Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  Melissa, as it happens, is a passenger on the train bearing Gertrude's remains back to Indiana, and it is Melissa's story that is mostly foretold here. In his notes to the novel, Cheever reminded himself to emphasize “the lonely and erotic nature of man, that all the splendid ceremonies, the music and the bells, meant to honor and contain his drives, the atmosphere of loneliness and bewilderment is never expunged.” In a world where nuclear oblivion seems imminent, and life in any case is “bitterly disappointing”—bereft of “splendid ceremonies” or much in the way of spiritual fulfillment—one is apt to overindulge one's carnal appetites. Lonely Gertrude, without even the creature comforts afforded by working appliances, consoles herself with drink and sex until she's driven to suicide; Melissa takes up with the nineteen-year-old grocery boy, Emile, because she thinks she's dying of cancer: “The image, hackneyed and poignant, that came to her was of life as a diversion, a festival from which she was summoned by the secret police of extinction, when the dancing and the music were at their best.” But human beings are meant for better things than dancing and rutting; the erotic, for Cheever, is ideally a symbol of divine love, and animal despair can only be transcended by the soul's aspiration toward the “illustrious.” The Dionysian Melissa does not end up dead like her farcical counterpart Gertrude Lockhart, though her eventual life in Rome does seem a living death of sorts, as she divides her days between dubbing Italian movies and thereby impersonating fallen women through the ages (“She was the voice of Mary Magdalen, she was Delilah, she was the favorite of Hercules”) and wandering around a supermarket (“Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean“) in search of food for her oafish paramour. In a separate but “parallel” story line (so noted by Cheever), Coverly also has a brush with death—a mysterious hunter fires an arrow at his head just as he stoops to tighten his shoelaces—but consequently takes a more Apollonian route: “Coverly's resolve to do something illustrious settled on a plan to diagnose the vocabulary of John Keats.” Feeding the poet's oeuvre into a computer at Talifer, Coverly discovers that a list of Keats's most frequently used words results in an odd, lyric pensée about the flawed nature of humankind (and hence restates the novel's main theme): “Silence blendeth grief's awakened fall / The golden realms of death take all / Love's bitterness exceeds its grace / That bestial scar on the angelic face / Marks heaven with gall.”

  Fittingly, the novel ends with a Last Supper of sorts at Honora's house in St. Botolphs, attended by eight guests from the Hutchins Institute for the Blind. These wretches have been invited at Honora's behest—her last request as she proudly drinks herself to death, departing a heartless world embodied by the Internal Revenue Service, which has hounded her all the way to Europe and back. Indeed, an entire way of life seems to be passing with Honora, beginning with her beloved old house, which like a “carapace” seems to dwindle into “cobwebs and ashes” along with its tenant. Her posthumous hospitality toward the blind Christmas guests—”the losers, the goners, the flops”—seems a final act of ceremonial kindness, as well as a timely reminder of human misery and death. One thinks of Cheever's injunction in “The Death of Justina”: “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?” At this late hour in history, we are thus urged to consider our fragility, and mutual dependence, as well as our ultimate purpose as immortal beings. Not to do so is to end up like poor Moses, a hopelessly drunken reprobate who can no longer bear to consider his life in the sober glare of (Christmas) morning: “The brilliance of light, the birth of Christ, all seemed to him like some fatuous shell game invented to dupe a fool like his brother while he saw straight through into the nothingness of things.”* At the end of the novel, the temporal world is fading away, and Cheever's favorite bit of Plato in the final paragraph (“Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal …”) seems a relinquishment of all that. “I will never come back,” the narrator concludes, “and if I do there will be nothing left, there will be nothing left but the headstones to record what has happened; there will really be nothing at all.”

