Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  In a state of tipsy exhilaration, Cheever arrived in Moscow at midnight and heard, amid the shushing rain, what sounded like cheep cheep cheep. This was a delegation of some fifteen Soviet writers, headed by Vasily Aksyonov, all of them calling Cheever Cheever Cheever. Any lingering unease he might have felt was dispelled by his hosts’ almost overwhelming enthusiasm: they fell upon him, embracing and back-slapping and “pour[ing] vodka into [his] ears.” Indeed, this was the kind of wide-open affection for which, on some level, Cheever had hankered ever since his glacial childhood on Wollaston Hill. (“But why,” he'd written the year before, “having known so little contentment, do I think continuously of a world, a scene, in which comely men and women greet one another eagerly and with love.”) After a number of toasts, the writers dropped Cheever at his hotel—the cavernous Ukraine—where he washed his socks in the bathtub and got a few hours of sleep. At his publisher's office the next morning, Cheever was seated at a “felt-covered” table and given brandy, coffee, and cakes. “Then a man comes in with the boodle [royalties] and counts it onto the felt,” he wrote Weaver. “Then you say Bolshoi Spaseba and the publisher gives you a big smelly kiss, right on the bouche.”

  In some ways, it was very near paradise. After years among the philistines of Westchester, Cheever found himself revered by a people to whom books mattered “tremendously”: to be a writer in Russia, he said, was “like being a priest of some functioning religion”—and to be an American writer (pisatel’ amerikanskii) was to be a sort of demigod. But then, the presence of any American was “like the arrival of a mail order catalogue in an especially provincial neck of the woods”: “We represented Marlborough [sic] cigarets, freedom of speech, opinion and movement, an uncensored literature, soap, toilet paper, serviceable and inexpensive automobiles and decent clothing.” Cheever rose to the occasion with vigorous conviviality. Where English failed, he marshaled a few Russian phrases he'd learned before the trip, along with an eccentric brew of Italian, French, and vodka-fueled expostulation. “It seemed as if he were in sort of a cloud,” said Bill Luers, a young officer at the U.S. Embassy who saw a lot of Cheever. It was not, however, a lonely cloud. “Soubletsky put an arm around my shoulders and I put my arm around his,” Cheever wrote of a typically spontaneous, ineffable friendship. “He ordered a bottle of vodka and we clanked our glasses and began to drink. Our conversation consisted mostly of repeating the word Printemps. I suppose he meant by this that he would see me in the spring … or perhaps he simply meant that in spite of the gloom of the early winter in Moscow we should remember that spring would come again.”

  Cheever had a tendency to slip away without telling anyone, and this was clearly disconcerting to the authorities. The exchange program was still something of a novelty, and neither side wanted any “bad incidents.” In theory, Cheever was supposed to be accompanied by his “interpreter” from the Writers’ Union, Giorgio Breitburd, a nice-enough fellow who (according to Litvinov) was a KGB agent. At gatherings Cheever would pump his new friends with eager questions about every aspect of their lives, while Breitburd hovered and sighed and looked at his watch and reminded him of other engagements. And when Cheever managed to escape his minder, it was seldom for very long: “Wherever we went,” said Litvinov, “we'd suddenly come across [Breitburd].” When at last she explained the man's function to Cheever, he shrugged and said he wasn't afraid. “Well,” she said, “you'd better be afraid.”

  When sober—that is, not often—Cheever did know the odd moment of fear. Waking at 3:00 a.m. in Azerbaijan, he was racked with homesickness and worried that he'd be kidnapped (“Will I have anything better than a single bed in a country where I do not speak the language”). But the next day his anxiety was eased by a bracing swim in the Caspian Sea, after which he flew to Tbilisi in Georgia (“the country of argonauts, Prometheus and Medea”) and was driven “through oceans of sheep” to a monastery in the mountains. Next was Kiev and another picturesque drive to Yalta, where he visited Chekhov's final villa. “Welcome to the house of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov,” the guide exclaimed in every room. “In house of Chekhov were being entertained Stanislavsky, Rachmaninoff … and the great Maxim Gorki.” Afterward he lunched with the poet Margaret Aligher, and the two went swimming in the Black Sea. Near the beach was a dilapidated statue, its wire rigging exposed: “Chekhov?” asked Cheever. “Da, da,” his companion sadly admitted. After further investigation, however, she rushed back to Cheever with some good news: “Was not Chekhov. Was Pavlov.” Finally, on October 14, Cheever returned to Moscow and noticed that the ubiquitous portraits of Khrushchev had all vanished; people were marching around waving flags and Brezhnev posters. Breitburd said he was “sorry for the old chap”—Khrushchev, that is, who'd been deposed that day—a “brave” remark, said Litvinov.

