Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Probably it was here that Cheever completed the one and only story he would write in Italy, “The Bella Lingua,” rather inevitably about alienated Americans in Rome. Kate Dresser, a language teacher, tries to believe that the seedy life she's made for herself and her teenage son is better than going home to Krasbie, Iowa, where her father had been a trolley conductor. Meanwhile one of her students, a middle-aged businessman named Streeter, finds the city and its people unknowable and even a little sinister, as when he observes a man struck by a car: “The victim lay in a heap on the paving, a shabbily dressed man but with a lot of oil in his black, wavy hair, which must have been his pride. A crowd gathered—not solemn at all, although a few women crossed themselves—and everyone began to talk excitedly. … Streeter wondered why it was that they regarded a human life as something of such dubious value.” A string of other, similarly aversive vignettes follow—where arguably one or two would do—most of them culled almost word for word from Cheever's journal, and indeed the whole story suffers from a diffusion of effect. Cheever himself realized he was showing rust, and advised Maxwell to “just put [the story] in a drawer somewhere” if he didn't like it. When Maxwell promptly bought it, Cheever assumed he did so out of friendship (“I wish it had been better”), and remained skeptical when Maxwell suggested he return to Rome in September 1958—financed by The New Yorker—and “write some more pieces with an Italian background.”

  By then it was summer and Cheever had almost had his fill of Italy, at least for a while. As a last adventure, he'd arranged to take the Warrens’ place at La Rocca, an enormous sixteenth-century fortress in Porto Ercole—a move that began ominously, with rumors of a polio epidemic in nearby San Stefano. “Yes, the city is dangerous!” Cheever's doctor shouted over the telephone, having been called away from dinner. “Life is dangerous! Do you expect to live forever?” Under a pall of doom, then (Cheever smelled spoiled meat in the air), they departed after a slight delay, and were taken aback by the awesome beauty of the place as well as its daunting lack of amenities. The bedrooms—beetle-and scorpion-infested—were gloomy barracks with straw mattresses; the one toilet could only be flushed with a bucket of icy water drawn from a well (and there was no paper except a pile of old magazines); the courtyard was inhabited by a balding goat, a few elderly chickens, and a multitude of starving cats. And that wasn't all: “When we arrived here we found that the signorina had rented the place out as a movie set,” Cheever wrote the Blumes. “There were two light generators in our yard and a small company of about forty-five people wandering around, acting, eating sandwiches and relieving themselves.” Mary caught a bad case of impetigo and they almost gave up, but soon enough both the itchy pustules and the movie people vanished, and the Cheevers began to have fun. The village was populated by friendly peasant folk, mostly sardine fishermen and their families, who took a shine to the Americans: “When Ben walks down the street everyone shouts: Bengy, Bengy, c'iou Bengy and there was a dance on Saturday night. Susie went with an Italian family and danced with the beach-boys. The music was an accordion and a set of trapdrums.”

  The majestic cliffs and the purple Mediterranean stirred immortal longings in Cheever, and he spent many wistful hours sitting on a wall, sipping cocktails, and gazing at all the strapping fishermen gamboling about in the nude. One day a couple of youths carved a woman in the sand, then mounted her “with considerable agility and ardor” while Cheever's heart turned over. It was all so hopeless—and yet sometimes, with a sense of “gaiety and terror,” he considered “follow[ing] his mischievous nose” and the world be damned—but he only sat there drinking and feeling old. “And it seems that we cannot reform our sexual natures,” he wrote in his journal. “And there is a point where denial is sheer hypocrisy, with its train of gruelling and foolish anxieties. … I think how narrow and anxious my life is. Where are the mountains and green fields, the broad landscapes?”

  AS A CONDITION for renting La Rocca, Cheever had agreed to hire the caretaker—an energetic middle-aged woman named Ernesta—as a cook. Eleanor Clark had warned him that Ernesta (“an absolute jewel”) and Iole would despise each other, and she was right: Ernesta banned Iole from the kitchen, and Iole began blackguarding the woman at every opportunity. She told Cheever that Ernesta was taking kickbacks from merchants, and that her shiftless husband, Fosco, was siphoning gas from the Fiat. One day, too, Cheever returned from an afternoon swim to find a group of tourists milling around the courtyard taking pictures—they even took a picture of the startled, naked Cheever as he stumbled into his trunks. Outraged, he ran them off with a bucket of water and threats to call the police, whereupon Ernesta indignantly explained that at least one of the visitors was “the local Marquesa, paying a courtesy call.” According to Iole, however, they were all Germans: Fosco had accosted a tour bus and sold them tickets at fifty lire a head.

