Cheever
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The main aspect of this personage was his curious accent. Was he a Cambridge Brahmin? British? What? It was hard to pin down. Philip Roth pointed out that it wasn't really a New England accent at all—“more like an upper-class New Yorker, someone like Plimpton, perhaps.” This was close, though Cheever's accent was somewhat more mutable than Plimpton's. When appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, or putting an impudent barkeep in his place, Cheever became almost a parody of the pompous toff (“like Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island,” the writer James Kaplan observed, “or Chatsworth Osborne in Dobie Gillis”), but at other times—relaxed, cracking jokes—he sounded not unlike a boy from the South Shore with an English mother. “I knew John before he had an accent,” said Jerre Mangione, his old FWP colleague from the thirties, and Mary Cheever also seems to remember when her husband had a more conventional way of saying “idear” for “idea” and “Cheevah” for “Cheever.” No matter. Most agree that Cheever's accent became a well-assimilated part of his persona—”a suave, fictional dialect,” as the poet Dana Gioia put it, “[that] seemed to have the force of ancient authority, as if he were some New England Homer standing at the apex of a long oral tradition.”
Nor would it be accurate to say that the persona itself—in its finished form—was false. “He saw what he wanted and he became it,” said Allan Gurganus. “That's what Cary Grant said, who started with Archie Leach: ‘I made up the name Cary Grant and then I became him.’ “ One thinks of F. Scott Fitzgerald—or rather Cheever did, noting the disparity between Fitzgerald the vulgar, drunken prankster and Fitzgerald the artist, Fitzgerald the well-meaning father who “preserved an angelic austerity of spirit,” as Cheever wrote in Atlantic Brief Lives: “Noble might be a better word, since as a boy in what had been the frontier town of St. Paul he had considered himself to be a lost prince. How sensible of him. His mother was the ruthless and eccentric daughter of a prosperous Irish grocer. His gentle father belonged to the fringe aristocracy of the commercial traveler, moving from Syracuse to Buffalo and back again. How else could he explain his gifted-ness?” Needless to say, Cheever might just as well have been writing about himself. Also like Fitzgerald (and any number of American writers), he was a wistful snob—simultaneously enchanted and repelled by a materialistic culture where artists, no matter how great, remain outcasts to some extent. Fitzgerald, finding his grandfather listed in the St. Paul Social Register as a “grocer,” penciled in the word “wholesale;” Cheever, feeling belittled in some way, would pull an accent and become the lost prince of Wollaston. And yet the part of him that remained Archie Leach, so to speak, was a humble man who felt tender toward the other Archie Leaches of the world.
“I can't connect my life,” Cheever remarked once in the late seventies. “That person in the Army wasn't me. And there was a whole life before that that I can't connect either.” There were other lives, too, until finally he became the world-famous writer and Westchester squire. “It is strange to relate that I never had such a clear impression of knowing someone so well as on the first evening I met John Cheever [in the fifties],” said Elizabeth Spencer. The two remained friends over the next twenty-five years, though Spencer never again felt remotely as close to Cheever. “But I continued to believe that that funny and charming person was the real one.”
IN HIS JOURNAL, Cheever described himself as “a fat slob enjoying an extraordinary run of luck,” and no wonder. Earlier that year, the producer-director team of Alan Pakula and Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird) had bought the rights to both Wapshot novels for seventy-five thousand dollars. On April 3—while Cheever's radiant face still lingered on a few newsstands—he went to Los Angeles to finalize the deal and discuss the possibility of adapting the novels himself.
He was met at the airport by Pakula's wife, the actress Hope Lange—”a pretty young woman whose company I enjoy,” Cheever noted, quietly enough, of the person who would become a lifelong (if sporadic and mostly platonic) mistress, for lack of a better word. Lange had debuted in the movie Bus Stop (1956) and earned an Oscar nomination the following year for her best-known role, in Peyton Place. By 1964 she was thirty and temporarily retired, the better to devote herself to family. Charged with entertaining Cheever that first night, Lange would later remember that “he had his New England mumble and suit on”: for an hour or so, he sat stiffly sipping drinks and glancing uneasily around the Pakulas’ orange basement playroom, until Lange put Guys and Dolls on the phonograph (Cheever loved the sound track even more than Tosca) and a wonderful time was had by all.
