Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  When John alluded to his brother's life in “The Five-Forty-Eight,” Fred let it pass without comment (despite his wife's indignation); but when “Journal of an Old Gent” appeared in 1956, and Fred recognized certain of their father's notes reproduced as “fiction,” he gave John a call: “What are you doing?“ he asked, clearly unnerved by the ramifications. John related this anecdote to his Barnard class and then appended a moral: “Ignore your family,” he said, “and just keep writing.” And so (shortly after that Thanksgiving debacle) Cheever wrote “The Scarlet Moving Van,” about a pedantic drunk named Gee-Gee (for “Greek God,” after the promising youth he used to be) and his long-suffering wife, who wear out their welcome in one “felicitous” suburb after another. “They've got to learn,” says Gee-Gee, regaling his “stuffy” neighbors with a jig and a dirty song. “I've got to teach them.” The nature of his lesson, the narrator determines, is that decorum and felicity per se are the worst self-deceptions: “the happy and the wellborn and the rich … would not be spared the pangs of anger and lust and the agonies of death.” Fred Cheever may or may not have agreed, but he would have been hard-pressed not to recognize himself in the portrait. For one thing, he'd recently broken his ankle and taken to rolling around his house in an office chair (“My office is the house”); the fictional Gee-Gee, similarly impaired, gets around “half riding in a child's wagon, which he propelled by pushing a crutch.”

  The story appeared in the March 21, 1959, issue of The New Yorker, at a time when Fred had pretty much retired to his bedroom to drink full-time.* Shortly before, Iris had summoned John to Connecticut to discuss her husband's condition, and at one point Fred lumbered into the room and joined them. “His face is swollen almost beyond recognition,” John wrote afterward. “I think his brain is damaged. … His conversation makes no intellectual or human sense.” After a few minutes, Fred gave up trying to make sense and called his dog—a toy poodle, dressed in a tutu, that Fred had taught to dance on its hind legs while he waved a cracker in the air. (“For a moment F[red] seems happy and I do not mean anything uncharitable by observing this.”) Finally Fred went back to bed, while John and Iris agreed that a thorough physical examination was in order, “to see how far gone he is.” But matters came to a head before anything definite was arranged. As Susan Cheever remembered, either Iris called to say her husband was killing himself, or Fred called and slurred something like “She's trying to kill me, Joey!” In any case John drove back to Weston with his daughter and found a fraught domestic scene. “Something terrible had happened,” said Susan, “like [Fred had] thrown something at [Iris] or she'd thrown something at him. And she was kind of skulking around.” With his daughter's help, John got the bloated, red-faced Fred into the car and drove him to New Haven Hospital, where Dr. Bill Winternitz had his office. “Well, Joey, nice of you to drop by the club,” Fred muttered (more or less) as he was poured into bed. Throughout the ordeal, according to Susan, her father's demeanor was mostly stoical: “He wasn't cranky to Fred, just Ugh: exasperated. Looking up to the heavens to make sure God saw that he was taking care of his brother, who he wanted God to know was a real pain in the ass.”

  Fred was found to be suffering from alcoholic malnutrition and an enlarged liver; on the brighter side—according to Bill Winternitz—he “laughed a lot and seemed apologetic.” Why was such an affable man bent on destroying himself? As Bill reported to his brother-in-law, a psychiatrist thought it was due to some obscure childhood trauma—which, John reflected, must have been his own birth: “He was happy, high-spirited, and adored, and when, at the age of seven, he was told that he would have to share his universe with a brother, his forebodings would, naturally, have been bitter and deep. … I have felt for a long time that, with perfect unconsciousness, his urge was to destroy me. I have felt that there was in his drunkenness some terrible cunning.” Alarmed that his brother's fate could prove to be his own, John pored over his journal and was appalled by the obviously “progressive” nature of his disease. “I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous,” he noted, after taking Fred to New Haven. “Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin, and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.”

  * One could argue that Macdonald played kingmaker that year. He lavishly praised James Agee's posthumous novel, A Death in the Family, which went on to win the Pulitzer.

