Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Often he drank because he was worried, and not all his worries were ill-founded. He was fifty years old and had published almost 150 stories—many among the best of the postwar era—as well as a novel that had consumed half his life: could he go on like that forever? Meanwhile his financial obligations were crushing. He awoke (earlier and earlier) in the grip of the cafard, and lay in bed thinking about things (“eviscerated, insubstantial”) until it was time to have breakfast and get to work—but all too often the work went badly, which made him even more anxious and presently despairing, until a state of total pitiless sobriety was simply out of the question. Then he would sneak a drink or two and wait for lunch, when he could legitimately drink more, after which he'd try sweating it out with a long walk or a scything session. Young Federico was always “terrified” to see his drunken father tottering off with the big unwieldy scythe over his shoulder: “I was never sure if he was going to come back with all his limbs.”

  It helped a little that Cheever managed to find humor in his own low spirits. He became more and more fond of the refrain that he was an “old man nearing the end of his journey,” and he noticed that, like his mother, he was apt to indulge in “copious sighs” as well as the bleak little proverbs that accompanied them (“There's not enough rain to water the garden,” he'd quote her, “but enough to keep you indoors”). And—like his father-in-law—he often assumed the role of martyr in order to put others subtly in the wrong: “Oh, don't worry about me, dear,” he'd sigh, having served his wife and family with generous portions so that nothing was left for him but a potato and a puddle of grease. “This is plenty for me.” His children took to calling him Eeyore, and once Susan presented him with an empty honey jar and a dead balloon.

  Another way of shaking off the torpor of the cafará was to remind himself, emphatically, of certain abiding virtues that made life beautiful. As he wrote in his journal at the end of that disappointing spring, “I wake at three or four—soft moonshine from the west—and half-rising in bed exclaim: Valor, Love, Virtue, Compassion, Splendor, Kindness, Wisdom, Beauty, Vigor! The words seem to have the colors of the earth and as I recite them I feel my hopefulness mount until I am contented and at peace with the night.” For years he'd resort to that little incantation when all else failed to rouse him (his recital was wan at times), and meanwhile it provided the spark for “A Vision of the World,” about a man who rebels against “incoherent” reality by imposing the logic of his dream life. In sleep the narrator keeps encountering an oddly heartening, quasi-Slavic phrase—“Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego”—but when he urgently repeats this to his vapid wife, she dissolves in tears. At last, waking once more “in despair,” he suddenly, ecstatically grasps the (implicit) meaning of the dream motto—”Valor! Love! Virtue!” etc.—and so achieves a peace that passeth understanding.

  One imagines that Cheever resorted to his incantation more than a few times when thinking of his brother, Fred, who had fallen off the wagon in spectacular fashion. For a while, according to his daughter Jane, Fred had been not only sober but almost content—or rather he was “wonderful in the morning,” though afternoons weighed heavily and his mood darkened as the once-beloved cocktail hour came around. On weekends he'd drive into town with his youngest daughter, Ann, whom he'd ask to wait in the car while he went around the corner to buy meat or hardware; the waits became longer, until one day the fourteen-year-old girl noticed a telltale odor when her father returned (wreathed in smiles). Then, one Sunday afternoon in 1961, Fred paid his first visit to Cedar Lane; he was obviously tipsy and had a funny story to tell. “What is involved seems almost beyond my comprehension,” John wrote. “He is drunk. He has lost his job and will not be given another. And in his drunkenness he has tried to find a college roommate, an old friend of forty years ago, a homosexual friend for all I know* … and has ended up in the jail of the town where our prominent and respectable parents shaped a life for themselves and for us, and he refers to this whole series of events as an uproarious joke. I think this is insanity.” In fact, Fred may well have sought his old Quincy friend in the hope of getting some lead on a job, a matter that made him understandably desperate. He was pushing sixty, and his problems had become well known among former associates; he'd called every conceivable friend and connection, but no one could help. Almost every day he went into the city and sat around employment agencies, returning so drunk in the evenings he could hardly stagger off the train. Finally Iris called John in despair: Fred was back in his room and keeping himself drunk; she couldn't take him anywhere, since he'd only slip away and hide until the only thing she could do was go home and wait for the police to call. “But oh my god, my god how he must suffer,” John wrote. “Can I see it, can I feel it? He has completely lost his sense of reality.”

