by Blake Bailey
Fortunately she survived the weekend, and in her wake left a large, balding “kitten” named Blackie who (she explained) had belonged to the poet Delmore Schwartz's estranged wife, Elizabeth Pollet. This was quid pro quo: many years ago, the Cheevers had unloaded on Herbst a cat named Harriet who'd proved ill-suited to their small New York apartment; the cat had thrived in the wide-open spaces of Erwinna, and it was Herbst's hope that Ossining would have the same tonic effect on Blackie. The latter—whom Cheever promptly renamed Delmore—spent a few days hiding under furniture and then began spraying the walls, until a veterinarian suggested he be neutered. “If the knife should slip,” said Cheever, “there would be no recriminations.” The castrated Delmore was not a whit more amiable: he pissed in Cheever's shoes and ate flowers off potted plants, and once made a point of “dump[ing] a load in a Kleenex box while [Cheever] was suffering from a cold.” Herbst, it seemed, had placed a curse on Cheever's house, and consequently the two friends fell out of touch for a while. In the end it was Cheever who made amends, writing to assure Herbst that he'd allowed Delmore not only to live but to prosper: “He is very fat these days and his step, Carl Sandburg notwithstanding, sounds more like that of a barefoot middle-aged man on his way to the toilet than the settling in of a winter fog but he has his role and we all respect it …” By then the writers’ respective careers had diverged even further, and when Cheever complained that his long-awaited wealth and fame made him “intensely uncomfortable,” Herbst replied that he could ease the pain a little by loaning her a hundred bucks to pay the electric bill. Cheever gave her at least that much (“I'm glad you asked”), and two years later—enlisting the support of Bellow and Warren—he finally got her that grant from the Institute. This restored her to the public eye somewhat, and the following year she was tapped to serve on the fiction jury for the National Book Award.
CHEEVER'S NEIGHBORS on Cedar Lane were Ted and Sally Ziegler. Ted, an energetic polio survivor, was himself an author (Men Who Make Us Rich), which perhaps had something to do with what appeared to be a defensive attitude toward his more famous neighbor. After their first dinner together, Cheever noted the “sharp edges to Ted's personality” and suspected he'd made a bad impression for some reason—confirmed a few days later, when Cheever went to get his mail and noticed that Ziegler, working outside, abruptly seized his papers and stormed into his house, slamming the door. From there matters went downhill, though long placid intervals passed when the two didn't speak at all. Every few years, however, the feud would get hot again. Ziegler took up the French horn in middle age and began practicing outdoors at night, until Cheever “marched up the hill” and threatened to “fire off [his] shotgun at intervals of five minutes.” That was in 1967; nine years later, Ziegler suddenly began railing at Cheever about his dogs (“For fifteen years his wife hasn't been able to take a walk, his daughter has been terrified, his old cat is miserable …”). Meanwhile one of Ziegler's sons, Andrew, sometimes found himself in the midst of these imbroglios and would notice an odd tangy odor he couldn't quite identify until the Proustian moment, many years later, when he took his first sip of gin and “immediately thought of John Cheever.”
Partly as a means of staving off (or sweating out) those first drinks of the day, Cheever had become a great taker of walks, for which the pastoral environs of Cedar Lane were well suited. His favorite route was along the Croton Aqueduct—a forty-five-minute (or so) hike through the woods and along the Croton River leading at last to the fabulous spectacle of the Croton Dam, which Cheever especially liked to show companions in spring, when the 180-foot marvel overflowed (“in spate”) and the crashing water could be heard a mile away. “This is the second largest cut-stone mortised structure in the world,” Cheever would always explain to first-time visitors, adding in later years, “—and one of the last things on the planet to be seen by Neil Armstrong before he was hurled into space.”
On his way home from the aqueduct pathway, Cheever would often stop for a drink at Shady Lane Farm, which Aaron Copland had sold in 1960 to the Italian poet and novelist Antonio Barolini (“a member of the Vicenza aristocracy,” Cheever was apt to point out). Barolini was a gentle eccentric who tended to greet Cheever with a great hug and buss on both cheeks, calling him “my dear” and affably declaring his love. The two would then retire to Barcaloungers and attempt to communicate in a curious pidgin accompanied by florid gesticulation—until one day Cheever noticed Barolini had begun speaking entirely in English, translating even the simplest bits of Italian. (“Is too bad you cannot read my article, he says. But I can read Italian I say shyly. No reply.”) “I am loving the Beatles,” Barolini suddenly announced in 1964. Cheever asked if he'd seen them on TV or bought their records, and the man presently explained that he was referring to “George and Helene Beatle” who lived in Croton. These were the Biddles; indeed, Cheever had kept up a witty correspondence with George for many years. The old man was a well-known artist from an eminent Philadelphia family; his brother Francis had been attorney general in the Roosevelt administration, and George had used his influence with FDR (an old Groton and Harvard classmate) to help establish the WPA's Federal Art Project. Soon after the Cheevers moved to Cedar Lane, Biddle presented them with an enormous Muscovy duck—”Duck Biddle”—who presided over the Memorial Tarn until he was devoured by neighborhood dogs.
