by Blake Bailey
Large questions, to be sure, and one could go on and on—such that the story (surprisingly short) strains a little at its all-too-visible seams. But then, too, it's funny and profound and unlike any story written at the time, which might explain why The New Yorker “summarily rejected” it: “B[ill] says the satire lacks support and I suppose he means that it is over-intense.” Cheever responded with his usual show of equability. As he wrote Maxwell, he thought he'd just go ahead and break the story into its constituent parts—that is, save the dream sequence and commercials for some other project (probably the novel), and sell the Justina plot to a lesser magazine like The Reporter. On further reflection, however, he decided against this. Instead he sold the story (intact) to Esquire, and later—with the rejection of “Justina” (and other stories) decidedly in mind—remarked of Maxwell: “If you don't grow and change he baits you; if you do grow and change he baits you cruelly.” At the time he expressed a similar sentiment in his journal, albeit in the words of an old adage from his father: “If you run they'll bite you. If you stand still they'll fuck you in the arse.” At any rate Cheever loved the story, and for the rest of his life he generally chose to read it at any public gathering. If the audience responded well, he knew they were the right sort and would favor them with a second story. And almost always, delightedly, he'd announce that The New Yorker had rejected “Justina”: “They thought of it as an art story,” he'd say with breezy contempt.
* As Susan Cheever related in Treetops, “When Winter died in 1959 at the age of seventy-four, the autopsy found that his body was riddled with ulcers. … [I]n the end, they perforated his stomach lining and killed him.” As for that birthday party for Phil Boyer, Cheever described it as a “big blowout” hosted by his fellow New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway When he first received the invitation, though, Cheever had noted his reservations: “I am tired of [Boyer's] lechery, tired of the rudeness and the frustrations of his friends, tired of alcoholics, tired of promiscuous women in their middle forties, tired of finding myself back in this train of thought.”
*”Effeminate” was Cheever's invariable epithet for the boy, and it appears to have been the mot juste: “At the time I had no idea of my sexuality,” said Rick, a very good-humored (and gay) man in his fifties when we spoke. “My family never made an issue of it. But later I asked an old junior-high friend if she thought I was effeminate, and she said, ‘Yes, I certainly did.’ “
* He was given thirty-six hundred dollars this time.
† One presumes that Moses is Moses Wapshot and the title character is Cousin Justina from The Wapshot Chronicle, but Cheever doesn't constrain himself with a lot of intertextual exactitude: the story's Moses reflects on the “neglected graves of [his] three brothers,” whereas the novel's Moses has only one brother, Coverly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
{1960-1961}
AFEW DAYS BEFORE the fifties ended, Cheever wrote in his journal that he'd been watching his beloved Benny Goodman on TV one night when he began to weep (“I am like a boozy sponge”) at the thought of having “lived in great times and known great men”: Cummings, Bellow, Warren, Ellison, and so on. Then, a few pages later, he wrote: “I think bitterly of the solitude of my life, that I know no writers, that weeks and months pass in which I see almost no one, living in a haunted house by the railroad tracks.”
Minus his time in Italy, Cheever had lived almost eight years in Westchester and had wanted to leave for most of them. He was tired of being snubbed by businessmen at cocktail parties, and tireder still of what passed for cultured companionship. A rather good friend, Kenneth Wilson, was editor of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and though Cheever liked Wilson all right, it was jarring for him to consider that he squandered his time “in the company of people who condense books.” As for the rest of his circle—the Kahns and Boyers, et al.—he regarded them as “a society of the bored and disappointed,” and was now gaining a bona-fide reputation for saying “atrocious insulting things” (as Ginny Kahn put it) when drunk. By mutual agreement, then, Cheever's life among the local gentry had become a somewhat more solitary affair, and when he did attend the odd cocktail party, he couldn't help noticing the “cursory service” he received from part-time bartenders, who realized Cheever had not been asked “to the X's, the Y's and the Z's.” The main exception to all this was Art Spear (“the best company I have these days”), who shared a boyish delight in such escapades as swimming “beararse” in the Hudson and waving at passing trains. Cheever liked to woolgather over the prospect of taking Spear to Rome and showing him the sights (“Why that is a corker, he says”)—but really, when all was said and done, he had to admit that theirs was not a very profound attachment: “[I]f he moved to San Francisco tomorrow it wouldn't make much difference,” Cheever noted, a few pages after imagining Spear in Rome.