  Iris eventually enlisted the aid of a psychiatrist, who advised her to leave home immediately and let her husband “sink or swim;” in the meantime the man would check on Fred every so often and try to keep him alive. Iris took the keys and cut off the telephone, then went to visit her mother in Florida. Ann went to live with sympathetic neighbors. Fred (except for the psychiatrist) was totally isolated. His daughter Jane lived in the South Shore town of Hingham, where she had a family of her own; David had “escaped to the west” (Boulder) and worked in a bank; Sarah had left home after her father's breakdown in 1959, when she was eighteen, fed up with playing buffer and go-between to her feuding parents (“Finally I thought, ‘This is not my problem’”). While her mother lingered in Florida, young Ann went by the house each day to feed the dog, but at least two weeks passed before she saw her father again. (“His favorite word for me was diffident. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but finally I looked it up. He was right: I was timid and intimidated. It was a put-down. He was a very bright man.”) When Fred emerged at last—to be hospitalized—he was scarcely recognizable: “His skin was sagging all over him,” said Ann. “White, pale. Just a bag of flesh.”

  But Fred remained first and foremost a Cheever, and Cheevers were men of destiny and force: it was a matter of breeding. When he returned to Cedar Lane a few months later, he was fat and beaming and full of advice. John attributed his heartiness to alcohol, and observed him with exasperated detachment. “He has endured many disappointments, indignities, and injustices and in his determination to rally he has developed a crude mockery of cheerfulness. Everything is wonderful, simply wonderful.” At such times John tended to retire into his “fastidious” manner, though on this occasion he probably couldn't resist the odd sarcastic aside, which might have provoked Fred into an even more pointed heartiness; in any case, John would always refer to this conversation as an argument of sorts, and by way of having the “last word,” Fred remarked, “Whatever else I have, I have four beautiful children. Loving, wonderful children.” John guardedly allowed that his son David was “very loyal,” which angered Fred: “He lifts his face,” John wrote, “swollen now with years of drink, and says, ‘They're all loyal to me.’ I have seen them scorn and disobey him, and they have all run away from home. There is not a grain of truth in this pitiful claim to love.”*

  Fred's remarks about his children's love—innocuous enough on the surface—seemed to infuriate his brother: he brooded over them for years. In a nutshell, they seemed to express all of Fred's maddening perversity, and perhaps in a general way suggested just how lost in self-deception a man—his “only, only brother,” no less—could become. Where would it end? “F[red] calls and he will call again,” John noted later in 1962. “I suppose he needs money. If he's at the club says F[red] to M[ary] then I'll go there; and here is the nightmare I have already worked out in detail. I am sitting in the reading room, looking at La Nouvelle Revue Francaise when I hear his loud voice in the downstairs hallway. It is the voice of a totally broken spirit shored up by a pint of lemon-flavored gin.” And there was another, even more disturbing nightmare that seemed parlously close to realization: “I was planning to take him trout fishi
ng up at Cranberry Lake,” John said, a year after his brother's death, “which is just miles away from everything in the wilderness, and I realized if I got him up there he would fall overboard. I would beat him with an oar until he stayed.” It was the kind of obsession that drove one to drink.

  AT A COCKTAIL PARTY he gave in the sixties, the publisher Sol Stein remembered how Cheever had glared at another celebrated guest, Leslie Fiedler, whose sweeping critical studies of American writers had omitted any mention of Cheever. Indeed, the only notice he'd received from anything resembling academia was in Ihab Hassan's Radical Innocence (1961), which had described The Wapshot Chronicle as a “collection of quaint episodes” that were “far from unified.” But that summer a promising overture came from Frederick Bracher, a respected scholar at Pomona College: “My credentials for this overdue bit of criticism are a relative freedom … from academic bias, a dislike of the current critical jargon … and a real, and I hope true, feeling for your work.” He proposed to write the first serious study of Cheever, focusing mostly on The Wapshot Chronicle, and wondered if he could put a few questions to the author. Cheever responded with great wooing enthusiasm, discussing at length his rationale for omitting certain historical and topographical details from the novel in order to create a more universal world and so forth. Bracher duly incorporated these points in his paper (“The Wapshot Chronicle is loosely situated in time and space …”), which so delighted its subject that he literally couldn't put it down (“He's reading Professor Bracher's paper again,” said Susan): “That you should have undertaken to diagnose so unarchitectural a work as mine seems to me one of those admirable pieces of generosity that keeps the world from flying apart,” Cheever wrote with abject gratitude.

