Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  THE WEAVERS ARRANGED for Cheever to stay at the Chateau Marmont—a few blocks from their house—where the management grandly informed him that he'd been given the “Mitzi Gaynor Suite.” It was small comfort. What struck Cheever most about his lodgings was the constant racket from the Sunset Strip outside his window, where he could observe an enormous papier-mâché chorus girl advertising the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Los Angeles was “the magnification of all our vices,” he wrote, with special reference to the large metaphorical chorus girl. Finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning, Cheever would pick up the telephone and order an elaborate breakfast by way of goading himself into the shower before he committed suicide. As for the Weavers, their hillside sanctuary only served to remind him of the domestic security he'd left behind in West-chester. For the rest of his life he was haunted by a curious memory (among others) from that visit to Hollywood: standing alone on the Weavers’ terrace, he'd heard Harriett flush a toilet and address a casual remark to her husband. “The sensation of my aloneness was stupendous,” Cheever remembered.

  On the surface he affected to be cheerfully bemused by the oddities of Hollywood life. He told friends about his “fancy hotel apartment” at the Marmont, and proudly noted that his carnation-filled parlor had a water cooler in the corner. “I ran up a bill of a hundred dollars a day,” he wrote Maxwell, “but it was all so deluxe that I was terribly ashamed of the cigarette burns in my dressing gown and the fact that much of my underwear is torn. I had a white Lincoln Continental convertible” —actually a Ford Falcon—”which I never took out of the garage and when someone at the pool said: ‘There he is; that's Cheever’ I dove in and lost my trunks.” That he raffishly clashed with his environment was a matter of pride—part of his studied disdain for the “sumptuary laws,” the point being, of course, that such a vividly civilized man could dress howsoever he liked. “My God, John,” said Harriett Weaver when he appeared in her kitchen wearing a navy Brooks suit, “your crotch!” Cheever was about to leave for Twentieth Century-Fox to meet Jerry Wald, but Harriett demanded he hand over his pants. A few minutes later, when Henry Lewis arrived to pick up his client, he found Cheever sitting in his boxers sipping a martini while Harriett ironed the wrinkles out of his crotch.

  As he loitered around the studio waiting to see Wald, Cheever ran into his old friend and Stories collaborator, Daniel Fuchs, now a gray-haired man whiling away his days in an office that reminded Cheever of “a side-parlor in the Hotel Gladstone.” Fuchs advised him to treat Wald “like a demented child,” and subsequently Weaver reported to Mary that her husband was following a serial about Marilyn Monroe in the Mirror so he and Wald could “talk more intelligently”: “They talk about Saroyan's tax problems, Yves Montand (‘an alley cat’) and the works of D. H. Lawrence, especially Ulysses, which seems to be Mr. Wald's favorite.” As a matter of fact, Wald was a kind, affable man who respected good writers and warmed to Cheever in particular. He claimed to have no problem with Cheever's request to spend a month in the Midlands soaking up Laurentian scenery, but as for his more earnest desire to work at home in Scarborough, Wald refused. He assured Cheever that he'd do his best to make him comfortable: the writer would have his own secretary, office, and nameplate, and be left entirely alone.

  Though he liked Wald “immensely,” Cheever seemed miserable to a degree that puzzled his colleagues, among them Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, two writers from his Signal Corps days. Occasionally Cheever would stop by their offices to borrow gin—there was no alcohol in the Fox commissary—and vaguely complain about the place, which he described in a letter to Cowley as a “literary graveyard.” Mostly, though, Cheever holed up in his own office (“an old bathhouse at the edge of the lot”) and worked steadily, the better to return to his family as soon as possible. He submitted a finished draft of his treatment in early December, only to learn that he had to wait ten more days for the studio's verdict. Meanwhile he stuck as closely as possible to the Weavers, but even their wholesome company wasn't much of a diversion from the usual dark thoughts. Walking along Malibu Beach of an afternoon, Cheever picked out squalid details—swastikas painted on a wall, or “curious domestic scenes such as a blonde in an adhesive-tape bikini helping a drunken man up a flight of stairs.” He also obsessed over the brazen, ubiquitous homosexuals who seemed to be tempting him at all times. “I think there is a fag beside me at the lunch counter,” he somberly recorded in his journal. “He drums his nails impatiently and who but a fag would do this?” He prayed for the surf to wash them away.

