by Blake Bailey
The better to gather these disparate thoughts, Cheever went to Yaddo in February 1965 and found himself sharing a bathroom with Maxwell's old protégé Harold Brodkey. Thirty-four at the time, Brodkey seemed already in decline. With Maxwell's help, he'd published his first New Yorker story, “State of Grace,” in 1953—a year out of Harvard—and five years later his collection First Love and Other Sorrows had made him a minor literary celebrity; in the years since, however, he'd published only two more stories in the magazine, and (so he told Cheever) he'd resorted to “hacking trash” for a living. He'd also entered what he later called his “binary” sexual phase, a matter he elaborately impressed on Cheever: “B[rodkey] talks about sexual orgies (two) he has participated in, a position I have never heard of, and the homosexual community which he seems to know well. … He is young, one might say wayward and immature. So we dance, play psychic games, then ping pong and I go to bed feeling lonely, lonely, oh lonely.” For a number of reasons, all disturbing, Brodkey reminded Cheever of Calvin Kentfield (“he is, as C[alvin] was, in the process of selfdestruction”), but when the beguiling youngish) man “embraced” him in the “winter twilight,” Cheever couldn't help putting reason aside for a while: “I think that I am in the throes once more of a hopeless love.”
Fortunately the visit lasted only a few days, and Cheever soon came to his senses. A wistful letter from Brodkey left him feeling vaguely disgusted: “I want hearty and robust friendships; not men who write emotional letters to one another.” Reflecting on the flirtation—and probably it was no more than that—Cheever decided the “book of the month club had something to do” with Brodkey's ardor. A bit later, he invited Brodkey to Cedar Lane, and amid that heartening domestic tableau he wondered how he could have ever taken such a man seriously: Brodkey, he noticed, had exchanged his “dismal beard” for a mustache, and adopted or refined an accent that was distinctly on the “faggoty side.” This, he concluded, was the quintessential “mirror person”—the Freudian homosexual doomed to abide in the “barren country” of prenatal narcissism: “I think of Brodkey in St. Louis,” Cheever mused, “falling in love with himself because there was no one else so intelligent handsome and rich in the neighborhood; and how bitter this marriage was.” Every so often Cheever would cast back to those three or four days at Yaddo, and shudder over the way Brodkey had forever been fishing for compliments: Did his beard look all right? Had his tan begun to fade? And meanwhile, at The New Yorker's offices, a young (and later celebrated) writer was startled one day when Brodkey accosted her to announce that Cheever was gay. “Oh, but he is!” Brodkey insisted, when the woman seemed skeptical. “I had an affair with him!”
AT THE BEGINNING of May, Cheever and his wife boarded the Twentieth Century Limited for a weeklong vacation in Chicago, where Cheever had agreed to serve as a visiting writer in Richard Stern's fiction class. He'd engaged a roomette on the swanky Century in the hope of “[tying] on a can,” but when he climbed down to his wife's berth she determinedly feigned sleep, and her recalcitrance continued for most of the trip: “Mary complains about the smell of the hotel, the smell of the train, the smell of the world.” Stern, too, was startled by Mary's sharpness toward Cheever—”I felt defensive for him,” he said, and the feeling was mutual: “[Stern's] wife greets the guests but says nothing for the rest of the evening,” Cheever observed in his journal. “[Y]ou realize that it was he who bathed the children and put them to bed; it was he who cooked the goulash. She has not spoken to him for a week.” The two unhappy husbands enjoyed each other's company, at least, and Cheever also had a pleasant lunch with Bellow. The year before, he'd read Herzog and been rather comforted to find it a sub-par performance, or so he thought: “The fear that he was without parallel, that I should always be second or third best seems to have faded …” Thus he was able to relax even better in Bellow's company, enjoying the man's “erudite, bellicose and agile” mind without feeling the usual inferiority.
