresque” that “didn't quite hang together.” Other reviewers would also point out the novel's “episodic” or “fragmented” structure, and the main question was whether or not they thought this defect was transcended by its virtues. Most of them did. Two days after Geismar's mixed review, Charles Poore wrote in the daily Times that the novel was “a magnificently exuberant story of a Massachusetts sea-sprayed clan, rising, falling, rising again, entangled in plots of awesome adventurousness,” and the Washington Post was similarly effusive: “Cheever's venture is exuberantly, cantankerously, absurdly, audaciously alive,” wrote Glendy Culligan, who also found the book “brilliant, ebullient, alternately sad, funny and tender …” And then there were critics who thought Cheever had decidedly broken loose—not only advancing on previous work, but (as Fanny Butcher claimed in the Chicago Sunday Tribune) “add[ing] something new to the stream of American fiction.” But perhaps the poet Winfield Townley Scott said it best: “It is difficult to think of another contemporary who can write without sentimentality and yet with so much love.”

  Love was very much to the point: “A dear book it is,” Cheever would say of his first novel, never forgetting the terrible obstacles he'd overcome in writing it—a twenty-year effort to reconcile himself (in art, at least) with family demons, and thus find the strength to forge a style, a world, that was magnificently his own. As Rick Moody wrote in his foreword to a later edition, “Where did [Cheever] get the confidence to begin disassembling and reassembling American naturalist fiction, thereby helping to pave the way for the experimentation of the late sixties and the seventies? He got the confidence by writing The Wapshot Chronicle.“ Abandoning naturalism—in this case a literal and all-too-painful evocation of the past—was akin to walking out the “door” that had stood open for Cheever all those years he spent trying to dig his way out of jail “with a teaspoon,” as he'd once put it. What this entailed was yet another reinvention of the young writer who'd once, long ago, been preoccupied with history—namely, the fatalism of a generation coming of age between the wars, during a Depression that had left one feeling rootless and doomed. In The Wapshot Chronicle, however, there is no history as such: no wars, no Depression, and very few “signposts” whatsoever. “I am a little troubled by the way Mr. Cheever plays fast and loose with time,” wrote the critic Granville Hicks, noting (for example) that Hamlet's search for gold in California “must have happened in the 1890s” and yet is depicted “as if he were one of the original Forty-niners.”* Just so, and this was one of Cheever's favorite effects: wiping the slate clean, as it were, the better to give his characters “a freedom to pursue their emotional lives without the interruptions of history.” Likewise he cobbled together a mythical place, St. Botolphs, that “can't be found on any map” but rather represents “a longing for simplicity and coherence.”

  Ejected from this paradise, the brothers Moses and Coverly embark on a series of adventures in the disorderly modern world, with little regard on their creator's part for narrative continuity. As Cowley predicted, Cheever would always be an episodic writer, more or less, having persuaded himself that conventional cause-and-effect narration was silly and contrived, worthy only of parody—and on a deeper level, he was almost temperamentally incapable of constructing such a plot. “Perhaps you could have given the book a little more of a novelistic air by adding a few sentences here and there to answer some questions left hanging,” Cowley remarked, noting that strands of the novel are abandoned and never retrieved. (What becomes of Rosalie from the first section? Leander's illegitimate daughter?) Cheever, with his usual breezy candor, replied that such questions were left unanswered because the author was “such a pig-headed fool”: his editors had made all the same points, Cheever said, but he simply chose to ignore them, because “for once [he] was on [his] own and would not change or explain a word.” And doubtless he liked it better his way, without a lot of deadly, quibbling logic. Cheever was, after all, an improvisational writer who trusted his instincts: he wrote scenes out of sequence, in bursts of inspiration, and when tangents or characters were exhausted in his mind, he dropped them and moved on to something else. “One never, of course, asks is it a novel?” he once wrote. “One asks is it interesting and interest connotes suspense, emotional involvement and a sustained claim on one's attention.” In those terms, at least, Cheever was a consummate novelist, as were his eighteenth-century forebears, Fielding and Sterne.

  And whatever its structural lapses, the novel has a high degree of thematic integrity. “St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town,” it begins, with repetitive insistence on oldness: permanence, tradition. In this pastoral setting, everybody knows everybody else (“It's only the Wapshot boys”), and such familiarity breeds a kind of grim sufferance for human quirks. During the wonderful tour of St. Botolphs in the third chapter, one encounters such curious specimens as Reba Heaslip (“SALUTE YOUR FLAG! ROBBERS AND VANDALS PASS BY!”) and Uncle Peepee Marshmallow, who is adopted almost as a kind of village mascot, despite his tendency to wander around naked: “What could the rest of the world do for him that could not be done in St. Botolphs?” But the most elaborate and loving study of eccentricity—so incubated in the hothouse of a tiny New England town—is Honora Wapshot, who deliberately leaves lobsters behind on buses (fighting for their lives in a bag), and tosses her mail in the fire. The kindly and humorous narrator, however, is at pains to remind us that such a person is not to be regarded as a simple figure of fun: “[H]ow much more poetry there is to Honora,” he remarks of her impulse to throw away mail, “casting off the claims of life the instant they are made.” And such uniqueness has its poignant side, too, as people like Honora are scarcely aware of their own freakishness. Walking past a window, she overhears her servant laughing over her odd behavior: “[Honora] stops and leans heavily, with both hands, on her cane, engrossed in an emotion so violent and so nameless that she wonders if this feeling of loneliness and bewilderment is not the mysteriousness of life.” Fortunately such paroxysms are passing in a noble soul, and Honora proceeds to eat supper with a “good appetite.”