  AFTER MONTHS of grueling anxiety—redeemed at last by “booming” sales† and mostly excellent reviews—Cheever decided he needed a vacation and asked Mary if she'd like to visit Italy again. She countered with the suggestion that they go to Paris instead—she'd yearned to return for some thirty years now—but Cheever petulantly refused (“I am fatuous and disgusting”) and even decided to stay home rather than travel alone. When he announced as much to his family, however, “They seemed so terribly disappointed”—he wrote Weaver—”that I announced again that I would leave for Rome on Sunday and so I shall.” The first thing he did was savor the grandeur of Porto Ercole again, staying with the Australian writer Alan Moorehead (Gallipoli) and his wife, Lucy, whom he'd befriended in Italy seven years before. After a few days of sitting on the beach with Mrs. Moorehead—who discussed her husband's “ruthless infidelity” with a kind of doting detachment—Cheever proceeded to Rome and took an apartment at the Academy. Lonely as ever and searching for love (“someone who will take care of my needs”), Cheever ended up dining with fellow guests almost every night and feeling the “institutional blues, those old Yaddo blues.” He returned to Ossining at the end of January.

  Through the Mooreheads he'd recently met another Australian, Alwyn Lee, who, after a picaresque career as a Melbourne journalist, had come to the States during the war and joined the staff of Time. As a former colleague reminisced, Lee “had a unique reputation even among the extraordinarily alcoholic group of writers” at the magazine. One day in 1958, a researcher had passed Lee's office and observed the following: “Lee lay on the floor, under his desk, with only his feet visible. Half kneeling, half peering into the dark hollow, stood Henry Grunwald, present Editor in Chief of Time, Inc., asking plaintively, ‘Are you all right, Alwyn?’ “ Lee's first appearance on Cedar Lane was also memorable. As Ben Cheever wrote, “I came home from school to find a tall, slender Australian in a suit and vest attempting cartwheels on the lower lawn. My father was standing off to one side watching.” Despite his own vagaries, Cheever tended to find overt eccentricity distasteful, and Ben felt certain his father would take an immediate dislike to the tipsy Australian. But not at all: he found Lee a “first-rate” raconteur and was in awe of his larger-than-life persona. “[Alwyn] had a series of ardent and eccentric attachments to barkeeps, whores, unemployed actors and an international spy called Hong Kong Harry,” Cheever recalled after Lee's death. “He had been, as a youth, the sexual and political terror of Melbourne and when his face was in the shadow you could see how comely he had been. In the light, of course, his face was heavily scored. He drank two quarts a day.”

  Such was the man who proposed to write a cover story about Cheever for Time. At first the latter demurred as a matter of course—all such publicity was “abominable”—but Lee insisted: they were kindred spirits, he said, pointing out that they'd been born the same year (1912) in spring (or rather Cheever had been born in May and Lee in October—”the Australian spring”). Cheever claimed that he and Ben promptly absconded to Vermont to escape the predations of Time, but actually the trip was an expenses-paid “research” boondoggle for which he was accompanied by Lee and an assistant. (“In the bar after dinner,” Cheever mused in his journal, “Lee picks up a girl who dumps him out of her Volkswagen three miles from town. He walks home but still shows up for breakfast, bathed, shaved, dressed for skiing.”) It wasn't long, however, before the lark began to pall. When Cheever returned to Ossining, he found the artist Henry Koerner installed in Susan's bedroom, painting one of Cheever's shirts. Afterward, Koerner remarked that he'd included Cheever's pet doves in his cover portrait “because they seemed … to symbolize the peaceful world with which Cheever surrounds himself “—unaware, perhaps, that his placid host had suspected him all the while of seducing Mary and was “prepared to murder” Koerner if this should prove to be the case.

  Cheever's general paranoia about the project was not unjusti
fied. A second reporter, Andrew Kopkind, soon arrived from California and began interviewing family and friends.* One night Cheever got an idea of just how deeply the man intended to dig: “What have you done wrong?” Fax Ogden inquired, phoning from Delaware. “To have this friend of my adolescence, who I have not seen for forty years, brought into the picture is strange and unnatural,” Cheever wrote. It got stranger still. When Cheever had first agreed to cooperate (“it's better this way than hiding in the bathroom like Salinger who never seemed to find his way out”), he made only one request: Leave my brother in peace. Kopkind, however, lost no time running Fred to ground in Connecticut, and soon it transpired that he was indeed searching for “smut.” The Warrens almost kicked the man out of their house for asking unseemly questions about Cheever's marriage (“I remember that son of a bitch!” said Red Warren twenty years later), and certain other friends, Cheever noticed, seemed “uneasy” around him these days, as if worried they'd said a little too much to Kopkind.