  * Among Cheever's papers is a draft of a speech he wrote for some unknown occasion subsequent to the March 11, 1958, National Book Award ceremony: “It is very gallant of you to come here tonight and it is also quite gallant of me, since I find this kind of thing quite difficult. The last time I spoke to any sort of gathering was in receiving an award and in this connection I said how much a writer desires the good opinion of strangers. Three newspaper men in the audience reported … that from my manner, my demeanor on the platform I needed the good opinion of strangers in the worst possible way.”

  * The story is worthy of particular consideration because it was hitherto unpublished—that is, written specifically for The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and thus intended to tilt the thematic balance somewhat.

  † Ossining is only a few miles away from Scarborough, though of course Cheever had yet to move there when he wrote the story. That Ossining is a famous prison town was perhaps deemed pertinent to the homesick protagonist's predicament.

  * Within a week or two, Fred suffered the collapse that led to his hospitalization, described below. Was there any connection? It's impossible to say. At the time Fred was probably in no condition to read anything, though certainly he would have read the story later with (one imagines) something less than delight. But, as we shall see, Fred remained inscrutable on the subject of his various incarnations in John's fiction. The rest of Fred's family were less inscrutable. His daughter Sarah bitterly remarked that Uncle John used Fred as a “classic drunk” in his work, and Iris was enduringly furious. In his journal John describes her “exhaustive” attack on one of his stories (unnamed), as well as his own sheepish response: “She seems like one of the orphic harpies and I am driven into a regressive fastidiousness that I detest. She is predatory, lumbering, and faced with this massiveness I don't actually simper but I become retiring, wounded and feeble.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  {1959-1960}

  CHEEVER ONCE REMARKED to his son Ben that he'd had many fathers and that Ben should try to have many fathers, too. In Cheever's own life, one of the “critical turning points” (his words) had been finding a father—Dr. Milton Winternitz—who commanded his utmost respect and affection and even reciprocated as much, after his own volatile fashion. Over the years Cheever had repaid the man's kindness by being, in effect, a good son: deferential, hardworking (scything with Peter Wesul and so on), witty and charming. From the beginning, though, he'd had serious reservations about both parents-in-law—Winter was a tyrant, Polly a shrew—and as Cheever's place in the world became more secure, he was less and less comfortable with the rather obsequious role he'd come to play at Tree-tops. Returning from his sumptuous year in Italy as a proper paterfamilias, he felt less obliged to laugh at Polly's “gossipy and uncharitable” remarks about Mary's mad sister (though of course he couldn't stand Buff either), and as for his father-in-law, Cheever now found the man almost insufferable. As Winter's storied tenure as dean of the Yale School of Medicine receded further into the past, he'd become all the more inclined to indulge his perversities at Treetops. He toiled like a bitter martyr in the kitchen, say, making breakfast and mopping the floor, as if he'd been forced to do so by the sheer worthless laziness of his family; but if anyone tried to help, he'd throw an “insane tantrum”: “Here are the unreasonable and insatiable hungers of our egotism,” his son-in-law mused.

  Cheever's last visit to Treetops while Winter was still alive was in the summer of 1958. Winter greeted him at the Stone House with a petulant attack on The New Yorker, while Polly immediately began to impart “some gossip about Philadelphia”: “T
hey talk loudly and at cross-purposes and when her back is turned he makes a face at her and says she is a stupid bitch.” Later Cheever and Polly went away for martinis and she resumed her usual waspish spiel about her ghastly stepchildren: Buff was crazier than ever, Tom a troublemaker, and Mary “obtuse and neurotic.” In the past Cheever would have obliged her with at least a chuckle—and probably did so on this occasion—but he was not laughing on the inside. “Where is my sense of humor?” he chided himself. “I can enjoy these antics but I think they threaten my happiness.” By far the greater part of his grievances, though, were directed against Winter, whom he'd come to blame for the precarious state of his marriage. He reminded himself, again and again, that the bitter old man had beaten Mary with a belt when she was a child, and now the memory of that violence had returned to haunt her—indeed, this was the true cause of her “capricious” depressions (“she cannot, quite understandably, face this”), which she saw fit to blame on Cheever. “I have come to think of [Winter] as the king of a hades where M[ary] must spend perhaps half her time,” he concluded. “There is no doubt about the fact that he is a source of darkness in our affairs.” Thus, after that last visit, he announced to his wife that he would not be returning to the “beauty and embarrassments” of Tree-tops: he loved Polly and Winter, he said, but he loved her and the children more, “and the two seem incompatible.”