  The most abiding human quality found in this old, stalwart place is the kind of Emersonian self-reliance embodied by Leander, who first appears at the helm of the Topaze—a larger-than-life character given to shouting “Tie me to the mast, Perimedes!” whenever he hears the merry-go-round at Nangasakit. Leander wishes to instill in his sons “the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life”—the kind of values that enable a man to be a man and enjoy life as it ought to be lived: “He had taught them to fell a tree, pluck and dress a chicken, sow, cultivate and harvest, catc
h a fish, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc.” In the better world of St. Botolphs, all this is enough, and one has the courage to be oneself, whatever that may be; amid the institutionalized conformity of the modern city, though, an assertion of anything smacking of the peculiar is swiftly punished. Screened by a personnel psychiatrist for his first job in New York, Coverly decides “Honesty [is] the best policy” and blithely admits, among other things, that he dreams of having sex with men and (once) a horse. To his surprise and dismay he is not hired, and presently comes to dread what he suspects is “a furtive strain of morbidity” (chiefly sexual) in his nature—whereupon it falls to Leander, of course, to reassure him: “Played the man to many a schoolboy bride,” the father writes with manly frankness. “All in love is not larky and fractious. Remember.”

  St. Botolphs may be an Eden of sorts, but it is a fallen Eden, and the provoking odors of the place (the “smells” that had worried the author so much) are a constant reminder that flesh lusteth contrary to the spirit—surely the major theme of Cheever's work as well as his life. In the village, one is assailed by scents of wood smoke and salt marshes, or (indoors) floor oil and coal gas and perhaps a boiling fish: “A carp is cooking in the kitchen, and, as everyone knows, a carp has to be boiled in claret and pickled oysters, anchovies, thyme and white onions. All of this can be smelled.” Such bouquet is a goad to sensual sport, and indeed the very name “Wapshot” suggests an aspiration to subdue one's animal passions: derived from the Norman “Vaincre-Chaud”—literally, “to defeat heat”—the name graces a family of “copious journalists” who have long been in the habit of using their diaries (as Cheever did) to reproach themselves “for idleness, sloth, lewdness, stupidity and drunkenness, for St. Botolphs had been a lively port where they danced until dawn and where there was always plenty of rum to drink.” No wonder Coverly flees when he sees a stripper do “something very dirty” with a farm hand's hat at a “cootch show” on the fairgrounds, only to find himself “admiring squashes” while he tries to regain his composure (“The irony … was not wasted on him”).

  But if anything the novel is a celebration of “larky,” robust sensuality of the sort suggested by Moses, who remarks to the tractable Rosalie, “What harm can there be in something that would make us both feel so good?” Far from being harmful, the point is made again and again that sexual commerce is one of the great consolations in this vale of tears, as when a young man aboard the sinking Topaze sees fit to reflect (potentially his final thought) on the “fair and gentle” way his girlfriend has just “spread her legs” for him. Certain extremes of celibacy are perceived as a form of meanness, most notably in the case of Cousin Justina, who “hatefully” forces Moses to traverse a quarter-mile of treacherous rooftop to get to his lover's bed each night. Such prudery is an excess almost as damnable as outright “lewdness,” and both are degrading to the spirit. The danger of the latter is illuminated for Leander in his dream of “walking alone through hell,” where he encounters a hideous old man who exposes his “inflamed parts”—intoning “This is the beginning of wisdom”—before walking away “with the index finger up his bum.” Thus Leander spends his last waking hours on earth in a sort of purification ritual: attending church and then swimming away into the cold, beloved sea.

  That human beings are sinful is never in doubt, but Cheever is ultimately more concerned with the possibilities of goodness—the goodness of God, no less, manifest in our own better instincts and the beauty of all creation. Despair is almost never final. Hobbled by a sense of aloneness, Honora soon recovers her appetite; Melissa's first husband, the egregious Beaver, rallies himself “at the nadir of his depression” with visions of “cities or archways at least of marble” and so absconds with Justina's jewels. And finally, most movingly, Leander is succored by rain at the funeral of his first wife, Clarissa, a suicide: “Wind slacked off in middle of prayer. Distant, electrical smell of rain. Sound among leaves; stubble. Hath but a short span, says Father Frisbee. Full of misery is he. Rain more eloquent, heartening and merciful. Oldest sound to reach porches of man's ear.” Such a humanistic vision was realized by Cheever in the course of making peace with a father whom he could never properly love or understand. Coverly then, in tears, recites Prospero's speech at his father's grave, and perhaps manages to “build some kind of bridge between Leander's world and that world where he sought his fortune.” But the idealized father is given “the last word”—a page of advice for his sons on how to live happily in the world, with a proper regard for both flesh and spirit: “Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house,” the novel concludes. “Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord.”