  The final blowup occurred in early August. Susan and Ben had begun filling their hats with figs from a tree near the lighthouse when Ernesta snatched the hats away and dumped the (unripe) figs on the ground. Iole scampered down from the terrace and the fight was on: she called Ernesta a big, filthy witch (strega), while Ernesta replied in effect that Iole was a whore (mignotta) and a piece of shit (caeca). An hour later Cheever put his family on a train to Rome, then returned to La Rocca and coldly paid Ernesta her wages. “What troubles me most are unkind feelings about Eleanor,” he wrote afterward, “some timidity towards her that is best overcome with anger, some fear of losing her friendship or perhaps her advocacy.”

  They left Italy three weeks later, after a stop in Pompeii to examine the crater of Vesuvius, where Cheever was smitten by a Danish actress. He sat with her on the bus going back and was about to get her name when she suddenly disembarked, and Cheever was left feeling “sick with love.” (He would moon over the encounter for years.) Two days later, in Naples, they boarded the Constitution with Iole in tow as well as four Japanese dancing mice (recompense for Barbara Frietchie). “After having wondered for so many months about the depth and reality of my love of Italy,” Cheever reflected, “after having imagined this scene so many times, I stand at the stern deck, staring at the cliffs along the coast; it all slips and falls away as insignificantly and swiftly as a card house.”

  * The line in question—”You've talked yourself out of a fuck”—was changed in The New Yorker to “Shut up, Melissa. Shut up.”

  * Granville Hicks was a Yaddo director, whom Cheever tended to call (privately) “Granny.” Little did Hicks know that the actual Hamlet Cheever had gone west in the same feckless, anachronistic style.

  * The latter had “a vaguely suggestive cover,” as Susan Cheever recalled, which her father removed from every copy that came into his house. He asked his teenage daughter not to read The Wapshot Chronicle.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  {1957-1959}

  IT WAS A MORE BUOYANT Cheever who returned to Westchester in the fall of 1957. His time in Italy had enhanced his cosmopolitan airs, or so it seemed whenever he slung a lot of Italian-sounding phrases at Iole, his own donna di servizio, who cooked wonderful homemade pasta and changed the baby's diapers. While in Italy, he'd gotten letters from home that were all about “surly soft-ball games” and “great advances in amateur theatricals”—at this rate, said Mary, he'd never return to the States. But in fact Cheever was “very excited”: The Wapshot Chronicle was a hit and its author a world traveler whose daughter would soon attend the posh Masters School in Dobbs Ferry. He was eager to tell old friends (and detractors) all about it at the Schoales's welcome-home party on September 14.

  He was in for a nasty shock. “We think a skunk is in the woodpile,” Zinny told him, calling him on the carpet at the Cow Barn. The word was out that certain characters in The Wapshot Chronicle resembled members of the Vanderlip family—for instance, the repulsive Cousin Justina seemed a caricature of Mrs. Vanderlip, and Justina's browbeaten “ward,” Melissa, was likely modeled after Mrs. Vanderlip's daughter and namesake, Narcissa (Mrs.
Julian) Street, who'd once been scolded for presuming to speak to her mother without first making an appointment. (And never mind the fact—so noted by Cheever—that Mrs. Vanderlip was “a dedicated feminist in favor of separate bedrooms and a minimum of sexual intercourse.”) Nor was this the first time such rumors had circulated. A few years before, an “Iagoesque nuisance” had told the family that Cheever's reason for moving to Beechwood was to gather material for a book “implicating the late F. A. Vanderlip in the Teapot Dome oil scandal”: “The family was galvanized,” Cheever wrote a friend at the time. “People were telephoned to ask about my character, letters and copies of letters were sent here and there, and I was finally told the secret. I demanded apologies, and got none; but things have quieted down.” Even then, truth be known, Cheever was not quite so innocent as he claimed: writing about stale political scandals was hardly his line, but right from the start he'd been intrigued by, say, a story about the time Mrs. Vanderlip had learned her paintings were forgeries, which was one of several chestnuts he was finally able to use in The Wapshot Chronicle.