After that, Cheever made little attempt to disguise the fact that he was smitten with Pakula's wife. He shined his shoes, shaved twice a day, and gazed at her with dewy fascination, whatever the company. Most of the others found it oddly endearing, and Lange's younger brother, David, even viewed Cheever as an ideal father figure of sorts (“a writer of consequence, witty”)—while Cheever in turn was impressed that David was dating Natalie Wood. One night the young man picked up Cheever at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the two went cruising around the neighborhood; as they passed Glenn Ford's house David mentioned he knew the man, and Cheever (“acting like a naughty boy”) said, “Let's go see him! I've got to have something to tell the kids.” So they went, though the midnight visit was “pretty dull,” according to David, since Cheever was shy and Ford was sleepy.
The one person who seemed to hold out against Cheever's boyish charm was Alan Pakula. While they were dining together one night, Cheever noticed that the man “seem[ed] cross” with him for some reason, and finally Pakula's brother took him aside and explained things. Mortified, Cheever delivered a little speech the next day to the effect that he loved Hope as he loved “the light of day,” which may or may not have done the trick; afterward Cheever cursed himself for indulging in such a “vain and indecent flirtation” (“Improve, my soul, improve”). Nevertheless, he arranged to say goodbye to Mrs. Pakula on his way to the airport, and was alarmed to find she wasn't home. Thinking her husband had “forbidden” her to see him again, Cheever spent much of the transcontinental flight drinking gin in the toilet, and when he got home that night (presumably worse for wear) he lost no time telling his wife and seven-year-old son “about [his] emotional embroilments.” The next week or so passed in an agony of worry: “Why should H[ope] have stood me up, oh why oh why?” he wrote, thinking his “drunken and immature behavior” had ruined the movie deal: “There will be a desperate call from Henry [his agent], a prolonged lawsuit, etc.” But at last he got a call from Hope, who explained that she'd had to run an errand the day of his departure, that she was very sorry, and meanwhile everybody loved and missed him. “I've never wanted anything more from the world,” Cheever sighed to his wife, “than to be rich, famous and loved.”*
“Will success spoil John Cheever?” his family joked, and for a few weeks, at least, it seemed the opposite was true. He gleefully deposited a fat Hollywood check at the local bank (whose employees were gratifyingly incredulous) and began spreading the wealth—lavishing gifts on his wife and children, paying off part of the mortgage, and treating himself to a sporty new Karmann Ghia convertible. In June he and Mary went back to Italy with Alwyn and Essie Lee, more or less retracing the steps of Cheever's previous visit: Mary “flash[ed] her rubies and diamonds on the deck of the Mooreheads’ yacht” in Porto Ercole, where they spent the balmy days sipping gin and eating lobster and playing backgammon. Cheever was glad not to be a solitary traveler again, if a bit piqued by Lee's flashy Italian (and agitated by the comely youths “pos[ing] on the rocks and the headlands” of Sperlonga).
By July, however, the “dog days” had returned to the Hudson Valley: “I have the disposition of an adder,” Cheever reported. This had become a yearly cycle, ever since Cheever had decided that Treetops was “an inbred group of neurotics”—no longer mitigated, even, by the presence of a few charming Whitneys, since they'd been banished after Winter's death. Still, Mary insisted on making the trip (and taking Federico and the dogs)
, though she tried to mollify Cheever by filling the freezer with precooked meals and reminding friends that he'd be in need of their hospitality. To no avail: “Alone, alone,” he brooded in his journal, “eating boiled eggs while you [Mary] stuff yourself and play mahjong with your mad sister.” Such was his restless desolation that he entertained friends whom he could scarcely bear anymore, or never much liked in the first place. Art Malsin (“Bomb Cuba!”) made an appearance one night, and wanted to discuss Negro writers vis-à-vis the Civil Rights Act: “[James] Baldwin is a homosexual,” Cheever recorded the gist of it. “Baldwin is a negro. Ergo most negros are homosexual. One of the results of the civil rights bill will be to legitimize homosexuality.” Which, of course, was another sore subject: lonely, bored, and drunk, Cheever felt as vulnerable as ever to unsavory temptations, and the more he tried to distract himself, the more the world conspired to remind him. When Alwyn Lee went back into the hospital, Cheever volunteered to give his wife rides from the train station: “My motives are 1 to occupy myself and 2 to help her. She gets into the car with a newspaper clipping that says gin-drinkers are determinedly married to conceal their homosexuality.”