Perhaps his happiest encounter, though, was with a total stranger. “Mary flew back on Thursday and I took the Twentieth Century Friday night,” he wrote Weaver, “carrying a lot of nice, serious books. … Well the engine took fire somewhere east of Gary and in the confusion I got horribly mixed up with a broad from Evanston who was drinking rusty nails. This went on until three when the conductor told us we couldn't play strippoker in the observation car.” The “broad” in question was one Sherry (Mrs. Donald H.) Farquharson, who was taking the trip with a girlfriend to see a few shows in New York. They were sitting in the club car when (as Mrs. Farquharson recalled) Cheever came over and asked, “May I join you?” (“[I]t pleases me to make friends when I travel,” Cheever once noted.) Before Cheever could even mention it himself, the women realized they'd seen this very face on the cover of Time, and a “delightful” evening ensued: the three had drinks and dinner, and later Cheever did in fact coax Sherry to the observation car and ply her with Rusty Nails; the vivacious matron was not, however, so far gone as to play strip poker with a new acquaintance, who in any case was a perfect gentleman throughout. Indeed, he called her in New York the next day and asked her to have lunch with him, but she had to decline—with regret that persisted for decades—because of a previous engagement.
Just over a week after his return, Cheever was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished novel of the last five years. He claimed to feel appalled at the honor (“Mother would have been indignant”), not only because of his Yankee humility, but also because he didn't have a high opinion of the novel in question and found the very concept of such an award ridiculous. Repeating his usual chestnut about literature not being “a competitive sport,” Cheever added, “I don't think that you can divide American fiction into five-year periods.” Perhaps an even more compelling reason for his distaste was an uncomfortable awareness of just how dubious the politicking had been this time—that is to say, even more dubious than usual. “I had lunch with Ralph Ellison and asked him if he knew what sonofabitch had put me up for it,” Cheever wrote Helen Puner, a neighbor.
He said angrily, that it was he and that it had been uphill work. Louis Kronenberger abstained. Everybody else wanted to give it to Saul except Glenway Wescott who had promised it to Katherine Anne. She wanted it. She's crazy about jewelry. The reason Ralph insisted that I get it was because when Ralph and Saul lived together in Tivoli Saul, stepping out onto his terrace one morning, slipped and fell into a pile of dogshit. He asked Ralph if he couldn't train his dog. … A bitter quarrel ensued. Saul's tongue is longer and sharper than Ralph's and Ralph evened things up by getting me the medal.
In all likelihood, Ellison's zealous support of The Wapshot Scandal over Herzog had little to do with a quarrel about dogshit, but may well have had plenty to do with the fact that Cheever had helped Ellison get into the Century Club a few months before. Because of the racial issue, it was apparently no easy task. In the summer of 1962, Cheever's old friend Lib Collins had visited Cedar Lane with the Ellisons and Albert Murray; she later distinctly remembered Cheever telling Ellison (in effect), “I'm sorry, but they won't let you in, and that's all there is to it.” Eventually, however, Cheever managed to pull it off with the help of Red Warren, to whom he wrote: “I am very fond of Ralph and would not want him to suffer that unreasonable bitterness that seems to overtake grown men when they are turned down by even so arterosclerotic an organization as ours.”
On the day of the award ceremony, May 19, Cheever awoke feeling “crushed” with malaise, and when Mary told him that she intended to teach a class even though (as he saw it) it would make them late, there was a nasty exchange: “Her voice goes up an octave and cracks,” he wrote in his journal while waiting for her to return. “It seems the voice of a child; then the voice of some female mouse in an animated cartoon.” He told Weaver that he “took some gin” to calm down (“cheap bourbon” in his journal), and when he arrived at the auditorium, “The secretary took one look at me and said: �
�Every single year, someone has to be carried out feet first.’ “ It was, in fact, a lively ceremony. Academy President Lewis Mumford (“who seems to be losing his marbles,” Cheever wrote) kicked things off by denouncing the Vietnam War as a “moral outrage,” whereupon artist Thomas Hart Benton stormed off the stage and later threatened to resign. Finally it was time to present the Howells Medal, and Ellison made an orotund speech about laughter in the face of the “chaos that we've made of our promise”: “It is John Cheever's achievement to have made us aware not only of what our laughter is about, but of that tragic sense of reality, that gracious-ness before life's complexity which is its antidote.” By comparison, Cheever's own remarks were almost aggressively modest, perhaps reflecting his considerable cynicism toward the proceedings. “Thank you very much, Ralph,” he began.