  Cheever also struck up friendships with Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny (“Zhenya”) Yevtushenko, both famous in a way that was almost unimaginable in the West, not only as poets but as daring spokesmen for greater artistic freedom. Khrushchev had denounced Voznesensky as a “bourgeois formalist,” and Yevtushenko's most famous poem, “Babi Yar”—an indictment of Nazi and Russian anti-Semitism—would not be published in his own country until 1984. “How many letters do you get?” Yevtushenko asked Cheever, who said he got maybe ten or twelve a week. Yevtushenko beamed: “I get two thousand a day.“ That was the sort of thing that excited Cheever's love. “Everybody says that [Voznesensky is] a better poet than Zhenya and he definitely thinks this himself,” said Cheever; “but my affection for that incontinent and self-destructive ego-centric makes Andrei's gleaming face seem a little complacent.” Cheever's crush on Yevtushenko (platonic) was confirmed when he saw the man perform at a public reading, which was more like a rock concert than a literary event: for two hours, the flamboyant poet dashed around the stage reciting from memory, while the ecstatic crowd threw flowers. “I seem to love him as I love most natural phenomena,” Cheever wrote, though he was more restrained about the poetry itself: “[Zhenya] writes always of a new world, its failures and promise. I know that the paradise he speaks of is populated by stupid and drunken peasants. The cows are scrawny, the children are hungry, the wheat crop is blighted and the trains are late but I would much sooner hear him speak than listen to the mumbling of my colleagues.”

  Cheever admired and perhaps even preferred Voznesensky's work, but quietly deplored the way the serious young man sipped water when others were toasting with vodka. No such qualms applied to Yevtushenko, who fully reciprocated Cheever's admiration in this respect. “You drink like Siberian worker!” he declared, adding that Cheever's face was perfectly “working class.” Then he gave the puzzled American a big kiss. (“Was best compliment,” Yevtushenko explained forty years later. “Because he didn't look like an intellectual. What was great in John Cheever, when he came to Russia, he was very childishly curious about things. He created atmosphere of sincerity around him. The real artists, they are never peacocking. That is the great quality of the John Cheever character.”) When the two wanted to speak freely, they'd take a bottle to Pasternak's grave and sit there on the bench; it was a common spot for such chats, as it seemed impervious to eavesdropping, and Yevtushenko's home, of course, had long been bugged. Years later, however, when Pasternak's daughter-in-law wanted the bench repainted, a bugging device was found in one of the hollowed-out concrete legs.

  Whatever his awe of Yevtushenko, Cheever's most abiding attachment was with Tanya Litvinov, whom he'd first met at a reception given by the editorial board of Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature). While publisher Boris Ryurikov “was booming along” about “common aims” and so forth, Cheever and Litvinov ducked behind a bowl of fruit and whispered about one thing and another. (“You could talk about anything with him,” she remembered. “As if you were going on with some conversation that had begun long, long ago. It was absolutely wonderful.”) Litvinov had begun translating “The Swimmer” and wanted to know why, exactly, Neddy was obliged to swim from one
pool to the next, but Cheever mostly wanted to talk about her. (“Tanya,” he noted afterward. “A very quick woman. A suit, a man's haircut, bad teeth, quick laughter, quick smile … She speaks of her mother; never her father. An intractible woman, I think. A light, feminine fierceness, having lived a life that would best be understood by a lunatic”) At one point Cheever produced a few well-thumbed family photographs from his wallet, and Litvinov remarked that Susan looked like a Russian girl (“he took it—as I intended it to be—as a compliment”), and when he gave her a somber publicity photo of himself, she said, “Mr. Cheever on his guard.” “Always am,” he replied.