Such congenial locals were a comfort, as Cheever was suffering from “inhibitive megrims” which made it “as difficult for [him] to leave [his] quaint old house in the country as it is difficult for an impacted wisdom tooth to leave its seat in the jaw-bone.” His anxiety over the Kentfield affair would not go away, inflaming an old dread that he was an “impostor” whose iniquity would surely be discovered and his “chosen way of life” destroyed. He became more and more wary of any sort of taxing social encounter. One of his very few outings in 1961 was the Institute lunch in May, a “painful bore” where he found himself acting as minder for John Knowles (“I never dreamed I'd take a leak with Robert Graves and [Fredric] March,” the man quipped) and wincing as Glenway Wescott read award citations (“You have made a GAME of the sport and a sport of the GAME!”); afterward the Cowleys and Blumes came to Cedar Lane for dinner and began chatting about a married football star who, they happened to know, was a pederast. “They continue to talk about married homosexuals,” Cheever fretted in his journal. “I don't seem to know any. … Glenway with his lisp and fancy-work prose gives me a pain in the neck.”
It got so bad that Cheever could scarcely drive across a bridge without suffering a full-blown panic attack, as if he were being physically chastised for leaving the safety of his home. “Poor X,” he wrote.
As he approached the bridge there would be an excruciating tightening of his scrotum, especially his left testicle, and a painful shrinking of his male member. As he began to ascend the curve of the bridge it would become difficult for him to breathe. He could fill his lungs only by gasping. This struggle to breathe was followed by a sensation of weakness in his legs, which would presently become so uncoordinated that he could legitimately worry about being able to apply the brakes. The full force of the attack came at the summit of the bridge when these various disturbances would seem to affect his blood pressure and his vision would begin to darken.
This terrifying experience was evoked in a story he wrote that year, “The Angel of the Bridge,” in which the narrator comes to perceive his phobia as the manifestation of some vague disenchantment with “modern life”—abruptly cured by a young hitchhiker who carries a small harp and serenades the narrator with an old folk song: “She sang me across a bridge that seemed to be an astonishingly sensible, durable, and even beautiful construction designed by intelligent men to simplify my travels, and the water of the Hudson below us was charming and tranquil.” Such a bizarre deus ex machina was the very sort of “marvelous brightness” to which Alfred Kazin would perceptively refer (a few years later) as a dubious effort on Cheever's part “to cheer himself up.” It was
an effort that would only become more strenuous, and nothing akin to an angelic hitchhiker was likely to make it otherwise.
Marooned to some extent in Westchester, Cheever continued to see a certain amount of the white-collar crowd, who remained a rich source of material. That was the summer of the Berlin Crisis, a few months after the Bay of Pigs, and one night Cheever spent an evening at the Boyers’ with some banker guests and an architect named Art Malsin whom he'd always despised. “Micks in the White House!” they complained. “Bomb Cuba!” (“On and on it goes,” Cheever wrote Biddle, “and I spend most of my time counting to ten so that I won't be intemperate and expose myself as an enemy agent.”) Around that time, too, Mrs. Vanderlip had decided to “hydrogen-proof” her vintage bomb shelter, built during the Great War, and the whole paranoid ethos inspired Cheever to write one of his most entertaining satires, “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow.” The story begins, “I would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming, ‘O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcaps?’” This fanciful shelter belongs to Charlie Pastern, the “brigadier” of the Grassy Brae Golf Club, who spends his days “marching up and down the locker room” shouting, “Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let's throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who's boss.” For all his bravado, though, Charlie proves to be a pathetically unhappy man stuck in a loveless marriage while expiring under an avalanche of debt. To distract himself, he begins an affair with a promiscuous matron named Mrs. Flanagan, who ultimately demands a key to his bomb shelter in exchange for her favors. When this gets back to Charlie's wife, she is duly vexed: “He had dragged her good name through a hundred escapades, debauched her excellence, and thrown away her love, but she had never imagined that he would betray her in their plans for the end of the world.” Finally, as she prepares to leave the wretched Charlie (who has lost Mrs. Flanagan too), she relates her epiphany: “You want the world to end, don't you? Don't you, Charlie, don't you?” A funny, poignant dénouement follows in the form of a letter from the narrator's mother, who reports that Charlie subsequently went to jail for grand larceny, leaving his family destitute, while the now divorced and similarly bereft Mrs. Flanagan was last seen standing beside the bomb shelter “like a mourner,” until the new owner sent a maid down to shoo her away.
That dénouement led to the first explicit clash between Cheever and Maxwell, whose friendship had been on the mend since the latter's brisk rejection of “Justina.” A few months before, Maxwell had even gone so far as to accompany Cheever to the dentist—a gesture of almost maternal solicitude that had moved Cheever, who reflected in his journal: “He has for more than twenty years, encouraged and supported me, it was he who got me an award and took me into his club* and now he sits beside me at the dentists to cure my anxieties. It is a friendship I think [of] today with no jealousy, no dependence, none of the imbalance of the lover and the beloved.” At other times, suffice to say, Cheever was very much inclined to dwell on the “imbalance” (“[Bill] was a man who mistook power for love,” he'd later remark), though it's not enough to say he merely concealed his misgivings—rather he seemed determined to abolish them with good behavior, almost as if he were reproaching himself for having such ignoble thoughts in the first place. As Maxwell put it shortly after Cheever's death, “He tried to separate things so that he could be my friend and I wouldn't be responsible for anything The New Yorker did that made him angry.” To a large degree, though, Maxwell was responsible, and Cheever was never quite so foolish as to think otherwise.
