Cheever

by Blake Bailey

  With this in mind, Cheever spent the rest of the year working on a long sequence in which the protagonist's son, Tony Nailles, is stricken with sadness and takes to his bed. “Tony's melancholy is not a symbol of the spiritual bankruptcy of Bullet Park,” Cheever reminded himself. “Melancholy is some part of the human condition and he is its chance victim.” When he'd finished the section, Cheever could finally envision the novel all the way through to the end; in fact, he thought these pages were the best he'd ever written, and his confidence was boosted further when Maxwell bought the entire excerpt and proposed to publish it as “Tony in Bed.” Presently, though, he infuriated Cheever by asking him to cut at least two galley pages: “A short story is as precise as a poem and it cannot be slashed,” Cheever brooded in his journal, while betraying (as usual) only a hint of peevishness to Maxwell and agreeing to make the cuts. When his Swimmer money came through in April, however, Cheever abruptly canceled the story and gleefully returned the $4,147.50 payment to the magazine. In the meantime another excerpt, “The Yellow Room”—previously rejected by Maxwell (“the narrator isn't a man of very much particularity”)—had appeared in the January 1968 Playboy, the first of several appearances Cheever would make in the magazine: “They pay well and they are hospitable,” he wrote a friend, “and the tits aren't any more distracting than the girdle advertisements in the New Yorker.” As for the latter, it would not publish another Cheever story for seven years.

  CHEEVER FINISHED A DRAFT of Bullet Park in mid-July, though he kept the news to himself until his agent called and pronounced the work “magnificent,” whereupon he and Mary went out to celebrate and ended up (“for reasons that I can't recall”) quarreling bitterly. Matters escalated, and it began to look as if this time, surely, divorce was imminent, until the two were found in the library giddily poring over travel brochures. Less than a week later, they departed for Ireland with Federico. In the parking lot of Shannon Airport, Cheever got in on the wrong side of the rental car and promptly had a minor collision; after a few calming Irish coffees, he drove a replacement vehicle south across the mountains. For the next few days, he fished for salmon in the shadow of a beautiful ruined castle, humming with bees, and (while spending a night in the village of Adare) chatted with a priest about local history, particularly the noble Dunraven family. Driving on to Galway, Cheever sang a ditty he'd composed off the top of his head about the Duke of Dunraven's fateful journey to America.* Very like the duke in his song, Cheever drank an enormous quantity of Irish whiskey, and even startled himself at one point when he realized he'd polished off an entire fifth of Jameson Crested Ten in half an hour.

  Cheever's impromptu ballad would be his last composition for a long time. Toward the end of August, he completed some very minor repairs to Bullet Park, then became so blocked that he even stopped writing in his journal: weeks passed without a single word, perhaps the first time he'd neglected this daily chore since his years in the army. “Ropesville,” he tersely wrote in one of his infrequent entries. “Martinis for breakfast or thereabouts. It takes three to get me fixed.” His days passed in a browned-out fog. When Donadio called to impart the happy news that he'd gotten a large advance from his English publisher, no less, Cheever was able to express a seemly incredulity, but afterward had no idea of the figure in question. A few weeks later, he somehow managed to catch a train to New York, go over his “Percy” galleys with Maxwell, regale a stranger at the Biltmore bar about his career as a jockey, then return to Ossining with only a fleeting recollection of the whole adventure.

  His wife was unsympathetic, and it didn't help that she seemed to dislike Bullet Park. “Of course I cannot judge the book,” she said, “because I know in every case the facts on which it is based. Hammer is revolting …” Cheever thought this rather hard, since after all there was “some correspondence” between Hammer and himself. He was still mulling it over when Mary announced that one of her Briarcliff students had run away from home, and needed a place to stay for a while. “So off one goes again to find some spare room, tool shed, office, loft, or garage,” Cheever complained to Exley, though in fact he was allowed to keep his little room off the terrace, while his wife's student, Martha, was installed in a “mouse-infested room behind the kitchen,” as Federico described it. Martha (whom Cheever privately called “the waif” or “stray”) was a thin, prettyish, depressively self-absorbed young woman who seemed mindful nonetheless of the inconvenience she was causing in the midst of an already tense situation—which is to say, she tried to be polite to Cheever, who at the time required a special brand of tact. “What a ghastly color,” she remarked of some medicine Cheever had fetched when she was ill. “I fly into a rage,” he noted, “and say that the least she could do would be to refrain from complaining about the color of her medicine. She cries. I apologize.”