  Zinny warned him that he was in danger of being banished from Beechwood—a threat that had hung in the air for years. Narcissa Street, for one, had never liked him: Jack Kahn had been her pet, and now the resident writer belonged to Zinny. As for the mother, her favor toward Cheever had always been qualified by a kind of seigneurial hauteur, lest he forget whose estate he was (for the time being) squatting on. Perhaps Cheever explained to Zinny how an artist transmutes his material (much of which, in the present case, had been provided by Zinny herself), but at any rate she interceded so effectively that he soon received a magnanimous note from old Mrs. Vanderlip:

  I was awfully pleased to have The Wapshot Chronicle from you with your very pleasant little message. I am sure it must be very entertaining to be the author of such a controversial book, or perhaps to the younger generation it does not seem so controversial.

  You do not need to worry about anything you may say about Beechwood. Personally, I thought several points were very well taken. I have always been horrified by the roofs of this house. … There were other references that I recognized too, but I am very flattered to figure in even a remote way in a book by “one of the modern authors.”

  She couldn't resist the implication, however, that she'd found the work as a whole rather distasteful, with or without the “flattering” personal references: “Except for Leander I do not think you presented a really loveable character in the whole book, and I think, just for contrast, this is always pleasant in any novel or play.”

  The immediate danger was averted, but Cheever never again felt quite so welcome in Scarborough. For the most part he drifted away from the old crowd, including Kahn, who one day let him know that he (Kahn) had advised the Vanderlips to rent Beechtwig to the new headmaster of the Scarborough Country Day School. Cheever interpreted this as “the callousness of an intensely competitive nature”—and certainly, by then, Cheever was far more esteemed by the world than was Kahn. His social confidence was another matter, though that too seemed to be gaining somewhat. “In an upper-class gathering I suddenly think of myself as a pariah—a small and dirty fraud, a deserved outcast, a spiritual and sexual impostor, a loathsome thing,” he wrote shortly after his return from Italy. “Then I take a deep breath, stand up straight, and the loathsome image falls away. I am no better and no worse than the other members of the gathering. Indeed, I am myself. It is like a pleasant taste on the tongue.”

  AMID THE PHILISTINE DOMAINS of Westchester or Wauwinet, Cheever sometimes repined over his “lack of literary companionship.” When a young Elizabeth Spencer remarked, in Rome, that she wasn't keen to meet other writers, Cheever seemed slightly affronted: “Some of the nicest people I've ever known are writers,” he replied. Even apart from the prestige, then, it must have been a pleasure for Cheever to be elected in May 1957 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, where he took his place as one of 250 of the most celebrated personages in literature, art, and music. He even composed a ditty for the occasion: “Root tee toot, ahhh root tee toot, oh we're the boys from the Institute. Oh we're not rough and we're not tough, we're cultivated and that's enough.” In years to come, this august body would prove a comfort to Cheever, providing him with a kind of nominal respectability as well as all the literary companionship he desired. “I love my colleagues,” he wrote a friend in 1975, “embrace them, kiss them, and sometimes weep with them over our cruel separation, but why is it that we only do this once a year?”

  Whatever his irreverence, Cheever took his responsibilities within the Institute very seriously indeed. Soon after his election, he nominated Bellow (“the most original writer in America”) and proposed a grant for Maxwell, whose own successful nomination he seconded a few years later. (“When I open my handkerchief drawer,” Maxwell wrote Cheever, “there among the cufflinks is the rosette that you took out of your buttonhole and placed in mine, and the symbolism of this overcomes me, morning after morning.”) But his greatest and certainly most grueling contribution was as a member (and thrice chairman) of the Committee on Grants for Literature, which obliged him to read stacks of novels by “young associate professors with scandalous affectations”: “[W]hat is that old man doing at twelve o'clock noon?” he wrote Maxwell while in Wauwinet one summer. “He is pouring himself a glass of gin. What does he hold in his hand? He is holding a sensitive novel by a young man who wants to go to Rome. How can a drunken old man judge the merits of a sensitive novel? He cannot. What a cruel world is it where the destinies of the young lie in such shaken hands!” It must be noted, though, that in the actual presence of a sensitive young novelist, Cheever went out of his way to seem gracious and attentive—as the writer Stephen Becker put it, “[H]e would make [one] feel like the only other person in that room. … [T]o me he was affection itself, approval itself, whatever youthful brashness I displayed.”