In April 1960 he went to Yaddo, and while walking along Union Avenue he noticed that a mid-Victorian mansion, the Drexel House, was for sale at the remarkably low price of fifteen thousand dollars. The house was something of a wreck, as Saratoga had declined since its fin-de-siècle glory days: a number of other rickety mansions along the street were also for sale, if not altogether forsaken. But Cheever liked the idea of savoring the vistas of his youth amid relative splendor, as well as having easy access to artistic peers at Yaddo. “There will be the boredom and the bigotry of a raffish small-town,” he conceded, writing a friend, “but I think it's about time that we tried another way of life.” A week later, he brought his family up and showed them around the Drexel House—the airy bedrooms and porte-cochère and large, creaking veranda. “Mary seemed to like the house,” or so he thought, oblivious perhaps to the dim glare she'd given that whole gloomy block, to say nothing of her impression of the Worden, where they stayed in a suite that (as Cheever observed) “smelled of old poker-decks and cigar ends.” Nevertheless, he met with a banker and was all set to sign the papers when, a few nights later, he noticed his wife weeping over the dishes: she did not want to live in Saratoga, she said, and that was that. “I'm quite pissy about my disappointment,” Cheever wrote.
Just because Mary was opposed to living in a moribund spa town did not mean she was opposed to moving per se. “I was tired of living in someone else's playpen,” she said, and in fact had been looking at houses for years, perusing the real-estate news almost every night. Nothing had quite clicked, though, until one day late that summer, when she found a lovely stone-ended Dutch Colonial farmhouse on five acres of the Van Cortlandt estate in Ossining.* “M[ary] claims to have dreamed of [the house] long before she saw it,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “It's the most wonderful thing ever to happen to me, she says. I will faint, I will swoon.” For Mary the best part was the natural beauty of the place—what with its view of the Hudson, its little brook and apple orchard, all of it sequestered in a private valley. Cheever also made note of the brook, as well as the “stately living-room” and (perhaps the clincher) “enough bedrooms for us but not enough for Mary's sister to come and stay. I shall buy it.”
So he thought. The house cost $37,500, and officers at the Knickerbocker Mortgage Company and Bank couldn't help wondering how a self-employed man in his late forties, with little in the way of personal assets, proposed to pay for such a spread. With some slight trepidation, Cheever suggested they get in touch with Milton Green-stein, a lawyer at The New Yorker who handled payroll matters and might be expected to cosign a mortgage on the magazine's behalf. Greenstein—”a pathological cheapskate,” according to one editor—had always thought Cheever a bit on the profligate side, but this took the proverbial cake. “Freelance writers,” he told Maxwell, “should not own property.” At the time Cheever had been having second thoughts, but when Maxwell (“tactlessly”) repeated this remark, he made up his mind. Mary contributed a ten-thousand-dollar down payment out of her own savings, and Cheever persuaded Dudley Schoales to cosign a mortgage for the rest (“and all I have to do now,” he wrote Cowley, “is to write a short story a wee
k for the next twenty years and turn out plays and novels in the evenings”). For a day or two he may have gloated over trumping The New Yorker, before reminding himself that (in addition to other misgivings) he was now positively doomed to remain amid the “crushing boredom” of Northern Westchester:
I feel imprisoned, angry and bitter and when I think of taking a walk with A or drinking with B I only feel more bored and disappointed. Everything I look at, the gateposts, the rooftops across the street, the majestic elm—they all seem like old ticket stubs to plays that bored me. Nothing is interesting. And I think angrily of the house, that I am trapped within the circle of the commuting area that spreads out around the city, as clearly defined as a stain, that M[ary] wants the pleasures and none of the risks of my life.