  That was during the first, relatively placid stage of Martha's visit. Soon Cheever decided that the girl had a “fleeting bloom of attractiveness” and that he might as well enjoy the arrangement while it lasted: “Dazzy had, after all, been looking for a young mistress and found one sleeping in the spare room. If you behave like a damned fool, he said to Muzzy, you can expect some consequences.” But Martha was impervious to his charm—more so, indeed, than just about anybody he'd ever met. His wit left her stone-cold, she flinched at his caresses, and was amused (in a bad way) when he “prance[d] around in [his] underwear.” At length it occurred to Cheever that she perceived him as a “drunken comical and flabby old man,” and hence he began despising her in earnest. He especially resented the way she distracted Mary from her wifely duties. One evening, when served a dish he'd always affected to like, Cheever roared “Meatballs/”—shambling out the door and off to a proper restaurant meal, while Mary and Martha bemusedly watched him go. He became convinced the women's relationship was “unsavory,” and said so, emphatically, on an almost nightly basis. Matters came to a head when Cheever interrupted a “tender conversation” (as he put it) by wandering downstairs stark naked; as Mary recalled, she and her guest “tried to be polite,” but couldn't quite stifle their giggles. This, it seemed, was not the response Cheever had expected.

  The girl was gone by December, and Cheever resolved to treat himself for the holidays. A lot of publicity was scheduled for Bullet Park, and he was worried about his smile: his teeth had always been a disaster—snaggled, capped, and brown—and his dentist advised him to get rid of them once and for all. After the procedure at Phelps Memorial, Cheever remained incoherent long after the anesthesia wore off, hardly recognizing his own family; it was Rob Cowley's impression that “he'd had no alcohol that day and couldn't function.” Once Cheever got used to the dentures, at any rate, he took to flashing them with cheerful regularity. “Wipe that artificial smile off your face,” said his exasperated wife. “The only thing artificial about this smile is the teeth,” he replied.

  The day after Christmas, he took his family to Curaçao, where they stayed at a little resort on a remote part of the island. Cheever begged off while the others snorkeled; he claimed that he couldn't put a tube in his mouth “lest [his] smile fall to the bottom of the sea,” but in fact he was terrified of swimming over the abysmal depth of the continental shelf. Mostly he drank gin and tonic, read Graham Greene, and flirted with his wife—the two had entered yet another of their weirdly renascent phases. “We had adjoining terraces,” Susan remembered, “and I looked over and she was sitting on his lap, and I was like whoa.“ The usual status quo became evident, however, when Federico began to sob on the airplane. Ben, sitting beside him, asked what was wrong, but the boy only shook his head. “I thought it was because he'd been stuck with this problem, that we'd deserted him,” said Ben. “I thought, ‘This is bad. This is really bad.’ “

  * The unmailed letter may be found in the pocket of one of Cheever's journal notebooks at Harvard.

  * To this day Federico remembers his father's song almost word for word (“As they say about ABBA, it's full of hooks”) and is happy t
o sing it, as follows: “The Duke of Dunraven, he snored in his sleep / He frightened the turkeys, the cows, and the sheep / He drank Irish whiskey from morning to night / And [something something] was a horrible fright. [REFRAIN:] Dunraven, Dunraven, come back to your hearth / Come back to Adare, the place of your birth / The rooks are all grieving / The brooks are in spate / Come back and inherit your broken estate.” Federico stopped there, but explained that a number of further verses tell of the duke's adventures in the New World, where he discovers such delicacies as “dehydrated taties” (potatoes) and “fresh frozen peas.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  {1968-1969}