  With Breitburd in tow, as ever, Cheever and Litvinov were driven to Kornei Chukovsky's dacha in Peredelkino, a writers’ settlement a few miles outside Moscow. The eighty-two-year-old Chukovsky had not only discovered Cheever for the Russians, but also written an admiring preface to Litvinov's translation of The Enormous Radio. The two men loved each other at once. Chukovsky said that Cheever looked just like his old friend H. G. Wells, with particular reference to a pen drawing he'd kept from the twenties. He also produced a number of other souvenirs—Oxford robes, an Indian headdress—and asked Cheever to add his name to the distinguished list of visitors in Chukovsky's guest book. “May I kiss you?” Cheever asked, saying goodbye, and Chukovsky said he supposed it was all right, since they'd never meet again.* Ten years later, Cheever told Raymond Carver that one of his fondest memories was falling asleep that evening with his head in Tanya's lap during the drive back to Moscow, and then waking just as the lights were coming on in the city (“note how this is the dream of a little boy sheltered by his mother,” said Carver). Cheever was supposed to go to the Bolshoi that night with Breitburd, but the man wanted to write his report on the Peredelkino meeting, so he gave his ticket to Litvinov. Left alone for once, the two decided to skip the Bolshoi and spend the night walking around Moscow. As they passed the zoo—closed at that hour—Litvinov indicated a place in the fence where the stakes had been loosened, and Cheever excitedly insisted they squeeze inside. Litvinov was tempted, but then imagined the headline in Pravda: “American ‘So-Called Writer’ Caught Spying on Soviet Animals!” She told him that he would be “non-grataed” and sent home, while she would end up in the Gulag.

  Cheever's friendship with Litvinov would continue—with occasional interruptions both personal and political—the rest of his life. “We all enjoy your letters tremendously and they are the only letters I have ever saved,” he wrote her a few months after his return to the States.* Whenever his friends went to Russia, it pleased Cheever to put them in touch with her, so he could hear about their meeting afterward and vicariously partake of her company. The summer after Cheever's visit, for example, Art Spear and his wife went to Moscow “on some sort of International Amity Excursion,” after which Spear and Litvinov exchanged affectionate letters for years. Spear returned with some stories written by Litvinov's English mother, Ivy, which Cheever passed along to Maxwell with the result that (1) a number were published in The New Yorker, and (2) Maxwell and Tanya also became lifelong friends. “We had a heartwarming reunion with the Maxwell's,” she wrote Cheever in 1978, after she and her family had defected to England. “They took Vera [her daughter] and me to an Italian restaurant in South Kensington and we poured our monologues into the din.” By then she and Cheever had grown apart in more than a geographical sense, though they both felt there was some inviolable aspect of their friendship that transcended worldly differences: “I am sure that when I die and you (many years later) die we will meet at once and have a very stimulating eternity,” Cheever wrote.

  CHEEVER HAD TO DISPOSE of his publisher's rubles while in Russia, and one day he told Litvinov he wanted to stop and buy a football. “What do you want a football for?” she asked. “Well,” he said, “I'll toss the ball with the other John.” The “other John” was Updike, who arrived with his wife Mary in the middle of Cheever's month-long visit. Cheever was nothing but eager for his American colleague's company, though his opinion of the man's work remained problematic; in the privacy of his journal, at least, he found it hard to pay him an unadulterated compliment. “Read Updike's new book with pleasure,” he wrote of the collection Pigeon Feathers (1962), adding: “with mixed feelings but always with pleasure; what we call pleasure.” He continued to disapprove of the way Updike “retard[ed] the movement” of his narrative with excessive detail, though at the same time he found the details oddly compelling: “[H]is prose has that pace, that intensity that, when we put down the book and step out of the house on to the road, we have a heightened acuteness of feeling.” Meanwhile the public Cheever was a veritable fount of praise and good works in the younger man's behalf: “I sincerely admire the brilliance of your equipment,” he wrote Updike earlier that spring, calling his own prose “so much shredded wheat” in comparison. The year before, he'd nominated Updike to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and as a National Book Award judge he'd been “instrumental” (his word) in pushing The Centaur ahead of Pynchon's V.—though afterward, as ever, he was bemused by his own generosity: “Sometime I like the thought of [Updike] and just as often he seems to me an oversensitive changling [sic] who allows himself to be photographed in arty poses.”

  In any event, Cheever was at his ebullient best when Updike arrived in Russia with his attractive wife. “He greeted us with glee,” she remembered, “as if all three of us were about to embark on an enormous adventure in a place as outlandish as the moon.” Cheever, well adapted by then, acted as a kind of ideal host and tour guide, telling stories and jokes as the three of them were herded around schools and catacombs and the like; what might have been a “glum” ordeal, said Updike, became “as gay as an April in Paris.” Certainly “Big John” (Cheever) and “Little John” (Updike)—a distinction based on age rather than size—gave the impression of being “really chummy,” as Litvinov put it: “John was proud of [Updike] like an uncle.” And sometimes, when Cheever and the Updikes were alone together in their hotel rooms, they'd gossip and gripe about their Soviet minders (despite the bugs, into which they often made a point of speaking), or chat about their children and even their literary careers. Cheever cheerfully admitted that he was fed up with The New Yorker, and found it “a considerable relief “ to be less dependent on its vagaries. “Cheever's confession made me sad and, yes, exultant,” Updike later wrote: “one less competitor for that delicious glossy space …”