  After a few days of unwanted leisure, Cheever sensed he was beginning to slip. A casual meeting with the actor Dean Stockwell was a terrible ordeal: though Cheever didn't doubt the actor's heterosexuality (“His tender looks are aimed at girls”), he felt afterward as if his penis “had been put through a mangle.” His dinner with the singer Peggy Lee, however, caused no such consternation. Cheever was intrigued by Lee's Chinese garden, the dwarf trees sagging with Christmas ornaments, as well as the loutishness of Lee's boyfriend, who called her “baby” and kept saying, “It's going to be cool.”

  One night, toward the end of his visit, Cheever brought a friend to the Weavers’ house for dinner—a writer in his mid-thirties named Calvin Kentfield. The two had met a decade before at Yaddo, and kept somewhat in touch through Maxwell, who'd edited some of Kentfield's fiction for The New Yorker. At Yaddo, Cheever had been impressed by the young man's looks and charm, but the years had been unkind to Kentfield. His first two books had gained little recognition, and he'd been forced to support his wife and daughter with long stints in the merchant marine—which provided a lot of nautical literary fodder, but was otherwise a strain. A heavy drinker, Kentfield brawled with other sailors, and in 1958 he fell off a gangplank and broke his kneecap on the deck below. By the time he was reunited with Cheever in Hollywood, Kentfield was missing two front teeth and walking with a limp. Also, he was recently divorced from his beloved, long-suffering wife, Veronica (“the true image,” he called her in one book dedication), who only a year before had borne him a son.

  Cheever duly noted his friend's defects—the limp, the missing teeth, “the face weathered by whisky and time. … He is late for everything and sometimes doesn't come at all.” One afternoon the two went to a Finnish bath together and sat around chatting “beararse,” and a couple nights later, after dinner, Cheever asked Harriett Weaver if she'd like to read his journal. She accepted the small three-ring binder and read politely for a minute or two, then smiled and returned it to Cheever without comment. Her eyes had fallen on the latest entry:

  I spend the night with C, and what do I make of this? … Perhaps sin has to do with the incident, and I have had this sort of intercourse only three times in my adult life.* I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines. It is not my choice that I am alone here and exposed to temptation, but I sincerely hope that this will not happen again. … I trust that I have harmed no one I love. The worst may be that I have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie.

  Let it serve as a measure of Cheever's distress that he felt compelled to seek immediate absolution—even implicitly—from a kindhearted person; nor would it be the first time he went about it in this manner. (Cheever had prepared the Weavers with an amusing spiel about how his “seafaring progenitors” had all kept journals, “secure in the knowledge” that their oldest sons would burn the things once they were dead.)

  After his encounter with Kentfield, Cheever was more desperate than ever to escape Hollywood—”he seemed to think he was imprisoned here,” Fuchs recalled—and was almost ecstatically grateful when Wald told him he was free to go. Home in time to spend Christmas with his family, Cheever boasted incessantly of having “bussed” Peggy Lee, and made a point of listening to her records with a lovelorn expression. By then his children were used to odd confidences of one sort or another, and joked about the “stacks of satisfied starlets” he'd left behind in California.

&nbs
p; • • •

  “AFTER LEAVING C,” Cheever wrote four years later (while engaged in a flirtation with another, better-known writer), “I suffered the worst agonies of my life for a month. Why should I ever let myself in for such pain again?” That winter, after he returned from Hollywood, Cheever was outwardly occupied with the move to Ossining and the labors required to pay for it—a hectic time that he seemed to take in stride, albeit boozily as usual. In fact he was consumed with an almost suicidal self-loathing. His imagination was crowded with sordid daydreams of the “unwashed sailor” (Kentfield), which could only be subdued with huge doses of alcohol. Not surprisingly, he was more impotent than ever with his wife (“there is not a spark of life in the old root”) and worried that, for his sins, he'd now become decisively homosexual. When, a month later, Wald offered him two thousand a week to come back and write a screenplay, Cheever was tempted to accept—certainly he needed the money, but the thought of seeing Kentfield “[took] the lead out of [his] pencil” all over again. Wald persisted, proposing that Cheever was the only man to write “a big, important film that will explore, investigate and interrogate all the people residing in the suburbs,” but Cheever continued to beg off. He never wrote for the big screen again.