  In public Cheever affected a breezy, nothing-to-hide scorn: he claimed to have advised one group of friends to say he was impotent, the other that he had “two cocks.” He wrote the following set piece, word for word, to various correspondents:

  Sally Ziegler, a small-town Georgian who lives in the cottage on the hill, has been preparing herself for the TIME interview for a month. On Friday the doorbell rang and she let the man in. “I don't approve of this kind of sneaky journalism,” she said, “but the truth is that I know a lot about him because I can see him from my windows. I mean to say that I know he's a very heavy drinker and I often see him out there at twelve o’ clock noon with a martini cocktail in his hand. And he sometimes chases his wife through the orchard in full view of my children. And he almost never wears his bathing-suit when he goes swimming and I've always thought there was something peculiar about men who go swimming without their bathing suits. But as I say I don't approve of this kind of gossip and if you'll ask me some suitable questions about his habits I'll try to answer them to the best of my ability.” Then the man said, “Lady, I'm your Fuller Brush representative.”

  Cheever's private attitude was far less debonair. Once his face appeared on “four million newsstands” in late March (he fretted), he'd be exposed for all time as “impotent, homosexual,” to say nothing of all the other sins he'd committed in his almost fifty-two years. “So the boundless continents of anxiety appear,” he wrote after one sleepless night. “I will be described as an impostor, a bum sponging off the government and the corporation of Yaddo, a cheap social climber, an imitation gentleman.”

  No doubt Kopkind turned up something of that sort, but it was not to be found in Lee's elegant puff piece, “Ovid in Ossining.” Far from being described as (essentially) a snobbish crypto-homosexual, Cheever was praised for the “moral vision”—the pietas—that was everywhere evident in his work: “John Cheever, almost alone in the field of modern fiction, is one who celebrates the glories and delights of monogamy.” The better aspects of The Wapshot Scandal were incisively discussed (Lee was a first-rate critic), and its supposed flaws were explained away as ingenious formal effects: “Cheever is not a great expositor of character. Fiction as character study belongs to the Victorian novel, and this, he believes, is as obsolete as the world it moved in—the tight, homogenous community, before mass communications smoothed out the world and blurred individuality. This tends to make his novels seem disjointed, but he defends it on the ground that disjunction is the nature of modern society.”

  Astonished by Lee's “transcendent generosity,” Cheever invited the man over for a celebratory walk to the dam. When Lee complained of the cold, they returned to the house and sat around a fire. “I'm frightfully sorry,” said Lee, lowering his whiskey, “but I'm about to go into the torture of little ease.” Cheever looked puzzled, and Lee clarified that he was about to die and needed to find a bathroom. “He goes to the bathroom, vomits, returns, goes to the bathroom again,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “I hear him spitting out his guts and crying pitifully. When I open the door I find him lying in the bathtub.” Cheever helped the dying man out of the tub and put him to bed with a hot-water bottle, then phoned for an ambulance. “You're not going to die, Alwyn,” he said, taking Lee into his arms. “The tenderness in this scene was marred by the fact that I had a sharp pain in my arse,” Cheever related to a friend. “Standing, I saw that I had sat on his false teeth. ‘Godamn it Alwyn,’ I said, ‘you just can't leave your false teeth anywhere.’ At this The Angel of Death—a conservative and humorless spirit—vanished. The ambulance arrived and he made a miraculous recovery.” Lee's near-fatal attack of pancreatitis had yielded, for Cheever, that choice business about the false teeth, which eventually became a linchpin moment in Falconer.