THEY WEREN'T MOVING until January, and in the meantime Cheever did a fair amount of traveling. Rust Hills had invited him to San Francisco to appear with Philip Roth and James Baldwin for an Esquire-sponsored symposium titled “Writing in America Today.” The program began October 20 at the Berkeley campus, where Cheever was scheduled to speak followed by a panel discussion; Roth would speak the next night at Stanford, and Baldwin the third night at San Francisco State. It was not a miscalculation to invite a Wasp, a Jew, and a Negro, two of whom were young and reputedly angry about things, while the third was supposed to be the suave embodiment of the Eastern literary establishment. As the New York Times reported, “It was the general hope that Cheever, Roth and Baldwin would disagree violently about practically everything and that San Franciscans would not have seen anything so lively since Kerouac and Ginsberg left town.” In fact, Cheever got along fine with Baldwin—they'd met at the Institute—and he admired Goodbye, Columbus so extravagantly that he'd been moved to write a little note to Roth's publishers: “This is not for publication because I don't believe in setting a good book afloat on a spate of quotations but I would like to thank you for the immense pleasure I took in the Roth stories. It was my wife who said that she is very grateful to Mr. Roth for having proved to her that somebody lives in Newark.”
And so the three were pretty much en rapport among themselves, if not always with their audiences. That first night, Cheever was (as ever in public) very nervous, excusing himself to take a calming swim in the Berkeley pool before mounting the dais, where he read “Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel”—a numerical list of items (with witty, illustrative vignettes) which Cheever wished to eliminate from his own work and, as far as possible, the work of others. “Out with … explicit description of sexual commerce,” he proclaimed, “for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if—jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts—we were describing the changing of a flat tire?” He also wanted to dispose of “all lushes,” and perhaps gave Baldwin pause by declaring a moratorium on “all those homosexuals” too—a statement mitigated somewhat by the (personally fraught) rhetorical question that followed: “Isn't it time that we embraced the indiscretion and inconstancy of the flesh and moved on?” Finally he asked the audience to consider the career of one Royden Blake, who'd begun by writing “bitter moral anecdotes … that proved that most of our deeds are sinful,” before entering a “decade of snobbism, in which he never wrote of characters who had less than sixty-five thousand dollars a year.” Toward the end, Blake found himself in a rut, writing about all the tedious things Cheever had just proscribed: “You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged … the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.” Such an ecstatic vision was the very thing Cheever longed to recover, for (he asked in closing) how otherwise could one “hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream?”*
Having described what he viewed as his own predicament, Cheever spoke of the “abrasive and faulty surface of the United States in the last twenty-five years,” which had led to the coarsening of American fiction: “[H]aving determined the nightmare symbols of our existence, the characters have become debased and life in the United States in i960 is Hell.” Under the circumstances, Cheever concluded, “the only possible position for a writer now is negation”—which jibed nicely with Roth's own manifesto (“the alienation of the writer in America from a grotesque contemporary society”) and drew an ovation from Berkeley students. According to the Times, however, older members of the audience were indignant, “climb[ing] and totter[ing] to their feet” to accuse Cheever of “deliberate obscurity” and “anti-Americanism.” Cheever responded with an air of patient, wistful politesse. Asked why he bothered to write at all if he thought everything was so terrible, Cheever replied, “I write to make sense of my life.”