When The Wapshot Scandal was completed my first instinct was to commit suicide. I thought I might cure my melancholy if I destroyed the novel and I said as much to my wife. She said that it was, after all, my novel and I could do as I pleased but how could she explain to the children what it was that I had been doing for the last four years. Thus my concern for appearances accounted for the publication of the novel.
Mumford was far from alone in his outrage over Vietnam; already in 1965 a number of artists and intellectuals had pledged to boycott White House functions in protest. Cheever, however, was not among them, and so looked forward to meeting LBJ at a reception for Presidential Scholars in June. Susan was graduating from college a few days before, and that morning, as he prepared to leave for Providence, Cheever spotted a three-and-a-half-foot snapping turtle making its stately way across his lawn. Firing ten shotgun shells into its head, Cheever mused that the ancient reptile “seemed to possess the world much better than I—I with a shotgun, my hands shaking from a cocktail party.” (“The gun blasts really shattered the usual serenity of that suburban milieu,” Andrew Ziegler recalled.) As it happened, Cheever's fellow New Yorker writer S. J. Perelman was getting an honorary degree at the Brown commencement, and later the two met for drinks and learned they were both attending the president's reception. They decided to “get stoned” at the Hilton and then walk over to the White House together and heckle John Updike, who was scheduled to give a reading. Cheever's resentment toward his younger colleague had only deepened. In Chicago he'd given Stern the impression that Updike was a kind of “pet hate,” and a week or so before the White House affair he'd written in his journal, “The arrogance of Updike goes back to the fact that he does not consider me a peer.” He did, however, consider Salinger a peer, or so Cheever had bitterly concluded.
“The Updikes were [at the White House] and I did everything short of kicking him in the trousers,” he wrote Litvinov afterward. The evening had begun with a buffet supper on the lawn, where Cheever had mingled with fellow luminaries such as John Glenn, Stan Musial, Marianne Moore, and John O'Hara, who joined Cheever (said he) in “banging folding chairs together” when Updike got up to speak. Years later Updike was again mortified, retrospectively, when he discovered Perelman's account (in a letter to Ogden Nash) of what followed: “[Updike] read extracts from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I couldn't personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page. But Cheever brought me tidings that all three extracts dealt with masturbation, a favorite theme of Updike's. When I asked Cheever whether Lady Bird was present, he informed me that she was seated smack in the middle of the first row. What are we coming to?” In his own correspondence, Cheever claimed to have remarked to President and Mrs. Johnson that Updike kept autographed copies of The Centaur in his underwear, and in his journal he wrote: “I am high and a little drunk and am rude, I think, to John. The result of this is that I like him better than I did. He reads three descriptive passages and I find them very bad.” Reflecting on these matters, Updike later wrote that only one of the three extracts he'd read that evening was (obliquely) about masturbation, and as for the shock of “finding [him]self discussed with such gleeful malice” by two of his greatest idols—it was “chastening, perhaps edifyingly so”: “In fact, I know now, the literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to stamp on his fingers.”
Later that summer, the Updikes came to Wellfleet and lunched with Cheever, who'd calmed down considerably after his cathartic rudeness at the White House: “I think that we will never be friends because I think we both dread the sort of self-consciousness involved but we are for this day at least amiable companions.” And then, as in Russia, the presence of Updike's wife helped sweeten Cheever's mood: “Having missed the size of her breasts in Moscow … I am curious and pleased to see, in a bathing suit, that they are splendid.”