  DAYS AFTER FINISHING Bullet Park, Cheever signed a lucrative two-book contract with Knopf, ending his happy thirteen-year association with Harper & Row. Meeting his new editor, Robert Gottlieb (“A pleasant young man”), Cheever was uncharacteristically insistent that Knopf make it worth his while, since otherwise he had no good reason to leave Harper. “I'm afraid I was a nuisance about money,” he wrote Gottlieb afterward, “but I have this nightmare where I push a super-market wagon across River Street—macaroni and cold cuts—and am either run down by Roth in his Daimler or buzzed by Updike in a new flying machine.” The whole business left him in an awkward position with Harper: Frances Lindley had labored extensively over The Wapshot Scandal (“page after page of ruled paper with comments and queries,” as she recalled); without her efforts, said Cheever, the novel “would have withered and died unknown.” Squeamish as ever to admit that money exerted a pull, Cheever explained to her that he'd been discouraged by “gossip” about “so many changes at Harpers” (“I felt as if the firm as I knew it had vanished”), and then retreated into a quip: “I've changed everything—my doctor, my lawyer, my dentist and my liquor dealer. I've even asked Elizabeth Ames to resign from Yaddo. As you can see, I'm running wild.”

  Actually, his role in removing Ames was the result of long, sober deliberation. Several years earlier she'd finally acceded to one of Cheever's pet proposals—the building of a swimming pool—only to change her mind at the last instant, again, fearing her guests would behave dreadfully in and around water. Cheever was furious: “I believe we have voted for the swimming pool seven times now,” he wrote Cowley, “and to have the vote of any representative body disregarded this many times seems to me to reflect seriously on its usefulness. … [I]f the pool is overlooked again I would like to resign.”* And this, of course, was part of a larger grievance. Ames's conduct as director had always been a bit on the peremptory side, and now that she was all but totally deaf and a little demented, too, she'd become a tyrant. “No!” she shouted into the telephone when an eminent critic called (during working hours) and asked to speak with a resident artist. At the time, the critic in question was visiting the ladylike Anne Palamountain, wife of the Skidmore president, who vividly remembers her own first visit to Yaddo. It was late at night, and her new friend Cheever had proposed that she and her husband follow him (amid a lot of antic shushing, lest the despot be roused) to a back door of the Trask mansion; making their furtive way into the main hall, they encountered an equally apprehensive Philip Roth creeping down the stairs. “Ames had everyone terrified,” said Palamountain. It got so bad that Cheever himself had begun to dread the place—”the demesne of a powerful and weary old lady,” whom he blamed, moreover, for cultivating “the company of emasculated men” and hence leaving him at the mercy of Rorem and the like: “There are never any attractive or available women and in my desperation for company I find myself drinking with homosexuals.” Still, a part of him would always be fond of Mrs. Ames, and he took care to relate his decision to her in the most gracious possible terms: “This, of course, has nothing to do with our long and affectionate friendship, or with the fact that you have been my most intimate confident [sic]. Without Yaddo, as you've managed it, it would have been impossible for me to be a writer. … [But] I am convinced that a change is in order and I know you have the strength and intelligence to assess such an opinion.” At the subsequent board meeting, when Ames conceded her resignation, Cheever spoke movingly of her “imperturbable, humorous and fair” treatment of the (very) odd assortment of artists she'd hosted over the years: “This is a life and a triumph.”

  • • •

  AS 1968 CAME TO AN END, Cheever summed up his recent life as follows: “I've written nothing since the novel was completed and have spent a lot of time posing for photographers and mouthing crap about the essential prophetic nature of literature.” Knopf had paid dearly for Bullet Park and insisted the author do his part in promoting the book, always a dreary prospect for Cheever and even more so in this case. He thought he liked the novel all right, but he didn't want to talk about it—certainly not in terms of its deeper meaning, or (God forbid) its autobiographical elements, though he knew these were precisely the sort of questions he'd be asked. As he worried in his journal, “I don't know whether to admit to Sheed that I suffer from melancholy and that the incantations were invented to get me, not Tony [Nailles] out of bed.” Sheed was Wilfrid Sheed, an estimable novelist in his own right, who would soon be interviewing Cheever for a big feature in Life. Cheever knew what to expect when the magazine called beforehand and asked him to give a cocktail party and play a game of touch football for the photographer. “Clichés of suburban life!” he sighed in a separate interview. “This is not the way I live. I told [Life] they have to take me as a boozy recluse.” To illustrate this, Cheever downed martinis for the duration of the Life shoot, though he agreeably tossed a football and stood in the Vanderlips’ empty swimming pool and so on. As for Sheed, Cheever would later boast that he'd gotten the man so plastered that he (Sheed) had had to come back and finish the interview later—and even then Cheever was as evasive as ever, letting Sheed know that he could interpret Bullet Park however he liked, as long as he didn't mistake it for “crypto-autobiography.” “After a few more questions have been detonated like this,” Sheed wrote, “you have the impression you are supposed to have: that the work is everything, the writer is nothing.”