  True to his word—though Winter was very sick by then, and wanted to see him—Cheever arranged to spend most of the following summer (1959) in Europe, alone, first at a PEN conference in Germany and then (by way of the Brenner Pass) in Austria and Italy. “This is the best; this is it,” he wrote Maxwell from the Carlton Hotel in Frankfurt. “I go to cafes, dance with Dutch girls, climb mountains, attend passion plays. Oh boy.” Actually, he found the conference “very dull” and his fellow delegates “not much” (“wouldbe writers, former writers, the authors of cook books, etc”). And while he was, at first, almost as excited as he would have had Maxwell believe—Frankfurt seemed “literally risen from known ashes,” and the “comely, kind” citizens were nothing but hospitable—he soon began picking out unsavory details, such as the odd legless beggar, the one-eyed man renting boats, and so forth (“the tragedy is brought home to you sooner or later”). And of course the exhilaration of traveling alone soon began to pall, though he still had almost six weeks of vacation ahead of him. On his last night in Frankfurt, he ran into some fellow English-speaking PEN delegates in a bar and was mortified when he wasn't invited to join them: “I walked around the streets, looking for some place where I could get supper without being seen and so exposing my aloneness.”

  The rest of the vacation followed the same pattern: excitement on arrival at some new place, followed by loneliness and boredom. He was delighted to return to Venice (“although I wonder if I am worthy of the spectacle”), and his high spirits were promptly rewarded with a happy coincidence: cruising down the Grand Canal in a vaporetto, he spotted his old Signal Corps buddy (whom he still met for lunch every so often at Sardi's), Leonard Field, drinking coffee on the terrace of the Hotel Gritti. As he wrote their mutual friend John Weaver, “I began to wave my arms and yell: ‘Lennieee, Lennieee,’ and he finally recognized me. I couldn't get off the boat until San Marco's but then I ran back to the Gritti and Virginia [Field's wife] came down and we went to the Lido and in the very next cabana was Nancy Mitford and Victor Cunard. Swam in the same water with them and everything.” That was precisely the sort of thing Cheever liked writing to his friends, but no further anecdotes happened in Venice, and soon he moved on to Rome, where he took a room at the Academy. “[Rome] is like coming back to a school where one had a tough time and finding it all small and pleasant,” he wrote in his journal. For the first week or two, he sat sipping gin in the golden dusk, savoring his own independence. His wife's letters had been full of complaints (finances, her sick father, etc.), and Cheever found himself remembering her “not as the loving woman [he had] known but as a threatening, derisive and unhappy figure.” He couldn't help wondering what it would be like to spend the rest of his life in Italy. But then he began to worry: What if Mary wanted to divorce him? What if he never saw his children again? “I am lonely and bewildered,” he wrote. “I feel very melancholy and wonder how I can make sense, order, give value to my life.” The first step, he figured, was to return home immediately.

  He almost didn't make it. In the middle of the Atlantic, one of the airplane's port engines caught fire, and the captain turned around and tried to land in Shannon, then London, but both airports were fogged out. Finally they made it to Orly in Paris, where passengers were given coffee and reboarded on “another seedy-looking plane” that “labored across the heavens for another seventeen hours.” Cheever—”unafraid” the while—placidly read Lolita during the second flight and wasn't surprised when he phoned home from Idlewild and found nobody there but Iole and the baby: the others, naturally, were in New Hampshire with Mary's dying father. “I [had] not expected her to be [home],” he noted matter-of-factly in his journal—but soon he felt a touch of chagrin, calling his wife at the hospital in Hanover and (rather like Francis Weed in “The Country Husband”) trying to regale her with the story of his brush with death. She seemed too upset to pay much attention. He would have liked a little sympathy, at least.

