Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  The next year at Yaddo, Cheever met another young poet, Natalie Robins. “I don't know why he liked me,” said Robins, who was a little startled when Cheever got in touch after Yaddo, inviting her to come for Thanksgiving and bring her boyfriend, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Along with Rudnik, the couple became a fixture at holiday meals for many years—though the tradition got off to a shaky start, since that inaugural Thanksgiving was less than a week after JFK's assassination. Cheever, rather gloomy at first, said he'd been “glued to the television,” but his mood lightened as he watched the young people play touch football in the post-prandial twilight (“it was something he liked people to do,” said Lehmann-Haupt, “a memory of what people ought to do on an occasion like that”). “I have an anxious seizure on Thanksgiving morning,” Cheever wrote afterward, “and during the next twelve hours I drink nearly a fifth of whiskey. This is dangerous, odious and obscene. I barely see Raphael who leaves empty beer cans all over the place. Natalie wears a purple dress and her boyfriend is an attractive young man with a vaguely familiar look, that sense of kinship. … I am proud of my wife, my sons, my daughter, my house and this holiday, sometimes so difficult, passes with pleasure.”

  Two years later, the Cheevers went to Christopher and Natalie's wedding at the Algonquin, and that December (1965) Lehmann-Haupt published one of his first pieces in the New York Times, reviewing a new edition of The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead. At the subsequent Christmas dinner on Cedar Lane, the young man asked Cheever what he'd thought of the review. The latter was “polite but definite”: “You failed to catch the spirit of the book,” he said. Lehmann-Haupt felt “soundly rebuked,” but decided not to take it amiss—especially in view of Cheever's touching devotion to Natalie. Every year the two would sit in front of the fireplace, hugging and holding hands, at perfect ease with each other. “I felt his need to hold on to me,” she remembered, “as if it grounded or anchored him.”

  Mary Cheever was also warm and motherly, and it occurred to the couple that they'd been adopted as “surrogate children.” As such, it struck them as odd that they “never saw” Cheever show any affection toward his own children, for all his blatant doting on Natalie; the contrast was so uncomfortable that Ben once said something bitter to Lehmann-Haupt, later explaining that his father acted as if he loved Christopher and Natalie more than him. And indeed the couple had to wonder: Was Cheever's restraint some sort of Wasp thing? Was he warmer to Natalie because she was Jewish? If so, it soon became clear that Jewishness per se was no guarantee of his favor. One Thanksgiving he asked Natalie to bring her mother, a middle-class widow from New Jersey “whose idea of good fiction was Danielle Steel”: “She was totally bewildered by the Cheevers, who didn't accommodate her at all,” Lehmann-Haupt recalled. “In the car going home she burst into tears. She couldn't understand their attitude. They were mean to her, both Mary and John—making sarcastic remarks. It was the only time we can remember them being mean.” (“Natalie's mother comes,” Cheever wrote. “She is the sort of woman who speaks in clichés, asks the price of everything. What a charming setting she says of our diningroom. That highboy was a nice purchase.”)

  Despite the (mostly) good times, the couple now wonder whether their friendship was ever anything more than “superficial.” It was true Cheever played the role of “literary father” to Natalie—but then Lillian Hellman had been a literary mother of sorts: “She'd always ask me for pictures of my children,” said Robins, “but none turned up among her effects after her death.” Rudnik, too, had reason to wonder about the man he regarded as a revered mentor. “Rafael [sic] calls from a bar,” Cheever noted in 1966. “I guess he is drunk or drinking. I am troubled to think that what appeared to be a simple friendship is becoming unsimple.” Apart from whatever transpired at their holiday meetings on Cedar Lane (that “great good place” for Rudnik), Cheever realized he knew “very little” about the poet and was more or less content to keep it that way.