  Another curious outcome of the Time story was a meeting at the Century with his old “boy chum” Fax. “This is no reunion to be turned into a story,” Cheever wrote of the rather melancholy occasion. The middle-aged Fax was a homely man “with a sad song to sing”: his public-relations business was failing, and he seemed to dislike his wife and children. He thought perhaps he'd write a textbook or a television show (“something that will bring in large and sudden sums of money”). After lunch the two walked along Forty-third Street with their arms around each other's shoulders for old times’ sake, and in parting Fax asked Cheever where he could get a whore (“I suggested the elevator man at the Iroquois but you know with a face like that he might have some trouble”). Every so often, in years to come, Cheever would get late-night phone calls from Fax, always a bit drunker and sadder, and generally wondering if Cheever was interested in some vague “business venture.” Then, around 1970, the calls stopped.

  CHEEVER USED TO SAY that he had “two conspicuous lacks”: a singing voice and a self-image. By the latter he meant (on one level) a public image, the lack of which was due, he said, to “a genuine horror of notoriety” engendered by his Yankee upbringing; also, sober, he was a desperately shy man who felt oppressed by strangers. He tended to drink before any public appearance and then would “smile, smile, smile” until his face ached—what else to do?—and afterward he felt so ashamed of himself that he drank more. “I feel like a remorseful masturbator,” he wrote after a recent reading, “holding his aching, softening cock in one hand while sperm runs down the wall paper like the white of an egg.” But then he always professed not to care about fame: literature, he was fond of saying, was like a vast impersonal “stream.” He himself had been influenced by everything since the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and though his own work might be forgotten (“it wouldn't disconcert me in the least”), it would forever be part of that “stream” running into the future. Asked about his father's “stream” concept, Federico laughed: “To say he stood on the shoulders of giants is to say he's Isaac Newton. It's a wonderful kind of double play. You say ‘Ah, I'm nothing in the great stream of things,’ but in saying that you put yourself in the great stream of things.”

  His appearance on the cover of Time increased his visibility in the stream, and also gave him the beginnings of an image—that of a “serious and likable person,” no less, not to mention one of the great writers of his generation. He began to be noticed on the street, and didn't really mind it at all (“Me tickled”): now perhaps he'd be fussed over in restaurants and whatnot; his barber might tack his picture to the wall. Meanwhile his mailbox was stuffed almost daily with Time covers to autograph, and Cheever was only too happy to oblige. This serious and likable, witty and gifted author began to worry about things like publicity photos, and was dismayed when others failed to share these concerns. Shown an advertisement featuring her husband's likeness, Mary remarked: “What are they going to do with it, pin it up in the post office?” “Should there be some way of seeing this humorously,” Cheever fumed in his journal, “I would be most grateful. Gin seems to be the only way out.”

  What Cheever anxiously sought in these photos, perhaps, was some further confirmation of the image so perfectly c
aptured by Time, which had initiated (as Federico put it) “the media shakedown cruise for the new landowning Cheever.” “[Cheever] wears Brooks Brothers shirts with their conspicuously missing pockets and would never consider having a mongrel dog,” Alwyn Lee noted, alongside pictures of the tweedy author and his faithful retrievers, strolling around his West-chester estate. And lest he seem an arriviste—a cartoon gentleman like John O'Hara, with his spats and hard-finish suits—Cheever wore clothes as though he'd been born in them: one collar-point of a button-down shirt was carefully unbuttoned, his crewneck sweater was gone in the elbows, and his “wash pants” were rumpled and stained. Real aristocrats (to say nothing of real men) didn't worry about whether their creases were ironed, as long as the label said Brooks and certain other touches were right. “I am a Wasp, my God, look,” he remarked (with his usual protective irony) to a journalist: “Palms over a Seth Thomas clock on Maundy Thursday!” His next remark, perhaps, would be some drawling reference to the century in which his farmhouse was built (“Pushkin and Sterne were still alive”), followed by a footnote about how it was completely “restored” (the audible quotes were a further level of irony) by Gugler in the twenties. “Cheever was not, I think, content merely to be an artist,” said Maxwell. “He wanted a place in society, to lead the life of upper-middle-class people as he saw it (with some idealization, I think). He would have liked to have had lots of money, entertained beautifully, been socially the best there was.”