  Even then Updike couldn't resist keeping his hand in, finding time “in one neo-czarist hotel room or another” to order his impressions into a few poems that Cheever described as “assinine” [sic] when they appeared in The New Yorker the following June. By then Cheever had decided that Updike was rivalrous, and had rearranged his Russian memories accordingly. “At the University of Leningrad”—he wrote a fellow writer—”[Updike] tried to upstage me by reciting some of his nonsense verse but I set fire to the contents of an ashtray and upset the water carafe.” Lest one think this is so much lighthearted hyperbole, much the same thing appears in Cheever's journal, where he brooded over the way Updike “hogged the lecture platform” and even stepped in front of him when pictures were taken. Cheever also liked to describe, in letters, how he and Updike competed to see how many of their books they could dump on the Russians: “[Updike] then began distributing paper-back copies of the Centaur while I distributed hardcover copies of The Brigadier. The score was eight to six, my favor. … On the train up to Leningrad he tried to throw my books out of the window but his lovely wife Mary intervened. She not only saved the books; she read one. She had to hide it under her bedpillow and claim to be sick. She said he would kill her if he knew.”

  Cheever's ambivalence toward the gifted young man isn't all that puzzling. For one thing, he was intimidated by Updike's intellectual versatility, which he scorned or praised according to mood. “John reviews a French novel in his most graceful and erudite manner,” Cheever noted in 1971 (when Updike was in good odor for the moment). “Th
is would be beyond me and I do not understand all the words and have forgotten, if I ever knew, what is the Descartian man. He writes with that authority and comprehension that makes it seem as if writing—literature—was the legitimate concern of a distinguished man.” Which was well and good, of course, but when Updike was holding forth in such a “graceful and erudite manner” for the benefit of Russian audiences, it was perhaps an uncomfortable reminder that Cheever himself (as he'd blithely admit in less invidious circumstances) had “no formal education, no critical inclinations, no critical vocabulary and no long-range perspective of literature.” Thus, if Updike “hogged the lecture platform,” it was largely a matter of having more to say; also, the recent translation of The Centaur had made him a darling of Russian youth, though the courteous Updike was at pains to redress the imbalance as best he could: “At one of our joint appearances, I blush to remember, observing our audience's total ignorance of Cheever's remarkable work, I took it upon myself to stand up and describe it, fulsomely if not accurately, while my topic sat at my side in a dignified silence that retrospectively feels dour.”

  By the time Updike wrote these words, he'd read Cheever's shockingly uncharitable account of their trip in the latter's posthumous Letters, which includes that antic fantasy about the lovely Mary Updike hiding Cheever's book under her pillow to read on the train. It was true that Cheever was charmed by Updike's wife and vice versa, though it's unlikely this caused any friction between the Updikes; if anyone was envious it was Cheever, who already felt considerable chagrin over his own Mary's absence.* Nevertheless, Cheever's journal suggests some particle of truth to the train story: “While Mary [Updike] and I danced in Leningrad,” he recalled in 1976, “she told me that [her husband] could not endure having a book of mine in his room …” Whatever Mary had actually said (“why should [Updike] forbid his wife to read my stories or even mention them,” Cheever fretted at the time), no doubt her dancing partner laughed it off amid the relative amity that prevailed in Russia.† Mary Updike remembered how “bereft” she and her husband felt while saying goodbye to Cheever, who was so eager to resume their friendship that he called the couple (“unsober”) as soon as they returned to the States. “He is unyielding, really inscrutable,” Cheever wrote of Updike's phone manner. “Can it be that he dislikes me. How could such a thing come to pass! Chekoslovakia [sic] is worth a good two or three weeks, he says, talking like a travel agent.” Cheever was devastated by the snub (as he saw it), and wondered over its import for months: “I cannot bring [Updike] into focus because I cannot believe that he would take such an instantaneous dislike to me. … He may be so intensely competitive that he finds my existence an exacerbation but I find this difficult, I find it impossible to imagine.” The following summer Cheever and his family vacationed in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and when he got the impression that Updike was reluctant to visit him there—though Updike did, in fact, visit him there—Cheever made up his mind for the time being: “I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid [Updike's] company,” he wrote a friend that June. “I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.”