  When he wasn't cultivating the young and gifted at Yaddo, or enduring another lunch with the Friday Club, or meeting (more and more rarely) some literary acquaintance at the Century, Cheever was alone, except for a small son and a wife who often wasn't speaking to him. During “seizures” of loneliness in the past, Cheever would occasionally ride the train and chat “anxiously with strangers,” but he didn't like the train anymore; there was also Mrs. Zagreb, but that only worked in moderate doses. Desperate for almost any company at all, he'd sometimes respond to letters and calls from random admirers with invitations to visit.* As he was reminded again and again, however, people who presume to make friends with their favorite authors tend to be a little on the eccentric side. “An admirer arrives on Saturday,” Cheever wrote in his journal. “He has a bad facial tic and has been confined to Bellevue and Hillsdale. He rants, shouts, attacks President Kennedy and has some nice things to say about Hitler. I tell him to calm down and he does. Why, I wonder, should my admirers always be mad.”

  In 1965, Cheever received a letter from Frederick Exley of Water-town, New York, who'd been moved to get in touch with him after hearing Bellow say on Montreal TV that Cheever was his favorite writer. Exley was a fan of both men. “A man named Exley wrote to say that he liked the stories,” Cheever subsequently related to Weaver. “I thanked him briefly. He then called collect from Miami and asked me to post five hundred dollars bail. He had just smashed up a saloon and knew I would understand.” Exley did, in fact, have a long history of alcoholism and mental illness, though his assumption that Cheever would meet his bail wasn't nearly as bizarre as Cheever implied. First of all, the bail was only two hundred (duly noted in Cheever's journal), and moreover Cheever had not replied “briefly” to Exley's letter(s), but rather at lavish and witty length, since Exley was one of his few interesting correspondents at the time. It was Exley to whom he wrote those scurrilous Updike indictments, as well as some of his most inspired set pieces: “Coming in late last night I opened the ice-box and grabbed a piece of cold meat, swallowing a false tooth which included a plastic backside and two sharp hooks.” The tale went on, serial fashion, in Cheever's next letter, wherein he described a visit to the dentist, who informed him with great dismay that the tooth couldn't be passed “without medical assistance.” And so the punch line: “It is true that when I fart these days it sounds like a police whistle but I suffer little pain and it's very easy for me to get cabs.”* After several letters, Cheever figured that Exley was ready for a visit to Cedar Lane, and was disappointed when the disturbed young man stood him up; concluding that Exley had been offended by the “cursory” nature of his most recent letter, Cheever hastened to explain: “If my note to you seemed cursory it was meant to be since your last letter contained so many provocations and snappers that if I'd risen to them all it would have taken me a day to reply. I meant to be cursory but not unfriendly.” Three years later Exley would stun almost every soul in Watertown by producing his quasi-fictional masterpiece, A Fan's Notes, but meanwhile he was just another drunken lunatic with delusions of grandeur, and Cheever happily kept writing him all the same.

  Cheever particularly enjoyed hearing from students: it meant his standing in the academy might go up a tick or two in the near future, and also such people were a little less likely to be certifiable. In 1966, an undergraduate at Georgetown, George McLoone (hoping “to obtain a direct quote” for a paper he was writing), queried Cheever about the importance of environment in his work—and lo, the famous author replied: “Environment plays, I hope, a very superficial part in my stories. … When I exploit an environment—Rome or St. Botolphs—it is for the purpose of illuminating people.” Thus began a correspondence that spanned almost eight years and several personal meetings. When McLoone followed up with a phone call, Cheever urged him to catch a train to Ossining and bring a friend if he liked. McLoone did so, and when Cheever noticed that the friend—one Tommy Sullivan from the Bronx, who was at Georgetown on a baseball scholarship—wasn't keen on discussing literature, he in
vited the boys to go for a swim at Sara Spencer's house (she waved at them from inside). “The water was icy cold,” McLoone remembered, “but it didn't seem to faze [Cheever]. Tommy was an athlete, and even he had trouble with the temperature.” McLoone's four or five subsequent visits were made alone: Cheever always picked him up at the train station and drove him back roughly two hours later, and was never less than convivial—”a witty, impish guy with a twinkle in his eye”—and once he seemed downright ecstatic: “Mary!” he called down from the library. “George is doing his master's thesis on me!”

  By far his most reliable attachment (and in many ways his most profound) was with his black Labrador, Cassie. “The old dog; my love,” he wrote in his journal.