  Winter clung to life for almost a month, repeatedly asking to see his son-in-law, but Cheever stayed put. “I have seen him make a spectacle of a head-cold,” he remarked knowingly (hypochondria was another thing the two had in common). Mostly he was annoyed by the claim on Mary's attention: every time the doctors thought Winter was finally about to die, she'd have to drop everything and race back to New Hampshire; then he'd rally again, “to everyone's astonishment, some people's embarrassment and a few cases of indignation,” as Cheever wrote Herbst. He himself was among the indignant ones: “It gets me down, it gets me down,” he wrote in his journal. “The death watch of a great man but bathing the baby and washing the breakfast dishes forces me into a sullen frame of mind.” And still he didn't visit the man, though he could hardly claim anymore that Winter was faking: the latter had stopped eating a month ago, and must (as Cheever conceded) “be skin and bones.” In fact, as time passed, Cheever's irritation over the extra housework gave way to grudging admiration (“how great his energies and his powers of endurance”), though he was no more inclined to go to New Hampshire. Meanwhile he sensed some increased friction in his marriage. Mary refused to speak to him except in “biting and derisive” terms, and he suspected her of ruining meals on purpose—putting grenadine in an artichoke sauce, for example (“I do not mind a light supper,” wrote Cheever, “but I mind what I think is the sullenness that lies at the bottom of these spoiled dishes”). He might have been right; certainly she didn't see the point of discussing her complaints, such as they were. “Reproach Cheever?” she said, recalling the episode. “He was in a different world.”

  Dr. Winternitz died the night of October 3, while the Cheevers were attending Phil Boyer's fiftieth-birthday party at Snedens Landing.* “Winter is dead,” said the pithy message awaiting their return (Cheever reflected that the man “always had some violence of poetry”). At the funeral in New Haven, Polly seemed cold toward Cheever, and he got the impression she was “in the process of casting [him] off”: “I am unhurt by this but I can't help wondering why.” As for Winter, whatever his thoughts toward the end, he went ahead and bequeathed his vast, dandyish wardrobe to his son-in-law—they were about the same size, after all—including some nice Peal shoes and silk bow ties and a vicuña coat Cheever would cherish forever.

  CHEEVER'S RELATIONS with his children had become more strained since their return from Italy two years before—partly because of his drinking, and partly because they were older and more complicated. “Susie is in the throes of adolescence and not very good company,” Cheever reported that year to the Warrens. More than ever, he wanted her to be pretty and demure like his friends’ daughters—particularly L
inda Boyer and Pammy Spear, much admired by Cheever—but instead she continued to eat too much (as he saw it) and slump around with an unhappy scowl on her face. “S[usan], twenty pounds overweight,” he ruefully observed, “shaped, to my fine eye, like a barrell [sic], wearing azure stockings and a purple scarf, her hair dirty and unkempt.” At such times his eye would drift to other, perkier girls (“that one at the corner, that one waiting for a bus, that one coming out of Plummers”) and he'd long to be young and in love again.

  Sarah Schoales had been “puzzled” by Cheever's decision to send her friend Susan to the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry (“Dobbs for snobs!” she'd teased her), perhaps unaware that Pammy Spear also attended the school and Cheever very much wanted his daughter to emulate Pammy. “He was constantly engineering situations in which my imperfections would be highlighted vis-à-vis Linda and Pammy,” Susan remembered. One such occasion was when he took her and Pammy to hear the great classical guitarist Andrés Segovia at the Century Club—”hoping” (as he wrote a friend) “to prove to [Susan] that the pleasures of respectability are not necessarily boring. I think she was impressed although there was a certain amount of pushing at the sandwich tables.” This was cruel, but then Cheever only wanted the best for her: over and over he insisted that if she'd only improve her looks (lose weight, curl her hair, etc.) and her attitude—why then she'd have lots of dates, like Linda and Pammy, instead of sitting in her room all night reading books and stuffing herself. As it was, she seemed to be turning into the very sort of eccentric, precocious “sorehead” he'd been at Thayer, and (whether or not the similarity occurred to him as such) he wanted better things for her. When she'd complain about her insipid schoolmates and rotten teachers, the author of “Expelled” would advise her to be “still and patient and watchful”—but evidently she insisted on making trouble. “Susie comes home with the news that she is on some sort of probation,” he wrote when she was sixteen.