  Cheever's long ordeal in writing The Wapshot Chronicle would be amply rewarded. The book sold more than twenty thousand in hardcover, and a subsequent Bantam paperback sold almost 170,000 in the United States alone.* That spring in Italy, meanwhile, Cheever continued to woolgather over his imminent good fortune, dreaming one night of the Eisenhowers alone in their White House bedroom: “Mamie is reading the Washington Star. Ike is reading The Wapshot Chronicle.”

  ZINNY SCHOALES CAME OVER in April, joining the Cheevers on a trip to Venice for the St. Mark's Festival. Arriving in the rain at the Hotel Europa, the group was refused rooms because of Federico's squalling (Iole allegedly punched the desk clerk) and proceeded to the Londra. The rest of the trip was “wonderful.” They were woken the next morning by all the bells of Venice pealing in honor of the festival, and spent the day riding gondolas and attending concerts and watching the various religious processions. The drinks were nastier than ever, though, and Cheever allowed himself the luxury of a celebrated tourist trap, Harry's Bar, “just to see how disgusting it was”: “The second day I went in to make sure. … I took Mary back the next day to show her how disgusting it was and we stayed until closing.”

  A decent martini reminded Cheever that he was more homesick than ever. Federico was colicky and crying all the time, which left Mary exhausted and inclined to cry, too. As for Cheever, he was tired of playing host to a lot of dull Americans in his vast salon, and longed to get back into a proper working routine. The combination of idleness and drink tended to make him mean. One day Ben came home from an outing with friends—a warm, jolly (if a trifle déclassé) family whom Cheever described to his guests “with much unkind detail” while the boy stood there holding a pail of tadpoles. “Then the guests go,” Cheever wrote in his journal,

  and when we come to the [dinner] table Ben is sobbing as if his heart would break for, having left people who I think of as needing my condescension he has come home to find his own house, as is so often the case, full of men and women drinking whisky and jawing. I speak to him, stupidly perhaps—I was too drunk to remember what I said—and this morning when I wake him he takes one look at me and buries his face in the pillows. He does not want to see me, touch me, he does not like my house or my friends. And standing in the Piazza Venezia beside a dirty beggar I get a crushing visitation of the shabbiness of my life.

  Things improved somewhat with the arrival of Jean Douglass—Salinger's mother-in-law—a charming woman who enjoyed the company of children and soon began babysitting for the Cheevers, whose parenting style bemused her. “She likes to take care of [Federico],” Cheever wrote, “and like all baby-lovers she feels that his parents are giddy and unworthy and whispers things to him like: ‘Did Mummy have a little too much wine at Tre Scalini, Federico?’ “ That sort of thing was benign enough, but one night the woman witnessed an episode that shocked and enraged her. Cheever had promised to take the thirteen-year-old Susan to see Renata Tebaldi sing the role of Desdemona in Otello; with Douglass's help, the girl had picked out her only suitable outfit, a pink dress she'd worn to dancing school. When she was ready to go, Cheever (drunk) walked in with Zinny, looked his daughter over, and stiffly declared: “You won't do.” Douglas
s exploded, demanding he apologize at once or she'd never speak to him again; Cheever, cowed and ashamed, not only apologized but spent forty thousand lire on a new wardrobe for the girl. As Susan recalled, “Jean Douglass had just taken the skin off him, and for about six months he was completely different toward me.” It helped that (as Cheever would have it) the girl was dressed properly for once. “Susie has a new dress and shoes with heels,” he noted a few days later; “[she] feels very adolescent and pleases me. What a pleasure it is to raise a family.”

  The Wapshot Chronicle (and its reviews) behind him, Cheever was trying to get back to work with an almost alarming lack of success. For the time being, at least, he had nothing in particular to say—or rather nothing fit to print. Such was his desperation that he even considered writing (“oh so boldly”) about the homosexual romps of his youth, perhaps having the stuff published privately in Europe. The notion, however, was short-lived: “I seem to have one, and only one axe to grind and this is the enormous and monotonous question of sexual depravity and I trust that I may see the face of the devil in some other guise.” He thought it might help to get away from the commotion of Rome, so he bought a Fiat (“a rotten little car,” as Mary remembered) and drove back and forth on weekends to a friend's country villa—an idyllic place with a fountain and willow trees, located at the bottom of a steep wall of stairs leading to the pleasant town of Anticoli.