  That she always got to her feet when I entered the room. That she enjoyed men very much and was conspicuously indifferent to women. That her dislikes were marked and she definitely preferred people from traditional and if possible wealthy origins. That she had begun to resemble those imperious and somehow mannish women who devilled my youth: the dancing teacher, the banker's wife, the headmistress of the progressive school I attended.

  In her dotage the dog had become all the more loving toward her master. She lay at his side and made comforting wheezing noises while he brooded in his wing chair, and when it came time for bed, he'd push and coax the whimpering, arthritic beast up the stairs so that neither of them would have to sleep alone. One day she fell in the snow and couldn't get up again, and Cheever carried her home and presently called the vet to put her down. “She was a wonderful companion and I loved her dearly but I shed very few tears,” he wrote Litvinov. “Fred cried for about an hour. We had her for fifteen years and she led a very active and useful life …”

  THE SUMMER OF 1965, after her graduation from Pembroke, Susan went to Tuskegee, Alabama, in order to “teach the Antigone to negroes,” as her father put it. When she returned—joining the family in Wellfleet—she spoke excitedly of her often dangerous encounters with white segregationists, while Cheever nodded and sighed and wished she were married. For years he'd been arranging the details in his mind: he, wearing a morning coat, would guide her down the aisle while an eighteenth-century pavane played (“I give her away first at All Saints, then at St. Pauls in Rome”) and a crowd of “substantial” guests from the Social Register watched in admiration. As it was, she would have to go on teaching in the fall at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. (“My guidance counselor at Pembroke told me, ‘All our best girls are engaged. Sorry, but you have to look for a job.’ It wasn't just my father.”) All was not lost, however: one of her fellow teachers, as luck would have it, was none other than the young Ned Cabot, of the Boston Cabots. Tippling in the wee hours, Cheever gloated over the possibilities: first, of course, he'd have to discuss the union with Ned's father …

  [W]e meet at my club. He has the bony face of his caste, his family but is pleasant. He explains to me the difficulties of becoming Mrs. C[abot] and hopes S[usan] understands them. In the nature of things in Boston Mrs. C[abot] is bound to be an institution. She must be a director of the hospital, leader of the Sewing Circle, a member of the admissions committee for the Chilt Club and she must distribute one hundred thousand dollars a year among the worthy. Is S[usan] capable of this. I say that I know her to be capable but that she must herself express her willingness to be an institution. … How pretentious, vulgar and absurd is this revery but it seems to improve my spirits.

  Absurd, perhaps—but what sweet revenge against all the Wollaston nobs who'd murmured about his drunken father and shopkeeping mother! What a swipe at Rollin Bailey and his tennis court! “He always wanted his children to belong,“ said Federico. “He wanted them to join country clubs, sail skiffs in Nantucket Harbor. That was important to him. But,” he added, “at the same time it was very threatening, and he did what he could to prevent it from happening.”

  When Susan told her father that Ned would be flying back with her at Christmas and spending a night in Ossining on his way to Boston, Cheever was delighted and insisted on picking them up at the airport. For the occasion, of course, he'd fortified himself with gin, though this wasn't baldly obvious until Ned was crammed into the boot of Cheever's two-seat Karmann Ghia and inhaling Cheever's breath point-blank whenever Cheever turned around to make eye contact (his little car lurching this way and that). They were crossing the George Washington Bridge when Ned suddenly remembered that he'd promised to stay with a cousin on Riverside Drive; Cheever remonstrated to no avail. As Susan later wrote, “My father finally concurred, behaving, I'm sure he thought, in a way that Ned would recognize as the mark of a gentleman. We dropped him off at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street; a light snow began to fall.”

  But again it's worth bearing in mind, perhaps, that Cheever only wanted the best for his daughter, and was naturally worried about her becoming an old maid. “I think she is a courageous, intelligent and unhappy young woman,” he reflected. “I wish I could do more for her.” Meanwhile the little he could do, as ever, was remind her that fat girls don't get husbands. “I find S[usan] picking at scraps in the icebox. Oh kick it, I say. Go to hell. She hurls the line at me, laughing …” And with that, the pavane began to fade—the striped tent, the champagne—it was all going up in smoke. “I look for someone supple and lovely like the young women who pose for girdles and find myself up against a strong, independent and contentious spirit who does not seem to dream of children gathered at her knees, arranging roses, waiting at dusk for her beloved spouse.”