  Nor, it seems, did he ever see Kentfield, who continued his long decline. After finishing his third book, All Men Are Mariners—which took five years to write and vanished with hardly a trace—Kentfield devoted himself all the more to emulating the feckless lives of his heroes, Malcolm Lowry and Hart Crane. Returning to Sausalito after a chaotic sojourn in Mexico, he promptly fell down some stairs (“or in fact up them,” he wrote a friend), breaking several ribs. “He is lost and I know something about this,” Cheever wrote in 1964, after reading Kentfield's final story in The New Yorker, about “alcoholism and whores in Mexico.” A few years later, as chairman of the grants committee, Cheever discreetly inquired of Maxwell whether he knew anything of Kentfield's whereabouts; he doubted he could get Kentfield a grant, but he thought the committee might make some charitable gesture if things were as bad as he suspected.

  Things were bad, all right, though Kentfield persevered for nearly fifteen years after that meeting in Hollywood, and even managed to produce an autobiography of sorts, The Great Green. This did not lead to a surge of interest in his work, however. Nor could he stop drinking, though he'd made a last-ditch effort to get help from Synanon, a spin-off of Alcoholics Anonymous that had evolved into a cult of sorts. When they demanded he prove his commitment to sobriety by shaving his head, Kentfield threw in the towel. “Local Writer Falls from Cliff “ read the headline in the Point Reyes Light on September 11, 1975. “Kent-field's nude and battered body was found Thursday morning at the bottom of a 500-foot cliff at Palomarin,” the newspaper reported, along with some other curious details. Kentfield had left a hastily scribbled will of sorts, advising his beneficiaries that his most valuable possession, a ramshackle van, needed a new clutch and fuel pump. By way of explaining his suicide, he mentioned his disillusion with Synanon and suggested the reader consult chapter ninety-three of Moby-Dick, “The Castaway,” in which the sailor Pip has a near-death experience that leaves him indifferent to the world: “[T]herefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense …” Kentfield's son may have taken this to heart in some obscure way, for he fell to his death from almost the identical spot twenty-five years later.

  A 1978 journal entry reveals that Cheever knew something of Kentfield's fate. At a time when Cheever was sober, celebrated, and “terribly lonely,” he seemed to think it was Kentfield's estranged wife who had driven him past the cliff en route to a rehab clinic. “I want to stop and have my last drink,” he imagined Kentfield telling the poor woman, before he got out of the car. As far as anyone knows, though, Kentfield died alone.

  * Later, when holding court for journalists (the apple wood crackling in his fireplace, the heirlooms on display), Cheever often pointed out that his house in Ossining had been built in the eighteenth century “and so handsomely restored by Eric Gugler in the 1920's” (as he wrote for an architectural journal in 1976) “that it has lost its historical status …” Such status was never actually conferred, since the house was built in 1928, though the land was acquired in 1799 or thereabouts.

  *Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel was the title of Cheever's next collection, and this particular piece was reprinted as “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear,” in which a number of items from the magazine version were deleted. One such item had borrowed verbatim from the eccentric preamble to “The Death of Justina”—which ran the same month in Esquire (November i960) as “Some People” in The New Yorker!—and another was a transparent attack on Salinger, though Cheever would later claim, “The only writer I meant to attack was myself [i.e., in the person of Royden Blake].” The Salinger-slurring item called for the elimination of “all autobiographical characters who describe themselves as being under the age of reason, coherence, and consent” and included a little parody of Catcher in the Rye: “I mean I'm this crazy, shook-up, sexy kid of thirteen with these phony parents, I mean my parents are so phony it makes me puke …”

  * Eventually—with the spectacular success of Rich Man, Poor Man in 1969—the transformation would be complete. As Cheever succinctly described this massive potboiler: “It is the history of an emigrant family, much fucking.”

  † After his arrest, Arvin was ordered to have a psychiatric examination that resulted in a “classic homosexual profile,” as Barry Werth wrote in his excellent account of the Arvin affair, The Scarlet Professor. Whatever one may think about the state of psychoanalytical theory circa i960, it's interesting to consider Arvin's profile in light of Cheever's own history: “[Arvin] was fixed at a prepubertal stage of development and consequently sought solace in an inner world. … He was insecure as a result of early parental conflicts. He had a strong affinity for his mother but resented her dominance. At the same time, he had an indifferent and inexpressive father to whom he yearned to be close. … This compensatory longing for affection from other men, he was told, was the chief source of his depression.”