  Academic critics, however, didn't share Bracher's esteem for the well-known New Yorker writer. The Hudson Review returned the paper with a printed rejection slip (“the first I've ever received,” Bracher noted), as did a lesser journal out of Purdue, until finally a reworked and shortened version—”John Cheever and Comedy”—was published in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. A few months later Bracher came to New York, and Cheever took him to lunch at the Century: “He is generous, intelligent and colorless and I feel somehow that I fail him,” Cheever wrote afterward, sensing he'd drunk too much and been in bad form generally. To Bracher, of course, he wrote with ornate graciousness: “[Considering the complexity of all human relationships, the powers of gin, the stuffiness of the clubrooms and the bitter weather outside, I hope that somewhere along the line I made my pleasure in meeting you apparent.”

  Cheever would go on corresponding with Bracher for years, and when he was at Yaddo that September (1962), it was Bracher to whom he confided that he couldn't “ever recall having been so discouraged and melancholy.” He'd gone there hoping to finish The Wapshot Scandal, only to realize the prospect remained as distant as ever. And then, a day or two after he arrived, his old hero Cummings died at home of a cerebral hemorrhage. That night Cheever talked of Cummings with two Yaddo friends, Curtis Harnack and his wife, Hortense Calisher. Harnack had also known the poet, and amid long ruminative pauses, the two swapped remembrances. “The body of Cummings might have been there in its coffin,” said Calisher, “and in a way it was. I was at a wake.” Cheever had seen Cummings a few years before at Susan's school in Dobbs Ferry, where the poet had agreed to give a reading. As Susan remembered, the two men had warmly embraced in the headmaster's office: “The force and openness of their affection for one another seemed to shake that airless, heavily draped room.” Afterward they drove the poet back to Patchin Place, stopping for hamburgers at White Castle, where Cummings railed wittily against his arthritis as well as the silly teachers at Susan's school. As Cheever liked to point out, the poet had “perfect style”: “I think of Cummings, who played out his role as a love poet into his late sixties. There was a man.”

  A further source of unhappiness at Yaddo was, as Cheever saw it, the ever more visible presence of homosexuals, though of course they were hardly a novelty there. As a much younger man, Cheever had warily taken tea with composers David Diamond and Marc Blitzstein (“thinking, without censure, that their world was very unlike mine”), and now, twenty-five years later, here was Blitzstein still—and still vaguely “ungainly,” it seemed to Cheever: “I think that this is not the force of an invincible society but the invincible force of nature that demands that we take procreative attitudes and loathes the gymnastics of perversion.” Be that as it may, the force of society (as opposed to nature) was much on Cheever's mind too—it was society, after all, which had left Newton Arvin “stripped of everything.” Before and after that unfortunate man's fall, Cheever had militated at board meetings in favor of building a swimming pool at Yaddo, and now the thing was done at last. Every afternoon, then, Cheever sat beside the water watching the sun-bathing youths and reminding himself of his devotion to attitudes of procreation. “But my itchy member is unconcerned with all of this,” he glumly noted, “and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world.” Arranging his towel, Cheever felt again like “a practiced and consummate impostor” and concluded that he was “heading for ruin.”*

  As a self-proclaimed (and often drunk) impostor, Cheever was increasingly poor company around his family. His daughter and he were especially apt to clash, as she got older and more assertive and perhaps eager to get a bit of her own back. These days, when he began to lecture her about her weight, instead of bursting into tears she was just as likely to call him a “troll” and slam the door in his face. Of course, Cheever had always encouraged (and certainly modeled) a sort of mocking banter among family members, such that the dinner table was characterized as a “shark tank” and a “bear pit.” At the best of times, no one appreciated a well-aimed barb as much as Cheever, even when he was the target, but these were not the best of times. “You have two strings to play,” said Susan, at pains to deflate her father's occasional pomposity. “One is the history of the family, the other is your childlike sense of wonder. Both of them are broken.” Cheever exploded, and even managed to force her into tears again. “I think, abysmally bitter, that Orpheus knew he would be torn limb from limb,” he wrote; “but he had not guessed that the Harpy would be his daughter.”