  What the writer was, in fact, was lonely and depressed and desperately alcoholic, and no amount of wealth or fame seemed to help much. The good news kept pouring in: the Book-of-the-Month Club had paid fifty thousand dollars to feature Bullet Park as an alternate selection; Bantam had offered seventy-five thousand for paperback rights (though Knopf was holding out for twice that much); the first printing had been bumped to fifty-five thousand. “Celebrate!” said Gottlieb, but Cheever didn't quite know where to begin. His dogs were gone at the moment (Mary had taken them for a long walk), and it occurred to him that he “[didn't] seem to have any chums”—or chums he cared to see, at any rate. Toward Christmas, his publisher put him up for two days at the St. Regis Hotel so he could give more interviews, and so he did—gleefully ordering bottles of gin up to his room (“Guess what the bill is? Twenty-nine dollars! Wait until Alfred Knopf sees that!”) as well as bottles of whatever the interviewers were having, and meanwhile nobody seemed to find anything amiss about this witty, boyish man who appeared to be drinking himself to death. “In fighting the hootch I seem to be fighting something much stronger than my own character,” Cheever reflected as the new year began; “I am overwhelmed by the spirits in the gin bottle. What, under the circumstances, does one do. Pray. Join AA.”

  Then, too, he began to wonder whether his book was really worth all the fuss: “Sometimes I recall a chapter that seems competent. Sometimes the book returns to me as sloppy, trifling and worthless.” As his paranoia began to swell, he projected these doubts onto his editor, Gottlieb, whom he suspected of deliberately “cut[ting]” him at the Century Club, as well as “exploiting] every possibility for anxiety and self-doubt”—this despite all the money and attention Knopf had lavished on the book, and never mind Gottlieb's constant reassurance and enthusiasm. Indeed, the editor had expressed only a single significant qualm: “Perhaps you remember that when we first talked,” he wrote Cheever, “I said that the only
thing that I didn't love about the book was that it stopped—I wish it had gone on longer. … [T]here is an abruptness there.” Cheever said he would try to “enlarge the last chapter,” but didn't—either because he was too blocked by then to write any further, or perhaps because he simply decided that he preferred the ambiguity of his original ending. Whatever the case, Gottlieb continued to make encouraging noises and even mentioned that Cheever's old nemesis, Bennett Cerf, was “very impressed and moved” by the novel.

  In more temperate moments, Cheever reminded himself that Bullet Park was, if nothing else, “better than the Scandal,” and that he'd basically fulfilled his own aims, to wit: “a cast of three characters, a simple and resonant prose style and a scene where a man saves his beloved son from death by fire.” Let the reviewers do their worst, then, though Cheever hardly expected as much; on the contrary, his friend Lehmann-Haupt had brought good tidings on that score, or so it seemed. Lehmann-Haupt, then an editor at the Times Book Review, had asked Cheever whom he would choose to review Bullet Park if the choice were his. “Ben DeMott,” said Cheever. “Good!” said Lehmann-Haupt. “Because that's who you're getting.” To both men, DeMott had seemed the perfect fit: a Waspy Amherst professor, he'd written a judicious review of the Scandal for Harper's—applauding the novel as a witty (if episodic) evocation of the modern world's “living hell”—the sort of thing, in short, that Cheever had in mind when he remarked to an interviewer at the St. Regis, “I would rather have an informative [review] than a silly rave.” In this case, though, a “silly rave” would have done nicely, given that DeMott's review was slated for the entire front page, and would be accompanied on page 2 by Lehmann-Haupt's interview with the author. Not long before the review appeared on April 27, however, Cheever got a call from his agent: Lehmann-Haupt's sidebar piece, which was nothing but admiring, had been bumped to the back pages—a bad sign. As Susan Cheever remembered, “My father seemed suddenly very frail.”