  * This seems as good a place as any to make the indelicate point that Cheever almost certainly meant oral intercourse. One has it on good (and diverse) authority that he was just as entitled to the claim Farragut makes in Falconer: “When I die you can put on my headstone: ‘Here lies Ezekiel Farragut, who never took it up the ass.’ “ Or, as he wrote in his journal in 1967 (and elsewhere in so many words), “I have no conscious desire to have anyone put their cock up my backside.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  {1961}

  IN JANUARY, Cheever moved to Ossining—about five miles from Beechwood and thirty miles from Manhattan, on the eastern shore of the Hudson. “We know that it commands the greatest views except for the Bay of Naples,” Cheever was fond of saying (tacitly paraphrasing Tocqueville) once he'd become the town's most celebrated resident. At first, though, he was nothing if not conflicted. For one thing, he was still suffering “overwhelming anxiety” about the Kent-field affair and his sexuality in general (“I wonder … if by repressing these instincts I don't crush myself”), and this led to the question of whether such “a shabby and ridiculous figure” was worthy of so grand a demesne. He found himself standing frozen in one room or another—bemusedly examining the pilasters in the library, the cheerful yellow walls of the dining room, his grandfather's Canton handsomely on display—and wondering what on earth he was doing there. It was a long way to come for the seedy but self-sufficient youth knocking about in an old roadster during the Depression, living in rooming houses and fourth-rate hotels. “I feel very much like a bum,” he wrote Peter Blume a few days after moving in, “and think that what I would like most to do is grow a long beard and recite dirty poetry in my underwear at the YMHA. This revery alternates with an imaginary evening party in which I say things like: President de Gaulle may I present my old friend Pete
r Blume?”

  He expressed both the pleasure and pain of being a homeowner—at last—with quasi-deprecating humor. A previous occupant had named the house Afterwhiles (inscribed on the gateposts), and Cheever took to calling it Meanwhiles, mocking the pomposity of naming one's house while calling attention to the fact that one lived, no less, in a house with a name. Perhaps he also meant to suggest the transitory nature of the arrangement. Things began falling apart as soon as they moved in. One day it was the water pump, then the oil burner, plus the roof leaked, and finally, when his publisher, Cass Canfield, came for dinner, a sewer line burst under the stairs and squirted the man. And while Cheever rallied to keep the house in repair, the grounds began to deteriorate too: the elm trees blighted and died, the pond (dubbed the Turgenev Memorial Tarn) clabbered into a swamp, the little bridge collapsed, and the overall effect “rivaled the jungles of Borneo,” as Federico put it. Within a few months Cheever was half seriously composing an advertisement to sell the place (“Stone ended 18th Century manor house, etc.”), though he was pleased to show it off to an old rival like Shaw. “Irwin came for lunch and said that we both got what we wanted,” Cheever wrote: “i.e. I got a picturesque old dump and he got a Swiss chalet and a taxfree two million in Geneva.”

  Perhaps his first real houseguest was Josie Herbst, who would admire the place, he expected, “with gusto and sincerity.” In the past, Herbst had always been a vivacious presence, especially toward the children, but in recent years a strain of acerbity had begun to get the best of her. During their last encounter at Yaddo, in 1959, Cheever had noted how she “force[d] the conversation into a false and evasive vein” (“Yes, you say, we are all frustrated and miserable, we are all poor”); but mostly he was sympathetic, and afterward resumed his long campaign to get her a grant from the Institute—”not for her work,” he wrote then-secretary Louise Bogan, “but for a nonstop literary conversation that must have begun in Sioux City around 1912 and is still going strong. … She is also old, sick, poor and quite embittered.” No grant was forthcoming, however, and when Herbst arrived in Ossining two years later (hefting a cat carrier), she looked older and quite a bit more embittered. As Cheever drove her home from the train station, she immediately began blasting the Institute: “They're a bunch of stuffed shirts,” she said. “Nobody any good is a member.” At last Cheever told her that if she didn't desist he was going to stop the car and leave her on the side of the road. The next morning she stayed in bed so long that her hosts feared she'd died in the night.