Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  HAVING RECENTLY FINISHED a novel as well as one of the century's finest short stories, Cheever decided to ask The New Yorker for a raise. As a New England gentleman he hated to talk about money, but really the time had come: the upkeep on his picturesque farmhouse was onerous, two of his children were in private schools, and his drunken brother was constantly asking for handouts. Besides, it wasn't as if The New Yorker couldn't afford it. According to a Wall Street Journal article, the magazine was wildly prosperous, having the highest per capita ad rate of any national magazine (twice that of Life), and “probably” the highest profit margin at 10 percent.

  What was at issue were the terms of Cheever's “first look” agreement, which paid him a yearly bonus in exchange for a first reading of anything he wrote. It also stipulated a word rate, which varied from author to author and was a matter of considerable secrecy. This was based on one of Ross's byzantine systems. Having decided that the magazine's fiction was getting too long (moving away from the frothy “casuals” he preferred), Ross provided what he hoped would prove an incentive for shorter work: he doubled the word rate on the first two thousand words, after which the rate was half or less in certain cases. Shaw's minimum rate in 1945, for example, had been “34-15,” or thirty-four cents a word for the first two thousand and fifteen cents thereafter (later the system was revised to the “first 2,000 words or first half of wordage, whichever greater”). Ross also established a system that assigned grades to stories, ranging from C— to A, which dictated the price of a story. Maxwell always gave any story he accepted an A (“on the ground that it was not a cent too much”), and in Cheever's case would hasten over to bookkeeping, figure out the exact price of a given story, and order an immediate check up to 75-80 percent of the total, the balance to be paid on publication (“Sometimes,” he recalled, “this process would be forgotten, and John would be distressed when the check was small on publication”).

  Perhaps because he took such pains, Maxwell was touchy on the subject of money; also, as Brendan Gill once noted, though Maxwell “seemed the gentlest of men,” he was “on some level of his being … tough as nails.” Cheever knew this as well as anybody, and privately mocked his friend's “gentle and tender” manner when imparting bad news of some sort, particularly bad news for which Maxwell was largely responsible—a rejection, say, or the fact that one of Cheever's stories had been stuck “behind the cartoons” (“One is always being pushed into second class”). Once, at a dinner party in Scarborough, Mary Cheever had adamantly told Maxwell that he ought to pay her husband better, whereupon Maxwell had stormed out of the house (only to find he'd left his headlights on and couldn't start his car; Cheever came out and pushed him down a hill and on his way).

  In any event, Cheever's request for a raise went over badly—“embarrassing and painful,” as he wrote in his journal. Eventually he'd make a funny story out of it: as Susan Cheever remembered, “[H]e often set it on Christmas Eve and threw in a snowstorm and the suggestion that he couldn't afford to buy presents for his children.” In fact, Cheever did complain that he was “harassed by indebtedness,” and—though he loved working with Maxwell, of course—he simply had to make more money. Maxwell threw up his hands: he was only a part-time editor, he said, and couldn't change the payment system; with the best will in the world, he suggested that Cheever might be able to do better elsewhere.

  Through the falling snow—as he liked to tell it—Cheever walked to a pay phone on Forty-fourth Street. (“I remind myself of my brother,” he noted at the time; “sitting in a pay-phone, trying to make some business arrangements. … Since he has failed and since I look like him I seem bound to fail.”) Cheever hadn't had an agent to handle his stories since he and Lieber parted company in the forties,* but now he called Candida Donadio, whose clients had been listed that year at the “red-hot center” of Esquire's “literary universe.” She told him to give her a few minutes, then called back: The Saturday Evening Post, she said, would pay him twenty-four thousand for a first-look contract and a minimum of four stories a year, which would roughly triple his New Yorker income.