Fortunately, a rather wholesome alternative was right across Cedar Lane, at the lovely hilltop “chateau” (as Cheever described it) of a merry divorcée named Sara Spencer. For years the woman had combed The New Yorker each week to see if Cheever's name appeared at the end of any stories, and was therefore delighted to learn in 1961 that her favorite writer had become a neighbor. Soon they had struck up a friendship of sorts, but only recently had things become really interesting. One day Spencer had taken the liberty of carrying a large bundle of Cheever's mail down to his house, and while he sorted through it, he remarked, “I get letters from all over the world, and yet I'm desperately lonely.” Appalled that this wonderful, witty man—this world-famous writer who'd recently graced the cover of Time!—had been abandoned by a callous wife, Spencer gave Cheever the run of her house and somewhat acceded to his overwhelming “appetite for sexual tenderness,” as he put it. That summer he'd published a story titled “Marito in Città,” about a married man who has a larky affair with an aging seamstress named Mrs. Zagreb, which was how he invariably referred to Spencer in his journal.* “I take Mrs. Zagreb to a restaurant in Peekskill and have a jolly wrestling match on her sofa,” he wrote of a night in August. “You could use a young man, say I. I could use three or four young men, says she.” The two could talk about almost anything, it seemed: Spencer was a shrewd businesswoman who owned several apartment buildings in the Bronx, and sometimes, amid the afterglow of whatever went on between them, she gave Cheever financial advice. Indeed, he felt so comfortable with this kindly, worldly matron that he even mentioned his “homosexual instincts”: “Oh baby, she said, you're not queer; you love women more than any man I ever knew, you're all man, all male.”
No wonder he forgave her for being middle-aged (at least), though it wasn't a matter he could forget entirely. Again and again he tabulated her defects—her face had evidently been lifted at least once (“the firmness of her chin contrasted with the slackness of her neck”); she dyed her hair in the “silvergilt” pattern of aging blondes; her legs and breasts “show the mileage they've traveled”—and yet: “[S]he is so easily approachable that I am delighted to be with a woman who does not flinch at my touch.” She also had a fine swimming pool* and skating pond, and never seemed to mind if Cheever was drunk or naked or (usually) both. All she asked was that he sign a legal waiver absolving her of any liability in the event of accidents.
* In 1959, Mike Bessie had left Harper to co-found a new publishing house, Atheneum, and was startled by Cheever's refusal to follow him. The Wapshot Scandal was edited at Harper by one of Cheever's oldest friends, Frances Lindley.
* The following year, when The Wapshot Scandal was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters, Wescott was one of Cheever's main detractors: “[H]e forced some perfect stories into a somewhat loose, somewhat arbitrary novel,” Wescott demurred—in direct contradiction to his Book Week review—noting his own preference for Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools.
* Such digressions serve the same purpose as, say, the dumb show in Hamlet—indeed, a Hamlet motif is yet another ingredient in this generous, sprawling novel, an incidental spice Cheever uses whenever he happens to think of it. Like Hamlet's father, Leander's ghost haunts the early pages as an emblem of protest against the decadent modern age (“Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?”), and then vanishes altogether—qua ghost anyway—after only forty pages or so. Talifer is a kind of Elsinore, with Cameron its murderous king; Gertrude Lockhart evokes Hamlet's tragic, debauched mother; and Melissa is explicitly likened to the mad Ophelia.