• • •
BY AUGUST, Cheever's cafard had become so overwhelming that he feared losing his mind. For years he'd routinely taken the tranquilizer Miltown and now worried that he might become hooked; besides, the present emergency seemed to call for something stronger—something that might even discourage him from drinking, much less popping Miltown. His regular doctor, Ray Mutter, prescribed a “massive tranquilizer” that left Cheever “as collected and stagnant as the water under an old millwheel.” Indeed, he was so collected that he felt “rather glum,” yearning for his usual tendency to woolgather and take the world lightly, at least when drunk. Thus, after a week or so, he reported that he'd “kicked the pill” and resumed drinking (“jibbering slightly”).
The coming of autumn got him down: Susan and Ben would be leaving, Federico would be in school most of the day, and Mary would resume teaching. The last was an exacerbation that his marriage could ill afford at the moment, especially in the absence of buffering children. For a long time Mary had tended to retire (with a “shuddering sigh”) to the farthest side of their bed, and now Cheever spent most nights in a separate room at the top of the house. Mary claimed this was simply a matter of practical necessity (“he used to scratch me with his toenails; also he was a restless sleeper, and he snored”), but Cheever took it hard: “I think pissily in bed that since we sleep separately, as we do, this fact should be published and not concealed under a bedspread. I think I will tell people that I am forced to sleep alone.”* Not for the first time, he considered divorce—but again he couldn't quite bring it off. Why should he go, after all, when he'd just spent ten thousand dollars repairing the front porch? “And to tell the truth I am, alone, utterly incompetent. I step into a bar where there are some whores and my cock seems to strike an affirmative attitude of limpness. Nothing doing, it says. … It seems to be a homeloving cock, attached to simple food, open fires and licit ejaculations.” Two out of three, however, did not a full marriage make, and Cheever was determined to regain his conjugal rights. “The battle rages on,” he recorded that September. “Is it that you detest me, I ask, or that you detest men? I don't detest men, she laughs. I conclude that she is ghastly, then wicked, then evil.” Still mulling over the breadth of her turpitude, he saw, or thought he saw, Mary and Essie Lee (who'd just given Mary “a present of some trousers,” no less) hugging in a manner that struck him as decidedly peculiar: “Suddenly I conclude that she is a lesbian. This would explain the rebuffs I'm given, the moodiness and melancholy, it would explain everything.” Perhaps, but looking back he couldn't find much in the way of hard evidence—and then, whatever her proclivities, and however much he swore and swore to divorce her, the fact was that he felt “terrified” (when sober) that she'd end up leaving him. “People named John and Mary never divorce,” he wrote, resignedly, as autumn got under way. “For better or for worser, in madness and in sameness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce.”
Happily there was always the refuge of art, and so Cheever turned to writing a rabidly misogynistic satire titled “The Geomet
ry of Love,” about a mild-mannered “freelance engineer” named Mallory who endeavors to understand his wife's cruelty through Euclidean theorems, but finally sickens and dies. It was the first story Cheever had finished in over a year, and at first he rather liked it. Certainly the opening is among his most memorable: “It was one of those rainy late afternoons when the toy department of Woolworth's on Fifth Avenue is full of women who appear to have been taken in adultery and who are now shopping for a present to carry home to their youngest child.” The “imposture” of adultery among the housewives of Remsen Park, in the story, was somewhat inspired by Cheever's recent suspicions over his wife's constant, wistful sighing, as well as the trouble she took with her appearance whenever she went shopping in town: “She has all the airs and graces of someone involved in a tragic love.” As for the comic viciousness of Mallory's wife as he lies dying in the hospital (“Nobody seems to miss you”), this reflected an earnest concern on the author's part that he might get sick, and then what? “I do not expect M[ary] to have the graces of a nurse,” he wrote, “I only expect her to sit for a little while at the foot of my bed, in a kindly way but this I think I won't have.” These elements of the story, however mean-spirited, are often funny and effective, but the surrealism—Mallory's magical use of geometry (Gary, Indiana, vanishes as a result of his efforts)—is vague and unconvincing, and no wonder: Cheever's knowledge of Euclid was pretty much limited to one year of plane geometry at Quincy High, for which he'd earned a D.