  He returned to Maxwell's office and reported the offer. “Great consternation” ensued: Mr. Shawn was summoned, along with the magazine's treasurer, Hawley Truax, and together the men tried to reason with Cheever. He was, of course, one of their most illustrious fiction writers, but they simply couldn't afford to pay him the sort of money that would support his lavish lifestyle (“I am accused of improvidence”); as Maxwell claimed, “To do so we would have had to make an exception of him, and that would make others furious.” In the end, as Cheever put it, he was offered “a key to the men's room and all the bread and cheese [he] could eat”: “The Saturday Evening Post has offered me twenty-four thousand, The New Yorker has offered me twenty-five hundred, and I will take the latter, I'm not sure why.” Actually (in addition to the alleged bread and cheese), the magazine had raised his first-look bonus to twenty-six hundred, and added a clause that allowed him to submit his work elsewhere from time to time; also, his minimum word rate was fixed at “18-9.” But as Ben Yagoda would reveal in his comprehensive book on the magazine, About Town, “Cheever didn't realize how low this was.” Not only had Shaw gotten almost twice as much in 1945, the young Updike's bonus in 1964 was thirty-five hundred, and the younger-still Shirley Hazzard got two thousand and a word rate of 20-10.

  Forty years later, Ben Cheever read Yagoda's book and was taken aback: How could this be? After his father's death, he and Maxwell had become close friends—indeed, Maxwell was a surrogate father of sorts—and so he approached the man: Did he know? Maxwell replied that he'd had no idea; it was shocking to him too. Yagoda, however (who pored over the whole massive archive of New Yorker editorial correspondence at the New York Public Library), doesn't think this likely: “Whoever was editor of a particular writer knew what that particular writer was paid,” said Yagoda. “That particular editor would know the rates of all the writers he worked with.” Maxwell's writers included Updike and Shirley Hazzard, among others with presumably higher rates than Cheever's. But then, Cheever was (as his daughter would say) a “patsy” when it came to money: Yankee reticence or no, it was a subject that made him extremely uncomfortable (“Perelman screams and I guess it keeps his prices up, but I can't”). Which is not to say, necessarily, that he didn't know when he was getting screwed. Toward the end of 1975, as Maxwell was about to retire from the magazine, Harold Brodkey (one of Maxwell's discoveries) told Cheever that Maxwell had been “financially, intellectually and emotionally dishonest” with Cheever, who reflected, “Some of this I know to be true.”

  * Perhaps the only instance in Cheever's enormous journal where he uses the word homosexual (or some explicit equivalent) in the context of his brother, though it obviously colors our interpretation of certain other passages.

  * There was, in fact, more than a grain. Though Fred's children were naturally anxious to distance themselves from an unbearable situation, they continued to care deeply for their father. “I separated the alcoholism from the man,” said his son David, and even the more estranged Sarah wrote to her father at the time, “I love you. … I have a great deal of respect for you. … It hurts both you and me to have me tell you to stop drinking. Or to have me tell you to go to AA. Or for me to see you in such bad shape.”

  * While at Yaddo, Cheever had witnessed Marc Blitzstein's will “by chance,” and so was summoned to the probate in 1964 when Blitzstein died—beaten to death by Portuguese sailors in Martinique. Sharing a cab to the courthouse with Aaron Copland (“I cannot find a trace of the fact that he is queer but my examination is unremittent”), Cheever found the whole business “shocking” and “unimaginable” and longed more than ever “to love what is seemly and what the world counsels one to love … a lighter destiny than to court a sailor in Port-au-Prince [actually Fort-de-France in Blitzstein's case] who will pick your pockets, wring your neck, and leave you dead in a gutter.”

  * Cheever's Russian translator, T
anya Litvinov (who loved Cheever and vice versa), was also revolted by the story. While translating The Brigadier and the Golf Widow in 1965, she wrote that she was “side-stepping the Educated woman for the while … I'm woman enough to resent its unfairness.” As for Mary, she was quoted in Time a few months after the story appeared: “I did go to one or two meetings of the League of Women Voters,” she coolly remarked, “but I do think he should not have killed the little boy.”

  * One of the story's pleasant ambiguities is whether the seasons change as a matter of magical realism or as an aspect of Ned's delusions.