  By contrast, Ben returned from his first year at Loomis a conquering hero. “Ben, who is my favorite, returned on Friday,” his happy father reported. “I damn near swoon every time I see him.” The seventeen-year-old had lost his baby fat and become stocky, handsome, and even rather athletic, holding his own on the wrestling and lacrosse teams. “I love you not for the person you are,” Cheever had told him as a boy, “but for your possibilities.” What he wanted was a young man who wasn't an Orioles fan because of the pretty name; what he wanted, above all, was a son who wasn't “hungry, artistic, worried and broke,” as the young John had been. And so his wish had come true—or, as Ben put it, “to some extent I was able to imitate that”—though there was little in the way of profound communication between the two. “The attachment seems to resist any analysis,” Cheever noted at the height of his somewhat abstract esteem. “I simply love him. His skin is clear, his face is muscular; we mostly joke.” Of course, there were still times when Ben would step out of character and startle his father with some unself-conscious remark, like the time he observed that boys at a school dance had seemed more attracted to one another than to girls. “Let us be manly and raise manly sons,” Cheever sternly intoned. (“I think he is fine and pray that he won't have a troubled life,” he fretted afterward.) And Ben, it seemed, was ever more determined to take such proverbs to heart; during a subsequent visit, he got off the train with a strange woman who appeared to be in her thirties. As he explained to his parents, he and the woman had struck up a conversation (Cheever had always advised him to make friends on the train), and finally he'd invited her to have dinner with him, perhaps see Ossining in the morning. And so dinner came and went—a bit of a strain, to be sure—and when Ben awoke the next morning, his new friend was gone.

  For the most part, Ben had a pleasant relationship with his father during these years. Cheever was proud to have such an amiable, good-looking son, and proud of himself for “shield[ing]” the boy from the privations he'd suffered at that age. Above all, he was lonely, and thought it “very natural” to take “vicarious pleasure” in reliving his youth through Ben. The best times were summers, when Mary and the others were at Treetops and the two men had the house to themselves. For dinner they'd heat up some Stouffer's roast-beef hash and put the tray between them on the porch: “We'd each have a fork,” Ben remembered, “we'd eat toward the middle, and whoever ate fastest got the most. … We were always laughing, and he was in his fifties then.” Cheev
er's vicarious impulses were especially piqued by the presence of Ben's perky girlfriend, Lynda—the sort of girl who “waves to everyone,” Cheever noted with approval: “There's Charlie, there's Louise, there's Helen. Yoo Hoo … I find the company of the young very heady and am in some danger of mistaking myself for one of them.” Cheever was pleased to drive the couple around in his Karmann Ghia, musing over how impressed the girl must be with his sporty roadster, to say nothing of his “faithful and pedigreed dogs, [his] charming stone house [and his own] personal gifts.”

  On New Year's Eve that year (a week or so after Cheever had given Ned Cabot a lift from the airport), Ben and Lynda had some friends over and were listening to loud music, while Cheever hovered nearby and his daughter cloistered herself upstairs, “eating Triscuits [as she remembered] and reading Hawthorne.” At some point she came down and asked if they could lower the volume a little, as she couldn't find a room in the house where she could read in peace. “S[usan] complains about not having a room in which she can read,” Cheever wrote. “I say that if she had a date I'd see that she had a room.” This went over badly. “Fuck you!” his daughter replied, bolting upstairs and out the terrace door and into the snowy night, her father in shambling pursuit. “Do I have to hide in the woods to get away from you?” she cried, while he called and called her name. The rest of the holiday she spent reading in the attic with a chair propped against the door. “Christmas was for some reason not as pleasant as I had hoped,” Cheever reported to Litvinov. “I love the children passionately and the house was full of them and their guests but something went wrong.” He didn't elaborate.