  Meanwhile his own reputation was decidedly ascendant. The Wapshot Chronicle won the 1958 National Book Award—scoring a major upset over James Gould Cozzens's acclaimed best seller, By Love Possessed, whose stock had plummeted after Dwight Macdonald's career-destroying abuse (“By Cozzens Possessed”) in Commentary* Cheever's own feelings toward Cozzens were typically mixed. In his journal he opined that By Love Possessed was “excellent”—the product of a “loveless” but “broad intelligence”—and years later, when told that Cozzens admired his work, Cheever claimed to have been so appalled at winning the National Book Award that he'd considered sending Cozzens the blue Canton dishes his grandfather “is supposed to have brought home from China.” At the time, however, he acknowledged at least one congratulatory note—Katharine White's—by writing how “pleasant” it was to win, “partly because I've always felt that Mr. Ross would not have liked By Love Possessed.” And whatever else Cozzens had going for him, he didn't have “at least three good friends among the [NBA] judges”—as did Cheever, who cheerfully admitted as much. Actually he had two friends, William Maxwell and Francis Steegmuller, as well as a staunch supporter in Elizabeth Ann McMurray Johnson; what he didn't know, and would never find out, was that Steegmuller had actually been the lone dissenter, preferring Malamud's The Assistant. Maxwell not only adamantly supported The Wapshot Chronicle, but afterward took Steegmuller aside and insisted they make it unanimous. “Bill was very protective of John,” said Shirley Hazzard, later Steegmuller's wife. “He knew better than almost anybody how much John needed the reassurance, whereas someone else may not have cared all that much.”

  On the day of the award ceremony (“a gathering of nearly 1,000 writers, publishers and booksellers in the grand ballroom of the Commodore Hotel,” reported the Times), Cheever was very nervous. After Clifton Fadiman presented him with a plaque and a check for one thousand dollars, Cheever recited a very brief speech “in a swift mutter that verged on unconscious discourtesy,” as one observer recalled. He spoke about the loneliness of the writer and how much the writer depends on the “good opinion of s
trangers;” fortunately, said Cheever, there were still so many readers in America who, “beset with an unprecedented variety of diversions, continue to read with great taste and intelligence.”* The audience sat in rigid silence, straining to hear, but suddenly it was over and Cheever was replaced on the dais by Randall Jarrell—then the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—who proceeded to deliver a jeremiad that vividly contradicted Cheever's sunny view of the American reading public. As long as people preferred Peyton Place to the works of Proust, said Jarrell, they would be “enemies of [their] own culture;” he also said some hard things about South Pacific and the like. (As Cheever wrote a friend afterward, “Randall Jarrell, who had just washed his beard, made a long speech, the gist of which was that Bennett Cerf is a shit, that South Pacific is shitty and that people who look at the sixty-four thousand dollar question are virtual cocksuckers.”) An even graver ordeal had to be faced the next morning, when Cheever appeared with Robert Penn Warren (the poetry winner) on the Today show. Outside the studio window on Fifty-second Street “were about four hundred women milling around and holding up signs saying: HELLO MAMA. DORIS. SEND MONEY. GLADYS. HELP. IDA,” Cheever noted.

  I was asked to wait in a green room where there was a chimpanzee drinking coffee, a man with a long beard and a lady in Arab costume practising a song. … [I]t took two strong men pushing and pulling to get me into the studio and everybody on the street shouted: It's Gary Moore. I sat down at a baize-covered table and quivered like a bowlfull of chicken fat for fifteen minutes and then I drove Mary home. Mary took the check away from me and Ben hung the plaque up in his clubhouse … so I may not be any richer but I sure am a hell of a lot more nervous.