  * Edith Haggard at the Curtis Brown agency had negotiated Cheever's book deals and foreign sales until her retirement in March 1963, after which he severed relations with the agency. As for short stories—his main source of income at the time—Cheever's later agent, Lynn Nesbit, pointed out, “The New Yorker made it clear they didn't like agents fussing around. It was a gentlemen's club, and they dealt with each other in a gentlemanly way.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  {1964}

  AFEW WEEKS AFTER SUBMITTING the final draft of The Wapshot Scandal* Cheever had lunch at the country estate of his publisher, Cass Canfield, who lovingly recited one of his favorite passages from memory. Everyone seemed excited about the book except its author. Cowley had found it a “pure delight” and praised Cheever's “power of invention” with an almost paternal pride: “That riot of the housewives over the plastic easter eggs: it's a Breughel vision of hell. I've been disturbed by the slowness of readers in realizing that your work is completely outside the New Yorker pattern or any other; that it's something unique in contemporary fiction.” But Cheever was unpersuaded. Right up to publication, he continued to suffer “seizures” of melancholy: “I have a feeling that [the novel] is not only a failure—it is an odious crime—and the world is whispering about it at my back.”

  Such fears were somewhat dispelled by Elizabeth Janeway's frontpage rave in the January 5, 1964, New York Times Book Review: The novel, she wrote, was “a riotous, slapstick, tragi-farcical show of the world today.” And perhaps Cheever was particularly gratified by her remarks on “mythic elements” such as the maenadlike housewives, Melissa Wapshot's “suffering for her Adonis,” and so on: “More than anyone except perhaps Nabokov (and he does not suffer from Nabokov's plunges into pure grotesquerie), [Cheever] is able to use the objects, the scenes and the attributes of contemporary life for the purposes of art.” Two days later, Charles Poore concurred in the daily Times, noting that the book “should be on everybody's list for the best novel of the year.” In his journal Cheever reflected that he found it “disconcerting” to be “embraced by an institution,” though he couldn't resist showing the Poore review to Maxwell over lunch that day. The latter's response, he wrote, “seemed close to unfriendly”: “I do not understand the nature of this friendship; I think I never have.”

  Most of the other notices seemed to indicate that the world was indeed realizing (as Cowley would have it) that Cheever was a good deal more than just a proficient writer of New Yorker fiction. “I can think of no other writer today who tells us so much about the way we live now,” Joan Didion observed in the National Review, while Cheever's (secretly despised) colleague at the Institute, Glenway Wescott, applauded the novel on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Book Week as an improvement over its vaunted predecessor—”a true novel, not just a nouvelle expanded, not a set of stories strung along like matching or contrasting beads on arbitrary string, not a disguised memoir or autobiography.” Wescott also wrote Cheever a personal note, expressing his almost feverish gratitude: “[N]ow and then, as it were by chance, a particular book comes along, and it's a love affair.”* A few prominent reviewers, however, delivered the sort of pans that Cheever had anticipated with such terror. In The New Republic (“Sugary Days in St. Botolphs”), Hilary Corke wrote that Cheever's Wapshot novels were marred by “unredeemable carelessnesses and loosenesses of construction” as well as “arrant sentimentality.” And perhaps the most distinguished reviewer of all, Stanley Edgar Hyman, began his review in the New Leader with this rather prescient salvo: “When a highly-esteemed story writer tries a novel and fails at it, in this amazing country, he is rewarded just as though he had succeeded. … John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle won a National Book Award. In The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever has again tried, and again failed, to make short story material jell as a novel. As a two-time loser, he can probably expect the Pulitzer Prize.”

  One could also make the case that Cheever was deemed a “failed” novelist by certain critics for the very reason that he was regarded as a story writer first and foremost; as with its predecessor, the structure of The Wapshot Scandal may be reduced to the formula of three or four long stories rather loosely (in terms of linear plot) plaited together. Moreover, as Maxwell asserted (and Hyman made a similar point), “the psychological consistency of characters” is sacrificed somewhat by the author in order to be “freer” and more “fanciful.” When we last see Melissa Wapshot, for example, she's wandering around an Italian supermarket like “Ophelia,” madly chanting commercial jingles (“Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean“); reading Cheever's notes, we learn that he considered using Coverly's wife Betsey for this scene, before randomly deciding to “throw it to Melissa”—in other words, it was the set piece that mattered rather than the characters, most of whom are mutable ciphers responding to their respective predicaments. But then, if one insists on well-rounded characters, there's always Honora, who remains perfectly herself from start to finish, and that's arguably as it should be: Honora embodies the more coherent traditions of an old, dying world, whereas Melissa and Betsey reflect the alienating chaos of modern times.