In the present case it was Maxwell, and Maxwell alone, who decided that the little dénouement to “Brigadier” was superfluous—he didn't share Cheever's taste for abrupt tonal changes, whimsical digressions, or really anything that diverged (much) from straightforward realism. Cheever, however, thought the final image of Mrs. Flanagan, standing forlornly beside the bomb shelter, was imperative to the story's integrity. (“Did you know that The New Yorker tried to take that out?” he remarked in The Paris Review, still indignant eight years later.) What's more, the cut was presented to Cheever practically as a fait accompli.* Dropping by The New Yorker to correct galleys, Cheever had noticed a page missing at the end—just like that—whereupon he asked Maxwell to meet him for lunch at the Century. As he wrote Weaver, “I kept the conversation … on the subject of his wife and children but when we said goodbye he asked about the cut. ‘Do anything you want,’ I said and walked over to the station where I bought a copy of Life [magazine] in which J. D. Salinger was compared to William Blake, Ludwig von Beethoven and William Shakespeare.”
Salinger, it bears repeating, was a sore point: Franny and Zooey had been published that September and had dominated the best-seller lists ever since, at a time when Cheever was struggling to get on with another novel while supporting himself, as ever, with inventive—but relatively less acclaimed (and now maimed)—short fiction for The New Yorker. Reading the Life tribute, Cheever went into a “slow burn” and began drinking heavily, until finally he phoned Maxwell in a rage; writing to Weaver, he recounted his rant thus: “You cut that short story … and I'll never write another story for you or anybody else. You can get that Godamned sixth-rate Salinger to write your Godamned short stories but don't expect anything more from me. If you want to slam a door on somebody's genitals find yourself another victim. Etc.” According to Maxwell, it was the “only time” Cheever really showed anger toward him, and as he admitted, “I blundered. I thought there were two endings and one was better.” That said, he also claimed (albeit at a distance of some twenty-five years) that he'd only removed the “second ending” in a preliminary “working proof,” so that Cheever could “see how it would read in print”: “[The story] wasn't about to go to press,” said Maxwell. “It wasn't scheduled.” Not so. That fulsome Salinger article ran in the November 3, 1961, issue of Life; “The Brigadier and the Golf Widow” appeared the following week (November 11) in The New Yorker. As Cheever asserted at the time, “[T]he magazine had gone to press and they had to remake the whole book and stay up all night but they ran [the story] without the cut.”
When it was over, Cheever wrote in his journal that he felt “troubled”: “The whole incident seems senseless and indigestible, perhaps because I cannot accept the degree of my dependence upon the tastes of others and in general my lack of success.” Success or no, he seemed genuinely remorseful for having insulted Salinger so rashly: “I admire Salinger, of course, and I think I know where his giftedness lies and how rare it is,” he wrote in a mollifying letter to Maxwell. “Another reason for my irritability is the fact that I am never content with my own work; that it never quite comes up to the world as I see it. This is not to say that I despair of succeeding; I think I may—but I am touchy.”
* In 1958, Maxwell had nominated Cheever for membership in the prestigious Century Club on Forty-third Street—a privilege that meant a lot to Cheever, though as ever he was at pains to downplay it: the main point of membership, he liked to say, was “to have a place to pump ship in midtown.”
* It should be noted that drastic, peremptory editing was not Maxwell's style, as Cheever himself pointed out: “[I]t has been my experience that Bill intends stories to be printed exactly as they are written,” he remarked in 1957, and surviving manuscripts bear this out. Vis-à-vis Cheever, at least, Maxwell usually restricted himself to the odd marginal comment. “Don't believe it,” he wrote beside a line in “The Bella Lingua,” where Cheever had written, “To be a trolley-car conductor in Krasbie was a position of some importance …” Cheever deleted the line. “What is a shapely day?” the literal-minded Maxwell queried a bit of description in “The Country Husband” about a day “as fragrant and shapely as an apple.” Cheever (happily) retained the line.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
{1962-1963}
ON THE FIRST DAY of the new
year, 1962, Cheever noted that he hoped to finish his novel—now titled The Wapshot Scandal (though he wasn't yet sure what constituted the “scandal” in question)—by the spring. “I think of the enormous responsibilities and burdens that have, very recently, overtaken fiction,” he wrote four months later; “to hold the attention of an audience whose attention is seriously challenged; to describe with coherence a society that has no coherence; to discover or invent links of precedence and tradition where there are none; to look into the moral questions of the hydrogen bomb; to renew a sense of good and evil.” A tall order, all that, and no wonder his progress was slow. Spring came and went, and that summer he wrote that he hoped only “to report here soon that the middle section of the Wapshots has fallen into shape”—but then added, “I expect that I will continue to report here that I drink too much.”