  The previous year, she'd begun attending Pembroke (the women's college at Brown), and hated it; she wanted to transfer to Bennington, but Cheever refused—he'd also talked Pammy Spear into choosing Pembroke, and she liked it just fine. Soon, however, Susan gave him reason to regret his obduracy. That spring she brought home a boyfriend named Webster, a Brown dropout whom Cheever described as having tight pants and a “Bottom-the-Weaver haircut”: He and Susan “read Reich aloud to one another and play junky music. I keep routing them out of one another's bedrooms.” For years Susan had heard her father's speeches about what she ought to do (lose weight and curl her hair) in order to get lots of dates, like Pammy and Linda, so now it pleased her to canoodle with Webster in plain sight. “No necking in the parlor!” Cheever erupted, finding her tracing a finger along the hair beneath Webster's navel. They slept until noon, ate enormous meals, and forced Cheever into such a “bilious humor” that he'd have to leave the house and scythe away his grievances (“jockeyed into the position of a heavy fatherinlaw”). When Webster departed after one of his visits (walking with “his yachtsman's stoop”), Cheever noticed that his daughter seemed forlorn, and sought to commiserate after his fashion. “It is not possible to talk to you,” she said. “You say what you don't mean and you mean what you don't say.”

  Ben, at least, was falling in line. “I cannot say truthfully that I have never felt anything but love for him,” Cheever reflected. “We have quarreled, he has wet his bed, he has waked strangling from nightmares in which I appeared as a hairy werewolf, dripping with gore. But all of this is gone. Now there is nothing between us but love and good-natured admiration.” Ben's love of the outdoors (his kayaking and whatnot) had gotten the ball rolling in the right directio
n, but his redemption was complete that fall, when he announced that he'd made the varsity football team. As a freshman! He forbore to mention that no junior varsity team existed for the six-man squad at Scarborough Country Day, or that he was probably the least popular man on the team, or, finally, that his status as a second-string center was “the athletic equivalent of wheelchair competition,” as Ben put it in sober retrospect. No matter. Cheever was thrilled that his son was staying after school for football practice, and more than happy to pick him up afterward, at whatever hour, and buy him a loaf of fresh bread at the Italian bakery. It helped that, as Ben recalled, his father never actually attended games (except once: “I go to see my son play football although he does not get off the bench”). And things just kept looking up from there. Later that year Ben was accepted to a boarding school in Connecticut, Loomis, whereupon his father (“beaming like a foolish swain”) escorted him to Brooks for a proper wardrobe: two suits, a tweed jacket, a dozen shirts, a raincoat, trousers, the works (“Never having been to boarding-school, and wearing at his age, tailless shirts, my underwear fastened with a safety pin, I am made very happy by this performance”). At Loomis, however, Ben was cut from the football team after two days. His father was crushed.

  ANOTHER NEW YEAR DAWNED, 1963, and still Cheever struggled on with his novel. It wasn't falling into place, and was far too gloomy for a writer whose work had been celebrated for its “wonder” and “brightness,” a writer who was trying, once again, to hear the dragon's tail swishing among the leaves: “[L]ast night I dreamed I was a Good Humor man, ringing a small bell and urging people to try the seven flavors of discouragement,” he wrote Weaver. “There are, between you and me, more than seven.” By the end of March, he was able to report that the end and the beginning seemed all right: “But the middle, aiie, aiie. The middle is wreckage.” He'd taken to sleeping (he said) with the manuscript between his legs; he'd made bargains with the devil. Finally, as another spring came to an end, he didn't finish so much as arrive at a point where he couldn't think of anything else to write or revise. It was time to send the thing to Maxwell, who if nothing else would be sympathetic. In his journal, Cheever drafted a sheepish cover letter: “A great many people felt that the Chronicle was not a novel, and the same thing is bound to be said about this, perhaps more strongly. I do hope you'll like it, but if you shouldn't I will understand.” Maxwell did not respond with his old alacrity, and Cheever wondered if the novel had “embarrassed him into speechlessness.” Meanwhile, the cafard seemed to become an almost corporeal presence; it spoke, late at night, in Hemingway's voice: “This is the small agony. The great agony comes later.” Cheever would get out of bed and chain-smoke in the bathroom—thinking the book was unpublishable, a disgrace—and finally go back to sleep, only to wake later and find the cafard worse than ever, smelling of “cheap handsoap” for some reason. “I wake, sucking air and scyth [sic] the orchard thinking that if I do any less I will know the torments of hell.”