  The Wapshot Scandal begins and ends during Christmas in St. Botolphs, where a “shine of decorum” still prevails “at the time of which I'm writing”—the latter phrase perhaps the most recurrent in Cheever's work, fixing time beyond history, again, though we are told that it's “late in the day.” Thus the “shine of decorum” in St. Botolphs is little more than “a mode of hope,” and everywhere a disparity is noted between appearance and reality. Even the apparently “benign” rector, Mr. Applegate, is in fact a cynical drunkard who seems to hear his parishioners’ silent prayers in all their maddening banality: “It was the feeling that all exalted human experience was an imposture, and that the chain of being was a chain of humble worries.” And yet there is still a redemptive sense of connection in St. Botolphs: carolers serenade their fellow townsfolk, the telephone operator knows everyone by name, and people do not judge their neighbors’ social prestige (“as they presently would”) based on the relative lushness of their Christmas trees. But meanwhile, at the Missile Research and Development site at Talifer, where Coverly now works and lives, the impending Apocalypse has imposed a mood of paranoiac isolation. Across the street from her tract house, Betsey Wapshot observes a man falling to his death while installing storm windows, and returns to her television rather than violate “security” concerns by getting involved. This, then, is what passes for a “shine of decorum” at Talifer, which is decidedly more hypocritical than hopeful. Near an abandoned farm with its deceptive “bucolic imagery” is the “dark, oil-colored glass” of the administration center—”buried six stories beneath the cow pasture”—and viciousness, in one form or another, is forever bursting to the surface. Coverly brawls with a loutish neighbor over a stolen garbage can, while in the background a missile rises brightly against the horizon. As for the Teller-like director of Talifer, Dr. Cameron, he boasts of skiing expertly down a steep slope at dusk (whereas in fact he furtively rode the lift both ways), and one page later reveals to Coverly that a bird is calling him by name (“Cameron, Cameron, Cameron”). In such hands rests the fate of the earth.

  The degree to which readers are polarized over the question of structure in The Wapshot Scandal (or any of Cheever's novels) seems ultimately a matter of taste. George Garrett singled out the book's craft as one of its most “outs
tanding” features, while Corke (et al.) thought it an architectural fiasco and certain reviewers seemed almost to take personal offense—Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times deplored the author as “weary, bored and confused,” and of course there were times when Cheever was inclined to agree. In due course, though, he'd arrive at a more charitable view, describing his second novel as “an extraordinarily complex book built around non sequiturs really.” And so it is: The Wapshot Scandal bulges with sideshows and discordant (to the humorless) bits of slapstick, but it is actually built around such moments. To take perhaps the most notable instance, the entire novel (more or less) is conveyed in microcosm through the self-contained parable of Gertrude (“Dirty Gertie”) Lockhart, who over the course of a four-page anecdote slides into alcoholism and promiscuity and finally suicide.* “Her downfall began not with immortal longings but with an uncommonly severe winter when the main soil line from their house to the septic tank froze. The toilets backed up into the bathtubs and sinks. Nothing drained.” Unable to find an available plumber in all of Parthenia, Gertrude hires a derelict to dig a ditch for two dollars an hour plus all the whiskey he can drink, and the two end up in bed together. The woman's decline continues as her appliances break down one by one, leaving her isolated and helpless and faced with the awful fact of her own “obsolescence.” One day she throws herself at the milkman in drunken despair, after which the oil burner stops working and no repairman can be found on short notice: “It was very cold outside and she watched the winter night approach the house with the horror of an aboriginal. She could feel the cold overtake the rooms. When it got dark she went into the garage and took her own life.” The lonely nomadism of modern life is such that Gertrude's husband can find no friends among their neighbors to attend the funeral; instead he musters a few “near strangers” whom they'd met “on various cruise ships.” Finally, as a kind of parenthetical rim-shot, we are told that the “oil-burner repairmen, electricians, mechanics and plumbers who were guilty of her death did not attend.”