But when his next collection was published a few months later, Cheever himself was repulsed by his bitterness: “Love never enters these pages and the prose seems precious. Here is a display of my worst characteristics and a devastating self-portrait of a man in a decline …” Having just returned from a book-signing in New York, Cheever was doubtless in low fettle when he wrote this; in any case it's too harsh. Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel is hardly “devastating” evidence of decline, though perhaps it's a slight comedown from the two superlative previous collections. At least half the stories (including “Boy in Rome” and “The Wrysons”) are mediocre by Cheever's standards, but “The Death of Justina” and “The Scarlet Moving Van” are proof of how cogently he was responding to the times—”a sort of apocalyptic poetry,” as Cowley put it, “as if you were carrying well observed suburban life into some new dimension where everything is a little cockeyed and on the point of being exploded into a mushroom cloud.” Such a viewpoint was also noted by the reviewers—likewise as a good thing, for the most part. Charles Poore praised Cheever's “remarkable inventiveness” in the daily Times, and David Boroff in the Book Review singled out “Justina” as “masterly” and thought the collection as a whole reaffirmed Cheever's “prowess and defines anew the terrain features of the curious suburban Gehenna his characters inhabit.”
But story collections were not going to pay for a life of landed ease on the Hudson, and hence Cheever appealed to his Hollywood agent, Henry Lewis, to find him a screenwriting job. Less than a week after he returned from San Francisco, the telephone rang at midnight: Jerry Wald of Twentieth Century-Fox wanted Cheever to write a treatment for an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl, the hitch being that he'd have to work in Hollywood for a few weeks—a big hitch, as Cheever saw it, and despite the money he almost refused. The prospect was ominous for a number of reasons. As he considered other writers who'd accepted such work, and been tainted by that milieu, he couldn't think of “anyone who [had] come out of it intact.” The most baleful example was Irwin Shaw, whose most recent fiction had struck Cheever as almost awesome in its vulgarity, as if written expressly for the movies. Enumerating the characters of one Shaw novel, Cheever noted, “X is a terrible man, Y is afraid, Z is a beast. Ten years ago [Irwin] would have trimmed and modified all these judgements.”*
A far more troubling concern was whether Cheever could, as he put it, “keep [his] nose clean.” After almost twenty years of tortured monogamy, Cheever had begun to hope that he'd put “the sins of [his] childhood” behind him forever; besides, the world seemed to be getting a little more tolerant on that score. Watching Gore Vidal on TV that year, Cheever was impressed by how “personable and intelligent” the man seemed: “I think that he is either not a fairy,” Cheever reflected, “or that perhaps we have reached a point where men of this persuasion are not forced into attitudes of bitterness, rancor and despair.” But then, two months before Cheever's departure for Hollywood, Newton Arvin was arrested at Smith College for possession of homosexual pornography—a controversy that was “huge” in Cheever's household, as Susan remembered: “Maybe I heard Malcolm [Cowley] talking abo
ut it—this innocent man hauled off to jail by brutes because he was homosexual. I may have asked Daddy, in all innocence, how that could happen. Now I know he was scared out of his mind.” At the time of his arrest, Arvin was director of Yaddo's executive committee, and Cheever may have expressed a quiet sort of solidarity by refusing an offer to replace him. But any open discussion of the matter made him “very unhappy and ill-tempered,” as he wrote when Susan asked why homosexuality wasn't legalized. As it happened, in Cheever's home state of Massachusetts, where Arvin had been arrested, sodomy was classified as an “abominable and detestable crime against nature,” often resulting in lengthy prison terms.†
Cheever feared that such a long isolation in the alien, decadent world of Hollywood would fatally impair his better instincts, and in his journal he agonized over “the Hollywood problem”: “It is true that I do protect my perhaps unstable and dangerous nature … with properties and affections that have the force of clemency and continence, and that Hollywood represents for me, at least, financial and sexual corruption.” One “immense consolation” was the proximity of his old friends John and Harriett Weaver, who lived in the Hollywood Hills. “She is a sweet, pretty woman without a line on her face and he is a most gentle, affectionate, and excellent man,” Cheever reassured himself, and to the Weavers he expressed a seemingly comic wish that their “kind presence will guide [him] away from violent drunkenness and disgusting venereal embroilments.”