* When first conceiving the novel, Cheever had meant for Moses to play a larger role—the “Dionysian” part largely taken over by Melissa. It's possible that Fred Cheever's grinding decline in these years left his brother disinclined to dwell on his fictional surrogate. In Cheever's working notes, anyway, references to Moses dwindle away until we come to this: “MOSES: nothing much. He's a goner.”
† The Wapshot Scandal eventually sold almost fifty thousand copies in hardback.
* Kopkind went on to gain a certain degree of fame as one of the sixties’ leading radical journalists, a frequent contributor to such magazines as Ramparts (one of whose founding editors was Susan Cheever's third husband, Warren Hinckle).
* Though Cheever would see more of the Pakulas (especially Mrs. Pakula), the Wapshot movie was never made. According to David Lange, Tad Mosel wrote a screenplay that was deemed “professional but not quite filmable.” A pity, as the cast would have been illustrious if Pakula and Mulligan had gotten their way: Spencer Tracy (Leander), Katharine Hepburn (Honora), and Robert Redford (Moses).
* Fifteen years later, when Hope Lange began to show her age, she too became “Mrs. Zagreb” in the journal.
* A pool “fed by an artesian well,” which Cheever gave to the Westerhazys in “The Swimmer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
{1964}
AMID THE (SOMETIMES) LONELY doldrums of that summer, Cheever consoled himself with thoughts of his “somber and mysterious trip to Russia in October,” as part of the State Department's new cultural-exchange program. Previous emissaries had been obvious candidates such as Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell, what with their proletarian themes, while Edward Albee had gone in 1963 on the strength (mostly) of his Death of Bessie Smith, since American racism was another favorite topic among Soviet readers.
The first Cheever story to be translated into Russian was “The Superintendent” (1952), about a humane, competent building super named Chester, who mediates squabbling among his crass, bourgeois tenants (“ ‘You get her stuff out of there, Chet,’ Mrs. Negus said, ‘and I'll give you ten dollars. That's been my apartment since midnight’ “).* The translator was Tatiana Litvinov, whose father, Maxim, had been Stalin's foreign minister before the war.† In 1961, she'd written Cheever a letter explaining that a friend of hers—an éminence grise of Soviet literature, Kornei Chukovsky—had recently loaned her a copy of The Enormous Radio: “I loved the stories so much that I began translating them there and then.” The first three translations were immediately published in Novy Mir (The New World) and Znamya (The Banner)—”our two most popular literary magazines”—and now Litvinov wanted to translate the rest of the book as well. Nor was her love of such stories as “The Season of Divorce,” “The Pot of Gold,” and “Torch Song” (her favorite) based on elements of anti-capitalist satire or socialist realism: “Your stories have a special appeal for us Russians,” she wrote, “brought up as we are in the Chekhov tradition of sympathetic irony”—a point she clarified with a note in the margin: “What I like about the stories among other things is that they made you grieve for the people without feeling sentimental about them.” Litvinov's translation of The Enormous Radio, published in 1962, was a particular success among other writ
ers, who seemed to agree with Litvinov that Cheever's work “belonged to Russia and had to be got back.” According to the New York Times, he'd also been discovered by a “lost generation” of Russian youths who were “alienated from Soviet goals and strongly oriented toward almost anything Western,” including the Twist, blue jeans, and long hair. Whatever pleasure Cheever took in this information, however, would have been dampened somewhat by the fact that Catcher in the Rye was far more popular (“almost a status symbol”) than any work of his. On the other hand, there was little question of Salinger's traveling on behalf of the government.
A week before his October 1 departure, Cheever went to Washington for his State Department briefing. “I was told that my liberty would be in danger, that my possessions would be rifled, my conversations bugged, and my walks shadowed,” Cheever would later recall (adding—inaccurately—”Nothing of the sort happened”). He was also asked whether he had any vices they should know about. “I've always been a very heavy drinker,” Cheever replied with a grin. His interlocutor then wondered if there was anything the KGB could use against him as blackmail leverage, and Cheever replied (perhaps after a tense pause) that he thought not.*